Wanted: Wife by Gwen Jones Page B

Instinctively I flailed my arms, gagging and coughing, doubling over with a sneeze. When I straightened up, the bright light treated me to floor-to-ceiling boxes, old furniture topped with papers and magazines, buckets of bottles and cans, and so much of what could only be called crap. Jesus , I thought, stepping back, is this what I signed up for?
    All at once something went snap ! under my foot, my heel sinking through the floorboard. I yanked it out and I spun around, heading toward the door and running face-to-face into something furry and most definitely—
    “DEAD!” I screeched, punching aside the hanging carcass of a groundhog or raccoon or whatever the hell it was, which I had no interest in clarifying. I kicked open the door, hobbling off the porch and right into Andy.
    “Julie!” he yelped, dropping my bags. “Don’t tell me you went inside!”
    I scrambled past him and down the steps. “If you think I’m spending even one night in that filthy freakhouse—” I slapped a spiderweb from my arm. “Dammit, Andy, I’d rather sleep in the barn with Betsy!”
    “Hey.” He jumped off the porch, holding me by the shoulders. “I know the place is a mess, but I’ve only been here a couple of weeks.”
    “Is that’s why you got married? You need a housekeeper?”
    He eyed me wryly. “Because a housekeeper who’ll get half of everything I own will be so much cheaper.”
    I shook myself, feeling skeevy, wanting to jump in the lake again. I shrugged him off. “Look, I’m not trying to be a diva, but there’s a dead possum in there!”
    “Raccoon,” he corrected me. “Rocky, to be exact.”
    “It’s got a name ?”
    “It’s a long story. You’d have to know my father.”
    “Not interested.” Though in fact, I was. “Andy, be reasonable! Do you really expect me to sleep in—”
    His look was such a grasp of the obvious I blushed right down to my toenails.
    Right then we reached the part in our tender marriage where obvious morphed very quickly into awkward . He grabbed my bags from the porch and beckoned me to follow. “Come on. And stay on the slate path. I want to show you something.”
    I followed him around the house to the side, past a bramble of flowering vines and the overarching branches of a few deciduous trees, to another screened-in porch which looked out to the woods a dozen yards away. However, this one was newly planked, with nary a hole in the screening, and it sported a freshly-painted wooden table and two chairs and a couple of hanging pots of very pretty, and pretty-smelling, flowers.
    “Well, well,” I said, truly charmed. “It’s certainly an improvement.”
    Andy looked down, his brow furrowed. “Don’t move.” He nudged open the screen door, hauling my bags to whatever was on the other side of the door opposite. A moment later he was at my side, lifting me up.
    Of course I’d read about this, dreamed of what it would be like when it happened to me, if it actually did. Richard would have thought it terribly anachronistic, something an uber-urban hipster would hardly entertain. But when neo-Victorian Andy carried me over the threshold, I knew it had to mean something more than when he hefted me across a weedy and tetanus-inducing yard. Because it was all so terribly romantic, setting me down in a wooden chair in a gorgeously sunny—and apparently clean —little bedroom, replete with quilted brass bed, fireplace, upholstered settee, crocheted curtains, and a dozen other accouterments specifically designed to make me ooh and aah and swoon with anticipation—which I just about did when he kneeled before me.
    “Do you know your foot is bleeding?” he said.
    “What?” I said, twisting it.
    “I noticed it when you stepped on the porch.” He turned it to the side for a look. “Hardly anything at all, just a scrape, but it’s seeping.” He pointed past me. “Bathroom’s right there. You’ll find all kinds of stuff in the medicine chest.” He stood. “I’ll let