Abby, Get Your Groom!. Victoria Pade

       Chapter One

      “I can’t get married looking like this!”

      Dylan Camden heard his sister’s lament as he went into the kitchen of his grandmother’s home. He was coming from an apology lunch he hoped would gain him a few more good-grace points with his family. He had fences to mend and he was trying to act on every opportunity to do that.

      But the minute he set eyes on his sister he couldn’t help laughing before he caught himself and agreed with her. “You’re right, that is not good hair.”

      It looked like a rats’ nest with bows.

      Lindie and Georgianna Camden—the grandmother they all called GiGi—turned at the sound of his voice.

      “And this is the third try!” Lindie said. “Three different stylists from three different Camden Superstores salons. No wonder revenues in most of them are down if this is their quality of work!”

      “I think I might have a solution that will kill two birds with one stone,” GiGi said. “You know about the visit from the prison chaplain—”

      It had come as a surprise to everyone three days ago when a chaplain from the state penitentiary had shown up at GiGi’s house in the heart of Denver’s Cherry Creek. He’d come a long way with a request.

      In the final week of longtime inmate Gus Glassman’s life, Glassman had asked that the chaplain track down a lockbox of his belongings to be given to the daughter he’d abandoned twenty-eight years ago when he was incarcerated.

      The incident that had caused the man to be imprisoned was something GiGi had read about in the recently discovered journals of her late father-in-law, the founder of the Camden fortune, H.J. Camden.

      During their lives, H.J., his son Hank—who was GiGi’s late husband—and GiGi and Hank’s sons, Mitchum and Howard, had all been suspected of heavy-handed, unscrupulous business practices. Rumors and accusations had flown about ruthlessness, deceit, and callous, cold-blooded and unprincipled practices.

      Nothing had ever been proven. And because GiGi and her ten grandchildren had never met with anything but loving care and kindness from the men, it hadn’t been difficult to deny what had seemed like only false accusations.

      Then H.J.’s journals were discovered, proving that all the accusations were true.

      As a result, the current Camdens were trying to quietly seek out those who were wronged in the past—or their descendants—and atone in some way that wasn’t disloyal to the men they’d all loved, and also didn’t open the gates to unfounded lawsuits.

      Gus Glassman had been sent to the Colorado State Penitentiary for manslaughter when he—working as an enforcer for the Camdens—had gone too far while giving a beating to a factory supervisor who was trying to form a union. The beating was given on H.J.’s orders. GiGi had explored the possibility of making amends to the family of the man who had died, but he’d left no descendants so she’d moved on to other incidents.

      But the prison chaplain had relayed information that there was another person caught in the fallout of Glassman’s deadly errand. An innocent whose existence was unknown until Gus Glassman revealed it to the prison chaplain.

      Gus Glassman had left behind a then-two-year-old daughter.

      When GiGi heard that, she’d assured the chaplain that she would find the lockbox and Gus Glassman’s daughter and take care of everything.

      “I didn’t want this to wait any longer so I’ve been looking into it since the minute I said goodbye to the chaplain,” GiGi went on, “and you aren’t going to believe it, Lindie—she’s a stylist for that salon, Beauty By Design. The one that Vonni said a lot of her brides are using instead of Camdens.”

      “The