A Small-Town Bride

by Hope Ramsay

  “Oh, shit. I can’t believe it. You cut the daffodils and left the chickweed?”

  “Chickweed?”

  He pointed to the ground cover with the delicate white blossoms. “That stuff. It’s a weed. Obviously you lied when you said you could recognize chickweed. And also, did it ever occur to you that we planted the daffodils so they would look pretty this time of year? Those flowers will bloom for the better part of two weeks out here in the garden if it doesn’t get too warm too fast. Back there in the centerpieces, they’ll wilt before the party is over.”

  Crap. When would she learn? She had never been good at anything in her life. No matter what anyone asked her to do, she managed to screw it up.

  Chapter Four

  Dusty swallowed back the profanity that wanted to explode out of him. Dammit to hell and back. The crew who’d planted those bulbs last fall had busted their asses, and now the bed would go naked unless he filled it in with some pansies that would have to be removed before the summer’s heat.

  Willow had given him the authority to fire her ass, and messing up the flower bed seemed like a good enough reason to do it. But Amy was a member of Willow’s family—by marriage. So he needed to tread carefully.

  Besides, he should have kept an eye on her. Rich debutantes didn’t know squat about gardening because they lived in big houses with paid help to do all the dirty work. On the other hand, this particular debutante had some talent for flower arranging. Not that Dusty would ever forgive her for cutting his daffodils.

  When he turned around, the tears in Amy’s eyes actually looked legit, like maybe she wasn’t trying to manipulate him. Like maybe she regretted what she’d done. A pang of pity settled in his gut. Okay, so he wouldn’t fire her, but he needed to teach her a lesson about asking questions—even stupid ones.

  “Come with me,” he snarled.

  He pivoted and headed across the lawn toward the barn. She followed him, jogging to keep up.

  “Wait here,” he directed when they reached the barn. He headed into the warehouse and rummaged around until he found what he needed: an empty plastic bag that had once held bird seed, a flashlight, a pinecone, and the leftover jar of peanut butter he’d used a couple of months back to trap a raccoon that had been raiding the garbage.

  He returned to find Amy still winded from her jog across the lawn. He stopped to assess her. Underneath those gigantic clothes, Amy was an attractive woman. A little part of him argued that he should send her home for the day and start fresh on Monday.

  But a much larger part of him argued back that this was a teaching moment. And hadn’t Willow told him to teach the girl? Yes, she had.

  “I’ve got an important job for you,” he said in a chipper voice. “It’s an after-hours job, so you’ll get time and a half. You interested?”

  “Time and a half?”

  Her stunning lack of knowledge surprised the hell out of him, but then again, she was a little rich girl who had grown up in a giant bubble. She knew nothing about the real world, and it was his job to teach her how things really worked. “Never heard of time and a half?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  “It means you get fifty percent more each hour than you do during normal working hours. But I figure a rich girl like you doesn’t really care about money, do you?”

  “What makes you say that? Everyone cares about money.” She tilted her chin up, and he had to hand it to her; she’d come back with a really good answer. He also remembered her asking him about payday. Why would a woman like Amy take a job like this? And why would she be so interested in payday? Those questions were like giant red flags that he chose to ignore.

  “I guess you’re right about money,” he said. “So you’re interested in this job?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay, here’s the deal. We have a small snipe problem up at the chapel,” he said with his utterly straight face. “You know what a snipe is, don’t you?” he asked, just to be sure. If she asked him to explain, he would let her off the hook.

  But instead she rose right to the bait. She nodded vigorously, like she’d been snipe hunting dozens of times, thereby proving beyond a doubt that she was a rube ready to be pranked.

  “All right, here’s what I need you to do. There’s this snipe about yea long”—he measured twenty inches between his fingers—“that’s been digging holes under the foundation of the old church. I need to get rid of that critter. But unfortunately, snipe only come out at night.”

  “Uh-huh.” She nodded, and he struggled to keep from smirking.

  “So you know how to catch a snipe?”

  Amy shook her head. The hook was set.

