And Charlotte would laugh. And that would be the way of it. Because that was how they were.
She caught sight of Steven again, chasing another monarch. Nash’s words returned to her. He’ll spend his entire life searching for what he wants. I’m the lucky one. I already have it. The difference between love and marriage and a lesson learned from a cornfield and a flat tire.
Monarchs would always be Dr. Steven Morneau’s love, but no amount of riches or accolades or beauty, no chasing what he didn’t yet have, would cause Nash Strickland to put her anywhere but first. His generosity of spirit, his willingness to allow her the time and space to do what she needed to do to be okay, to date her again after all these years simply because she asked him, to shape a heart out of the people and land she loved, was Charlotte’s Hoja, her leaf, her place to land.
She thanked Howard Gauthier for the thinking spot, climbed back into Daddy’s truck, and rested her head back. Her gaze drifted to the map atop the dashboard. Her brain tried to align three observations very much at odds: the map was new, dated this year below the title; it was a Louisiana map; and the creases were already worn and fuzzed.
She opened the folds.
Over St. Martinsville, the site of the live oak where Evangeline waited to be reunited with Gabriel after too much time apart, the site where Mama first saw Daddy, was a hand-drawn heart. Beside it, the words Marry me again? Here. Anytime you’re ready.
And she remembered: Get me to marry you all over again, and we’ll be back to touching toes in no time.
Charlotte pulled out her phone and posed for another selfie—her best determined look. She’d call this destination The Fighter. Looking like ten miles of bad, sweaty road made her The Messy Fighter.
She snickered. Cried. Folded the map.
And turned Daddy’s truck toward home.
* * *
Charlotte found the farm empty. She loaded five packed suitcases into Daddy’s truck bed, loved on Tibbs when he gave her his sexed-up mating dance, and stopped by the neighbor’s house to propose a whopper of an exchange: one week’s vacation while the other looked after the farm. Carl’s wife nearly wept. She had wanted to visit their grandchildren in Florida for years, but they never could figure a way out of chores at their pig farm.
“Thing is, I need our trip now,” Charlotte said.
“Yes, you do,” said Carl. “Glad to help.”
She collected Natalie and Allison and Gabriel from school and headed to the feed store, where Nash was rumored to be most middays. At the checkout counter, bottled up with the good ol’ boy network in overalls and smelling like fertilizer, none of them Nash, Charlotte decided that the magnitude of rumors swirling around Devon after the heart-on-the-airfield proclamation deserved an equal-caliber obliteration.
“May I make an announcement?” she asked the sweet young cashier.
Charlotte didn’t wait for his answer. She climbed atop the counter, held the courtesy phone to her mouth, and gave a head nod of reassurance to the clerk. The owner’s wife, Bonnie, came up behind him, tickled pink at excitement that wasn’t a flash sale on deer corn, and pressed the code for the intercom.
Speakers around the store warbled on.
Charlotte glanced around the expanding crowd at her feet, most of them stone-faced and geriatric. She felt like the opening act of a George Jones concert. Near the door, Natalie and Allison and Gabriel gave her smiles and thumbs-ups of encouragement. Never one at a loss for words, the moment had her tongue-tied.
“Um…this message is for Nash. Nash Leslie Strickland—although there really is only one Nash in town, and if you start calling him Leslie, he may never forgive me.”
A few chuckles fluttered through the crowd.
“It took me until Marthasville to figure out what I want. I want you to get the ice cream flavor you want, not the one you think will make me happy. I want to travel beyond the city limit sign with you and the kids, all together, because you’ll always be my best destination. I want not one more day to pass that we don’t touch toes at night. I want you to finally fix that tractor so I can bring you sweet tea when you’re out in the fields. And I want what happened at the top of the Ferris wheel, all the rest of our days.”
Catcalls and whistles rang out in earnest, each fueled by the others. Charlotte’s face burned August-in-Devon hot. Good grief, she couldn’t believe she just said that in front of their kids. But that’s what came from an alligator mouth and a hummingbird heart.
“I found your map in Daddy’s truck. And the answer is yes. I’ll marry you all over again.”
The crowd had swelled, but still none of them were Nash. Time expanded. A stalk of dropped hay would have made more sound. The ball of twine Charlotte’s stomach had become threatened to unravel the longer she stood, searching, waiting. She couldn’t say she blamed him. Her fire of self-discovery had darned near torched the good along with the bad.
Shuffling at the garden aisle drew her attention. Around the endcap of seed packets, Nash emerged, his dirty cap pulled low over his eyes. The rest took care of itself. Customers and employees carved a passage to the checkout, a little like Moses parting a sea of denim and dust and neck beards. Nash didn’t meet her gaze until he had climbed atop the counter beside her, and even then, it was just a snap, for he mined her wedding band from the depths of his pocket, slid it home, and kissed her like they weren’t on display in front of the God-fearing, hardworking, land-hugging masses of Devon.
Over the catcalls and whistles and cheers, inside a sea of birdfeeders, Earl Frizeal hollered, “’Bout damned time, Leslie!”
