The Family Wish (Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book 3)

by Danielle Blair

  Charlotte’s endearingly bizarre chant of sisterhood, laugh-worthy in any other frame of mind, was all the rally cry Freesia needed. She marched from the office. Her gaze landed on an athletic whip of a blonde with a Hermani handbag a half-second before the man with her stepped from behind a rack of dresses.

  Jay.

  Freesia’s pulse knotted, then zigzag stitched like she was inside Stella Irene’s old Singer machine, foot pedal to the floor: out of control, loud behind the eardrum, needle in danger of breaking. She froze. Around here, what Charlotte called groom-in-the-headlights. Around the driftwood and flotsam where Freesia was from, it was called woman-meets-rat-bastard.

  Once, Alex had told Freesia she was stoic. In moments when things fell apart—like the scene in Clement Grant’s law office eighteen months earlier when Alex and Charlotte had found out their father had an illegitimate daughter who owned a third of the bridal shop, or when Alex had crumbled atop the Kingsley Ruins—Freesia appeared a statue: tranquil, still, an observer more than a participant. To Freesia, stoic was no compliment. Fires in her belly made her the furthest thing from apathetic and submissive. Her brain simply needed longer to process.

  But then there was her mother’s prediction, what she would say if she was here instead of crowding a bed and dying: A storm. That’s what you will always be, child. One that stirs and whips and gets people all twisted. Inside this perfect storm, where Jay was engaged to be married and had professed a desire to make it rain forever to be with her, Freesia was the stationary eye.

  He hadn’t seen her yet.

  In dry clothes, his upper body appeared as a man’s dress form: proportioned, classic, impeccable. He wore a crisp twill shirt with French cuffs and blue detailing and enough product in his hair to command his long strands into place. He accessorized with the same sunken posture and vacant stare as he had displayed in the driving rain, all while the woman he had entered with strung words together like cultured pearls. A long string of cultured pearls leading up to the pavé diamond of his real name: Jameson.

  Jameson. Naturally, he was a Jameson.

  Free, don’t make his storm yours.

  But Freesia’s gaze dropped to his mouth as he turned and she was right back on the tailgate of her father’s truck, heat lightning warming a private tempest inside her. From the way his lips parted, his spine lifted, his chest ceased its rise and fall, she’d have staked her future that his slow crawl to awareness put him right back on that tailgate beside her.

  He stopped trailing his intended, became a bystander as she moved on, lining up more pearls—plunging neckline and brocade and bateau—while he stared at Freesia, responsive, bright, engaged, as if he didn’t care to fix the moment.

  At the end of her thread, his fiancée’s voice lifted, loud and sour. “Whiskey-bear, you haven’t heard a word I’ve said.”

  Beside her, Charlotte said, “Probably shouldn’t have had breakfast before I heard that pet name.”

  Freesia tore her gaze from him, threaded a deliberate path to the blonde woman, and introduced herself, all while his eyes roamed her. She felt him on every dash of her skin, visible and concealed.

  The woman introduced herself as Peyton. Also, the soon-to-be-Mrs.-Jameson-Scott, at which point, she tossed a smile at Whiskey-bear.

  In the suspended animation that followed, Jay’s tight-lipped, reciprocated smile barely surfaced, his stare crumbled to the wood floor.

  “Thank you for making the trip out, but as I’m sure my sister told you, I’m no longer taking on custom wedding gowns. I’ll be in New York.”

  In her periphery, Jay stirred.

  She’s very sick. Has been for some time.

  New York suddenly seemed irresponsible in light of the news from Georgia. Freesia pushed the thought aside and focused on the woman before her—the way her left palm and acrylic nails tipped up to keep her purse straps at the crook of her elbow, the way her free hand soldiered past dresses on the rack after a cursory inspection that usually ended in an unflattering twist of her expression, the enveloping nature of her scent, not an unpleasant mix of blossoms and suede-musk undertones but far too steeped for the early hour, the way her hair covered her shoulder like poured gold.

  “Flying to New York isn’t a problem,” said Peyton, her voice magnified and dismissive all at once. “I’m practically up there all the time, anyway.”

