“Thought you gave the kid all your money.”
“I said that to get you in a costume.”
She tickled him where his ribs met lean muscle, ground zero for making him squirm. He barked out a laugh. Their movement got the car to shaking again. When his breaths evened, he said, “Few weeks ago, I don’t think I was the kind of husband that encouraged that. Hell, I’m not so sure I’d even be here. Always so much to be done. Then Jonah got ahold of me. Came to see me the day after I rearranged that guy’s nose at the pool hall.”
Charlotte curled her back against him, looked out over the twinkling lights, the darkened land beyond. She threaded her fingers through his, where they rested along the back of the car, and brought the union to rest against her lips. “What did he say?”
“He told me that for the longest time, he had marriage all wrong. Thought it was two people living life in front of each other, pushing, pulling, dancing, fighting. He thought if he could fix every problem that came up, they’d be fine.”
Charlotte felt a gale-force memory tear at her emotions before he said it. Cancer. “Until a problem came he couldn’t fix.”
“Said the last year, apart from being the worst kind of sadness, was the closest they’d ever been. He learned to live beside her, listen to her, shut up when she needed to vent, inspire her to try new things, get out of the way and witness her life—what was left of it—with no regrets. To stop pretending he had all the answers.”
Nash’s chest rose and fell at her back. He nuzzled her hair, left a kiss she felt, scalp to toes.
“I don’t have any answers, Charlotte, but I know we need work and I’m a big part of what went wrong. I’m not sure when I turned into a man so absorbed in other things he lost sight of what’s important.” His voice tightened, along with his grip. “This. This is important. You’re important. Hell, you’re everything. I don’t tell you that enough.”
She twisted inside his arms, searched his eyes.
“You got me messed up and sideways,” he whispered, touching his forehead to hers. “I don’t want to do anything to ruin this.”
Inside her chest, her pulse acted like a three-story fall was imminent. “Then you should probably kiss me.”
He did. And how.
Most days, kissing Nash was as familiar as licking brownie batter from her fingertips: quick, before anyone made a fuss. He had firm, strong lips, too often bleached and baked from the sun. But in the time they’d been apart, Nash had packed his seduction suitcase with a few new items. Namely, a stretch of time for which they were stuck to fully explore. And a tongue.
Hello.
She thought to give it a formal welcome—you are cordially invited to plunder at will—ask it to sit on the porch a spell and catch up, for it had been so long. But sometimes, Charlotte just knew when to stem the sarcasm and keep her mouth shut. Or open, as it were.
The Nash and Charlotte that they’d been at seventeen would have gone too far, attempted too much, chosen immediacy over the prolonged. She would have risked the precarious balance they had achieved, of hands and bodies and hearts, to chase a pleasure so long denied. But on this night, with far too much at stake, Nash read her mind as she often did his.
“Stay with me tonight.”
Charlotte nodded.
18
Freesia
Jon Yu had called his driver to take Freesia and Allison and Lachlan anywhere they wanted. Lachlan’s model friends texted from all the nearby innocuous haunts—a bakery on Church Street, an art gallery around the corner, a mysteries-only bookshop. A few models checked hidey-holes in the building that housed the Galleries—restrooms, alcoves, catering kitchen. Freesia didn’t have to use the fullest part of her imagination to know they were hookup spots. Lachlan was convinced Oliver had taken Natalie back to his hotel room. Freesia’s attempts to extract this information from Lachlan were met with increasing worry when he found out Natalie and Allison’s ages.
“He’s not a bad guy,” Lachlan kept saying.
The declaration did not lower Freesia’s blood pressure. She tried Natalie’s cell again. Straight to voicemail.
By the time the driver pulled up in front of the Roxy Hotel, Freesia was making deals with a higher power. That Natalie should be here, that she should be safe, that hotel plus supermodel didn’t necessarily equate to being in a room. Lachlan lauded enough other things to do inside the historic building that he sounded like a tour guide. He almost had Freesia convinced that a sixteen-year-old with a young Jude Law would prefer jazz music in the basement lounge to a make out session.
