Charmed at First Sight
Page 1
Charmed at First Sight
Books by Sharla Lovelace
Charmed in Texas Novels
A Charmed Little Lie
Lucky Charmed
Once a Charmer
“Enchanted by You,” a novella included in The Cottage on Pumpkin and Vine
Charmed at First Sight
Sharla Lovelace
LYRICAL SHINE
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com
To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.
LYRICAL SHINE BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2018 by Sharla Lovelace
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
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Special book excerpts or customized printings can also be created to fit specific needs. For details, write or phone the office of the Kensington Sales Manager: Kensington Publishing Corp., 119 West 40th Street, New York, NY 10018. Attn. Sales Department. Phone: 1-800-221-2647.
Lyrical Shine and Lyrical Shine logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
First Electronic Edition: July 2018
eISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0701-8
eISBN-10: 1-5161-0701-2
First Print Edition: July 2018
ISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0702-5
ISBN-10: 1-5161-0702-0
Printed in the United States of America
Dedication
To my beloved Southeast Texas:
This story was finished during Hurricane Harvey, while rain and tears flooded our world. I’ve never in my life been so proud to be a Texan than I was in the midst of that, watching all the kindness and love of so many selfless people coming together, banding together, helping each other, and being stronger because of it. To my family and friends, my neighborhood, my town, my county, and my state—being “Texas Strong…Come Hell or High Water” has never meant more. Here’s to healing, recovering, and rebuilding, and dry, sunny days.
Acknowledgments
Hello lovely Readers!
I know it’s been a bit since we’ve gotten to hang out in Charmed, and I LOVE you all for waiting for CHARMED AT FIRST SIGHT! I’m so excited to revisit Lanie and Nick and Carmen and Sully and Allie and Bash (whew), and bring in a few new faces! In this book, we get to know one of Bash’s clients, the owners of Cherrydale Flower Farm…and boy, do we! A runaway bride and a mysterious hot motorcycle man land in Charmed, and stir up ALL kinds of chaos. But don’t worry! All your favorites are right up in the thick of all the shenanigans with the new kids, because you know they can’t stay out of trouble.
As usual, this book wouldn’t have happened without the TLC from my agent, Jessica Faust, and my editor, Wendy McCurdy, as well as all the Kensington Lyrical team that made it shine. My eternal thanks to them all.
My family deserves awards for putting up with me when I’m writing, even the members who don’t live here anymore. Family knows no limits when there is unlimited texting, so whether in the other room or out of state, no one is exempt from the gripey mama-on-deadline. Troy, Ethan, and Amanda, I love y’all bunches.
This was my first book written, by the way, in my brand-spanking-new author cottage that my amazing hubby built for me. I’ve been writing in the kids’ room, the living room, and my bedroom for years, and he finally said enough was enough. He was tired of turning down the TV. LOL. No, seriously, he built me a dream office that I couldn’t have imagined possible, and this book baby was the first result! If you want to see pictures, go to www.sharlalovelace.com and click on the Extras tab.
I hope you enjoy falling in love with Micah and Leo as much as I did! And please feel free to message me on Facebook or Twitter or any of the social places at @sharlalovelace and/or e-mail me at sharla@sharlalovelace.com to let me know what you think!
Okay, now go see what Micah’s about to do, because I’m telling you, she’s a hot mess. ☺
xoxo
Sharla
CHAPTER ONE
Why the hell didn’t I go with the flats?
That thought would kick my ass later.
Shoes? Really? At a moment like that, my heart pounding in my ears, sweating through fifteen miles of lace, silk, and guilt, and picturing everyone’s appalled faces right about now—I was just wishing for good running shoes?
I was a selfish, horrible troll.
A troll who they’d be looking for any minute.
“Shit!” I huffed, weaving through the cars parked along the street, holding up a dress that cost more than my car—“My car!” I gasped, stopping short and spinning around. It was in the back of the church, waiting to take Jeremy and me to the reception…but no, my keys were in Jeremy’s pants pocket, on his body, at the altar, waiting on the selfish horrible troll. Don’t think about that. “Damn it!”
I whirled back around and jogged into the street on my four-inch heels to make better time, knowing that at any minute someone would figure it out. Jeremy, my brothers, my friends—no, Jeremy’s friends. Someone would come to see why the big heavy music that shook the floor so hard I felt it in my hoo-hah didn’t come accompanied with a girl in a big white dress. My window was narrow at best.
I just had to make it to the signal light at the corner. Then I could—what? Call a cab? In Cherrydale, Texas? Right. And on what, my special holographic phone? Unlike my actual one still back in the dressing room.
Breathe…run…breathe…run…I chanted in my head to the rhythm of my feet hitting the pavement. Hopping really, like I was on stilts. Breathe…run…At the light, I could duck into the old Smith’s Drugstore, and pray that Mr. Dan, the pharmacist, would let me use his phone to call an Uber.