  “Yes, but my time and attention will be focused on garments beyond the wedding industry.”

  It’s likely to become increasingly difficult for her to maintain self-care.

  A string of nausea spun itself in Freesia’s belly. How could she be everything the design team in New York were expecting her to be when her mother was in the beach shack, falling, too weak to get help, feeling life slip away?

  Peyton stopped absently inspecting dresses. “I see.” She clasped her hands low. Her purse slipped to her wrist. For a moment, she studied Freesia. Really studied. “How much?”

  “How much what?”

  “Your highest gown commission—I’ll double it.”

  I can put you in touch with resources…

  “I’m sorry.” Freesia’s response came grayed out somewhere between a question and a statement.

  “Triple.”

  Freesia breathed past the intersection where the woman’s audacity lodged near her dwindling patience. Despite her best intent, her gaze slipped to Jay.

  He stepped toward his fiancée, his voice hushed beside her. “Pey, this isn’t a good look on you.”

  “Tenacious and generous?”

  “Stubborn and offensive.”

  “What’s offensive about offering her an obscene amount of money for her labor?”

  Labor. Not design. Not skills or creativity. Labor. If Freesia had any inkling to cave for the money, it vaporized on the woman’s minimalistic opinion on taking a bolt of silk and transforming it to the most important dress of a woman’s life. She inhaled, smuggled fresh oxygen against her diaphragm to keep her from saying what she really wanted to say: that no labor was insignificant, that all labor uplifts humanity and holds dignity and that every time she picked up a needle and thread, she brought nothing less than an excellence of intent to her work.

  “Besides, everyone has a price,” Peyton added.

  “Not everyone,” Freesia said.

  Her focal point of eye contact, Whiskey-bear, squirmed.

  Peyton circled the display of veils. Her eyes were creased, thoughtful; her heel clicks measured, grating. “I’m not sure you understand what a society wedding brings to the table. You do recognize the Scott name?”

  Freesia couldn’t resist a dig. “Paper towels?” She nailed feigned sincerity.

  “Hardly,” Peyton gave a practiced, tittering laugh, but a flush crept up her neck. “Oil and gas, mostly, with at least a dozen publicly-traded offshoot companies.”

  “Pey, enough.” Jay’s tone was all warning.

  Had slipping into the nearest empire-waist strapless with a silk rosette given Jay a way to duck out of the shop, Freesia was certain he would have taken it, but Peyton was the runaway bride-to-be here. Runaway expectations. Runaway entitlement. Runaway mouth.

  “At any rate, a society wedding benefits us both,” she continued. “You’ll get the kind of southern exposure that will make debutantes flock to your…whatever collection…and I’ll wear your creation, all the more desired because it’s the last of its kind.”

  Peyton was a princess holding court in the shop. Her voice carried, gathered up the stares of browsing customers and two sisters who had a vested interest in society weddings impacting the shop’s bottom line. Freesia felt certain, however, that Charlotte, the woman who had previously ejected customers from the shop for offenses ranging from body shaming to dusting the cobwebs off old family squabbles best left in the past, would happily apply her bizarre chant of sisterhood to the moment when Freesia called out mystery guy for being the worst judge of character in the world for marrying Miss Everyone Has A Pric
e.

  “Let me be clear, Miss. I have zero interest in creating your wedding gown. Not if you added a staggering commission. Not even if you were marrying paper towel royalty.” Freesia glanced sideways at Jay, who looked as if he was smuggling something of his own—a smirk. “Our inventory is handpicked, unique. I’m sure you’ll find—”

  “Tacky, mass-produced dresses worn by penniless sheep and rustic bumpkins?”

  A young woman browsing the veils frowned and drifted away.

  Freesia went openmouthed, mute.

  Alex stepped forward with the most exclusive vendor catalog they carried. “Perhaps something in here could be altered to an original.”

  “Thank you,” said Jay. “That won’t be necessary.”

  “Certainly not. Literally, an original.” Peyton’s ‘literally’ sounding more like lit-rally.” Then to Whiskey-bear: “Do I stutter?”

