A Match for Celia

“Stunned?” Frances supplied with a little laugh. “Flabbergasted?”

“Well—yes,” Lila admitted, relaxing a bit as she realized that Frances wasn’t terribly upset. “Who was that on the phone?”

“That was Celia. Lila, you’ll never believe this—but she’s gotten married!”

“Married?” Lila repeated with a gasp. “Celia’s gotten married?”

Frances nodded her head in shared astonishment. “Yes. It’s so hard to take in…. I suppose the phone will be ringing off the hook shortly when the others in the family find out.”

“Let me get this straight. Your youngest granddaughter has actually married that man who’s always in the gossip magazines? That jet-setting Damien Alexander everyone’s been so worried about is actually going to settle down and start a family?”

Frances laughed again. “She didn’t marry Damien Alexander. She’s married a man named Reed Hollander—a man she’s known less than two weeks. And she sounded deliriously happy about it. She promised me I’m going to love him.”

Lila’s knees seemed to fold beneath her. She sat heavily on Frances’s sofa. “Oh, my. What an impulsive, reckless thing for her to have done.”

“Yes.” Frances looked at Celia’s photograph and smiled mistily. “It’s exactly what Celia was hoping to find.”

“I hope she hasn’t made a terrible mistake,” Lila, always the worrier, fretted.

“So do I. But something tells me she hasn’t,” Frances, the eternal optimist, replied.

Now, she thought, turning her attention to another photograph on her old piano, if only her dear, stuffy grandson Adam would find someone who could make him do something so romantic and daring….