Sealed with a promise Read Online Free PDF

family had consisted of himself and his mother. When Social Services had returned him to his mother, he’d made sure any shortcomings about his home life were never noticed again. Theoretically, he must have had grandparents, cousins, maybe aunts and uncles, but not a one that he knew of had ever rallied.
      “Yes ma’am.” He used the smile older ladies in almost any culture reacted well to. “Having family you can count on makes all the difference.”
      Emmie Caddington was looking for a man. In a very short-term-goal, temporary sort of way, that is. Right now, before the wedding breakfast could break up, she needed to find Caleb Dulaude, the one everybody called Do-Lord.
      Eastern North Carolina men carry nicknames like Potlikker and Choo-choo to their graves without loss of dignity. Among them, a name like Do-Lord was unexceptional, but somehow, she couldn’t make herself use it. Despite his down-home persona, his rust-red hair, and the tan-over-freckles skin of an outdoorsman, there was an austere integrity to his features, not as obvious as handsomeness, that made the name all wrong for him.
      Whenever she saw him she longed for her pencil, or better yet, pen and ink to trace the relationships of broad, rather prominent brow ridges and longish nose, uncompromising cheekbones, and mobile mouth. When he was a boy, he’d probably been on the homely side. Bony features like his would take some growing in to.
      Even the unconscious flexing of her fingers as she mentally drew him started up the throb in her shoulder. Having her right arm immobilized in a sling while a dislocated shoulder healed was the reason, the only reason, she needed him. If she hadn’t been in denial about how long it would be before her arm was usable, she wouldn’t have waited so long before seeking him out.
      Of course, she might not have been in denial, if the thought of being anything but carefully polite to him wasn’t anathema to her. He and those like him represented everything she thought the world would be better without.
      Pickett’s sister Grace, her knit dress of lapis silk jersey nailing the “dressy casual” the invitation had called for, halted Emmie’s attempt to thread her way through the crowd around the buffet table.
      Every few millennia nature reaches the apex of an evolutionary line and produces a creature so perfect, so exquisitely adapted to its ecological niche, that it seems the environment was made only to be a setting for it.
      Such a creature was the exceedingly well-named Grace. She was absolutely everything a young matron of her class should be. She was beautiful, smart, alarmingly competent, and tireless in her devotion to her family and her life’s work, which was (as the oldest of the sisters and her mother’s right hand) to present them to the world as polished and perfected as she could make them. Aiding her mission, she had the sublime confidence of one who has never questioned, or needed to question, her place in the great scheme of things.
      “Where are you going,” Grace asked, “and with that look on your face?”
      Emmie wasn’t sure what expression might be on her face, but she didn’t miss the look of exasperated affection with which Grace swept Emmie’s beige Land’s End blazer and matching beige skirt. Emmie wasn’t by nature rebellious. With her logical mind, the thousand slippery rules governing style were simply incomprehensible. By the time she’d entered college she was already a true eccentric-a nerd who couldn’t even conform to the rules of nerd-dom. She had accepted her singular state and come to prefer it. Accepting it was easier than trying to fit in.
      She always bought generic clothes, efficiency and comfort being her wardrobe goals. Catalog shopping saved time since everything already matched, and the clothes, never in-or out of-style, lasted for years.
      This morning she hadn’t been able to move her arm enough to hook her bra,