The Married man by Andy Schell
MEET HARRY FORO…
One of the esteemed Kansas Fords, he’s glibly traded a BMW and Ivy League education for a beat-up Volkswagen, a flight attendant’s wings … and the freedom to live life on his terms. Evading disgruntled creditors and doling out packaged peanuts to harried fliers isn’t exactly liberating, but the disinherited blue blood has other things on his mind: like landing a red-blooded man who can make him forget about the millions he’d inherit if he brought home a bride before his next birthday…
ENTER AMITY STONE…
Harry never expected his soulmate to come packaged as a sassy, irreverent, ravishing blonde … woman! With a bravado bigger than her beauty queen hair and a Texas drawl as thick as her mascara, Harry’s new roommate has him captivated… if not converted. Why not marry the willing, wonderful Amity and collect his fortune?
SAY HELLO TO A SEXY
COMPLICATION
Now that Harry’s about to march down the aisle, his worries are over, right? Wrong! Temptation arrives in the muscular form of tall, dark, and handsome Ilicolo Feragamo, and lust quickly turns to love. Now, as the Big DayAand Big BucksAIoom before him, Harry finds himself facing a provocative dilemma that proves the road to happily-ever-after is anything but straight and narrow!
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
850 Third Avenue
New York, NY 10022
Copyright 2000 by Andy Schell
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
Library of Congress Card Catalogue Number: 99067617
ISBN 1575665492
First Printing: May, 2000
Printed in the United States of America
For Jonathan and Maria… and Madalyn too.
CHAPTER
ONE
How many heterosexuals work as airline stewards?” my mother asks me. I’m in the Kansas City International Airport, and a man’s voice is blasting over the loudspeaker, announcing my departure to Dallas. I can hardly hear my mother in the waxy receiver of the pay phone. “It’s Donald who’s wondering. He’s concerned you’re in the wrong environment to fulfill your father’s wishes.”
I cut her off. “Mom, they’re announcing my flight. I’ll call you from Dallas.”
“This is the year!” she says, instead of goodbye.
Hanging up the phone, I ask aloud, “For what?”
I skulk down the aisle, throw my suitcase into the overhead bin, and collapse into a passenger seat. I’ve only been flying for three months, but it already seems rote probably because I don’t really want to be a flight attendant. When I was a boy my father always told me that I would attend law school and that I would graduate first in my class, and I believed him. How did I end up becoming a flight attendant? Well, after things turned to shit with my father, I figured out the job he would least likely approve of and then applied. It was my way of getting back at him for reneging on all his promises. I’ve always reacted to my father in one way or another.
First, I opted out of prep school and demanded I be allowed to attend public high school with the real kids. And when Dad took away my Flat convertible, after I told the family I was gay, I hustled up enough bucks to buy a used VW bug. No one in my family had ever driven a used car, let alone one with an Amnesty International sticker on the bumper, and my mother was so appalled she wouldn’t let me park it in the driveway. Nor had anyone in my family attended a state university. But what was I supposed to do? It would have been awfully difficult to pony up tuition to a private university on student loans. So while my brother, Winston, was sent to Northwestern for his MBA, all expenses paid . and no one can rack up expenses like Winston I left college to pass out plastic trays of warmed-over Salisbury steak at 30,000 feet.
Today I’m a passenger. Looking out the window to the frozen tundra that surrounds the Kansas City Airport, I think of the slightly warmer environs of my destination. The balmy temperatures of Texas may make it bearable for me to live on the street in the event I don’t find an apartment, make a life, gather food, get laid. It’s only the first month of 1984, but something tells me this is going to be a long year.
I open the January in-flight magazine and do what all flight attendants at the airline do: go to the Flight Attendant of the Month page though we call it Slut of the Month, since the rumor is that you have to fuck the big, sweaty, redneck Manager of Flight Crews in order to be chosen. No guy has made it. There, on the page, in her sexy little stewardess uniform, is a Texas babe with thick blond hair and a hey-big-spender look on her face. Her name is Amity Stone, and the copy says that she likes “eating barbecue, riding horses, and searching the Texas sky for an occasional falling star.” Please. I picture her eating a hunk of barbecued Appaloosa while getting hit on the head with a meteor.
“Are you laughing at me?” a female voice with a Texas accent as thick as a jungle asks.
I wipe the grin off my face, look up, and there she is: Amity Stone, Slut of the Month. Her hand is resting on my seat back, and her head is cocked. Her perfume is heavy and her makeup is artfully applied. She’s more beautiful than the likeness in the magazine she actually looks like a young Grace Kelly. I’m intimidated. Not because she’s beautiful, women don’t affect me that way …… but because I can tell she’s incredibly confident, and with my ego freshly smashed, I’m not. “Not at you,” I say.
Her blue eyes highlight me like spotlights. “Then what, Bubba?”
I realize that Bubba is a salutation, like sir, or mister,
