Sweet

by Tammara Webber

  Whether Pearl believed in luck or not didn’t matter. I believed enough for the both of us.

  Pearl

  This morning, I woke up in my bedroom for the last time. I was only moving ten minutes away—again—but for a happier reason. Mama brought me coffee to wake me up, but I’d been lying awake, thinking, for at least an hour. When she opened the door, I sat up and slid my glasses on. “Morning, Mama.”

  She perched on the edge of the bed, her dark hair damp from an early shower. She and Thomas liked to get up at dawn every day and watch the sunrise from the little terrace off their room, Tux on one lap or the other. They were in love, but they’d become best friends. Boyce and I were best friends who’d fallen in love. Our way to each other was more convoluted than theirs had been, but we’d come to the same good end, no matter the path.

  “No second thoughts, mija?”

  I took the mug from her and smiled. “None.”

  She cupped my face and kissed my nose. “Good.”

  • • • • • • • • • •

  Mel and I peered out the window. The courtyard was filled to the brim with flowers and people. I spotted Mr. and Mrs. Thompson next to Mrs. Echols, who’d started bringing Boyce cookies and casseroles after he was shot and hadn’t ever stopped. Lucas’s girl, Jacqueline, sat next to the Hellers—Carlie, Cindy, and Charles. They had given me the perfect grad-school home for the past nine months. Next to them were Ray and Arianna Maxfield, who’d shocked the entire town last October when they eloped to Houston for a shotgun justice-of-the-peace wedding before anyone even knew they were seeing each other. Their spontaneity became more obvious around Christmas when Arianna started showing. Lucas’s little sister was due next month.

  Sam wheeled down the aisle just ahead of her dad. In thanks for her assistance at Wynn’s while he was recuperating, Boyce had helped Mr. Adams find a used, adapted truck for her seventeenth birthday last week. The girl who loved cars finally had her own. She’d driven herself and her dad here—Brit and I watched her taking five minutes to park it exactly between the lines in the lot.

  “New drivers.” Brit laughed. “Give her two weeks. She’ll be lurching that thing into a spot inside five seconds, lines be damned.”

  Sam had also instructed me to aim for her with the bouquet. “It’s not like I can lunge for it,” she said. “I might run over somebody’s toe.”

  I told her I’d do my best.

  Mel told me to aim as far from her as possible. “I do not wanna hear it from my mother,” she said. “If that thing comes my way, I swear I will spike it like a volleyball.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Dover were seated behind the seats reserved for my parents, who tolerated them the same way Boyce tolerated their daughter—with frequent asides.

  Any minute Lucas and Boyce would take their places, Randy or Mateo would lead my mother to the front, and the wedding march would begin. The little Vega boys had been appointed to toss flower petals ahead of the wedding party. I didn’t see Yvette, but she’d promised to personally send them down the aisle—on the other end of which their father would be stationed.

  Shanice and Brit had gone downstairs to check that everything was in place.

  “You do realize how bizarre it is that you’ve got Brittney Loper in your wedding party, right?” Mel said. “Even if she did plant the get married seed in both y’all’s heads, the crazy bitch.”

  I smiled. “Yeah. It’s weird—but she’s one of the kindest people I’ve ever met. And she cried and squealed like a pageant winner when I showed her the ring Randy designed.” I’d worn that engagement ring for almost five months. My hand felt naked without it.

  “Your boy does have decent taste in jewelry. There’s a shock.”

  “C’mon, admit he’s grown on you.”

  She sighed with her entire body. “A little. But mostly since he stopped calling me Dover.” When I pinned my lips together, she rolled her eyes. “To my face, at least.”

  Shanice and Brit came in the room then. “They’re almost ready!” Brit said, joining us at the window. “Look, there’s Boyce and Landon—Lucas—whatever he goes by now. Rawr. They look hot as a couple jalapeños.”

  Mel rolled her eyes and Shanice tried and failed to stifle a giggle, joining us.

  “Wait! You aren’t supposed to see him yet!” Brit said, taking me by the shoulders and walking me backward, away from the window.

  “Pretty sure that rule is for the groom?” Mel said.

