Tori sent her charges off to speak with Pastor Jim—who had performed many a ceremony for her and knew his way around a bride and groom—and focused on the next item on the to-do list: Locate missing best man.
She strode to the rear of the church, flicking through screens on her tablet to bring up the files her business partner had left her on the Houghton-Gaines wedding. This happy event was supposed to be Sidney’s headache, but her partner had gone on a reality dating show last year, fallen hard for the host, and had recently begun filming a spin-off show with him creating dream weddings for deserving couples.
Which was incredible exposure for their business, but meant Sidney was virtually unreachable on filming days and left Victoria holding the bag for this wedding that had to be cursed.
Bridesmaids with allergies sneezing into their bouquets, a mother of the groom who insisted last minute that they had to have a separate four-tier wedding cake for gluten-free guests, and now a missing best man.
Tori had dosed the bridesmaids with antihistamines and cajoled the baker into making the second smallest tier of the original cake with almond flour. Now all she had to do was find the best man and pray nothing else went wrong.
Luckily, Sidney was as organized as she was. The best man’s contact information and itinerary were all stored under a tab marked Taylor.
The itinerary file opened.
Victoria’s heart stuttered.
She’d assumed Taylor was his first name. She’d never heard him referred to as anything else, but the name written large across the top of the itinerary and sending shockwaves through her perfectly ordered world was Nicholas. Nicholas Taylor.
It couldn’t be her Nick.
It was a common name. There had to be hundreds of Nicholas Taylors in Manhattan. And probably dozens of those were California transplants.
There was no reason to suspect Nicholas Taylor, absentee best man, was the same Nick Taylor she’d loved with every atom of her teenage heart for three years of high school before college on different coasts had pulled them apart. The same Nick Taylor she’d reconnected with for an all-too-brief summer fling in the weeks after graduating from USC. The same Nick Taylor who had vanished back to the East Coast for law school and stopped responding to her calls and emails. Who had left her to fend for herself as she tried to figure out what the hell a twenty-two-year-old with a bachelor’s degree in English and a mountain of student loans was supposed to do about the little blue line on the pregnancy test.
No. It couldn’t be him. There were at least five million Nick Taylors in the world. This was a different one. It had to be.
Forcing herself to remain calm and poised, Tori pulled up the airline’s flight status app—only to find the best man’s flight had landed right on schedule three hours ago. Eden was a good hour north of LAX, but even in the most brutal traffic, he should have arrived by now.
Pastor Jim had things under control at the altar, so Victoria slipped out of the cavernous sanctuary and into the narrow entry hall to call the other Nick Taylor’s cell.
It went straight to voicemail. Her blood chilled.
She shouldn’t have recognized his voice. It had been eleven years since she’d heard it. She shouldn’t have any memory of the sound, but her heart recognized it, even if her brain denied the possibility.
The tone was a shade deeper, somber, and businesslike as he went through the standard voicemail instructions. She was so shaken by hearing his voice, she heard the beep to leave her message before she knew it. She jerked the phone away from her ear and stabbed at her screen to end the call, heart racing.
Crap.
She was a professional. She had a reason to call him. And she was thirty-three freaking years old. She should be able to be mature about this.
But as the exterior door to the church flew open so hard it banged against the opposite wall and a man in a dark suit rushed inside, all thoughts of maturity vanished.
She was fifteen again, clapping eyes on Nick Taylor for the first time. Colors were brighter, emotions sharper. Everything was more intense when Nick was in the room. It had always been that way, the very air around him electrified by his presence.
The tangible force of his personality hadn’t diminished in the past decade. If anything, it had intensified. But it was darker now, carrying a new hardness.
Was he happy?
And where had that thought come from? Why should she care if the man who had abandoned her was happy? She’d written him out of the story of her life. This was a blip. A momentary speed bump. By Monday he’d be in Manhattan, and she’d go back to forgetting him.
Nick rapidly scanned the entry and froze when his gaze landed on her. His jaw dropped, a crack appearing in his fierce focus. Those unforgettable amber eyes widened with shock.
Her daughter’s eyes.
“Victoria?”
She could do this. “Hey, Nick. You’re late.”
TORI JACKSON.
He couldn’t process it. The love of his life was here. He’d known she was still in Eden, but he hadn’t expected her to be inside the freaking church.
Her words were cool, but her face was flushed and her eyes were wide and … wary?
“You haven’t changed a bit,” he murmured, and the words held both truth and lies. She was as gorgeous as ever with her ivy green eyes and café-au-lait skin—but she looked different. More composed. Maturity, he supposed. She was a woman now, not the girl he’d remembered so many times over the years.
Victoria. His one regret.
Her eyes held his and a rusty thread of connection stretched taut between them, taking him back to a time when he lived to impress her. He hadn’t felt this in years—this tightness in his chest, this shortness of breath. Funny how all the old feelings welled up as if they’d never left him, just waited until he clapped eyes on her again. Emotion still fresh after eleven years of hibernation.
He would have stared at her forever, but she waved him toward the sanctuary. “You should go in. We’ve already started.”