  “All right, here’s what you do.” He opened up the bag and pulled out the pinecone and jar of peanut butter. “You take this peanut butter, and you put it on the pinecone, and then you put the pinecone in the bag and you wait. When the snipe comes along and takes the bait, you grab the bag. I put a flashlight in the bag for you too.” He gave her a reassuring smile, and in response, she gazed up at him like a trusting puppy.

  Maybe he shouldn’t send her off on a snipe hunt.

  Nah. She needed to learn her lesson, so he doubled down. “The snipe don’t come out until at least nine o’clock. You know how to get to the old chapel?”

  “It’s down that path.” She pointed.

  “Yeah. Set your trap right at the edge of the woods, before you get to the meadow.”

  “Okay.”

  “But not before nine. Now, you go on back to the pool house and pull up all the chickweed. And tomorrow morning you bring me back that snipe, you hear? I’ll meet you right here at nine o’clock.”

  She bit her lip as if it had only now occurred to her that she might not actually catch the snipe. Which was exactly what would happen, since snipe didn’t exist and he’d just sent her on the proverbial wild-goose chase.

  * * *

  The sounds of the wedding reception drifted across the lawn all the way to the corner of the parking lot where Amy had parked the Beemer. How she wished she were one of the wedding guests, drinking champagne, dancing the night away.

  Instead she huddled in a big, ugly camo coat, watching the dashboard clock click down the minutes to 9:00 p.m. and trying to talk herself out of the snipe hunt. She could be extremely inventive when it came to excuses for not doing stuff she had promised to do. In fact, finding excuses was her biggest gift besides covering up her mistakes.

  But she’d done the math. If she spent four hours hunting that snipe, it would mean fifty dollars in her pocket. A few days ago, she wouldn’t have thought twice about spending fifty dollars on a bottle of crappy wine at a DC restaurant.

  Today fifty dollars represented a large enough sum to have her seriously contemplating the idea of going wild-animal hunting—an activity that was so far out of her comfort zone that thinking about it made her stomach tie itself into knots and her hands go cold and clammy. She was not an animal person. Not even dogs or cats. Not even fish.

  She didn’t want to go out there into the woods at night. It scared her way down deep where all those kid fears lurked—the ones that grab you when you’re young and you never get over. Yeah, she wanted to come face-to-face with a snipe about as much as she wanted to sleep in her car.

  But the alternative came with too many hidden price tags.

  So when nine o’clock finally arrived, she locked the car and headed toward the chapel footpath. But as she approached, her fear got the best of her, and she took a sharp detour, drawn by the sound of dance music and laughter.

  The camo jacket hid her in the night shadows as she slipped through the bushes planted around the Carriage House and peeked into the French doors. Golden light washed the room and sparked in the crystals sewn into the bride’s bodice, refracting like tiny jewels as she danced with her groom. She literally sparkled. And the flowers were so beautiful and dramatic and…not wilted.

  Mr. McNeil was wrong.

  Amy clenched her fist, raise
d it high above her head, and gave it a couple of pumps, as if she’d just won a gold-medal race or something. Yes! Her quick thinking had saved the day for the bride. But the pool house flower bed looked a lot like scorched earth now that she’d pulled up all the chickweed.

  Who decided what was a weed and what was a flower, anyway? And was it better to have saved the centerpieces and made today’s bride happy or kept the daffodils in their flower bed for future brides to enjoy?

  Life was like this—one complicated trade-off after another. This ability to see both sides of every question explained Amy’s difficulty making choices. She always got lost in the pros and cons, dithered around, and then took the easy way out.

  She turned away from the light and took the footpath into the woods that stood as a buffer between the manor house and the chapel. Maybe the flower centerpieces were like a sign or something. Maybe she needed to stop dithering.

  Out here, beyond the party lights, the night and the woods loomed as dark as her deepest nightmares and cold enough to seep through the heavy coat. She huddled deeper into its gigantic confines, her heart thudding in her chest. She’d won a couple of tiny victories today: getting a job, fixing the centerpieces. She could handle this snipe hunt too.

