Contents ( 66)
- Cover
- Books by Valerie Fraser Luesse
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Map of Florida
- one
- two
- three
- four
- five
- six
- seven
- eight
- nine
- ten
- eleven
- twelve
- thirteen
- fourteen
- fifteen
- sixteen
- seventeen
- eighteen
- nineteen
- twenty
- twenty-one
- twenty-two
- twenty-three
- twenty-four
- twenty-five
- twenty-six
- twenty-seven
- twenty-eight
- twenty-nine
- thirty
- thirty-one
- thirty-two
- thirty-three
- thirty-four
- thirty-five
- thirty-six
- thirty-seven
- thirty-eight
- thirty-nine
- forty
- forty-one
- forty-two
- forty-three
- forty-four
- forty-five
- forty-six
- forty-seven
- forty-eight
- forty-nine
- fifty
- fifty-one
- Epilogue
- Keep Reading for a Preview of Valerie Luesse’s Next Book!
- Prologue
- one
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Back Ads
- Back Cover
“And?”
“And . . . we both had it bad. Don’t ever let anybody tell you there’s no such thing as love at first sight—or that puppy love can’t be the real thing. Aunt Gert could see it right away.”
“You took Daddy to meet her?”
“Yes, stupid me!” His mother rolled her eyes and laughed. “I could’ve spent a lot more time alone with him if I’d had sense enough to keep my mouth shut, but I never could keep a secret from Aunt Gert, so I invited him to supper that night. I can still see it to this day: Aunt Gert, a force of nature—lots of drama—and your pensive father together at the supper table, along with smitten little me who couldn’t eat a bite, I was so in love with Marshall.”
Peyton frowned. “But how could you be sure? You were just kids.”
“About like you and Lisa?” she answered, eyebrows raised.
“No fair changing the subject. What did you and Daddy do about it?”
“Got married.”
Peyton’s jaw dropped. “Then?”
“Not right then, but pretty soon. Marshall wanted to cancel his bike ride and stay in St. Augustine with me, but Aunt Gert put her foot down. She told him a boy who couldn’t finish what he started would grow up to be a man who never finished anything. He biked down to Key West and pedaled back as far as Miami, but then he got impatient and caught the train to St. Augustine. He tried to get Aunt Gert to take us to the courthouse when we picked him up at the train station. You can imagine how that went over. She told him if he was too young to drive to the courthouse, he was too young to get married there. But she promised us both that Marshall could visit as often as he wanted, and as long as we both finished high school and behaved ourselves, we would have her blessing.”
“So that’s what you did?”
“That’s what we did. We both turned sixteen that fall. Marshall got his driver’s license and came down literally every single weekend our junior and senior years of high school. He graduated first, then came to St. Augustine for my ceremony—Aunt Gert said she wouldn’t hear of a wedding till we both had diplomas. But once we did, she signed her permission for the judge.”
“Who signed Daddy’s?”
“That’s a whole other story. But the short answer is a fisherman named Finn, who pretended to be your daddy’s guardian. And then Aunt Gert took us to her church and had her preacher marry us again, ‘just to make sure it took,’ as she put it. Once Marshall carried me home to meet his family, your granddaddy was worried I might not be legally protected, so he took us to the courthouse and signed your daddy’s permission, and we got married again. Bet you never suspected your daddy was my third husband—and my first and my second.”