“I know the drill. Stand next to Kipp. Hand him the rings. No rehearsal needed.”
Her mouth pursed into a disapproving moue. “Nevertheless, rehearsals put everyone at ease. Go on. They’ve been wondering if you fell off a cliff.”
“Tori.” He didn’t want to go. Didn’t want to do anything that would take his eyes off her. Couldn’t risk that he would lose her for another eleven years if he did. He’d considered looking her up while he was in town. Fantasized about it. But this wasn’t how he’d pictured their reunion.
Focused intently on her tablet, a blush still rode her cheeks as she nodded toward the doors. “I should get inside.”
“Then allow me.” He held the door open for her. She moved quickly, avoiding brushing against him. Nick followed her inside, and a cheer went up from the groomsmen.
Duty called.
He tried to pay attention to the rehearsal, but it was impossible with Victoria moving between the pews.
The tablet. The teal sheath and tidy updo hairstyle. Her air of calm and authority. It all added up to one thing: wedding planner.
“Taylor? It’s our turn.”
Nick yanked his gaze off the wedding planner and focused on the maid of honor at his side.
“Right. Sorry.” Belatedly realizing they were holding up the practice recessional, he extended his elbow to her, and they followed Lolly and Kipp up the aisle. The rest of the bridal party fell in line, but Nick was barely aware of them or the bridesmaid on his arm. His gaze had returned to the upswept midnight curls Victoria had somehow figured out how to tame in the past decade.
Once they had proven they could walk down the aisle without tripping over their own feet, the minister pronounced them ready, and the large group immediately broke into smaller clusters. Carpool plans to the rehearsal dinner flew, but Nick could only
concentrate on Victoria as she disappeared through a small side door.
He detached himself from the party, moving toward that side door.
“Taylor! Wanna ride with me?”
Kipp’s invitation was as loud as the Hawaiian shirt he wore. Normally, Nick would want nothing more than to catch up with his oldest friend, but this was Victoria, and that changed everything.
“Nah, I need to check on something, but I’ll catch you at dinner, okay?”
Kipp hesitated, but Lolly tugged on his arm, and they headed out the front with the rest of the bridal party.
Kipp had never met Tori when they were dating. The Taylors and Houghtons had belonged to the same country club since he and Kipp were in diapers, but Kipp had gone to an East Coast boarding school for high school and had been living in Belize during that unforgettable summer after undergrad. He’d heard about her—there had been times Nick had talked of nothing else—but his friend had no reason to suspect the prim wedding planner Victoria was actually Nick’s Tori.
The side door led to a small dressing room filled with clergy robes and natural light. Victoria had her back to him, one hand braced on the window frame when he entered. God, she was gorgeous. He’d forgotten the line of her neck, how sensitive she was there.
His fingers itched to touch and he closed the distance between them, giving in to the urge. “Hiding?”
At the first brush of his fingertips, she whirled away, putting half the small room between them. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t know.” Nick flexed his hand. “I just … I’ve missed you.”
“You could have fooled me.”
He deserved the bite in her words. “Things got complicated after I left,” he said, reaching for the words to explain.
“You think?”
“With everything going on—” His father’s fraud arrest … His mother’s flight to a non-extradition country … And him struggling to keep his head above water in law school… “I thought a clean break was better.”
“Better for whom?” She held up a hand. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. You’ll be gone on Monday. Just stay away from me until then.”
She stalked past him, but he caught her arm, sliding his hand down until he held her fingers. “Tori—”
A hidden door he hadn’t seen in the north wall creaked open.
“Mom? Are we going soon? I’m done with my homework, and the wedding people are leaving.”
The girl looked about ten. The skinny arms and legs sticking out of a school uniform were brown as a beechnut. Her hair was Victoria’s wild midnight mop—and her eyes were the color of whiskey.
About ten.
Nick stared, his mouth going dry as realization slammed into his gut.
I have a kid.
VICTORIA STARED AT NICK, willing him to keep his mouth shut. All it would take was one careless word for Lorelei to realize he was her absentee father. Lore had always wondered about her daddy. It was only natural. But Tori had kept her answers vague—loved him very much but circumstances pulled us apart before we even knew you were on the way.
Standing in the vestry of First Presbyterian wasn’t how she wanted her daughter to learn her father was actually a self-centered asshole who’d abandoned them both.
“I’m almost done,” she said to her daughter, amazed her voice didn’t crack under the strain. “Why don’t you wait for me in the entry? I’ll be out in a minute.”
She spoke to Lorelei, but her gaze stayed on Nick, silently pleading with him not to speak. Not to ask. Either her psychic powers were improving or he was silenced by shock, because he didn’t say a word as Lorelei mumbled okay and trudged out with her bulging backpack slung over one shoulder.
His gaze followed Lorelei, staring after her long after the door clicked shut and her footsteps faded away.
When he swung to face Victoria, his eyes were hard. “How could you fail to tell me I had a child?”
She tugged her hand free. “I told you I was pregnant. A kid is the standard result.”