They tried the desk clerk and the concierge, described a blonde girl in a bright dress and crazy boots in rather frenetic terms. Both of the staffers, no doubt accustomed to Hollywood elite, looked at them as if they had collectively sprouted three additional heads. About this time, Lachlan got a text from Oliver’s roommate, who gave him the room number.
They spilled out of the elevators on the fifth floor. The lack of signage shriveled her stomach. Freesia suggested that Lachlan go one way, her and Allison the other to find the room number faster. Allison’s protest at the idea crumbled quickly at Freesia’s icy glare. On the hotel’s Sixth Avenue side, Freesia and Allison met back up with Lachlan, already at a door with a necktie affixed to the handle.
Freesia stepped in front of Lachlan’s ineffectual knocks and pounded the surface.
“You got five seconds to open this door before I call security,” she shouted through the door.
“Auntie Free,” said Allison, her eyes shifting to Lachlan, her cheeks flushed.
Behind the door, noises: shuffling, muffled voices.
Lachlan gave a supportive follow-up knock. “Come on, man. It’s Lach. Open up.”
The chain slid from the housing, metal on metal. The door cracked.
All Freesia needed.
She slipped her hands through the opening, gripped the door, and shoved her way past the mild push-back of pressure—someone standing at the door. The room was dark. Too dark. Snowy skies and the early onset of a winter evening cast the white window sheers and the peekaboo of city beyond, into gray shadows.
Somewhere behind the door, in the dark, a male’s voice, a protest, something her brain didn’t register for the blood pounding against her eardrum.
“Natalie?” she called. “Natalie, are you in—”
Freesia stopped short. Natalie sat on the edge of a bed, as pristine as hotel staff had left it, comment card and all. Yu’s dress was still buttoned to her throat. Milo Caprese boots on her feet nearly made Freesia weep.
At the intrusion, Natalie charged off the mattress and took backward steps toward the window. Her voice came out in a shriek. “What are you doing here?”
Freesia turned, her eyes adjusting to the room’s dim bulbs. Allison and Lachlan filled the space behind her in silence. Oliver stood barefooted in jeans, hugging low over his designer underwear, no shirt.
Oh hell no.
“We’re leaving,” said Freesia, as matter-of-fact as she could manage, given her current state of imagined Charlotte freak-out.
“He was showing me his ankh collection,” said Natalie.
“I’ll just bet he was.” Freesia wanted to launch into a takedown—how she specifically told the girls to stay put, how Natalie had deliberately defied her and ignored her texts, how Freesia had been moments away from calling the police, how Natalie didn’t even have a driver’s license yet she had steered herself straight into a dangerous, compromising scenario—but she didn’t want Natalie’s most potent memory of New York to be the same shame Freesia’s mother had put on her after her own youthful encounter with a boy called James. Best case: Natalie would roam the world to escape her choices. Worst case: Natalie would roam the world to escape her choices.
Natalie’s glare shifted between the players in the room. When she spoke, her venom was aimed directly at Freesia.
“I hate you.”
The room emptied of all viable air. Freesia was
sure of it. Her sternum ached from the emptiness.
“Nat,” Allison said, her tone sharp, fretful.
The moment stretched long—coarse and surreal and extravagant. She wanted to head for the elevators, hail a driver to the airport, get on a plane headed for some faraway land where no one knew her. Knowing people brought pain. But Charlotte believed her to be a gift and that confidence did not allow her to say nothing, to leave two sixteen-year-olds in New York to fend for themselves, no matter how insufferable. Once, Freesia had been insufferable.
She sampled things to say back—I’m not too fond of you right now, either and you’ll get over it—while air tightened her lungs and the faces in the room put eyes to her. None of it seemed right, or what she’d needed to hear all those years ago.
“You’re allowed to be mad at me,” she began, what Charlotte might have said, but there was the life experience and old hurts present, rippling just below the surface, so she finished with what she knew she had to say. “But you’re not allowed to make the worst mistake of your life under my watch.”
Freesia pushed through the bodies to the hallway. Brisk air from the passageway, from the atrium five floors below, reached her heated cheeks. She pulled in a lungful, stale but an improvement.
