Besides, it’s not as if she could generate the give-a-shit about a career, a future, a life. Her entire foundation had crumbled beneath her feet, and it was gonna take awhile to rebuild whatever she could. She was grateful to her parents for letting her hole up in her bedroom. Her mom worked overtime trying to find something—anything—that Harper would eat. She lost thirty pounds before she knew it, which normally would make any girl slightly thrilled, but in this case, the cost was too high. She’d take the thirty pounds she didn’t need to lose right on back if it meant this all hadn’t happened.
Allie had taken great care of Harper in those dark days. And she had a group of girlfriends from high school who tried to rally around her, inviting her out for drinks or dinner, the occasional beach bonfire. But soon they drifted away, one by one. You can only take the word “no” so many times before you take it to heart. No one, but maybe Allie, was going to beg her to come out and play. Harper had needed to figure this out herself: how to no longer be Harper and Noah, but instead, plain old Harper.
Months had passed, and she slowly graduated to sitting in the dark watching violent movies on TV. She couldn’t muster up the interest in any movie in which a couple even had a one-night stand, let alone an actual relationship. Even in the slasher movies, if there was a couple there, she was yelling at the TV screen, warning the girl about the inevitably untrustworthy guy she was dating, not about the scary masked psychopath with the chainsaw lurking around the corner. Usually she took an odd pleasure in seeing the boyfriend killed. It wasn’t a healthy time for Harper Landry.
The only other thing she could abide watching were those awful home-shopping channels. She felt a solidarity knowing that other sad, lonely people were wide awake at 3:00 a.m. debating whether they needed Joan Rivers’ pavé Bluebird of Happiness brooch. Because it seemed as if that would be the only happiness she would possess, so maybe she did need to shell out nearly a hundred and fifty bucks for it. Only she didn’t have a hundred and fifty bucks. Her bank account was as bare bones as Harper’s body was.
One day, after seeing Joan Rivers’ QVC jewelry show for about the fortieth time, she had a revelation. She didn’t need the Joan Rivers enamel Rose Garden Statement necklace. She wasn’t even clear on what a statement necklace was and whether she had a statement to make. She didn’t want Joan’s simulated Opal and Crystal Beetle brooch. She hated beetles—why would she want to wear it as a fashion statement? And truthfully, she was pavé’d out. But she was bored. And inspired.
After all, Joan Rivers didn’t come into this world a jewelry maven, yet here she was making a fortune with it. Harper had always had a crafty side: for instance, she knitted a mean sweater—sadly, she’d made Noah several over the years. And she wanted them back, dammit. She was sorely tempted to march over to his house and ask his mother to pony them up. But going to the Gunderson home would only sadden her, so instead, she hoped that his closet would become infested with moths so they’d eat the sweaters and be happy.
Harper had even dabbled in making jewelry at summer camp. She made so many of those embroidery thread bracelets she’d started selling them and did a brisk business during lunch break in middle school. Her handiwork was showcased on wrists throughout the population of Verity Beach Junior High School, home of the Fighting Seahorses. Seriously, that was their mascot. Well, if she could successfully manipulate all of those tiny threads into complicated patterns as a tween, surely now as a full-grown adult she could figure out how to make real jewelry that women her age would want. No pavé for her; rather she was going to make beachy, natural-looking jewelry that she’d want to wear.
At first she made simpler beaded things: drop earrings, bracelets, necklaces. But as her interest grew, she started taking classes and learned how to make her own silver jewelry. Her parents were just happy she had started washing her hair on a regular basis, and her father was downright elated when she started trying to sell her creations, being that they were taking up most of the space in the family dining room.
She opened an Etsy store and started marketing her products with ads on Facebook, and soon, her designs took off. She was receiving so many orders she had to find someone to help her manage the sales and shipping. And her parents gently encouraged her to find somewhere other than their home to create her masterpieces.