His amber eyes flared like he was the injured party. “You never told me. It’s not the kind of thing I’m likely to forget.”
“Are you kidding? I called. I emailed. For five weeks, I did nothing but tell you.”
He opened his mouth to retort, anger sharpening the lines of his face, but realization rolled over his face like a cloud, and he went still. “I deleted them,” he whispered.
“What?”
“It was September. My father had been indicted, my mom skipped the country, and I was about to flunk out of my first semester of law school. I knew if I heard your voice or saw even a single word of sympathy from you, I’d give up and run back to California with nothing, so I deleted everything without opening them.” He stepped away, falling onto a chair as if his legs would no longer hold him. “I never thought—Christ. It was for the best. I was so sure—”
“So you ignored me until I went away.”
“I was twenty-two and my life was falling apart.”
“Funny. So was mine.”
“I didn’t know you were pregnant.”
“Would it have made a difference?”
“Of course it would have!” He surged to his feet, pacing in the tight space. “You know it would have. You know me.”
“No, I don’t. Not anymore.” She tried to keep the words firm, but her voice was shaking. She was shaking.
She’d entertained the idea, over the years, that he might not have known about Lorelei—usually as part of some fantasy in which he’d been abducted by the Dread Pirate Roberts and fought tirelessly to get back to her side—but now hearing him claim he really hadn’t known rocked the foundations of her carefully constructed world.
She’d built a life for Lorelei and for herself. What happened now? Would he want to know his daughter? What if he wanted more? What if he wanted joint custody and every other weekend in Manhattan?
She hadn’t missed the designer cut of his suit or the glitzy watch that probably cost more than she made in three months. If he decided to make it a fight, he could pay for a more expensive lawyer in a custody battle. What if he tried to take Lorelei away?
She fought to take a full breath. She wasn’t thinking clearly, hadn’t been since Nick Taylor burst back into her life.
A reminder chime on her phone rang. The rehearsal dinner. She needed to get to the restaurant to make sure everything was going perfectly, but first, she had to drop Lorelei at her mother’s to be spoiled rotten tonight and tomorrow while Tori ran the wedding.
She had a job to do. Already Nick had distracted her too much. Normally she would have been guiding the rehearsal, but she’d let Pastor Jim run the show because she was too flustered by Nick, standing beside the altar, looking like several million bucks and ten thousand regrets in his dark gray suit. She’d retreated to the vestry to get her composure back, but she couldn’t seem to get herself together. Memories of the past were colliding with fears for the future and leaving her present an unholy mess.
“I can’t deal with this right now. I have to work.”
She didn’t give him a chance to reply, rushing through the sanctuary without looking around. She collected her daughter and hustled her out to her car.
Lorelei flung her backpack into the backseat before flopping into the front. “Was that the groom?”
“Just the best man.”
“Do you like him?”
Tori sucked in a breath as she pulled out of the lot, refusing to look in the rearview mirror. What must her daughter have thought when she walked in to see Nick holding her hand? Lore never saw her with men. Between taking care of her daughter, establishing her business and forgetting about Nick, Tori hadn’t had the time or energy for relationships. She’d only been on a handful of dates in the past decade. “He’s just someone I knew a long time ago
.”
Her daughter hummed knowingly—a mannerism she’d, unfortunately, picked up from her grandmother. “If you say so.”
“I do,” Tori insisted, and quickly changed the subject. Maybe it was cowardly, but she wasn’t ready to discuss Nick Taylor with his daughter. Not until she could figure out exactly how she felt about seeing him again, because as much as she wanted to hate him, it sure felt like some part of her heart was still his.
HE HAD A DAUGHTER.
The food at the rehearsal dinner was divine, but he barely tasted it. Activity flowed around him, but all he saw was a little girl with skinny arms, Victoria’s hair, and his eyes.
He’d had a daughter for ten years, and he hadn’t known.
He wanted to blame Tori, but she was right. He had cut her off when he’d left California to go to law school. When she’d tried to get in touch with him, he’d assumed she was calling to offer sympathy because his life was shit and he hadn’t wanted to hear it. All that had mattered to his twenty-two-year-old mind had been carving out security so it could never be yanked out from under him.
Sure felt like the rug had been pulled out now.
That little girl changed everything—and he didn’t even know her name.
“Taylor!” Kipp slung himself into the empty seat beside Nick, beaming like he’d won the lottery—and from the way Lolly looked at him, maybe he had. “You okay, man? You seem out of it.”
“Just happy to be here.” The last thing Kipp needed on the night before his wedding was to hear Nick’s drama.
He was a good guy, Kipp Houghton. A loveable teddy bear of a trust-fund baby who had never had a blow that wasn’t softened for him. But he was also the only person from Nick’s old life who had stuck by him through all his family shit, even when Nick hadn’t made it easy to do. And whenever Nick had asked him why, he would shrug and say Nick wasn’t his parents.
And now he was a parent. Christ.
SECOND CHANCES: A ROMANCE WRITERS OF AMERICA® COLLECTION Page 8