  She snapped on the flashlight and headed into the woods, stopping right before the path reached the meadow where the old chapel stood. It was time to lay her snipe trap, which might prove slightly problematic because she’d eaten the bait. She hadn’t meant to eat all of the peanut butter, but she’d been ravenous. Now only a tiny bit clung to the sides and bottom of the jar—not enough to smear on a pinecone.

  She didn’t think the pinecone was essential. After all, the peanut butter would lure the snipe no matter what, right? So she improvised and put the whole jar in the bag.

  She set up the bag, moved about five feet away, and turned off the flashlight. She didn’t know anything about hunting, but it stood to reason that no wild animal would approach if she kept the flashlight burning.

  She would have preferred to move a whole lot farther away from the bag and keep the light on, but the scarcity of peanut butter and moonlight made her worry that any snipe that ventured into the bag might escape if she didn’t stay close.

  She settled in, her body tense with fear. Who knew the woods could be so noisy at night, what with the whisper of wind through the branches and lots of tiny sounds that emanated from the leaf litter on either side of the footpath? Her imagination magnified every tiny snap, crackle, or pop into giant spiders, centipedes, and poisonous reptiles.

  She was already twitching with unease when a new, much louder rustling sound reached her. Footsteps. In the woods. Coming toward her. And then a shadow emerged from the undergrowth and moved toward the bag.

  Her stomach clenched with sudden nausea, and she wished with all her heart that she hadn’t eaten the peanut butter. What now? She didn’t know. She wasn’t cut out to be a snipe hunter. Or a gardener. Or anything else of any use to anyone. What had made her think she could catch a snipe?

  She crawled down the footpath away from the bag, thinking of nothing but escape. But to her horror, instead of going after the peanut butter jar, the snipe turned and headed toward her, snuffling and panting as it approached, as if it liked her scent.

  Crap. She must smell more peanut buttery than the jar in the bag. This was what came of eating peanut butter with her fingers because she didn’t have a knife or any crackers or anything.

  She strained to see in the dark and then wished she hadn’t when the animal’s shadow moved again. Holy crap. It was a lot bigger than twenty inches. It would never fit in the bag Mr. McNeil had given her.

  Oh, God. Where the hell had she put the flashlight? She groped around on the ground and finally found it. But before she snapped it on, she remembered something she’d seen on Animal Planet about bear attacks. She was supposed to stay still and not move. Or do anything dumb like shine a light into a wild animal’s eyes.

  Easy to say but hard to do when facing down a snuffling beast in the woods at night. A beast heading in her direction. Maybe she should have asked a few more questions about snipe. Were they vicious? Did they have sharp teeth? Could they give her rabies? Or fleas? She was an idiot to have put her life in danger for fifty bucks.

  She would not panic despite her racing pulse. She would get through this. She squinted in the darkness, trying to measure the size of the animal. It wasn’t a bear. Maybe more like a groundhog. How big was a groundhog? She didn’t know.

  The internal debate raged on as the creature approached, getting close enough to sniff her feet. She let out a terrified squeak, and the animal growled. Old fears of spiders, cats, dogs, and worms returned with a vengeance. How sharp were a snipe’s teeth? Did they bite? Did this snipe think she was a nice, tasty morsel?

  She drew in her legs, slowly, and the animal kept coming, sniffling and snuffling, crunching the footpath’s gravel as it advanced. Screw Animal Planet. She needed to know what she faced, but her hands shook so badly she couldn’t manage to switch on the flashlight. Another panicked whimper escaped her. The animal stopped its forward progress. Was it getting ready to pounce?

  Now was a good time to run. She scrambled up from the ground and bolted in no particular direction, right into the underbrush. Twigs smacked her face and pulled at her hair. She got all turned around in the dark, her panic mounting until she stumbled from the woods right into the old cemetery adjacent to Laurel Chapel.

  If she didn’t know better, she might have thought she’d fallen into one of those horror movies where the sweet, naive girl goes out at night and gets gobbled up by the monster living in the cemetery. Dammit.

  Did that make her too stupid to live?

  No. She was better than that.

