Married By Mistake

her shoulders. “Thanks. I feel a lot better.”
    The intense heat in his eyes unnerved her. “That was for luck,” she joked. “They call me Lucky Lips.”
    With his thumb, he traced the outline of her mouth, sending an erotic message straight to her core.
    “Whoever ‘they’ are,” he said, “I hope they know I’m the only man entitled to these lips.”
    For now.
    He didn’t say those words and neither did Casey. But they hung between them like neon lights, illuminating the tenderness of the moment and revealing it to be false.
    Casey stepped out of his embrace. “I’ll go see Eloise while you’re in court.” Adam had asked his stepmother not to attend the hearing, and she’d gladly agreed. Casey wouldn’t go either, since, as Adam’s bride, she was a sore reminder to Anna May that Adam had fulfilled the will’s conditions.
    As she drove to Eloise’s, Casey fretted over how the older woman must feel. She’d been through so much. To finally meet her soul mate, then to have him suffer a heart attack and a stroke just a few years later... And just when Eloise had thought James might recover, he’d—
    “That’s it!” Casey thumped her car’s ancient steering wheel in excitement. Eloise had mentioned all those tests James had undergone after his stroke. They must have included tests on his brain.
    Casey pulled out her cell phone and called her stepmother-in-law. A car honked behind her—not because the driver thought she was sexy, but because she’d strayed into the next lane. Casey got the Fiesta under control while she waited for Eloise to answer.
    Eloise caught on fast to her garbled questioning. She promised to have the information Casey needed by the time she arrived. Next, Casey phoned Adam. But his cell phone was switched off. So was Sam’s. She would have to go to the courthouse.
    Fifteen minutes later, Eloise had made two calls to the hospital that had treated James, and one to her late husband’s lawyer. The news was all good. She insisted on coming with Casey to the courthouse. “I’ll park the car, dear, while you run in.”
    The hearing was scheduled for ten o’clock. Technically, it wouldn’t matter if they were late, but Casey wanted to stop it before it even started. She wanted there to be no public mention of James Carmichael being unhinged.
    They made it with ten minutes to spare. Eloise gamely took over the controls of the Fiesta, while Casey raced inside. She found Adam with Sam Magill outside courtroom number one. Across the hall, Anna May and Henry waited with all three of their lawyers.
    Adam’s eyebrows shot up when he saw her. “I thought we said...”
    Casey was tempted to shout out that she had evidence Adam’s dad wasn’t crazy. But it occurred to her that some of the people milling around the hallway were likely journalists who’d enjoy provoking a discussion about the sanity of one of Memphis’s benefactors. So she pulled Adam and a bemused Sam into a huddle.
    She told them how Eloise had called the psychiatrist who’d tested James after his stroke, and how the man was certain James was fully competent.
    “We knew that,” Sam said. “What matters is James’s state of mind when he wrote his will.”
    Casey delivered her pièce de résistance. “Eloise told me that after the stroke, she asked James to change his will. He had his lawyer bring it in so he could review it. In the end, he decided he was happy with it as it was. Thanks to the psychiatric tests he’d just had, we know the will reflects the thinking of a sane man.”
    “We do,” Sam agreed, surprised but pleased. “But surely if we knew this...”
    “Eloise forgot about James reviewing the will until she mentioned it to me on Monday,” Casey said, “and even then she didn’t make the link between that and the psych tests.”
    Adam grabbed Casey by the upper arms. “You,” he said, “are incredible.” Then he kissed her, right there. Not quite the bone-shaking kiss they’d shared this morning, but with enough heat to cause Henry to clear his throat across the hall.
    By the time they surfaced for air, Sam was in close discussions with the other side’s legal team and Eloise was strolling through the courthouse doors with a spring in her step more suited to a garden party.
    Five minutes later, a triumphant Sam announced that Anna May had conceded Casey’s evidence outweighed anything she could present to the judge today. The hearing would be cancelled. Even Anna May’s