Harper decided it made sense to open a storefront. This was the beach, after all. Tourist mecca for three-quarters of the year. People always seemed to love to buy jewelry when on vacation at the beach. A perfect marriage of need and fulfillment. And probably the only marriage she’d ever be committed to at this point. But she was okay with that. At least she’d finally found a purpose. She sure wasn’t in the mood to find a man anytime soon—if ever—but she was excited to discover her passion, and her shop, Designs by Harper had taken off so well that she was able to move out of her parents’ place and into her own at last. And she was fine settling for unlucky in love, kick-ass in business. She didn’t need Noah Gunderson to lead a fulfilling life.
Chapter Sixteen
Noah sat relishing his morning coffee on the terrace overlooking the ocean, where a brilliant melon-hued ball of fire was cresting over the horizon. At this time of day, he was always at his best. He’d already been out surfing and was now strategizing his schedule in anticipation of the wedding the inn was hosting this evening.
These events always made him a little nervous, probably more so as they’d been negotiated by his mother long before he’d taken over the place. Bit by bit, her bookings had mostly come and gone, and he was already doing a steady business of booking events into the following year. But he wanted to do right by his mother and keep her legacy alive, so he was conscientious about trying to do things her way. Ultimately he wanted to transition into managing the place in the way he was most comfortable, but for now, he followed her plan of operation line by line, and in a way, her guidance was a reassuring hug from afar.
He hadn’t expected to enjoy being an innkeeper. It seemed so odd for a man of his young age to do so. Seemed like the type of job a retiree might take on. But after running the place for this long, he was grateful he didn’t wait until he was older. This was hard work: there were always repairs that needed to be done in the historic building. It seemed Mother Nature wanted to encroach on his little patch of land, with leaks here and there a regular occurrence. Soon he’d have to figure out how to replace the roof, but in the meantime, he’d been able to bandage together repairs enough to stave off that large expense.
Perhaps his taking over his mother’s money pit was a blessing in disguise. In all the traveling he’d done, perhaps the thing he loved the most was hospitality of strangers who made him feel at home even when he was oceans away from his real home. A mother’s touch, a comfortable bed, a home-cooked breakfast, a warm shower: all of these things may have seemed insignificant, but ultimately when you’re far from home, they mattered so much. And maybe somehow this was his mother’s gift to him, this legacy she passed on so he could extend that same sense of warmth and welcoming that was so important to him, to other travelers who might need a welcoming place to settle into or at least a psychological hug.
It sure beats practicing law, he thought with a laugh.
Sometimes he thought about the law degree he never completed. He wondered if he was a quitter, and that concerned him. Was he? He up and quit Harper with nary a glance backward. Ditto with law school. Though for two very different reasons. And if he honestly examined it, he’d admit he’d glanced back plenty. At Harper. Not at the relationship itself. That bit was what made him so damned scared. Harper? He would have been happy keeping things the way they’d been. She was the person who made him happiest in the world. But happy didn’t mean forever, did it?
The idea that he could get stuck like Matt, his whole future having to be rolled up like a dirty rug, all of those plans, those fun things forfeited because of a slip-up, was like a cold bucket of ice water dropped on his head. Ugh. That had been
the thing he selfishly focused on. Because when he was twenty-one, the idea of being tied down like Gulliver by the Lilliputians was downright terrifying. Now? It no longer instilled the fear of God in him. In fact, after having spent time with that little bugger Tyler, he kind of liked the idea. Sure kids were a lot of work, but they were also rewarding. It’s too bad the timing was so backward on this revelatory notion. Now, the idea of having a little Tyler-type Lilliputian with Harper almost put butterflies in his stomach. In a good way.
He’d hoped that his running away—and let’s face it, it was absolutely running away sans the bandana full of belongings tied to the end of a hobo stick and balanced on his shoulder—would lead to some soul-searching. And indeed it did. In India, he meditated beneath the scorching hot sun until his skin could take it no more. In Tibet, he contributed to the building and—necessary—destruction of beautiful sand mandalas. It pained him to deconstruct what took many monks and helpers like him weeks to craft, but that was the point of it all: to emphasize the ephemeral nature of life. He channeled energy at Machu Picchu. He stood at sunrise fixing his gaze on the magnificent statues at Easter Island, marveling at the unexplainable. He communed with aboriginal tribesmen at Uluru in Australia.
