Chapter Two
Tabitha
“Dr. Carter the reports you requested are on your desk.”
My assistant is a tall woman who dresses like a runway model but also has one of the sharpest minds I’ve encountered. She’s also three years older than me. An unusual circumstance since I’ve had my doctorate for five years and I just turned twenty-two.
I’m accustomed to my academic peers feeling inferior in my presence. Around Melissa, or Missy, as the other assistants address her, I find myself feeling nervous. She’s a reminder of everything I’ve never experienced. She’s confident in her body and she always has a date lined up for Friday nights.
Regardless, this is a professional workplace, and I won’t let my own internal demons affect our working relationship.
I’m a consummate professional on the outside, but on the inside I’m green with envy.
I haven’t been on a date in ages. I went to college when I was too young to attend parties and now my peer group works for me.
All my colleagues are too old, and all the age-appropriate friends I could make work under me.
I’m in my own little work bubble. Which would be fine if I could make friends outside of work, but my rigorous schedule makes that impossible. I don’t have time for drinks or for long lunches. Not while I work at this office. And dating has never been my strong suit.
Work progresses like normal. I review reports, send out memos and I speak to the biologists who filed the reports.
I did field work for a year myself, trekking through a Southeast Asian rainforest to study the rafflesia flower.
Rafflesia arnoldii is better known as the stinking corpse flower.
It produces the largest flower on Earth and smells like a rotting corpse.
It was fascinating despite its unfortunate scent.
Shuffling through paperwork and lab reports I think back to that year abroad. The days were long and sweat made my clothes stick to my aching back, but I loved every minute of it.
Melissa brings my lunch before she leaves for her own break, a goofy smile on her face that prompts my curiosity.
“Oh, it’s nothing Dr. Carter.”
My raised eyebrow stops her on her way out the door.
“I mean it’s not work related. Someone brought in a flyer for a new dating app and it’s the weirdest thing. I’m doing a poor job of explaining. Let me show you.”
She goes out to her desk and comes back into my office with a flounce, her modest black dress flaring around her knees like a paid actor.
“This!” she shouts. “It’s absolutely ridiculous. I mean who would want to drop everything to move out to the middle of nowhere to marry a strange man?”
The flyer she hands me is for a mail order bride service. There is a photo of a happy bride set in front of an evergreen mountain range and the company’s logo with their ad printed in a beautiful script.
Take a chance on love. Pearl’s Mail Order Brides . Meet your match today!
“It’s so laughably bad Penny at the front desk had to pass it around,” Melissa gushes.
“Its…different,” I say when she looks at me expectantly.
She shoots me a questioning look but her phone pings with a message distracting her from my odd reply. My assistant is gone in a flash, the flyer left forgotten on my desk.
“This can’t be real,” I mutter to myself even as I bring up the website printed on the paper.
It’s real. I spend my lunch break scrolling through the site, and reading their testimonials. Then to cross check their claims I hop on social media and do a quick search. Businesses can inflate and manipulate data, but people get honest on their own profiles.
I find fourteen posts. All positive. A deeper dive through public profiles reveals that all fourteen marriages are still going strong.
Melissa’s attitude was dismissive, but I have to admit the idea does appeal to me.
Friendship is hard to come by, and love is nonexistent in my life.
Dealing with messy emotions isn’t my forte.
The ad can make all the claims of love it wants but these couples agreed to marry before they ever met in person. They couldn’t love each other yet.
Not at first.
Something else pulled these people together. Respect and attraction, perhaps? A marriage based on shared ideals and values steeped in logic and rationality sounds like an idea worth exploring.
My lunch flies by and soon I’m reluctantly turning my focus back to work.
I do my best to focus on the tasks in front of me but my mind races with possibilities.
Melissa continues discussing memos, meetings, and the upcoming fundraising efforts that are occupying the board, without noticing my lack of attention.
It’s the same year after year. The same office.
The same reports and meetings. It’s all become rather dull.
I think back to that year of field research. The freedom. The feel of the hot sun on my skin as I conducted my own research rather than evaluating someone else’s.
There could be hundreds of men looking for a wife in locations suited to biological observation and experimentation. I could be back in the field. The reports could be mine. I could escape this sleek office. Not that I’m guaranteed to find a husband.
It couldn’t hurt to look.
Two days later my background check, and identity verification came back clean clearing me to use the site. The questionnaire I fill out that night is thorough. From questions about my profession to my ideal family life. By the time I’m done I feel like I’ve poured my soul into their database.
It’s another day before the proposals come in.
Men who have viewed my profile and thought we might be a good fit.
Most haven’t even messaged me. More than ten men have taken one look at me and decided I would make a fine wife all without a word spoken between us.
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. The app has a messaging function, but mail order bride is in the title and traditionally they meet their husbands for the first time on their wedding day.
It’s efficient. No need for small talk. If there is attraction and respect two adults can make a marriage work. I can appreciate that.
The first match is a medical doctor living out in a rural Kansas community. Kansas could be a lovely place to live but I know that kind of career is stressful and time consuming. If I’m going to marry, I want a husband who can be present in our daily life.
