Snowbound with the Best Man

by Allie Pleiter

  Kelly offered her daughter a look. “I think you two girls are getting just a little too good at scheming together.”

  “Banana chocolate chip pancakes.” Carly said the words with such relish Kelly knew she’d be unable to resist.

  “Well, maybe they can’t cook without electricity,” Bruce said, clearly offering her the only available out.

  “Oh, no. Our stove is gas. Only our fridge and lights don’t work when the power’s out. And the fireplace can keep us warm, too.”

  “Miss Kelly has a complicated day ahead of her, Carly. She may not have time to be making a big breakfast for us when we should be able to get something at the inn.”

  “But their power’s out, too, right, Mom?” Lulu replied. “And you always say a big day needs a big breakfast.” Both girls began enthusiastically nodding their endorsement of the idea.

  Kelly looked at Bruce. “It is going to be a big day. Big victory or big problem, or both—it’ll definitely be big.”

  Another burst of icy rain struck the kitchen windows, and the brightening daylight showed an alarming frosting of ice on everything in sight. “Big storm, that’s for sure,” he said with a worry she felt pressing down her own shoulders. “You got a woodpile?”

  “By the rental cabin back behind the garage, but I’m not sure how much of it is split. It’s not exactly how I choose to get my exercise.”

  “But you’ve got an ax?”

  “There’s one back there, yes.”

  He put his hat back on his head and grabbed his gloves off the hall table. “I’ll get you set for wood while you get the girls set for breakfast.”

  She couldn’t help but be grateful for the assistance. The logs that were split out in the shed wouldn’t last long if the fireplace had to be going nonstop to keep the house warm. “Thanks.”

  “Hooray!” Lulu and Carly cheered.

  * * *

  Bruce was just finishing the last load of wood when his cell phone went off in his pocket.

  “You left thirty minutes ago. Where are you?” Clearly Darren hadn’t been able to fall into bed as planned.

  “I’m at Kelly Nelson’s house, where Carly spent the night. What’s up?”

  “The power’s out.”

  “I’m aware of that. I’m over here getting Kelly set for wood in case they need it. Everything okay over there?”

  Bruce heard Tina yelling something in the background. “What do you think?”

  Suddenly, Kelly Nelson’s house was looking like the most peaceful place imaginable to have breakfast. “Tina’s not too happy about the storm, huh?”

  “You could say that.”

  Understatement of the year, Bruce thought to himself. Tina’s fuse had grown so short by the time they’d returned to Matrimony Valley Bruce hadn’t even bothered to try to go up to his room at the inn. Those four—Darren, Tina and Tina’s parents—were a barrel of stress he didn’t need. Best man duties went only so far, and he’d already gone above and beyond. “Well, hang tight, maybe get some breakfast, and I’ll see you once Carly’s done with breakfast over here.”

  “Flights are canceled for hours,” Darren said quietly—but not quietly enough to keep his bride from overhearing.

  “Hours!” Tina moaned in the background. “No one’s going to get here, are they?”

  “Maybe not, sweetheart,” Darren said carefully. He used the voice of a man defusing a bomb. A bridal bomb poised to go off any moment. Chocolate chip banana pancakes were looking better by the minute.

  He felt like he had to ask. “You gonna be okay over there?”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  “She’s going to be your wife tomorrow. You might as well learn to handle her in a mood now. Besides, this will make a great story to tell the grandkids.”

  “Darren, will you get off the phone with Bruce and help me figure out what to do about this?” came Tina’s sharp voice over the line. Bruce winced, and suspected his friend was doing the same.

  “For the record, this will only make a great story to tell the grandkids if we actually get married and have kids,” Darren whispered.

  “Sun’s not even fully up yet. You’ve got loads of time to make this work.” He should have said “we’ve got,” but at the moment he was grateful for every foot of icy snow between him and the irritated bride. “Godspeed, man.”

  Even as he clicked off the line, Bruce could hear Tina’s raised voice and sharp tone. A guilty chuckle rumbled up from his chest as he hoisted the last of the split logs and made his way to Kelly’s back door.