  “Huh—maybe you’re right, but I don’t believe in taking any chances. Plus, he might look up and see her! No bad luck is happening to these nuptials on my watch.” She reached to pull a few coils out of my updo, which Mel had spent an hour doing.

  “Wh…what…what are you doing?” Mel sputtered.

  Brit turned me toward the full-length mirror in the corner. A curl fell down the left side of my face and a few smaller strands fell down my back. “A man likes a girl to be a little bit disheveled. Kinda like a loose thread on a sweater. He just can’t help but wanna pull it.”

  “This is her wedding day, not a hoedown!”

  Brit was undeterred. “When a bride goes down the aisle toward her guy, she doesn’t want him thinking about being shackled to perfection the rest of his natural born days. No man can live up to that. If she’s smart”—she winked at me—“she wants him to ponder that little thread and how much he’s going to enjoy pullin’ it all the way loose later on.”

  “She looks gorgeous, Melody,” Shanice said, giving my hand a covert squeeze. “You did a fabulous job on her hair and makeup. Brittney’s tweak just adds that touch of sexy to the elegance.”

  A knock sounded on the door.

  “Come in!” Brit called.

  Thomas stuck his head in and smiled. I smoothed my hands over the embroidered bodice as Mel arranged my veil.

  “Oh, Pearl, you look beautiful,” he said, crossing the room and taking my hands in his. “You ready, little girl?”

  “Aww,” my bridesmaids said in unison—likely the first and last united opinion of the day for the three of them.

  I nodded, suddenly nervous. Spotlights were not one of my favorite things.

  “It’ll be over soon,” Thomas promised. “Grin and bear it.”

  I grimaced and he smiled. He’d given me the same advice before my valedictorian speech five years ago.

  The ceremony was a blur. Boyce and I repeated vows, exchanged rings, kissed in front of everyone—and all I retained at the end of it all was the dark green of his eyes, steady on mine with every step I took and every word I said. Once Thomas put my hand in Boyce’s, he never let go. His voice was calm and sure. It made all the buzzing anxiety go soft, like footfalls on a forest floor. Before I knew it, we were presented as Boyce and Pearl Wynn, and he leaned close.

  “Now that’s a Wynn-win,” he said, and we laughed.

  Boyce

  I carried my new wife up the steps and into our house. She hadn’t been allowed to the top floor yet. A quarter of the footprint of the rest of the place, it was surrounded with a widow’s walk wide enough for a couple of chairs, accessed by french doors. In the distance, the gulf was just visible—a sliver of water below a sky that ranged pale gray to bright blue, depending on the weather’s mood. It wasn’t the bay view her parents had, but she swore she didn’t need that.

  The bottom floor was a double carport—no more bedroom windows up against the side of the garage. The second-floor living quarters were brighter on cloudy days than that trailer had been in midsummer, and our bedroom had a bed like the one in that hotel in Houston. I was looking forward to performing my husbandly duties in that bed, but first I wanted to show her the top floor.

  Instead of setting her down once we got inside, I walked straight to the winding staircase and put her over my shoulder because it was way too narrow to carry her up any other way. I probably didn’t have to steady her with my hand on her ass, but hell—there was no reason not to.

  “Boyce!” She laughed, holdin
g on to the back of my shirt.

  There was no door—the staircase emerged into the center of a blue room, windowed on all four sides. I’d installed a big L-shaped desk into one corner—the one facing the gulf—and a sectional sofa in the opposite corner. Above the windows and the doors to the widow’s walk was a continuous shelf. On it were whelk shells I’d collected over the past few months—a couple hundred of them in just about every size. None were as big as that first one, which sat on her new desk.

  I put her on her feet and watched her walk around, peeking out the windows, trailing her fingers over the reclaimed-wood desk, the upholstered desk chair, her diploma on the wall—space for the next one just over it. She touched the glued-together shell I’d given her when she was a pretty little fourteen-year-old who’d turned my world upside down with one kiss.

  After walking around the room twice she returned, cuddled her hands on my chest and stared up at me. “This room is—?”

  “Yours. You’ve got three or four more years of school, and though I’ll welcome you in your sexy little glasses at the kitchen table anytime, I reckoned you needed a room all your own.”