Natalie and Allison joined her, silent, strangers.
They returned to their darkened hotel room without eye contact, without words, without a firm grip on why they were even there together. Freesia had wanted to be significant, inject herself into something meaningful, but she was a storm. And she would always be a storm.
19
Charlotte
They took the roads home in silence, holding hands. No radio with soothing lyrics. No cracked windows to usher in the cold. Fear of breaking the strand of connection they’d discovered at the fair, Charlotte supposed.
He shifted the truck into park. His voice came out hoarse, as if he’d already been projecting himself into the hours ahead, making love, same as she.
“Sorry to ask, but can we check on Milkshake? I can’t seem to sleep or concentrate until I do.”
A small concession to the freedom inherent in having him all night, in any space they chose. Charlotte agreed.
The barn was warm, protected from the elements. The dairy cow saw them and struggled to rise. Nash cooed her back to resting and crouched low beside her. One hand scratching the patches of white and brown at her chin, around her ears, he checked the hay for a surprise newborn. Finding none, he went through a visual prenatal check—abdomen, back end, tail—then replenished her special feed. Milkshake simply watched him with even breaths, her stretched pupils shifting only slightly, an animal at ease with her daily companion.
Nash had already turned one of the pens over to a hospital space: neat and orderly, clean and dry, instruments and equipment organized into sanitized bags or wrapped in bleached-out sack cloths, old garments and sheets laundered and folded and stacked nearby. Charlotte thought this part of the process premature until she remembered how long she’d been away. Three weeks. That nature and life had moved on, whether she came back, made her feel small, her worries insignificant. In days, maybe hours, when the time was right, Milkshake would risk her life to give birth to her calf. Charlotte, feeling unappreciated, drew things into sharp contrast. Maybe Nash had stopped showing appreciation, but Charlotte had, too. For life, for its fragility, never more in evidence than on a working farm. She wanted to dial back her selfishness, but in her mind, she was already too far gone.
She scanned the barn. A near-birth Ayrshire wasn’t the only development. The 584 International, red, white and grime, the very same one that had belonged to three generations of Stricklands and on which she’d first seen Nash, had been moved from the forgotten corner. Tarp gone, sprayed out from under years of dirt, spare parts aligned on folded tarps at the barn floor, it was a dissection of epic proportions.
“You got it running?” she called over to him, scrubbing his hands at the sink.
“Not yet. Jonah came over to help me tug it out. Tried all the obvious things—injector lines, fuel filter. Got broken switches, a handful of other things wrong.”
She heard the sound of running water shutting off. They were in dangerous territory—that of the mundane, where talk of to-do lists had the potential to scrub the moment of the two occupants. If Charlotte had a dollar every time their pillow talk turned to a list of things to pick up next time one of them was in town, she would be rich enough to buy Match Made in Devon outright.
Nash joined her, his hands pink and wet, his words buried in a towel. “Helps to have something to work on when I get to thinking about you driving the road out of here, maybe not ever coming back. Leastways, not to stay.”
Charlotte swallowed hard. She could do with a request to pick up a bundle of garbage sacks and a carton of orange juice right about now. But that was how they’d got here—forsaking the uncomfortable for the easy. Charlotte had always gravitated to light conversation, easy banter. The dark stuff was best swept out the door, alongside cobwebs that had been building for a while. Already, she didn’t know how to get back to the moment on the Ferris wheel. The magical strand had broken.
Then she got an idea. A crazy, nostalgic, Charlotte kind of idea often guaranteed to prompt eye rolls and a dismissive comment about the romantic stories that always got her wrapped up and weepy.
She tapped the tractor’s seat, nothing more than a thin strip of red leather stretched over a butt dish on a spring. “You should sit.”
Nash’s brow furrowed. “Why?”
Charlotte had two choices: give up, tell herself it wasn’t worth the effort, or stay, because everything about a happily ever after was worth it. “Because a pretty lady asked you to.”