  The most delicious scent met him as Carly pulled the door open. The house smelled warm and sweet, slightly smoky and sugary and altogether cozy. The exact opposite of whatever strife Darren was currently wrangling.

  As he deposited the wood by the roaring fire and shucked his coat, he called a warning to Kelly. “Your bride’s in full-scale meltdown, by the way.”

  “Is she?” Kelly slid a plate of steaming pancakes in front of Carly, who grinned from ear to ear. The pancakes he served usually came from a box in the freezer. This homemade batch looked as delicious as they smelled.

  “That bit you said about even the calmest bride getting a little nuts? Sounds like Tina left ‘a little nuts’ behind an hour ago.”

  “You better have a double helping, Mom,” Lulu cautioned as she dug into the plate Kelly had just set before her. Bruce had to admit, he was looking forward to digging into a plate of his own—the food and atmosphere here had to be ten times better than whatever was happening back at the inn.

  “I’ll admit, today presents some challenges.” She used the delicate tone of someone trying hard to put the best possible spin on a fast-degrading situation. “But it’s still early. A lot can still go right.”

  “Or wrong,” Lulu said with a mouthful of pancake.

  “Can Miss Tina and Mr. Darren still get married?” Carly asked. “Will I still get to wear my dress and boots?”

  Bruce thought he ought to leave that one to the professional, so he said nothing.

  Kelly leaned down on the countertop so that her face was at Carly’s height. “A wedding only needs four things to happen. Do you know what those are?”

  “What?”

  “A bride, a groom, a minister and God. Mr. Darren is here. Miss Tina just got here. Pastor Mitchell’s always been here, and God is everywhere. So we’re set. Everything else is just nice extras.”

  That sounded awfully simplistic for the “gotta get it perfect” florist Kelly had been since he’d met her. Did she really believe that? Or was she just pep-talking herself along with Carly?

  Carly, who was now pouting. “I’m just extra?”

  Bruce had been indulging her by telling her what an important part of the wedding she was. “That makes me an extra, too,” he told her. “But we’re extra-important extras now, because we’re here.” He nodded toward the window. “And maybe not everyone will be able to get here now.”

  “So we have to be extra enough for everybody?”

  “We might,” Kelly replied, not exactly keeping all the worry out of her tone. She looked at Bruce. “One of the bridesmaids lives close, right?”

  “The maid of honor.”

  “And the other groomsmen—two live within an hour’s drive, if I remember?”

  He shrugged. “Well, an hour’s drive on a good day. They were supposed to come in for a campfire tonight, but now...who knows?”

  “The groomsmen’s campfire at the cabin. I always thought that was such a nice touch. And now...” She put one hand on her forehead. Her brain was flying a mile a minute, he could see it in her eyes.

  “Kelly...”

  “No, really, it’ll be fine. We’ll make it work. We’ll...”

  “No, Kelly, the pancakes...” He gestured to the smoke rising from the griddle behind her.
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  “Yikes!” she cried, whirling so fast she knocked the jar of maple syrup off the counter. Bruce lunged to catch it, but missed, and it hit the floor with a thick-sounding crack.

  “Oh, no!” Lulu cried as the broken jar began oozing syrup across the floor.

  “Ouch!” Kelly yanked her hand back from the griddle pan where she had grabbed it without a hot pad in her surprise.

  The next ten seconds were a flurry of yelps, winces, shouts and grabs as Bruce used a towel to move the smoking pan off the burner, threw a second towel over the sticky mess on the floor, kept the barefooted girls on their stools and away from the broken glass and shifted Kelly to the sink.

  “I’m going to need this hand,” she moaned as she flexed her red fingers and palm under the running water. “And now there’s no more syrup for pancakes. The rehearsal dinner is tonight, the wedding is tomorrow...” She swallowed and looked up at the ceiling, blinking hard. Bruce’s stomach knotted. He couldn’t hug her again in front of the girls—it would just make everything worse. But so much of him wanted to.

