Bride Of The Bad Boy. Elizabeth Bevarly

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      Melissa Senate

      Senior Editor

      About the Author

      ELIZABETH BEVARLY is an honors graduate of the University of Louisville and achieved her dream of writing full-time before she even turned thirty! At heart, she is also an avid voyager who once helped navigate a friend’s thirty-five-foot sailboat across the Bermuda Triangle. “I really love to travel,” says this self-avowed beach bum. “To me, it’s the best education a person can give to herself.” Her dream is to one day have her own sailboat, a beautifully renovated older-model forty-two footer, and to enjoy the freedom and tranquillity seafaring can bring. Elizabeth likes to think she has a lot in common with the characters she creates, people who know love and life go hand in hand. And she’s getting some firsthand experience with motherhood, as well—she and her husband welcomed their firstborn, a son, three years ago.

      Bride of the Bad Boy

      Elizabeth Bevarly

      

      For Lucille Akin, the bravest woman I know.

      Contents

      Prologue

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter Twelve

      Prologue

      “I think I see him.”

      “Where?”

      “Up there. Just above the sycamore tree. About six inches to the left of the moon. See him?”

      Fifteen-year-old Angie Ellison squinted hard and directed her gaze to the area of the night sky toward which her friend Rosemary March was pointing. All she saw was a big black smudge of darkness surrounding a silver sliver of moon, and a tiny little speck of white light that differed only marginally from the other stars in the sky.

      “That little thing?” her other friend, Kirby Connaught asked incredulously. “That’s Bob?”

      Rosemary nodded. “That’s him.”

      “That’s nothing,” Angie countered in a tone of disgust that most fifteen-year-old girls had mastered without problem. “Frankly, I’m not impressed. What’s the big deal about Bob anyway? I mean he’s just a big, gaseous fireball, right?”

      Angie, Rosemary and Kirby lay on their backs staring up at the sky, at the very back of Angie’s expansive suburban backyard, where there were no lights from the town to mess with the comet’s luminous glow. They formed an irregular, six-pointed star, the crowns of their heads touching at its center, their legs spread casually, their arms folded beneath their necks. It was 3:13 a.m., and they were waiting. Waiting to catch a glimpse of Bob.

      Bob, or more specifically Comet Bob, was due to make his closest pass to the earth in the night skies above Endicott, Indiana, at precisely 3:17 a.m. For whatever reason, the comet returned to the planet like clockwork during the third week of every fifteenth September. And when it did, it always—always—made its closest pass at coordinates that were exactly—exactly—directly above the small town of Endicott.

      It was an anomaly that many a scientist had tried without success to understand over generations, an enigma that brought them back like lemmings to the small, southern Indiana town every fifteen years—only to send them home again after Bob’s appearance and disappearance, scratching their heads in wonder. And because no one had been able to explain exactly what caused Bob’s regularity or his preference for Endicott, the comet’s celebrity had grown and grown, and the little Indiana town had come to claim him as their own.

      The September night was hot and surly in spite of the summer’s end, and the scant breeze moving about the three girls’ faces did little but stir up more hot air. Although school had begun three weeks ago, the appearance of Bob—absent since the year of the girls’ births—and the subsequent Welcome Back, Bob Comet Festival for which Endicott, Indiana, became famous every decade and a half, called for a brief holiday. Schools were closed the following day, and all workers had been given an official holiday decreed by the mayor, just so everyone would have the opportunity to stay up late and get a good look at Bob.

      But Bob seemed to have other plans this year. Although he was right on schedule, according to those with high-powered telescopes, unusually cloudy weather this year had kept him inaccessible to most casual observers so far. And the night was partly overcast, making identification of the comet even more iffy. Angie squinted harder toward the area the local astronomers had indicated would be Bob’s stage, but she still saw nothing more impressive than a vague dot in the dark sky.

      “I think somebody goofed,” she said. “I don’t think Bob is coming tonight.”

      “He’ll be here,” Kirby assured the others. “It’s been fifteen years. He’s never missed.”

      “Bob is already here,” Rosemary insisted. “Up there above the sycamore tree, about six inches to the left of the moon. Look harder. It’s not much, but I’m telling you, it’s Bob.”

      Comet Bob actually had a much СКАЧАТЬ