The press of Nash’s lips dissolved into a grin. He laughed against her mouth.
“You’re gonna spend the rest of our lives making up for the Leslie thing,” he said.
“When can I start?” Charlotte asked.
Nash pulled her into another kiss, this one meandering so long and getting lost all up inside Charlotte’s senses that Bonnie started checking customers out through their legs. They hopped down, gathered up their three kids by the door, and headed to the truck.
“What’s with the suitcases?” he asked as they climbed in the seats.
“We’re taking an epic trip,” Charlotte announced. She fired up Daddy’s truck on the first turn, an omen of good things to come, and drove out of the gravel lot. “As much as I wanted adventure, I realized that adventure without those I love most means nothing. What I really wanted was home, in motion.”
“And just where is this motion taking us?” Nash asked.
Charlotte grinned. “Everywhere past our boundaries.”
She pulled out on the highway, headed north. At the Devon city limit sign, she gunned it.
End of The Butterfly Dream
Our Bridal Shop, January 2nd 2019
The Butterfly Dream, February 6th 2019
The Family Wish, March 6th 2019
PS: Do you enjoy women’s fiction romance? Please keep reading for exclusive extracts from The Family Wish and A Mother's Lie.
Thank you!
Thank you so much for purchasing my book. It’s hard for me to put into words how much I appreciate my readers. If you enjoyed this book, please remember to leave a review. Reviews are crucial for an author’s success and I would greatly appreciate it if you took the time to review the book.
If you’d like to know when my next book comes out, sign up to my mailing list at: http://eepurl.com/gb8zLX
About Danielle
Danielle Blair escaped the slog of her former accounting job to instead pursue writing women’s fiction. She pens empowering stories about women, for women, that focus on a woman’s unique journey to find her place in the modern world.
But this wasn’t always the case. Following a messy divorce, Danielle took to reading and writing to help sort out the whirlwind of emotions she was dealing with. What started as a coping mechanism turned into a passion and in 2017 she transitioned to writing full time. Along the winding journey to authorship she also met and m
arried her current husband, who is the love of her life.
She writes her books with the help of her two sisters—Jennifer helps to plot out the stories, while Linda is the beady eye behind the editing of them. Since setting up the tire swing in their back yard together as kids, they’ve always worked better as a team—so why not write a book together? She is the mother of two handsome adult sons, and three dogs that act like children (but she loves them anyway). When not lost writing her next book, Danielle can be found outside digging in the dirt, trying to coax her husband to just try yoga once, and cooking meals that may or may not end up burned every once and a while.
You will find her hanging out on:
BLURB
Every family has its secrets, and the March family is no exception.
For the March sisters, Match Made in Devon, the bridal shop opened by their parents, was a real-world example of what true love was all about. But for Freesia Day, the shop represents the family and love she has been denied her entire life.
Now, reluctantly accepted by her estranged sisters, Freesia still finds herself torn between wanting to know the truth about her biological family whilst believing they don’t deserve to know her at all.
So Freesia does what she does best and plans to leave the painful past behind, setting her sights on a new life in New York, and the career she’s always dreamed of. But fate has other ideas in the form of Jay—a soul as lost as she is, and one with an even darker past.
Freesia knows a future with Jay is impossible – they are two sides of a very different coin – and he is just another link that’s keeping her from running. But when Freesia’s past comes knocking at her door, she realizes that running won’t save her anymore. This time, in order to protect her heart, Freesia has to stand firm and face the past’s painful secrets head on… regardless of the consequences.
Three women bound by fate and family will have to struggle together to redefine what ‘family’ means and discover the raw truth where forgiveness meets love.
The Family Wish will be available March 6th 2019
www.DanielleBlairBooks.com
* * *
EXCERPT
Freesia
Freesia Day practiced what she would say to the police. The guy was wet. Like the wrong end of a firehose wet. For the purposes of picking him out of a future line-up: tall—his green eyes and soggy lashes had been level with the top of Elias March’s vintage black truck cab when she pulled up beside him; trim build; thirty-ish; beard stubble the color of coffee grounds and matched to his hair piled long and unruly and dripping atop his head; pasty skin—lighter than hers, certainly—but for two ruddy swipes, cheekbones to lips. Whether these were caused by exertion or stress, she couldn’t say, though he seemed out of breath. And yes, she knew that serial killers came in all tax brackets and sometimes looked like a black and white print ad for a timepiece and wore Etienne loafers, and that it was entirely possible that he had stolen the bumblebee-colored Lamborghini she had seen abandoned by the roadside a mile back, driver’s door popped open. But the stranger overrode her instinct for self-preservation the instant her tires crawled beside him, navigating the highway headed south, and he glanced up and his expression mirrored hers: incompatible.
His very own storm.
Don’t do this, Freesia.
While she waged her internal battle—you judging him by appearance is no difference than them judging you for yours…Jesus, what people around here do, help strangers, ‘cept you don’t belong here—Freesia braked and shifted the gear to park. She stretched across the seat and hand-cranked the passenger window down, her pulse already heavy.
“Need a lift?”
