Champagne Taste

CHAMPAGNE TASTE

Connie Keenan

Copyright © 2012 by Connie Keenan

Smashwords Edition

Cover Photo by Bigstock.com

Cover Art: Deedle, kgtoh

All names, characters and events featured in this novel are imaginary. They are not inspired by any individual person, incidents or events by any individual person, incidents or events known or unknown to the author. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

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The Cop and the Mermaid

Paradise Road

This book is dedicated to my husband, Bill

For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Matthew 6:21

King James Version

Chapter One

"His name is Hunter, I said, trying not to sound witchy. I’m sorry, but with a name like Hunter, I don’t expect him to be five feet tall."

Now I’d done it. Across that cozy table set by the café window, my friend Suzanne Nance stared disapprovingly at me. My new friend, I might add. Or at least, relatively new. At that point I was still pretty new in town, only having been there for about a year. All the friends I’d grown up with were back in Pennsylvania. Making new friends at twenty-nine had proved painfully slow-going. I didn’t want to diss the precious handful I’d managed to collect.

Come on, Kara, he’s a little taller than that, she protested.

Okay, well. Five feet…two inches. I’m five-six. I like tall men. That’s all I’m saying, Suz.

Usually I was better at being diplomatic. That was one of the valuable things my grandmother, who’d raised me, had taught me. Grandma Rose could tell someone they were the most annoying and obnoxious person on the planet without actually ever coming out and putting it in those insulting terms. She’d do it with a honeyed smile—and them? They’d walk away smiling. I wasn’t quite as talented at it as she was…especially not while I was dreading going out for the first time with a little guy with a big, macho name.

"Fair enough. But how about a man who doesn’t tower over you physically, but he does so financially? Hmmm? Giggling, Suzanne paused for a sip of her mocha frappe. He has those all-powerful initials behind his name, Kara. The Big M.D. Try to look at the big picture. Don’t be so shortsighted. He’s also been talking lately about how he’s looking for a serious relationship, that he’s ready for marriage."

Hunter Jarrett also shared DNA with Suzanne Nance. He was her first cousin. I tread gingerly because she was my friend, and Greenville wasn’t as big a city as Philly, but it was big enough to be better enjoyed with friends. And Suzanne really, really thought a single, eligible female like me needed hooking up with a single, eligible male. Namely, her cousin the doctor.

Better to let her get it out of her system. Besides, maybe I was being shortsighted. It was possible, after all, that Dr. Jarrett and I would hit it off.

I guess I—I should give him a chance, I said.

"Good! You won’t be sorry. He’s an awesome guy. And, hey—he owns a Mercedes and a boat. Big cabin cruiser. He’ll be so excited when I give him your number… She drank down another swallow before picking up her Blackberry. Her fingers moved deftly as she fired off a text to her cousin. You two are gonna look so cute together!"

Even though I smiled and bobbed my head up and down, I had a feeling that saying yes to a date with Hunter was somehow, somewhere down the road, going to spell trouble for my friendship with Suzanne. At the moment, however, certain buzz words that had been tossed around during the course of our conversation were busily buzzing through my head.

Words like Mercedes. Cabin cruiser. M.D. Lest we forget the most important one of all: marriage.

What kind of doctor is he, anyway?

Just when I was bracing myself to hear her say the words, a proctologist or a gynecologist, out of Suzanne’s lips flitted the very acceptable response: He’s a pediatrician.

"Yes! I’ll take it!" A kid’s doctor. Now him, I could marry. At the very least, I could put up with Sunday drives to the mountains in the Mercedes and moonlight cruises off the South Carolina coast. In between practically living at the mall, of course. Oooh, look at the time. I gotta run, but I’ll call you later this week.

Me, too, gotta run. And you’d better call me, girl. We need to go for chocolatinis this weekend. Unless… she paused, flashing me a smile, you’re busy with Dr. Jarrett.

I’m never too busy for chocolatinis with you! I blew her a playful kiss before heading out of our favorite coffee shop, tossing my own cell back into my purse, along with all the other paraphernalia I kept in that thing.

That reminded me of an article my grandmother had sent me—and by snail mail, no less. She’d found the piece in one of her magazines, and my grandmother read a lot of them, from Woman’s Day to Prevention. I have to admit it was interesting, a fun article about all the expensive items women carry in their purse. Grandma Rose made me laugh, telling me I probably carried close to a thousand dollars in electronics tucked into my leather tote.