  One tear and then another tumbled down her cheeks and her lower lip wobbled.

  “Happy crying?” I said, winding that escaping curl around my finger, tucking it behind her ear.

  Her hiccup of laughter made the rest of those tears spill, and her nodding smile was the clincher. “So happy. You?”

  I slid my arms around her and pulled her close. “I’m the happiest son of a bitch in this whole damn state.” One thin strap slipped off her shoulder, and that coil popped back out from behind her ear, and in our positions there was no hiding what would make me even happier.

  She raised one brow and gave me a sharp look. “I think that sofa behind you needs some breaking in.” She stretched on her toes and kissed my chin.

  I lifted her just off the ground and strode backward, kissing her, until my calves hit that sofa, where I paused. “In your wedding dress?”

  She pushed me down, lifted her skirt just enough to get it out of the way, and straddled me. Eyes shining, she bit her lip on that naughty grin she got sometimes. “Not like I’m planning to wear it again, right?”

  I shook my head and wasn’t sure where to start—the one million buttons down the back of that dress or the hundreds of hairpins in her hair. She reached up and started pulling pins out and tossing them to the floor. Buttons it is.

  “Sweetheart,” I said, kissing her while threading buttons the size of baby teeth through equally small holes, “I know you don’t believe in luck, but you’ll never convince me it doesn’t exist. Because I know for a fact that I am one lucky man.”

  Books by Tammara Webber

  CONTOURS OF THE HEART® series

  Easy

  Breakable

  Sweet

  BETWEEN THE LINES series

  Between the Lines

  Where You Are

  Good For You

  Here Without You

  Acknowledgments

  To every reader who takes a chance on me as a storyteller, who chooses to spend time with my characters and their stories, please accept my sincere gratitude. I couldn't do what I do without you. You cheer my heart and touch my soul every day with your support and love.

  I would never say that an author can't write in a vacuum, but I'm grateful that I don't have to do so. Many thanks to the people who help make me a better writer: my critique partner, Tracey Garvis Graves; my beta readers, Colleen Hoover, Robin Deeslie, and Hannah Webber; and my new editor, Anne Victory, and her team of oops-catchers.

  Thank you to my husband, Paul, for the miracle of over thirty years spent in love with you. You inspire every story in my heart and every moment of swoon in my imagination. Your voice shows through in every lead man I've written. Boyce owes getting a book of his own to your belief in him and the fact that you wanted his story before anyone else had a chance to.

  Very special thanks to Cammie Hyatt of UTMSI, who is as passionate about marine biology as I am about writing. She provided great insight into the work of researchers who study the effects of everything from overfishing to protected habitats to disasters like crude-oil spills and the associated cleanup efforts. Thank you, Cammie, for the campus and lab tour and for spending your valuable time in person and through e-mail to help a nonscientific fiction writer understand her scientifically-minded character!

  Thank you yet again to my amazing team at Dystel & Goderich. I feel so much support for what I do from everyone I've ever had the pleasure of dealing with there. Special thanks to my agent, Jane Dystel, and my foreign-rights agent, Lauren Abramo, who are tireless in their efforts on my behalf. You two are Wonder Women.

  One of my favorite contemporary quotes is from author Stephen Chbosky: “We accept the love we think we deserve.” (The Perks of Being a Wallflower, 1999.) Dear everyone who is accepting love that is less than you deserve: Let go now. Don't wait until circumstances align. Don't wait until you're less scared, less weak, less flawed. Be afraid. Be fragile. Be imperfect. Respect yourself as you are and demand that same level of esteem from those you choose to give your heart to, because you are worthy of it right now. Please don't be afraid to be alone, because you'll discover just how strong you really are and you'll fall in love with yourself again. Create a divine void that can be filled by the love you really do deserve and nothing less.

  About the Author

  I'm a hopeful romantic who adores novels with happy endings, because there are enough sad endings in real life. Before writing full time, I was an undergraduate academic advisor, economics tutor, planetarium office manager, radiology call center rep, and the palest person to ever work at a tanning salon. I married my high school sweetheart, and I'm Mom to three adult kids and four very immature cats.

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