Ain't She Sweet (Seven Brides for Seven Mothers #2) - Whitney Dineen Page 0,101

to make, with all three ladies greatly contributing to our brand, but in the end, we chose the contender who was responsible for the most innovative campaign.”

Here’s where the chain of events gets a wee bit cloudy. I could have sworn he’d called my name, so I stood up as planned, but my good friend and table-mate Lexi says that isn’t what happened at all. Apparently, old Jameson had called out Allison’s name, and she and I both went up to accept the award. How deforesting the planet is innovative, I do not know. I did hear through the corporate grapevine that Allison had gone to Jameson’s hotel room with him before the ceremony like a Kardashian auditioning her new sugar daddy. But I digress. Back to The Event.

I grabbed the silver spoon out my fellow nominee’s hand and proceeded to give my speech. All of it. Which for some reason I was allowed to do. It was a beautiful speech. I thanked my mother for her graciousness and manners, and I thanked my grandmother for teaching me how to fold dinner napkins into swans. I was about to thank Silver Spoons for having the wisdom to hire me, when Allison grabbed the Demitasse out of my hand. I may have chosen that moment to snatch it back and hit her over the head with it—obviously not very hard as she never pressed assault charges, thank God.

It’s all conjecture really. All I can say for certain is that I hastily fled the ceremony, trotting down all eight hundred thousand stairs of the Met in four-inch heels, in a cloud of disgrace and disappointment. I took a cab to a nearby bar, where I proceeded to drink my body weight in tequila before waking up in an unknown apartment in Brooklyn.

Tequila and I have a sordid past. One incident of over consumption resulted in my belting out my karaoke version of “I Will Always Love You”—the Dolly Parton version, not Whitney Houston’s—so poorly I’m sure ears bled; another found me French kissing a giant stuffed frog before throwing up on it; and the last time, before the Brooklyn incident, was when I urinated in my sorority sister’s shoe because I was so drunk I couldn’t find the bathroom. Now I can add “indiscriminate behavior” to the list.

Let me just say, I’m not loose by anyone’s estimation. I believe in using linens at every meal, for Pete’s sake! But the truth is, I spent the night with a stranger and if he wasn’t Armie Hammer from that movie Hotel Mumbai, because that’s who I thought he looked like, then I have no idea who he was. To make matters worse, we apparently didn’t use any protection. I soon discovered that I, Emmaline Anne Frothingham, of Creek Water, Missouri, was going to become a mother at the tender age of twenty-eight.

Chapter Two

The reason I’m so bitter about my roots is because when I was eight years old my daddy, Reed Frothingham, died, and the whole town of Creek Water—with the exception of our family—acted like Mama and I were leeching off my uncles for our survival. Which is simply not the truth. We were left a decent-sized inheritance, not huge as most of the family money was spent during my grandparents’ generation—we have the sterling-silver snail tongs to prove it—and my uncles didn’t start making good investments until after I’d become a half-orphan. It is by surname alone that we aren’t considered nouveau riche.

Mama and I had enough money to keep our house and pay our bills, but she had to go back to work so we could have the extras. She kept the books for the uncles and, in that way, managed to stay part of the family business, which, as I mentioned earlier, has become revitalizing Creek Water. Mama didn’t invest any of our money because she worried that risking it might send us to the poor house. My uncles didn’t have a good track record at the time.

I needed that scholarship to Duke as there simply was not enough money to pay for that caliber of education any other way. Yet, no one acknowledged my hard work, and instead, treated me as though I was using money I wasn’t entitled to. Every time Mama and I did something extra, like go shopping in St. Louis, some busybody would inevitably say, “Your uncles are so good to y’all!”—completely negating our ability to take care of ourselves. The uncles tried to set