  At a loss for how to comfort her, he put a hand on her shoulder while she sucked on the pad of her burned thumb, one tear slipping down her cheek.

  It was a mistake. Touching her, even on the shoulder, seemed to intensify the feelings already edging out of his control. Parts of him kept closing the space between them—literally and emotionally—without his permission.

  She shifted her head to look at him, and it was all there in her eyes. The pileup of worry, the nonstop struggle to get by, the importance she’d heaped onto this wedding, the desperate cling to independence he knew so well. Why did he feel like he understood her on such a deep level when they’d known each other less than a week? She was the florist for a wedding he was standing up for—why wouldn’t it stay just that?

  “Mom, are you okay?” came Lulu’s worried voice from behind him.

  “It just stings,” Kelly said, shutting her eyes even as a second tear slipped down her cheek. It just stings. Bruce found the description all too accurate. “Stay where you are, sweetie,” she called, forcing her voice to brighten. “Don’t get off that stool until we get this glass cleaned up.”

  As he bent down to the mess on the floor, Bruce wondered if the “we” in Kelly’s command stuck with her as much as it did with him.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Six more hours?” Kelly watched Hailey slump against the inn’s kitchen wall as she held the phone to her ear. “I can’t run an inn full of people without power for that long. I barely made it through breakfast and the hot water’s all but gone.”

  Kelly scribbled Watson’s Diner—sandwiches? on the clipboard that hadn’t left her hands in hours. The papers that kept hosting an ever-growing list of tasks and challenges. She was starting to feel like a general on the battlefield. How Mayor Jean handled wedding planning all year long on top of running the Matrimony Valley community was beyond her.

  Of course, Mayor Jean never tried to coordinate a wedding in the middle of a snow-and-ice storm. Jean had already called and offered to come over to help in any way she could, but the last thing Kelly wanted was to be worrying about a pregnant and nauseated mayor slipping on her bad ankle on a patch of ice. Couldn’t just one of today’s problems be uncomplicated?

  Hailey hung up the phone. “The county power company says we might get power back on by eight tonight. Might? We need power back on before the rehearsal dinner. We need power back on before lunch.”

  “I know.” Kelly sighed. Tina and Darren were impatiently waiting for word that some—even half—of their wedding guests would be able to arrive. And then there was the reporter waiting to cover a wedding that might not happen. “Has anyone seen how Samantha is doing this morning?”

  Hailey wiped her bangs out of her eyes. “How should I know? I’m still trying to figure out how to keep the second floor warm.”

  The second floor, where all the wedding guests were staying. Astonishingly, six guests had actually made it to the valley, but the tales they told of icy roads and closed highways didn’t hold out much hope for others arriving anytime soon.

  “I can’t put it off any longer. Lulu, honey, stay here with Hailey while I go find out just how happy our happy couple still is. Bruce said Tina’s nerves are strung a bit thin.” That was putting it mildly.

  “You can say that again,” Hailey muttered. “And who can blame her?”

  “It’s hopeless,” Lulu proclaimed with eight-year-old drama.

  “No,” Kelly cautioned, “we can’t say that. We can think it, we can worry, but we’ve got to stay positive in how we talk to the guests. To everyone. Come on, girls, we can pull this off. I know we can.” Kelly heard the words coming out of her mouth, but she wondered if anyone could see how little she believed them.

  * * *

  “The ‘before party’ is supposed to be tonight,” Carly said as Bruce tried to get her to take a nap back in their room. She hadn’t gotten enough sleep last night—and he’d barely had any—so they both needed to rest if tonight had any hope of being fun.

  If tonight had any hope of being at all.

  “Did God send that big awful storm?” she asked as she rolled over to look out the window.

  Where had that come from? “Well, now, that’s a big question for a little girl,” he said, grasping for an answer. “God created the earth, and the sun and stars and winds, so I guess you can say He creates weather. But I don’t think He set out to ruin Miss Tina and Mr. Darren’s wedding, if that’s what you’re thinking. I think they’ll still get married tomorrow, don’t you?”

