Marriage by Mistake

Angeles, pure and simple. "Okay, Matt, ice cream. But let's take it outside. It's hot in here."
    Pleased, Matt wheeled with practiced grace between the freezer and dish cabinets. Kerrin watched him and wondered how much longer the town was going to be safe for a kid in a wheelchair. No matter how agile and strong Matt kept himself, he'd still be vulnerable to a man with two legs. For that matter, everyone in town would be vulnerable, once that fellow from L.A. got here.
    And Kerrin was the only person in town who'd know who he was, and the danger he presented.
    "Come on." Wheeling, Matt led the way outside.
    On the porch, the air smelled of sage and pine and a little hot dust. From somewhere up the hill, where the sun still poked above the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, a bird called. But Kerrin looked down, to the bottom of the valley.
    "Here." Matt thrust a bowl at Kerrin from his lap. "Eat."
    Startled, Kerrin accepted the bowl. Sinking to a seat on the wooden steps below Matt and thinking about her meeting the next day, she continued gazing toward the valley, and the Owens River.
    Lazy, the Owens meandered between desert-dry banks until it hit the chunky concrete physical plant that straddled it, corralling the river into servitude. From there an aqueduct carried the water of the Owens Valley to a thirsty Los Angeles, two hundred miles away. The plant and the aqueduct beyond it were owned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. They'd built it and they ran it.
    It certainly was vulnerable . Kerrin had to admit it. If anything happened to that plant no water would go through to Los Angeles.
    Matt licked his spoon and his gaze, too, fell to the bottom of the valley. "Say, wouldn't this view be different if they'd never built the aqueduct?"
    Kerrin froze, her hands cupping the cold ceramic bowl.
    "There'd be fields down there instead of sagebrush," he went on, oblivious to her stark silence. "By now Freedom would have become a big city, 'stead of a rinky dink town."
    "But there is an aqueduct." Kerrin's voice was hoarse. She nodded toward the structure. "After ninety years we've come to depend on that thing." Yes, at her meeting with them last week the mighty Department of Water and Power had made that clear to her. The economic life of Freedom depended on the fact that two hundred miles away Angelenos drank their water. If the DWP pulled out of the town, the jobs and money that came with their presence would likewise disappear.
    Matt shrugged. "It's not a natural relationship. Them dependent on us. Us on them."
    Kerrin could only agree, silently. But that dependency was already a fact of life in Freedom. If the DWP wanted to send an "expert" in security systems to check out the safety of their facility, there was little the town mayor could do to stop them. No, not even when that "expert" was an expert at evading security systems!
    All Kerrin had been able to wrangle was a meeting with the man. All she could hope was that this meeting would convince him not to take the job, not to come to her town.
    "Aw, Kerrin, you haven't taken a single bite."
    Kerrin looked down at her untouched Rocky Road, then up at Matt. He looked so frustrated that she forced a spoonful of the sweet stuff into her mouth. Her eyes searched his to give her credit.
    "How are you ever going to get a guy?" Matt lamented.
    "I don't know." Kerrin swallowed her bite of ice cream. "It'll take a miracle, probably."
    "And knowing you, you probably believe that one will happen, too. A miracle."
    A smile started at one corner of her mouth. "It might." She was counting on it .
    "Like some knight on a white charger is going to come and sweep you up off your feet."
    "Maybe." She was sure of it .
    Matt's face expressed disgust as only a man of sixteen years could manage. "And that's about what it would take," he pronounced. "A white knight."
    "No doubt." In fact, Kerrin couldn't agree more. It would take a full-blown white knight to brave the dragons that scared off all other men, an armored hero to breach the wall of her defenses. But that such a man existed Kerrin didn't doubt.
    For him she wouldn't be too smart or too skinny. To her white knight it wouldn't matter that Kerrin had three college degrees, that she actually wanted to live in a small town in the middle of nowhere or that, worst of all, she was a complete dunce in all things physical. No, Kerrin didn't know his name or point of origin, his profession or his age, but she knew that one day