Nash’s lips quirked into a half smile, the same devastating one that sat atop his sexy clefted, five o’clock shadowed chin that he’d wielded all evening, and darned if that didn’t put her right back in that rocking bucket of a car, westerly winds rearranging his too-long hair while his fully-healed lips rearranged all five of her senses.
He reached for the steering wheel, found a familiar foothold—the spot where the fire-engine paint had worn clear down to the steel—and hoisted himself into the seat, easy as sliding into a glove. Nash was stronger than he was back then, formidable and fleshed out from years of working the land. She wasn’t sure her plan would work, but she was sure willing to try.
“Give me a few minutes,” Charlotte called over her shoulder as she exited the barn.
“Where are you going?” she heard him say.
“Don’t move. And don’t fall asleep on me. Pinch yourself if you have to.”
The minute she cleared the barn door, she took off at a sprint. Cool night air rushed her cheeks. She flew through the house’s unlocked door—no key necessary in Devon—up the stairs, and straight for the master bedroom closet. She stopped short, pulled out her phone, and whipped off an email to Steven. Can’t participate this year. Thanks for the invitation. She signed it Charlotte, not C or Monarch girl or Yours truly as she’d done in the past. Just Charlotte.
She tossed her phone on the bed and rummaged through the closet. Buried in the back, near all the things she’d filed away to wear again on a someday that may never come—her bridesmaid dress from Alex’s wedding, the black number she’d cloaked around herself at Mama’s funeral—the last funeral she vowed that dress would ever see, the maternity shirt with a stork and an arrow that said Farmer on Board. Charlotte unearthed a white lace sundress and an old pair of cowboy boots.
The boots fit. The dress, not so much.
Rats.
She glanced at the full-length mirror hanging in back of the closet. The buttons wouldn’t close over her chest and the rest of her looked like a butcher had stalled too long filling a sausage casing. The sting of tears surfaced behind her eyes. Her idea had been perfect, to seduce Nash on the tractor, the place that had been a symbol of their love—shoot, the story was even immortalized on the second floor
of the bridal shop. A glass of iced tea, even though it was chilly out. The works. Without the sundress, this dress, she struggled to see the point of it all.
They could never go back.
Clothes hanging in the closet washed away on a tide of tears she was helpless to stop. The crash of intent was so much more acute, given the ground they’d covered on the ride, how she’d built it up on the drive home. He was waiting for her, probably fiddling with the ignition that had always given him fits and starts, and here she was, unable to stand, her world, her future coming down to fitting into this one dress that would never fit again. It was a little like a clogged irrigation system, let one thought spray out and more unexpected ones surfaced: Not only would Nash not find her attractive, but no other man would either. Dr. Flutter would take one look at her, not thin and perfect, not Alex, not Freesia, not anything close to who Charlotte had once been, certainly not smart, and he wouldn’t stop his van alongside the charcoal-gravel road for her.
And that was the way Nash found her. Wearing more tears than clothes, in her utilitarian bra and panties, lacy sundress circling her waist like a tourniquet, boots on, curled up on the floor of the closet.
By the crazed look in his eyes and the way the normally docile Nash bolted to the floor and repeated his nickname for her, “Char? Char, honey?” he probably thought something terrible had happened—a seizure, a blackout, a break in a bone on the way up the steps. She tried to speak, almost did too, but he picked that moment to scoop her up and carry her to the bed with such little effort, she was incapable of rubbing two sentences together. A fresh round of tears commenced.
“I got worried when you didn’t come back.”
“How long’s it been?” A long time, she knew. She felt the answer somewhere between ten and twenty minutes.
“Half an hour.” He reached into his pocket. The man always carried a handkerchief, had since the moment his granddaddy told him a real man wasn’t fully dressed without one. And “because women cry, and you never want them to think you won’t take care of them.” What Nash pulled out, however, wasn’t one of the hundreds of white cotton ones she’d washed and folded over the course of their marriage. It was a red bandana, worn and frayed at the edges, sporting a swirly white pattern an awful lot like their artifact in the second floor of the bridal shop.
The Butterfly Dream: Match Made In Devon Bridal Shop: Book Two Page 13
