Carolina Isle Read Online Free

to the ladies’ room? But she knew he’d be there when she got out, then that first moment would take place whether she was ready or not. When she saw her mother, she smiled. Ruthless was too mild a word to describe her mother. Knowing that R.J. was watching her, Ariel glided across the room in a manner shehoped was part beauty queen, part seductress, and all cool beauty. When she reached her mother, all she had to do was whisper a few words and she knew that her mother would keep R.J. away from her better than a pack of wolves could.
    Ariel was right.
    Just as she entered the ladies’ room, she glanced back to see her mother confronting Mr. R. J. Brompton. R.J. looked confused, so Ariel knew she’d won. When she left the restroom fifteen minutes later, R.J. had left the party. Had she missed her one and only chance? No, she had more confidence in herself than that. Ariel smiled the rest of the evening because she had found what she wanted to do with her life: She wanted to marry and raise a family with her cousin’s boss.
    Life changed after that night as Ariel began planning how to go about getting what she wanted most in the world. First, she had to know her subject, so she went to the library and started researching, spending months reading, cutting out articles, memorizing, and writing her cousin hundreds of letters. The more she wrote, the more Sara wrote back, and Ariel encouraged hercousin to talk about her job and her boss. Ariel would have e-mailed her cousin daily except that her mother didn’t believe in the Internet. Ariel thought that her mother feared that her daughter would find out that men and women got naked and had sex and enjoyed it. She was determined to keep Ariel a virgin in both mind and body in anticipation of her wedding night with David—a night Ariel’s mother and David’s mother had been planning since the babies were born two weeks apart.
    As for David, as always, he was Ariel’s beast of burden. Since he had contact with the outside world, she had him look up R.J. on the Internet and give her the hundred and fifty pages he printed out. He had daily news flashes about R.J. e-mailed to him, and he gave Ariel copies.
    â€œThe media is more interested in his women than they are in what he does for a living,” David said, looking at a photo of R.J. “You wouldn’t think that a man that old and ugly would be able to get all those babes.”
    Ariel snatched the photo out of his hand. “He’s only forty-two and he is far from ugly,” she said, glaring at David.
    â€œForty-two is old enough to be our father, so—”
    â€œFor your information, you and I do not have a joint parent. Anyway, he would have had to be a teenager when he conceived two twenty-four-year-olds like us.”
    â€œConceived,” David said, smiling. “What a nice word.” He was lounging on her bed, twirling her stuffed duck-billed platypus around his finger. She took it away from him. He’d been back in Arundel since graduating from college two years ago, but he didn’t seem in any danger of getting a job. Against his mother’s protests, he’d studied horticulture. His mother had spent days with Ariel’s mother drinking endless cups of tea while she cried that her beloved son was learning to be a farmer. “Why couldn’t he be a doctor or a lawyer? Why a farmer?” she whined. Ariel’s opinion was that, with David’s money, what did it matter what he studied?
    â€œDon’t you have something to do?” she asked, but she knew their mothers had set an obligatory time that they had to spend together. If they missed it, their lives would be made miserable. David and she had made a silent agreement togive them what they wanted, which is why he was now lounging on her bed and nearly tearing the ear off her toy armadillo.
    â€œWe could go skinny-dipping in the creek,” he said.
    â€œDidn’t I