Now in truth, some of this wasn’t quite as glamorous as it sounded. In Tibet, he also spent a week puking his guts up with a mysterious ailment, only to be made well with the help of a Tibetan healer. He picked up nasty bedbugs at the hostel he stayed at before he made the week-long hike up the Andes Mountains to Machu Picchu. And he was bitten by hundreds of ants as he slept beneath the stars near Uluru.
But it was all worth it. Noah left a boy but returned a man—one who had seen the world and experienced mental and physical hardship, growing greatly in the process. He’d tested and learned his limits, learned to respect his fear and admire his bravery.
And now here he was in a more pedestrian world, back home almost as if he’d never left. Running an inn. Preparing for a lovely union of yet another happy couple. He always wondered a little bit about people who went into marriage with blinders on, only able to see how joyful they were at that snapshot in time, naïve to think they’d get through a lifetime together untainted. There was a time that probably would have stopped him from ever moving forward in a relationship—even one as serious as what he and Harper shared. He’d always assumed that his father and mother were equally smitten with one another when they were young, so that didn’t help instill confidence in the institution. It wasn’t until his mother was sick and dying that she confessed the truth about his parentage: they hadn’t been young and in love. His mother and father had had a one-night stand that took a bad turn when she got pregnant. His father was never on board with the whole thing but gave it a go for a while. He’d been young and irresponsible and didn’t actually even like Noah’s mother, let alone love her. It wasn’t enough to keep him around.
Noah sometimes felt bad that his father didn’t want him and Matthew, but he could also understand it, intellectually. Just as he had freaked out on behalf of his very brother. One thing he knew: parenthood was not for the faint of heart.
But now each time he oversaw another wedding at the inn, he smiled and sent his warm wishes into the universe that the couple would weather their particular storms and grow stronger. He’d seen it with his own eyes with Matt and Katie, so he knew that a deep foundation of love could help two people get through tough circumstances.
He wished he could get Harper to understand the Noah he was now, to realize that he was an improved version of the one she fell in love with when they were children. Maybe someday she’d come around.
Chapter Seventeen
Harper hit a shot of hot air from her blow dryer onto her eyelash curler, then squeezed the thing over her eyelashes. She only did this on important occasions—half the time when she used that damned contraption she ended up with an eye injury. Nothing more attractive than a big red mark from a pinched eyelid. But it did result in a much nicer-looking set of eyelashes, and it beat attempting those fake ones again, which was a disaster last time. Not that it would matter where she was going, but she wanted to give it her best. She was going to be the plus-one for her assistant, Georgia Childress, at the wedding of Georgia’s cousin Marcy.
“Dude. I need reinforcements,” had said. “My cousin’s fine enough, but her mother is a primo A-number-one beyotch. She’ll be so busy gloating about her daughter and her perfect marriage and dreamboat husband and bragging that Marcy was able to find someone but oh, poor Georgia, maybe you’ll find someone someday.” She put that last bit in air quotes. “I can’t stand being in the same room with her, and today of all days, I need someone to grab me by the shoulders and pull me away from her in case I feel the need to deck her.”
Harper adored Georgia—she was tall and well filled out. Not fat but certainly no petite shrinking flower of a woman. She brooked no bullshit from anyone and she sort of filled her body well with her sassy personality. She could care less that she wasn’t married, but she cared a whole lot that her aunt wanted to flaunt it. Harper wasn’t usually much on weddings for obvious reasons. But to go as a bodyguard? Sounded perfect.
She pulled on the form-fitting navy satin bias-cut slip dress that fell right above the knees and made her legs look a mile long, slicked on a couple of layers of mascara, pulled her hair back in a ponytail, slid into a pair of silver strap-heeled sandals, and checked herself in the mirror.
