Ivory Tower (2 page)

The soft swish of the fabric sang to her as she turned
toward the mirror, her eyes still closed.

This is it. This
is the dress I want to be married in. I can feel it.

Jenna opened her eyes. The loveliness reflected in the
mirror validated Jenna’s vision. Her hair, more blonde than brown thanks to
regular appointments, hung in soft curls to just below her shoulders. She’d
keep it down. Josh liked it that way. And she liked how he played with her hair,
running his fingers through it, tugging gently to pull her nearer.

The ivory, not white, of the silk, made her skin seem less
pale and more vibrant. But mostly, the strapless gown elongated her throat and
made non-descript blue eyes look larger than life. For the first time that she
could recall, Jenna felt beautiful. This was definitely the dress.

The yank of the zipper and her mother’s shrill voice jarred
Jenna back to reality and she yelped.

“Stand still,” Patricia Wilton said as she ripped the zipper
down. “I told you. This dress absolutely will not do. Good grief, Jenna. You
look like a plain Jane in it.”

“This is the dress I want.”

Jenna could almost see the skin tightening around her
mother's mouth.

“I will hear no more about this,” the matriarch said,
tugging the strapless dress over Jenna’s hips.

Jenna glanced around the white-dress filled room, trying to
calm nerves that never could quite settle around her mother. And, since she’d
moved back home after her father died two years earlier, another idea of her
mother’s,
 
it meant her nerves were
perennially frayed. She glanced skyward, wishing again that her father hadn’t
asked so much of her. If she’d known what “be patient with your mother”
had meant, she’d never have promised.

It hurt that he wouldn’t be here to walk her down the
aisle. Jenna missed her father. Missed his ready smile, the twinkle in his
eyes, and the way he bridged the gaping hole between her and her mother.
Without him, they were oil and vinegar and Jenna struggled to keep the two
mixed together.

Out of the corner of her eye, Jenna caught the mass of red
hair that almost overtook the petite, lithe frame of her best friend since
grade school. A best friend who, at the moment, was making the funniest
googly
eyes at her. Jenna stifled the laughter that bubbled
up and grinned at
Mags
.

“Well, I, for one, think it’s the perfect dress,” her
forever-friend said.

Jenna’s mother skewered
Mags
with
a look. “You would.”

Mags
stuck out her tongue at the woman’s back and Jenna clamped
a hand over her mouth to keep the laughter from spilling out. She tossed her
friend a grateful glance just as her mother’s “Aha!” foretold that Jenna’s
dress-selection day was going to tank even further.

Her mother handed the attendant a flouncy cotillion style
dress Jenna had disliked on sight when her mother grabbed it from the rack. “This,”
she said, “is a much more appropriate style.” She ran her hands along the
heavily beaded bodice with a wistful sigh. “You’re getting the wedding I never
got, Jenna. It’s going to be perfect.”

To forestall yet another rendition of how her mother missed
out on her own white-dress wedding, Jenna gave in and let the attendant help
her step into the gown. Too small to button up the back, her mother’s tsk, tsk,
said that Jenna would hear later about the need to lose weight.

The mirror confirmed Jenna’s opinion. She looked like a
Barbie doll. No way did she want anyone to see her in this dress. Getting that
through to her steamroller mother wouldn’t be easy, though. To date, Jenna had
won, oh, exactly zero arguments with the domineering woman.

She worried her lower lip. This wedding was turning into
something she didn’t recognize. That wasn’t quite correct. She couldn’t
identify with it, but she did recognize it as everything her mother had missed
out on due to the rushed nature of her own nuptials. As she’d been told on many
occasions, that’s what happened when you got pregnant out of wedlock.
Hold on to your virginity, Jenna. You don’t
want to make the same mistake I did.

Always nice to know you were the mistake your mother
regretted. Sigh. Jenna wondered for the zillionth time if she was doing the
right thing. She loved Josh. She honestly did. And it wasn’t just that he made
her forget, well, just about everything when they were together. Drawn to him
in a way she’d never thought possible, Jenna honestly couldn’t imagine life
without him.

They’d known each other since her father’s death. Working
his way through college at the funeral home, he’d offered her the shoulder her
own mother had deprived her of with her “stiff upper lip” attitude.

And now that he’d graduated college and launched his own successful
business, her mother finally found him worthy.

Marriage to Josh would get her out from under her mother’s
thumb. Another bonus. Still, at the age of twenty-five, it seemed like she'd
never been on her own. Ever. When would she get to make her own choices? Her
own decisions. She glanced down at the layers and layers of material, knowing
that dress selection was the least of her concerns.

Later, freed for the moment from her mother’s tight reins,
Jenna and
Mags
scoured the local mall for wedding accessories.
She picked up a tiara that combined fine filigreed silver and tiny pearls, her birthstone.

“
Ooooh
,”
Mags
said. “That is beautiful. Perfect for you.”

Jenna slipped it on and loved everything about it.
Imagining it with a veil just a touch longer than her hair, she realized her
friend was right. It was exactly what she would pick out. She placed it back in
the display case, rubbing her thumb across it one last time before turning
away.

“Oh, come on.”
Mags
rolled her
eyes as they walked out of the store. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Mother won’t approve.”

Her friend yanked her to a stop. “Tell me you are not going
to let your mother make
every
wedding
decision for you.”

“She’ll want diamonds, or something like them. You know how
she is with her bling.” Jenna envisioned her mother’s bony hands covered in
rings, her
bangled
wrists, and her neck never without
at least two chains around it.

“It’s
your
wedding,
not hers,”
Mags
said.