  “We’ve got the four things Miss Kelly said we needed, don’t we?”

  He was impressed Carly remembered. Together, they ticked them off on Bruce’s fingers. “A bride, a groom, a minister and God.” He felt a bit silly boiling down a wedding to those simplistic terms, but he supposed he did believe what the florist said was true—sort of. Life felt anything but simple and God-sent these days. These years.

  “Did you have those things when you married Mommy?”

  Bruce’s memory cast back to the sunny fall day he’d made Sandy his wife. He did feel as if God had smiled down on his life that day. The world was filled with possibilities and adventures, and he felt blessed to have such an incredible woman by his side for life.

  It was just that “life” hadn’t lasted nearly as long as either of them had planned. The “till death do us part” phrase rang ominous in his ears these days, and he wondered if those fateful words would be part of Darren and Tina’s vows tomorrow. “We had those things, sweetheart,” he answered his daughter. “And we had more. We had electricity, and nice weather, and all our friends could come celebrate with us.”

  “Did God know I was coming?”

  It took him a minute to work out what she meant. “Mommy and I asked God to bless us with children, so yes. You know Mommy always called you her gift from God.”

  “Did God know Mommy was going away when she did?”

  She asked the weighty question with such an innocence it made his heart twist. Bruce sat down on the bed. “What makes you ask that?”

  “Mr. Darren told me yesterday that he was sad God called Mommy home before she could be here to watch him marry Miss Tina. But she isn’t home, she’s in heaven. Did God know that would happen like He knew the storm would happen? Or the storm that took Lulu’s daddy away?”

  Wow—he was in way over his head. Sandy was always so much better at the hard questions. Bruce thought for a moment, smoothing down Carly’s wild hair while he groped for an answer. “I see it this way—God always knows what’s happening to us, and He’s around to help us. Sometimes that’s hard to see, especially when things feel sad or wrong. Like all of the people who can’t get here right now to come to the wedding. That feels sad, and wrong, and it’s okay to feel disappointed about it. But it doesn’t mean
God’s not watching over us, or that He isn’t in the sad or hard places.”

  Even as the words left his mouth, Bruce wondered if he still believed them. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t continually tamp down a boiling anger at God for taking Sandy from him. That’s not what he wanted Carly to learn about God, but he didn’t want to hand her platitudes he didn’t feel, either. His brain accepted the fact that God could still be found in the sad or hard places. His gut told him that he’d stopped looking for God in those places. That thought woke up the startling notion that given how sad and hard his last two years had been, it meant he’d stopped looking for God altogether.

  Were his fog and the lack of God connected? Bruce wasn’t sure he was ready to think about that right now. He settled on an answer to satisfy Carly even if he didn’t have one to satisfy himself. “I know God will be there tomorrow for Tina and Darren. Even if a whole bunch of things go wrong.”

  Carly stuck her chin out. “But they won’t. Ms. Kelly said that everything that could go wrong already has.”

  Bruce wasn’t quite sure that was true. A lot could still go wrong in the next twenty-four hours. “What I know, little girl, is that things will go a lot better if you and I get some rest before tonight’s party.” He settled her back into her blankets and handed her the pink bear that was her bedtime companion. “Can you do that for me?”

  “I’ll try.” The yawn she gave with the words told him Carly would succeed.

  Much better than he would. Bruce shut the door partway and sunk into the comfy chair in his adjoining room. Catch a nap of your own, he commanded himself. Despite the tiring drive, and even chopping Kelly’s wood, he knew it wouldn’t work. His brain was in too much of a tangle over Carly’s big questions, the threatened wedding and the pretty florist who wouldn’t leave his thoughts.

  He wasn’t ready to let someone else into his life—he knew that. But he also knew how bone-weary he was of being alone. He’d felt less alone in Kelly’s kitchen this morning than he’d felt in months. As if he’d been sitting in a dark room and someone struck a match. Just one match, but it was enough to let him see things he wasn’t sure he was ready to see.