Breathlessly, I reached the drugstore door, the glass etched with time and dust and grimy fingers, and pulled. Nothing.
It was—
“It’s two o’clock,” I huffed. “Who closes at—” I shut my eyes, willing back the tears of panic I felt welling up in my eyes and throat. Mr. Dan was at the wedding, too. Of course he was. Because Jeremy’s mother invited the whole damn town…
Plan B—what the hell was plan B when there was never really a plan A? I glanced upward. Really to drive back the tears, but I’d take any help at that moment.
What are you doing, Micah?
The unmistakable rumble of a Harley preceded an all-black machine straddled by an equally unmistakable male in jeans stretched to love him and a black T-shirt, his head and face completely covered in a black helmet as he rolled up to the light and set boots on the ground to balance the bike.
He turned his head my way and goose bumps went down my back. I swear there was a question there. I couldn’t see his face, but—no. No. That’s not plan B, little voices said in my head. You’re a responsible person now. You own—well, you sort of own a business. You have bills. Obligations.
You’re a Roman.
Yeah. That one right there should have slapped me back down the street. But being a respectable Roman, always held to some invisible standard that only my oldest brother could pull off, wasn’t working for me today.
Harley-guy’s right hand reached up, sliding the mirrored visor open, revealing dark eyes that even from twenty feet away made my breath catch. In a good way.
Shit, double fuckwaffles! No! I didn’t need breath-catching in any way. I just ran my dumb ass away from one man. But what the hell were my feet doing? I took two steps toward him, and I definitely saw the question that time. Curiosity. Puzzlement. Wariness? Yeah, Harley-guy should have that, because clearly I didn’t have enough.
“You need help?” he called out over the idling rumble, his voice deep.
I caught a distorted reflection of myself in the dirty window. Hair falling out of the expensive ornate up-do, poking out in unruly frizzy corkscrews above the short veil. Black spreading under my eyes from sweat and tears. Standing on a steamy sidewalk in a mountain of blinding white. It was probably a logical question, but damn the guy had to have balls to jump off into that crazy.
All I could hear was my racing heart and my breathing, even over the motor.
No. This is lunacy. All of it is lunacy, but what you’re thinking of doing here is the cherry on top of the—
“Micah!”
I gasped so hard it made me cough, as I jerked in the direction I’d come from, toward the familiar voice I’d known since I was twenty-four. In eight years, I’d heard every possible inflection or emotion in Jeremy Blankenship’s voice. I’d heard every range of happy, sad, and controlled anger, but I’d never heard this. Even from all the way down the road, I heard the timbre of mortification in his yell, maybe mixed with a little hurt and what-the-fuck. I’d give him that. He deserved the what-the-fuckedness of this situation.
He was standing in the church parking lot alone, until two other tuxedoed men appeared in the doorway behind him. Thatcher and Jackson. My eyes filled again as I turned away from them and stared back at Harley-guy. I couldn’t face my brothers right now. I couldn’t explain to them why—
“Micah!” Jeremy yelled again, this time in the tone I recognized. Not the one that told me he loved me last night. The one that said How dare you embarrass me. I glanced back to see him striding purposefully in my direction, and the panic seized my chest.
“Lady?” Harley-guy called out, yanking my attention back his way. “Light’s green.”
Fight or flight.
Fight or flight.
I looked into eyes I didn’t know from Adam and felt the weirdest pull ever. My stilettoed feet made the decision for me, carrying me off the curb, into the street, hauling my weight in dress up to throw a leg over the seat and straddle his ass.
“You sure?” he said over his shoulder.
Fuck no.
“Are you?” I felt a laugh rumble through his body as he shook his head. “Yeah, touché. You aren’t gonna kill me, are you?”
“Because if I was, I’d tell you?” he said, revving the engine. “Put on that helmet behind you and hold on.”
Oh, sweet Jesus, what am I doing?
That was my last thought as I tugged the veil off, bobby pins flying in all directions, shoved the helmet on, shut my eyes tight, and wrapped my arms around his middle the best I could with all that dress. Shut them against the reality of the world I’d just created. Against the sight of my veil lying in the street. Of Jeremy running down the street after me. My brothers running for Thatcher’s truck.
All there was, was the bike moving under me and the man between my legs as we sped away, out of Cherrydale. Toward the highway. To God knows where.
“Where are we going?” I yelled over the din as we hit the highway going south.
“I’m going to Charmed,” he yelled back, turning his head slightly so I could hear him. The I’m in that sentence was stressed to let me know in no uncertain terms that anything after that was on me. “It’s about an hour.”
I nodded, trying to calm my heart rate and breathe like a normal person. I knew Charmed, or I knew of it. My family’s flower farm rented beehives from Bash Anderson, the owner of an apiary there. That was fine. That’d be good. Not so far away that I’d totally lost my mind. Just maybe a little. Give me a minute to pull my shit together before the cavalry came. Also, it was good that the stranger I was straddling had a destination. Higher odds that he wasn’t going to rape and kill me and leave me in a ditch.
