Time and time again, I tried to sort out if it was the idea of getting married that scared me, or if it was Queen Hemlock specifically that I couldn’t picture as my wife.
My wife!
Every time that phrase crossed my mind, it was like an icy hand grabbed my heart hard enough to make it skip a beat.
Frankly, I was having trouble picturing anyone I knew in that role. In an effort to get a handle on my feelings, I forced myself to review the women of my acquaintance in that light.
Massha, my apprentice, was out of the question. While we were close enough as friends, as well as teacher/student, her sheer size was intimidating. The truth was, I had trouble thinking of her as a woman. Oh, I knew she was female all right, but I tended to see her as a friend who was female . . . not as a female, if you can see the difference.
Bunny . . . well, I supposed that she could be considered a candidate. The problem there was that she was the first woman who had made a solid pass at me, and it had scared me to death. When her uncle, Don Bruce, first dumped her on me, she was all set to play a gangster’s moll. Once I got her straightened out, however, she had settled into being my administrative assistant like a duck takes to water, and the question of anything intimate developing between us never came up again. Thinking of her in terms of a life partner would mean completely restructuring how I viewed her and worked with her, and right now she was far too valuable as my assistant for me to rock the boat.