Read Online The President's Daughter by Mariah Stewart - Free Book Online

still smiling as she walked toward the nearest cash register.
    “Nothing.” Dina sighed.
    As Jude searched her wallet for her credit card, Dina leaned over and whispered, “Mom, you’re in a rut.”
    “I like my rut.” Not bothering to whisper, Jude handed over the card to the saleswoman. “I’m happy in my rut.”
    The forty-something saleswoman chuckled as she rang up the sale.
    “Besides,” Jude continued, “I have lovely gray shoes that I barely ever wear—”
    “Would it anger the gods so terribly if you were to buy new shoes
and
a new dress on the same day?”
    Jude laughed good-naturedly. “Sweetie, you talked me into a dress. Take your little victory and be content with it.” Jude took the dress bag holding her purchase from the saleswoman with one hand and signed the sales slip with the other. “If you weren’t insisting on me accompanying you to this fund-raiser for the new park, I wouldn’t have thought about what I’d be wearing until the morning of the affair.”
    Jude tucked the sales slip and her credit card into her purse and nodded thanks to the saleswoman.
    “You’re on the committee. You have to go,” Dina reminded her mother as they walked toward the entrance to the mall.
    “But I didn’t have to buy a new dress, and I don’t have to go with my daughter.”
    “You have someone else in mind you’d rather go with?”
    “No, but I don’t know why you’d want to go to something like this with me.” Jude paused in the entrance. “How ’bout some lunch?”
    “Great timing. They can probably hear my stomach complaining in Chestertown, I’m so hungry.”
    “The Plum okay?”
    “Perfect. They have wonderful turkey sandwiches and they’re only three stores away.”
    “So why do you?” Jude asked as they walked into the restaurant and waited for the hostess to seat them.
    “Why do I what?”
    “Why do you want to go to this fund-raiser with your mother?”
    “Two?” the hostess asked.
    “Yes. Nonsmoking,” Dina added before the young woman could ask.
    “This way.”
    Dina and Jude followed to a small table at glass windows overlooking the mall, from which they could see the constant parade, mostly, on this Saturday morning, groups of teenage girls and young mothers with strollers.
    “You didn’t answer my question.” Jude decided not to let the subject drop.
    “Which question was that?” Dina’s eyes skimmed the menu.
    “The one about why you want to go out with your mother on a Saturday night instead of, oh, I don’t know.” Jude frowned and pretended to search for a suggestion. “A young man, perhaps. It’s not as if there aren’t any vying for your attention. There’s Jack Finnegan, and there’s that nice-looking Don who’s always building something for one of your projects. Those window boxes he made for the new library wing are just darling.”
    “Don and Jack will both be at the fund-raiser.” Dina looked up at the waitress who had appeared at her elbow the second she began to close her menu and said, “I think I’ll have the turkey and an iced tea.”
    “I’ll have the same.” Jude nodded and added after the waitress walked away, “Which one would you rather go out with?”
    “Neither.”
    “What’s wrong with them? They’re both such nice men,” Jude came to the defense of Dina’s would-be suitors.
    “Mom, there’s nothing wrong with either of them. Yes, of course they’re both nice men. They’re also both fun to be around. But neither of them . . . how does one put this to one’s mother?” Dina paused, then grinned. “Neither of them does much to speed up my heart rate.”
    “Oh.” Jude slipped a straw from its wrapper and slid it into the glass of iced tea that the waitress set before her. “But maybe if you—”
    “No maybes, Mom. The chemistry is there or it isn’t.”
    Jude frowned and Dina laughed.
    “Mom, what was it about my father that made you pick him out over every other man you met?”
    “What?” Jude