  Jay gave Freesia a hard stare. He looked poised to prod his beloved from the store, scream, do both. His nostrils flared on a hard breath; his jaw worked. And when she thought he might say nothing, as he had before, his voice came out deep, resounding.

  “That won’t be necessary because the wedding’s off.”

  Napalm inside a bridal shop.

  Freesia gripped the fabric of her skirt.

  For a room full of rustic bumpkins and penniless sheep, their customers certainly grasped the gravitas of the moment. A few gasped. One lowered herself into the infamous bawlin’ and stonewallin’ armchair near the dressing rooms for a good view of the theatrics. Alex’s face went pale, and she lowered her premium catalog like she’d been summoned in a lawsuit. While the speakers squeezed out gritty lyrics about two sparrows in a hurricane, underscoring Peyton’s point about poor folks finding their dream dress inside these walls, Charlotte remained curiously silent. Normally, she was champion of all brides and her allegiance was without waver. But when the bride was ugly of spirit, it scratched at her like burlap, as she was fond of saying. Likely, she considered herself rustic and penniless and would proudly wear the mantle of bumpkin.

  For Peyton’s part, she took the emotional blow as one might expect someone of means who just had all spending privileges revoked: muted, restrained until her cheek—once apricot and flawless—began to ripen and twitch like the earth shaking during the 6.0 quake in Izmir, Turkey when Freesia had helped a farmer tend her sugar beets.

  “Wha—?”

  “You heard me.” His voice was flat, lifeless.

  “You did not just say that.” Peyton’s words sounded like air being released from a balloon, all huff and screech and drawn out.

  Jay’s gaze roamed the shop. “Let’s step outside.”

  “Let’s not. Let’s do this publicly. Great idea. Let’s talk about how much of a limp dick you were last night...”

  A storm. That’s what you will always be, child. Stoicism fled, Freesia poised to bolt.

  Jay scrubbed a hand down his face before it settled, thumb and middle finger gripping his temples.

  A mother-of-the-bride near the dressing room let out an audible gasp plus “Oh!” combo. Hands covered mouths. The woman in the armchair nibbled a sample cupcake and settled in for the show. Another whipped out a cell phone. A gray and blotchy Alex slipped out a mostly-silent f-bomb.

  “…or how you’re a grown-ass man who can’t stand up to Mommy and Daddy…”

  “Pey—”

  “…or how much I fucking hate it when you call me that.” The woman’s athletic whip of a frame stretched and released like a rubber band. She dropped her twelve-thousand-dollar handbag on the rustic oak boards and squirmed out of her own way trying to extract the ring from her finger. One rather unladylike grunt later, she liberated the diamond solitaire and hummed it across the shop.

  Somewhere near the garters, displayed on a reclaimed barn ladder from Chickenbone, Mississippi—plink—the hardest substance on earth made an indelible mark on the shop.

  Charlotte selected that moment to claim her slice of pandemonium pie.

  “Everyone’s entitled to act stupid once in a while,” she said, “but you two really abuse that privilege. Now go on. Get, get, get. Both of you. Newspaper office is two blocks thataway if you’re craving this much attention.” She hiked her thumb in the vague direction of Main. Had she a horse crop, Charlotte would have used it to hasten their exit.

  The jilted bride scooped up her purse, stormed the door, and challenged its hinges on the way out.

  Alex scrambled over to the ladder and dropped to her knees. Customers who had only moments ago been so reactive suddenly became part of the shop: mannequins with gaping holes for mouths.

  Collateral damage from the storm.

  “Well, that’s a first,” said Charlotte.

  Jay’s stare stopped at Freesia. His eyes said everything, nothing.

  Oh hell no. Freesia shook her head, put a palm up to stay his approach. He would not lay this at her feet. She swiped the truck keys from the office hook and slid out the back. She wanted to drive to her meadow, drive straight to the March house and grab her belongings, leave Mississippi behind and head straight to New York. But her daddy’s truck had other things in mind. After three revolutions of the engine, two sputters and coughs, and one set of latent words that rose above all the other noise—this might well be the end, Ms. Day. I want to be clear—Freesia butted her palms against the steering wheel. She tried her best not to answer the fire in her belly and run.