An exaggeration, for sure, but if I ever lost my purse I’d also be losing my cell phone, my MP3 player, my digital camera and my ereader. According to my grandmother, women had come a long way from the days when she was my age. Back then, all Grandma Rose carried was her wallet, a small brush or comb, a little bottle of perfume, a handkerchief, some lipstick and facial powder, and a roll of peppermint Lifesavers.

Too bad nobody had come up with a different type of gadget, something equally useful, like a specialized GPS that shouted, Recalculating, recalculating! anytime a girl got too close to a guy whose name could easily be changed from Doctor With a Bright Future to Disastrous Relationship. I know that, no matter what price tag they stuck on that thing, I’d save up my pennies to buy it.

And what was with all the matchmaking? Didn’t that go out of style along with those awful platform shoes people wore in the 1970s? If I recalled correctly, four of my friends back in Philly had tried to make sparks fly between me and their idea of Mr. Right for Kara Childers. Now Suzanne was playing the role of matchmaker, with me again getting dragged into the role of matchmakee. Why did everybody think it was their duty to find me some bachelor who was also USDA choice husband material, too?

If I thought about it for too long, it depressed me. That wasn’t me. Most of the time, I was an upbeat person, always trying to stay positive, through all the kinds of weather that life threw my way. But as I walked along Main Street, I slowed down to check out one of my favorite boutique’s display window, and I caught my reflection in the glass.

There was the problem. That was the reason that I’d consistently made the number one spot on everybody’s list of Women that Must Be Matchmaked, or whatever it could be called.

The woman gazing back at me was about to hit the big 3-0, though I was always being told that I looked twenty-one or twenty-two. People, both men and women, were always telling me I was attractive, pretty, cute, so on. After over a decade after my high school graduation, I could still fit into my baton twirler uniform. That was partially due to the gym and running, both of which I kept up on diligently, hiking and belly dancing, which I also taught.

But the main reason I wore a size four was because I shared my genes with my mother. I was told she’d always been slim, too. We also shared the same wavy, thick brown hair. I’d never met her, neither did I have plans of ever meeting her. She’d never given me the time of day, so she wouldn’t be hearing from me anytime soon, either.

Anyway, the woman in my reflection wasn’t overweight or plain. Instead, according to my friends and former boyfriends, I was slender, pretty, stylish and smart, and supposedly, like an actress, I had presence when I walked into a room full of people. In other words, even in a crowd, I was told people noticed me.

So since the packaging was appealing, or in other words, with my looks and figure, I could appeal to a man’s lust, that meant there had to be something else going on. There was something on the inside that was driving them away, something innately wrong with me that had scared off the prospective husband in every man I’d dated as a grownup, mature woman.

I think I would have rather been chubby, with flyaway, dishwater blond hair, glasses, and the fashion sense of a total geek. Being told that my packaging needed fixing would have been a lot less painful, not to mention easier, than being told there was something wrong with me, Kara Childers, as a person. And that because of that, no guy had ever presented me with a diamond engagement ring. No one wanted me as a wife because it was my heart that needed fixing.

In the past, that had bothered me, though not quite as much as it had lately. The closer I got to my thirtieth birthday—two months away, in August—the louder I could hear that biological clock that Marisa Tomei had poetically spoken about in My Cousin Vinny.

I continued walking down Main Street in the direction of Falls Park. Home was that way. I could have brought my car, but why drive when the town was so inviting dressed in the colors and warmth of early summer? I don’t know what it was about Greenville. Up until two years earlier, my grandmother had lived in Pennsylvania but had moved back to the South Carolina town where she’d spent her childhood. Our relationship had always been close, so we’d missed each other. It had been hard being apart, especially when all we had was each other. Since I’d needed a change of pace from Philly anyway, I was thrilled when she called and invited me to stay with her in Greenville until I found a job and a place of my own. I might not have made the move at all if the magazine I’d been working for as an editorial assistant hadn’t closed up shop and laid everybody off, including me.

It was funny, too. I’d never fallen in love with a guy—I mean really fallen in love, head over heels and all that stuff. But I did fall in love with that town. It was hard to describe what I’d found there. Greenville was like some romantic place invented by a