My decision-making abilities needed an overhaul.
“Probably less than that, actually,” he continued, making my heart skip in my chest as he upped the speed. “They are going to come after you and I don’t feel like fighting today.”
“You don’t have to fight for me,” I yelled.
“I’m not,” he said. Well, so much for chivalry. “But that guy’s gonna need to hit something, and it won’t be you.”
There was that.
“What are you going to Charmed for?” I asked.
He paused. I wasn’t sure if he’d heard me.
“Work,” he finally tossed back.
“You work there?”
“I will shortly.”
We sped along the road in silence for the rest of about forty-five minutes, me attempting to look over my shoulder with a giant ball on my head while maintaining my death grip on some really good abs. A few cars tapped their horns at us, probably thinking we’d just gotten married, but no little old Mustang of mine whipped up next to us with an angry Jeremy inside. No big four-wheel-drive truck loomed, either. Which surprised me, because while Jeremy might give up, my older brother, Thatcher, wouldn’t. They must have assumed I’d gone home first or was hiding in Cherrydale somewhere.
That would have been the logical thing to do. Well—if bolting for the door microseconds before walking down the aisle was the relative comparison. In that case, a logical person would have maybe just gone outside to calm her frayed nerves. Maybe walked around the block even. If that person had gone so off the rails as to climb onto a stranger’s motorcycle and speed away, smart thinking would surely kick in after a block or two at which point she’d ask him to bring her back to the church. Or to Jeremy’s house where we’d lived together for the past two years, after sharing apartments for five before that, to get some things. Somewhere that made sense.
They were looking for that person. The Micah Roman who had put away her spontaneous fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants ways, along with her tendencies to ditch and run when things got too tough. The bar waitress-slash-sometimes artist-slash-whatever-made-money that had stepped out of those unstable shoes into business ownership with her brother, channeling her spirited creativity into the flower farming instead. The woman who packed up her beloved funky hats and shoes to finally adorn herself like a responsible businesswoman and worthy future wife to the heir of the Blankenship Resale empire.
Empire, my ass.
They ruled over Cherrydale Trade Days, mostly, which was several square miles of booth space for people to buy and sell their damn junk. That by itself was awesome. It’s where I’d met Jeremy, while I was digging through a box of old retro hats and jewelry. The Trade Days was still relatively new at the time, since his family had relocated from farther south four years earlier. It was still growing, and the family roamed the grounds, interacting with customers. He’d stopped and teased me, and I’d found him deliciously adorable in that way a guy is when he’s cutely making fun of your passion and you instantly think of fifteen ways you’ll change him and you’ll be picking out antique mosaic cabinet knobs together. Wearing matching plaid berets.
From that to now. In a ridiculous dress that was meant to say I do in, speeding down a highway with a nameless man to get as far away from Jeremy as I could—as quickly as possible.
So, it was just me and Harley-guy and speed. It was insane. I was insane! I could just hear my brothers now. Well, not Jackson. Jackson knew me. He knew my soul, my heart, my endless need for rebellion and nonconformity. He was my first shoplifting buddy when I went rebellious after our dad died, when I tau
ght him how to pocket bubblegum from the corner store. He was the one who raised an eyebrow when I moved out of the house at eighteen into a friend’s garage when I just couldn’t live under my mother’s roof anymore. And again when I put all my cherished old record albums and crazy prints into our mom’s attic to move in with Jeremy and started wearing just one watch instead of four. Jackson got me. He probably saw this coming like a smoking volcano. He’d just give me a look and a hug and tell me he had my back. Thatcher—oh, man. He was going to get all puffed up, probably pace, and ask me, “What woman in her right mind did this?”
And he was right. I didn’t know this dude I had my arms around. He could be twenty-one kinds of psycho, but oddly enough I felt nothing but safe with him. It vibrated off him, along with a primal intensity that was impossible not to feel. Okay, maybe that was the Harley’s motor thrumming under my ass, but it felt like more than that.
Shit, yes, I was certifiable.
But the speed. It was awesome. It was like being out in the fields and the greenhouses with my hands in the dirt, textures and colors and aromas surrounding me, filling my senses. I loved being out there with the flowers, free, dirty, and reaching for the sun. This was close. When I closed my eyes, it was like flying, free and unchained. Unshackled from expectations and the limitations of boxes. Boring, cream-colored Blankenship boxes that had been trying to enclose me for almost a decade. I felt like something freeze-dried that had been dropped into water, or one of those vacuum-sealed packages that explode to three times their size when introduced to air. I wanted to cry from the joy of it, but I wasn’t about to add hysterical female to what this guy probably already thought.
The exit for Charmed appeared, touting a big sign with bees and flowers on it saying Welcome to Charmed. Home of the World Famous Honey Festival. We slowed into the curve of the exit, and I was surprised as disappointment washed over me, a new anxiety prickling my skin.