He squinted through the deluge, took his time answering, contemplating, as if he wasn’t on an isolated stretch of road that might not see another passer-by for hours. His gaze did not waver from hers but for a brief detour south, to where her gauzy poet blouse hung away from her body. She scrambled back into the driver’s seat.
That all-too-familiar edge unsheathed in her gut, a defensiveness that, of late, seemed unfounded the more she had relaxed into her Devon surroundings, an ever-present worry that held fast to old labels and best-forgotten practices. It was entirely possible that in a low-lying area prone to flash flooding, he might be of a mind that climbing into a vehicle with someone like her was his least palatable option. In light of his hesitation, handsome was in danger of treading backward and drowning in ugly.
“I’m a mess.”
Painful. Obvious. He peeled his collar from his neck, but he wasn’t talking drenched clothes against her vinyl seats. The whites of his eyes were pink, his eyelids bloated. Pretty boy had been crying.
“Get in.”
He climbed inside and sealed them off from the rain’s sibilance—door, rolled-up window, all of it. Colossal drops bombed the cab like pellets fired at a tin can, not quite hail but far from polite. Cedarwood and leather and the spice of something eternally classy lifted from the droplets on his skin and reached her nostrils. His disheveled suit had the unmistakable silk texture of a tuxedo. One final bump of Free, you’re gone tricked up her spine before a weak smile from his lips snatched away all her female intuition.
Have mercy but he was beautiful damaged goods.
“That your car back there?” Freesia glanced out the back window, mostly to look at something that didn’t steal her words and her breath like the man who sat next to her. She expected to see more of the endless cotton rows she’d passed, but saw only rivulets on the glass and the emerging fog of their combined body heat. Her gaze slid firmly to his. Now who was painful and obvious? Along these back roads, unless he was a sharecropper with a Swiss bank account, the yellow coupe with the vertical door wing was most certainly his.
“My brother’s.”
“Won’t he be upset? All that leather and…” She couldn’t imagine the interior. Diamond-encrusted gear shift? Twenty-four carat gold dials? Seats crafted from the foreskin of a blue whale?
“He’s dead.”
Again, words and breath vaporized.
“I’m sorry.” Ninety-nine percent for the guy’s loss; one percent for thinking about whale penises during what was clearly the throes of a nervous breakdown. He curled his shoulders, a protective measure that exaggerated his slouch. Never had it been more apparent to Freesia that money didn’t solve all problems.
The stranger nodded absently, his five-yard stare out the windshield whisking him ten-thousand miles away. In her head, she sampled conversational follow-ups—something along the lines of boy-it’s-really-coming-down, a mileage estimate to the nearest gas station, a confession that she couldn’t decide if he was unbelievably attractive because or in spite of him being soaked.
“Did you call roadside?”
He blinked free of his daydream. “What?”
“The car?”
“It works fine.”
A sarcastic huff of what-the-hell? slipped free of her lips, dangerously close to a laugh. “Won’t after the locals get ahold of it.”
“It’s insured.”
Her mood bunched. “Are you for real right now?”
He went from studying the crystal cross hanging from the mirror, the stack of sketch materials beside her, to studying her. “I’ve been more real with you in the past two minutes than I’ve been in my entire life. Than I ever can be again.”
His words gathered the day and deposited the bleak landscape at her core. She might have blocked the darkness, but her own gray had settled inside at the prospect of leaving Devon in two days with more questions than answers, of letting go of one dream to follow another because life didn’t let you have both. The aches mingled and swelled and traveled her body, together.
Free, you’re gone. Don’t make his storm yours.
“We could trade cars. Extend that real.”
The sun came out in the form of a smile while the cloudburst flexed, the storm close enough to touch. Laughter rolled through his chest.
“Th
is truck is real,” he said. “Carburetor-fueled engine. An old tune slipping free of the speakers. Bench seat…”
The stranger’s chest lifted, stretching free from bad posture while his voice became animated clear of bad head space. He splayed his manicured hand on the vinyl, little space between them. His only ring, a silver and onyx tribal-esque symbol, weighed the last finger of his right hand.
Incompatible.
“It’s breaking down all the time…” Freesia added.
It wasn’t lost on Freesia that Elias’s truck picked this moment in time to idle strong beneath them while it seemed to hold this a broken man. Her stepsister, Charlotte, swore that was the way of it, was why she had asked her husband Nash to fix the old clunker time and again instead of selling it. She swore the old truck brought people back from where they’d lost themselves.
“Is it yours?” he said.
“My father’s.”
“Won’t he be upset? All this water…”
“He’s dead.”
Though she echoed the stranger, she paused less. The gap meant something. Less time, less attachment, she supposed.
“I’m sorry.” Ninety-nine percent sincerity. One percent solidarity on the shitty hand life had dealt them both. His gaze trained to the photo of Elias and Stella Irene when they were twelve held in place by the vent slats, no doubt running through the math, wondering why someone who looked like Freesia kept two pale children from the 1960s on the dash.
The Butterfly Dream: Match Made In Devon Bridal Shop: Book Two Page 20
