Find Romance at Wildwood
Sam Knight snorted his disgust when he read the words on the picturesque billboard to his right, and thought of the two long days he'd just lost in a Little Rock, Arkansas divorce court.
Romance? Bah, humbug.
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel of his gleaming black Jaguar, keeping time with the wipers swishing over the rain-swept windshield. Impatiently he frowned at the bright red traffic light, willing it to change green. But it didn't, and his gaze naturally shifted back to that disgusting roadside advertisement, illuminated and shining wetly in the night sky like a beacon for fools.
Specializing in weddings, receptions, and first or second honeymoons. Sam grimaced. Six years' experience as a divorce attorney had long since convinced him that the world would be much better off without honeymoons, not to mention the weddings that preceded them. Belatedly he noticed the other words, much smaller and in the lower right-hand corner of the sign: Petit Jean Mountain.
"Aw, hell." Sam groaned and dropped his head to rest on the backs of his hands. "Not Petit Jean." Why would anyone want to go and deface that beautiful mountain with a honeymoon hotel of all things? He wondered what that would mean to Cedar Ridge Resort, the motel he'd bought there barely a year ago—a fifteen-unit investment that had just begun to make money.
He thought of his rustic resort, bought impulsively after a weekend fishing trip to the central Arkansas mountain on which he'd lived as a youngster. He realized it had been over ten months since he'd escaped the confines of his Memphis, Tennessee law office to visit it, and even longer than that since he'd managed to go fishing. Maybe it was time to drive up for a weekend of R and R in the solitude of the nearby state park, the comfort of the log fishing cabins, the splendor of the mountain sunrises.
He was between court dates. He could borrow a fishing rod, catch a few crappie between rain showers, and finally meet the very capable manager his sister/accountant had hired to run his resort for him.
He would also take a good, long look at this Wildwood place and raise holy hell if it compromised, even minutely, the perfection of the mountain he'd always considered a haven to the chaos of broken dreams in which he lived.