  She found the flashlight’s switch, snapped it on, and aimed it at the woods. The creature stopped, its retinas eerily reflecting light in the narrow beam. What was that thing? A wolf? A coyote? She backed up, tripping over gravestones until she found the footpath again. Then she turned tail and ran all the way past the reception in the Carriage House to her Z4, which was parked in the back corner of the inn’s lot.

  She climbed into the driver’s seat and locked herself in for the night.

  * * *

  Traveling with Mia Paquet and the cast and crew of Vegas Girls was a gigantic pain in the ass, but Daniel Lyndon endured it for the sake of Scarlett, his eighteen-month-old baby. Danny might be old-fashioned, but he believed a man should marry the mother of his child. He also wanted Scarlett to be acknowledged as a full-fledged member of the Lyndon family.

  For two years he’d been begging Mia to marry him, and she’d finally said yes on the condition that they make their wedding a story line in Mia’s reality TV show. He’d quickly agreed to that quid pro quo before he realized that the producers wanted more than just a televised wedding. They wanted him to bring the showgirl back home to meet his family…without giving his family any warning.

  In short, they wanted him to ambush Uncle Mark, the senior senator for the Commonwealth of Virginia. Unfortunately, the show’s producers were so frugal that they booked the cheapest multistop plane tickets from Vegas possible, so they missed their connection in Chicago and were now running five hours behind schedule.

  It was after 9:00 p.m. when the two vans carrying the Vegas Girls stars, their wardrobe, and the camera crew turned into the long driveway leading to Charlotte’s Grove.

  “The light sucks,” Antonella Mastriani, the show’s executive producer, snarled.

  Daniel suppressed a smile. Maybe the ambush homecoming would end up on the cutting-room floor. It would serve the producers right. Coming here to Charlotte’s Grove made no sense in the real world. Danny’s parents lived down the road about half a mile, and it seemed to him that the prodigal son should go all the way home instead of stopping off here.

  But the producers disagreed with that logic because his folks were too ordinary for the story line. Mom was a housewife, Dad w
as a country lawyer, and his parents lived in a 1960s split-level tract house. His folks had plenty of money; they just never had lived very sumptuously.

  In contrast, his uncle Mark was a senator and lived in a three-hundred-year-old registered landmark. The producers were practically orgasmic about Charlotte’s Grove because it resembled the governor’s mansion in Williamsburg. The house would be prominently featured in exterior shots because it underscored the narrative of the showgirl marrying an American prince. Not that Danny regarded himself as a prince, but since when was reality television ever about the real world?

  “Holy shit,” Mia said, as the mansion came into view. “You weren’t kidding. It’s, like, I don’t know, the set for frigging Downton Abbey.”

  Daniel refrained from pointing out that Charlotte’s Grove didn’t look a thing like the castle in Downton Abbey. Built in 1730, the house provided a classic example of ruthlessly symmetrical Georgian architecture. Its unrelenting brick facade was practically austere. Tonight the exterior lights were ablaze, and a number of cars were parked in the driveway, suggesting that Aunt Pam and Uncle Mark were entertaining.

  Oh joy.

  Antonella’s assistant, George, brought the van to a stop, and everyone piled out, leaving David to unbuckle Scarlett from her car seat. His daughter drooled a little out of her sleepy mouth as he pulled her into his arms. Her head hit his shoulder like a deadweight, and he rested his mouth against her downy head as a rush of unconditional love coursed through him.

  It was unquestionably wrong to surprise Mark and Pam this way, but he hoped they would be happy to meet their new niece. Scarlett belonged to the Lyndon family and, by God, Daniel would do anything to make sure she got his last name.

  “All right,” Antonella said. “Everyone ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be,” Ivory snarked. One of the three Vegas girls that the show revolved around, Ivory had been pissy about the entire wedding extravaganza from the beginning because it meant Mia would get more camera time than she would. Like any Hollywood wannabe, Ivory yearned to be the center of attention at all times. But she’d had her chance last season during her brief but fiery affair with Demont Robinson, the forward for the Los Angeles Stars. Unfortunately for Ivory, Demont had taken his millions and moved on. So had the show.