“If only that were true.” How many times over the last
weeks had she heard her mother tell her how lucky she was?
She
would have more than a small ceremony in front of a tired judge
on a Friday afternoon.

“When are you going to break free of her overbearing
control?”
Mags
asked as they walked out to their cars
in the August sunshine.

Jenna shrugged. That was a question she’d love to have an
answer for, but she didn’t have a clue. She’d moved back home from college to
help her mother after the death of her father and now felt swallowed up in a
life that looked nothing like what she wanted.

“It's way past time for you to cut the cord.”

“You know damn well that’s pretty much impossible.” Her
mother governed almost every aspect of Jenna’s life with an iron rule.

“Maybe you should tell her how you earn your living?”

Jenna snorted. “Good Lord, no. It’s my one defiance and I
will not jeopardize it. She thinks I’m living off my meager inheritance and
it’s going to stay that way.”

“Oh, but it would be so much fun to tell her.”
Mags
grabbed Jenna’s arm. “Let me.”

“No.” Jenna spun her friend around and pointed her toward their
cars. “Absolutely not.”

“Okay,”
Mags
said. “But promise
me, if you ever do tell her, I can be there.”

“I’m not going to tell her.”

Mags
eyed her with that uncanny, all-knowing gaze she sometimes
had. “Just promise me I can be there if you do.”

“All right, all right. I promise.”

That seemed to appease her maid of honor. Soon, Maggie was
on her way, driving away in a rattletrap car that smoked and coughed its way
along. One of these days, Jenna hoped to help her friend buy a replacement.
Mags
didn’t make much in her job with a local food bank.

Jenna smiled. She had no idea how she’d have survived
without
Mags
. Their friendship had been proven
through more thick than thin.

Climbing into her own car, the day’s events settled like
bags of wet sand on Jenna’s shoulders. She sank deeper into the seat,
suffocated by a way of life she couldn’t break free of. Due to marry in a few short
weeks, Jenna felt like she’d be trading one autocratic lifestyle for another.
That wasn’t fair to Josh, who’d been nothing but supportive. He wanted her to
be happy, to make her own decisions. She knew it and loved him for it.

Although lately, he’d seemed preoccupied. Jenna frowned. It
was as if something weighed on him and he couldn’t tell her. Or wouldn’t. Yet.
Could he be losing patience with her?

Jenna felt her heart thump. Josh had always had the
patience of Job. He’d also been the perfect gentleman throughout their time
together. With chiseled good looks and a body beveled by a sculptor, he could
have anyone he wanted. Jenna knew for a fact that women had propositioned him.
He’d proven again and again that he only had eyes for her.

Sometimes, she thought he deserved someone better. Someone
more independent, more interesting. So far, she hadn’t managed to cut her
mother’s apron strings, no matter how cloying or restricting they had gotten.

Josh was the man she wanted to spend her life with and Jenna
loved him with all her heart. But forcing dear old mom to abdicate was another
matter entirely. Jenna couldn’t bear to be yet another disappointment in her
mother’s life.

Then, there were her father’s wishes to consider.

Jenna shook her head. Soon destined to move from her
parent’s home to Josh’s apartment, Jenna felt stuck in a corner she’d never be
able to dig herself out of. Would she never make a decision that was wholly and
completely her own?

She closed her eyes, thinking of the dress and how, as the
silk had settled around her, she’d felt the perfectness of the moment.

The dress she would not be wearing if her mother got her
way, which she usually did. Ruled by a stock portfolio and an inherited place
in society, her mother’s life was the antithesis of Jenna’s dreams.

Jenna would be happy at a little country church, with Josh
standing at the front in a simple suit as she walked down the aisle in her
perfect ivory dress, his eyes focused only on her ... and hers on him. No one
else mattered. Their life together would start on that day. That was the
important part. Not table linens or the A-
listers
she
and her mother fought about not inviting. She needed to remember that.

Her cell phone rang, jarring her from her ivory daydream.
Glancing at it, she almost didn’t answer. “Hello, Mother.”

“You’re still at the mall?”

“I’m just leaving now.”

“You do remember we’ve got the minister and his wife coming
for dinner?”

“Yes, mother. And I’m to stop and pick up the dessert you
ordered on my way home.”
The dessert you
didn’t trust me to pick out on my own.

“Well,” her mother huffed, “you’re running out of time if
you want to be dressed and ready in time for their arrival.”

Jenna wanted to scream, but she didn’t. Instead, she agreed
to get home in an expedient and safe manner and tossed her phone on the
passenger seat. Jenna gripped the steering wheel, willing herself to do
something, anything that was her own choice.

She tried to picture herself five, ten, even twenty years
from now. Happily married, but always nagged by the same question.

What if?

Just once, she wanted to do something for herself. Before
she stopped being Mrs. Wilton’s daughter and started being Mrs. Josh Latham.

She glanced at her watch and knew she was very close to not
keeping to her mother’s schedule. With a frustrated sigh, Jenna backed out of
the mall parking spot and headed for the bakery.

Today, apparently, was not the day she would find her
backbone.

Chapter Two

A successful dessert completed a dinner held in the formal
dining room, with the good china, that Jenna chafed her way through. Back just
this afternoon from a business trip of several days, Josh was the only person
she wanted to be with at the moment. And touching toes under the table wasn’t
enough by a long shot.

There was no reason for her or Josh to be at this dinner
since they’d met with the minister several times already and all the wedding
arrangements were set. Her mother, as usual, thought differently. So they
dutifully sat through three courses of mundane conversation about the upcoming
church bazaar, the wet summer so far, and a myriad of other equally dull topics
as her mother reigned supreme, basking in the minister and his wife's undivided
attention.