“Not bad,” she said, nodding at what she saw. “Not bad at all.”
Georgia—Georgie for short—insisted on driving and picked her up about fifteen minutes before the six o’clock wedding was scheduled to begin. “Hoping if we get there late enough we’ll get the seats farthest as possible from my aunt,” she said as Harper pulled on her seatbelt.
Harper would be happy to miss the ceremony altogether—each wedding she attended felt a little bit like salt in an old wound. Sure, she’d made it past the whole Noah thing in a general sense, but still, it was always hard to not reflect on what could have been. And now it was even harder because of the lust-filled way she’d so recently been reminded. So much so that she’d been running down the batteries on her vibrator, it had become such a necessary appliance in her life over the past few weeks. It seemed like every night when she tried to fall asleep, all she could think of was what had transpired between the two of them. And what red-blooded girl wouldn’t then feel the need to act upon that? It wasn’t as if she could call him up and demand round two.
They parked about a block from the inn where the wedding was being held.
As the venue came into view, Harper admired it. “Cute old home,” she said, eyeing the sprawling, pale lavender Victorian-style house with the inviting wraparound front porch. “I didn’t even know this place existed. And look”—she pointed to the roof—“a widow’s walk. They’re so romantic. The whole place screams charming.”
“Of course it does,” her friend said. “Leave it to my Aunt Jeannie to find the perfect, most romantic venue that no one else even knows about. God forbid her precious spawn marry at a venue others have used.”
Harper laughed. “Man, you love that woman, don’t you?”
“It’s only that she’s always put me and Marcy in a competition and I hated it. Left to our own devices, we could have been good friends. But with her mother adding that layer of ‘my daughter’s better than you,’ it was pretty much a doomed friendship from the get-go.”
Harper reached for her hand and pulled her toward the steps. “Well, you look absolutely ravishing.” And she did: her blond hair was pulled into a French braid that highlighted her soft, blue eyes. She wore a silver silk dress with a flared sheer floral silver organza overlay. The high-waisted dress was scooped at the neck and landed midcalf. She had on the most amazing glittery silver pumps. Harper pointed at her feet. “Oh, man. Those shoes. I have serious shoe envy, you know.”
Georgie stuck out her foot and wiggled it. “I borrowed them fr
om my mom’s best friend, Margie. Margie said she knew my mom would’ve bought me something equally dazzling if she were around to do so.”
“Aww, that’s so sweet. I love that you have her in your life.”
She nodded. “Tell me about it. You can’t put a price tag on moral support.”
Which was true. Harper still had her parents, though she tried not to lean on them. She’d done enough leaning on them for that first year after being dumped, so when she finally rose from the ashes, she savored her independence. She got along with them just fine, but she tried to give them space. Plus they traveled so much they were rarely in town anymore. All good, though. Harper had a wonderful network of friends and had carved out a lovely life for herself.
They entered the inn, which was spacious yet cozy, with two overstuffed floral-patterned sofas facing an inviting fire crackling in a large fireplace. An older woman ushered them through a second room with tables set up for the reception, out toward an expansive tented deck space that overlooked the ocean. Hundreds of lit candles twinkled both outside and inside the clear-sided tent.
Harper was partial to ocean-front views. The sand and the surf spoke to her, and ever since she was a little girl, it was a place she associated with joy. She and Noah had spent lots of time on the beach, both by day and night. It was the perfect place for a little late-night delight when there weren’t many quiet places to go parking in. They must’ve known every private beach cove for a good twenty-mile stretch of beach.
When they reached the door to exit onto the deck, someone opened the door for them.
“Welcome, ladies,” a man said. But not any man. That man. The man she so didn’t want to hear, even though she really did. Harper looked up to see Noah in a smart charcoal business suit with a crisp white button-down and a magenta-and-gray diagonally striped tie. She wondered for a second if he was the first course or the second course for dinner tonight. Because he looked good enough to eat, though she couldn’t let him know that’s what she was thinking.
Falling for Mr. Wrong Page 7