Next is a lifestyle influencer traveling cross-country in a van. No. Absolutely not. Hiking through the wilderness before eventually returning to a clean and spacious apartment is one thing. I’m not signing up for a 24/7 road trip that never ends.
I scroll by several more matches, dismissing them for one reason or another, before I find the one that catches my attention. Marshall Kent. His profile photo is from his military service, his age noticeably younger than the thirty-two listed in his bio.
With the first serious contender I find myself reaching for my yellow legal pad to begin a list of pros and cons. Cliché perhaps but effective.
This isn’t a love match. Surely an ex-Army Ranger will adopt a practical approach to marriage.
A pro if ever there was one. His profile is minimal, which isn’t ideal for a detailed analysis. I add it to the con side of my list.
Part of me can’t help but add another pro to the list.
He is awfully good looking.
I haven't cared about superficial vanity since my teenage years. And even then, I knew better. My hormones may have run rampant, but my brain was still in charge. Now my body is tingling with awareness over a simple photo. I’ve worked with handsome men.
Mingled at fundraisers with gorgeous models and CEO’s who look twenty years younger than their actual age.
He makes them look like boys playing dress up. He’s ruggedly masculine with stubble coating his square jaw and a glint in his eye that makes a hormone fueled primal part of my brain perk up.
I’ve always let logic lead the way, now I’m thinking it’s time to try something more earthy. Sitting behind my desk staring at his profile I feel more feminine than I ever have in my life. For this man I feel a girlish impulse to preen and he’s not even in the room.
My cheeks heat with mild embarrassment. In school I never would have approached him. Men like him never look at women like me. Not when we bury our noses in books studying for our degrees rather than going to college parties that only serve to damage brain cells and curate bad decisions.
But he approached me.
Five more men also submitted a request to match with me.
I don’t even care to look at them. My brain is screaming that I should evaluate and compare each profile and make a rational choice based on pros and cons.
The truth is that I’ve already made my decision.
My body made it the second I clicked on his profile.
Marshall Kent, prepare yourself.
It shouldn’t be so easy to fit my entire life and career into a box. I strip down my apartment with ruthless efficiency. My fiancé will already have furniture there’s no need for an extra couch or kitchen table.
When I informed the board about my marriage and pending move, I had my resignation drafted. My position was administrative, and I was to start fresh with a different company once I settled into my new home.
That proved unnecessary.
“He lives in the Viridian Mountains?” one board member asked.
“We can always use more soil samples,” another added.
“It’s such a remote range, with excellent forest conservation, the flora could be studied and compared to lab grown specimens.”
Suddenly our company is organizing a field lab. Equipment shipped and staff hired. My engagement announcement resulted in a new expedition. It’s not the board’s reaction that made me nervous. It was Melissa’s. The youngest in my field of study, I am no stranger to ridicule.
“You did it,” she says when I return to the office after meeting with the board. “You really did it.”
“I did.”
She stares at me with shock. The assistant gossip grapevine clearly supplied her with information that I don’t need to repeat. Perhaps she’s upset that she wasn’t the first to know.
“You’re really moving to the mountains?”
“Yes, and I’ll be running a field study there for at least a year.”
She stands in the doorway like a trembling leaf. Her confidence drained, and for the first time in years, she exhibits a trace of the nervous college student I hired.
“Can I go with you?”
Her question startles me. We don’t socialize outside of work, but I can’t imagine the reason a woman who wears heels and skirts to work would want to go to a remote mountain town. Let alone live there.
“I know I’m not a lab member, but I can help with the work. I can report to the main office, handle inventory, secure lodging, and I can fetch coffee!”
She’s out of breath and her face is red by the time she’s done. I note the way her hands clench into fists and the earnest expression on her face. No matter her reasoning, the choice is an easy one for me to make.
“Of course,” I reply to her visible relief. “Even with a field lab, administrative duties never end. I must warn you. Our work will be almost exclusively outdoors. We’ll be working in tents and hiking, there will be no air-conditioned office or food delivery.”
“That’s fine,” she replies. “Absolutely fine. I won’t let you down Dr. Carter.”
“Of course.”
“Thank you!” she shouts before she dashes out of my office.
The entire interaction was odd. Her behavior was certainly uncharacteristic. It would prick at an anthropologist’s brain or perhaps that of a biologist. Luckily, I am a botanist, with little more than a cursory curiosity I return to organizing my move.
I’ve messaged Marshall but his replies are slow coming and distinctly lacking warmth. There is a clinical precision. He answers every question. He always replies but he seems almost detached.
One night worry bubbles up making me second guess myself and I almost confront him and cancel the entire move. But rational thought keeps me from reaching out. The service is voluntary. If he didn’t want a wife, he wouldn’t have signed up. If he didn’t want to marry me, he wouldn’t have proposed.
My insecurity is my own problem. His practical nature is a trait I should be grateful for, not one that should have me second guessing this decision. I’m getting married to a man who appreciates me. Who sees me as something more than just a brain.