  And failed.

  Freesia made it to the end of the alley before Jay caught up to her.

  “Will you stop running? Please, wait.”

  Layers of pain and confusion erupted to the surface, threatened her composure. She would not cry here, in front of him. Life had come at her today with a vengeance, just as she was about to push past the inertia of indecision, and the absolute last load she needed to carry on her shoulders was the carcass of someone else’s failed relationship.

  “I can’t. I can’t do this right now.”

  She kicked up her pace. Her calves burned from the exertion. Rainwater from the morning’s shower kicked up inside her leather flats. Metal trash cans behind the barber shop sat open, a menagerie of different colored hair mixed with empty beer bottles and yesterday’s take-out containers. Cheap shaving cream overpowered her nostrils. Her earlier thread of nausea did a serpentine stitch, then threatened to unravel.

  “Do what? I just want to talk.”

  “Shouldn’t you be chasing your fiancée?”

  “Ex-fiancée.”

  Freesia reared to a stop. “Who does that? Who…breaks up…with a woman in a bridal store?” To her ears, she was breathy. Cardio endurance wasn’t exactly her greatest asset. But she also sounded Peyton-frenzied, like she was toting her own Hermani filled with attitude and judgment.

  Jay, too, was gassed. “It’s been coming…for a long time. Other people’s plans…the expectations—it all got away from me…before I even knew what I wanted.”

  Freesia remembered Peyton’s scathing assessment of his spine: a grown-ass man who can’t stand up to Mommy and Daddy.

  “The other day, you made me think,” he said. “For the first time, in a long time, I felt like I could breathe.”

  Breathe, he did. His exhales had eased to something that resembled how he might have looked, post-coital exertion. Magnificently hot and shamefully distracting. The harder Freesia tried to separate Highway Jay from Heartbreaker Jay, the more the lines blurred. She closed her eyes to fortify herself, speak her piece, independent of the face she had dreamed about the previous night.

  “Don’t you see? You’re projecting whatever you got going on in there onto me.” Her hands did a swatty-fly gesture in the vicinity of his broad chest. “This has nothing to do with me.”

  In the extended space that followed, she eased her eyes open.

  His slow-crawl response came on like another of their shared confidences on a tailgate, this one far closer to a lover’s whisper. “This has everything to do
with you.”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “It’s true.”

  “I want no part of ending a relationship.”

  “Then be part of the beginning of a friendship. I could use a friend right now. And I think you could too.”

  His presumption should have rubbed her like burlap. It didn’t. Her past was littered with brief, surface connections, nothing more. She had never stayed in one place long enough to nurture acquaintances to friends. Not until Devon, and most days she couldn’t be certain if Alex and Charlotte drew her inside or outside their circle.

  “You stick your tongue in all your friends’ mouths?”

  She had meant it as glacial sarcasm, but it cracked the chill between them and allowed warmth to seep in. And when a smile originated in his eyes and trickled down to his lips, her animosity started to melt.

  “Not unless they do it first.”

  Freesia’s chin dropped in mock protest. A lightness settled around her once-tense belly. “Did not.”

  “Did too.”

  He was playful, flirty. Everything he shouldn’t be after hurting someone. Even if that someone was abysmal.

  “This is a bad idea,” Freesia said. “I shouldn’t be talking to you.”

  “Why? Because we confessed things to each other and spent an unforgettable hour in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Because a man like you, a man who tosses breadcrumbs of emotion to someone he just kissed and tells her that he’d spend forever with her but he can’t, a man who would break a heart like you did back there…” Men just like the steady parade through her mother’s life, who’d as soon burn hot and quick as show a woman any longevity, men like Elias March. “…a man who is rich enough to think he can buy back a moment, an hour, long past, is the worst sort of man for a girl like me.”

  His stare detoured at the blow, came back with more intensity than before.

  “Go to New York. Take your brilliant, worldly perspective and the poetry of your words and become the best designer in the city and change people’s lives the way you changed mine. But don’t project whatever you have going on in there…” Instead of a swatty-fly gesture, a nod. “…onto me. I’m just a guy in wet clothes and tight shoes, trying to keep it real.”