by Amelia Wilde
New York Times and USA Today bestselling author, Jessie Evans, gave up a career as an international woman of mystery to write the sexy, contemporary romances she loves to read.
She also writes as Lili Valente. Visit her online at www.jessieevansromance.com or www.lilivalente.com!
1
The night before her best friend Lisa’s wedding—and her seventh turn as a bridesmaid—Lark March had all of her weirdest anxiety dreams.
Every. Single. One.
Babysitting her sister Aria’s baby and she loses the eight-month-old in the stuffed animal collection?
Check.
Crawling through a miniature Dutch pancake house with doors too small for her to squeeze through while “It’s a Small World” plays on endless repeat?
Check.
Getting knocked over the head, blacking out, and waking up in the middle of the early church service her Nana hasn’t missed in thirty-five years, wearing nothing but a fine layer of caramel corn stuck to her body like a bad cat suit and a bubblegum bow in her hair?
Check and check.
(She’d had that one twice, because apparently one “naked and covered in candy in front of old people” dream wasn’t enough for her subconscious.)
As a result of all the panicked dreaming, Lark woke up exhausted.
Exhausted, on the biggest day of her best friend’s life, not to mention the biggest catering job of Lark’s career. Ever After Catering had been growing steadily since she started the business three years ago, but she’d never handled an event like Lisa’s reception.
There was going to be a twenty-foot appetizer buffet, a sit down steak or salmon dinner for three hundred people, and a dessert spread featuring a five tier wedding cake, three different kinds of groom’s cake—Lisa’s soon-to-be husband and his two brothers all had very strong, but very opposing, views on cake—cupcakes with sprinkles for the kids, chocolate pie for Lisa’s Gran, an edible ice sculpture, and a white chocolate fountain.
And, out of all that, the ice sculpture was the only thing Lark, her two sisters, and her staff of four weren’t making themselves.
Even knowing the cakes were mostly done and waiting at the venue, the salmon was marinating in her industrial fridge, and the salad was sitting in giant containers, just waiting to be tossed with homemade honey-lemon dressing, wasn’t enough to keep Lark’s hands from shaking as she shoved a change of clothes and her lucky apron into a duffle bag and snagged her bridesmaid’s dress from the closet. She was always a little nervous before a big job, but today was worse than usual. Today had to be perfect, not only for Lisa, but for all the guests attending the reception.
At least six of Lisa’s friends from college were planning weddings in the next year. Booking even three more “big time” receptions could help Lark take her business to the next level, allowing her to compete with more established catering companies in Atlanta.
She had to pull this off without a hitch. There was no room for error, and certainly no time for a nap.
Three cups of coffee kept her going through the epic beauty salon appointment, and crying like a baby as she watched her best friend since preschool get married kept her conscious through the receiving line and the wedding party pictures, but by the time she arrived at the venue—a lovely old home on the historic register about five miles outside of Summerville, Georgia—she was pinching herself to stay awake.
But as soon as she walked through the door to the new, super-sized kitchen the owners had added onto the home when they decided to rent it out for events, the job-in-progress adrenaline thankfully kicked in.
“How are the potatoes? Are they ready for the warmers?” Lark asked as she bustled into the room, tying her lucky apron on over her bridesmaid’s dress.
In the end, she’d been too nervous to take the time to change before heading over. She was just going to have to cook in floor-length red taffeta.
“Are they done?” Lark asked again, squinting at the stove. “We’re going to need the oven for the last minute apps in less than ten minutes.”
“Hello to you, too,” Aria, Lark’s older sister, grumbled from the far corner of the kitchen, where she was bent over the wedding cake with a tube of frosting, adding a few last minute iced tulips.
At five-seven and barely one hundred and twenty pounds, Aria was the slimmest of the March sisters, unreasonably scrawny for a pastry chef, and, lately, about as sweet as a packet of damp Sweet’N Low. Ever since she had separated from her husband and moved back to Summerville five months ago, she seemed to have misplaced her sense of fun.
Lark had learned to put up with Aria’s new and unimproved personality transplant, but she had to admit she missed the big sister who used to play pranks on their parents and stay up all night giving her sisters makeovers and telling silly stories about the guys she dated.
“You’re here!” Melody, the youngest March daughter, bounded across the room with a squeal, clapping her hands. “How was the wedding? Oh my gosh, was it amazing? Was Lisa beautiful? Did Matt cry? Did you cry?”
“Great. Of course, a little, and of course,” Lark said, laughing as Melody pulled her in for a giddy hug.
Melody loved weddings almost as much as she loved to cook and only slightly less than she loved to eat. Her commitment to all things culinary meant that she had graduated from culinary school only one year behind Lark, even though Lark was two and a half years older.
The sisters shared a love of preparing food, the same long, sandy blonde hair and brown eyes, and the same gently rounded figures that gave testimony to the fact that they hit the cheese board more often than the gym. When they were younger, people often mistook them for twins, until Melody hit a growth spurt and left Lark behind. Now, when five-foot-two Lark stood between her taller sisters, she looked like a book with a pair of mismatched bookends.
No one knew where Aria’s red hair and green eyes had come from. There were rumors of a ginger-headed great-grandmother on their father’s side, but they were unsubstantiated. If Aria didn’t have their dad’s nose and freakishly long fingers—or if all three of the Summerville postmen weren’t actually postwomen—Lark knew there would have been jokes made.
“I hated to miss it,” Melody said with a sigh as she released Lark from her embrace. “Did you tell Lisa I was thinking of her?”
“I did, and she said thank you for holding down the fort here so I could be her maid of honor.”
“Of course!” Melody waved a hand in the air. “You had to be her maid of honor. It would have been a sacrilege if she’d picked anyone else.”
“Though it might have been nice to give someone else a turn,” Aria said, ducking between her sisters as she headed for the sink. “You know what they say about the March girls…”
Lark wrinkled her nose. She knew exactly what “they”—the town gossips, the women in their mother’s Bible study group, Nana’s friends at the DAR, and all the been-married-forevers who had nothing better to do than predict who was, or wasn’t, going to get married next—said about the March girls.
Too many times a bridesmaid, never a bride.
Between the three of them, the March sisters had been bridesmaids no less than twenty-seven times. Melody held the record, with ten bridesmaid appearances and three turns as maid of honor, all before her twenty-third birthday. At this rate, she’d have a dozen plastic bins full of old bridesmaids dresses in their parents’ garage before she was twenty-five. Lark and Aria weren’t far behind her, both of them tied with seven stints in a wedding party.
“Well, I think it’s nice that so many people want us in their weddings,” Melody said. “It means we have a lot of good friends.”
“Besides, you already proved them wrong, anyway,” Lark said to Aria’s back. “One March girl has been married, even if it didn’t stick. There’s still hope we’ll have fancy weddings of our own someday.”
Surely there must be, Lark thought, a little wistfully. Since breaking up with her on-again-off-again boyfriend, Tho
mas, last year, things had been pretty quiet for Lark in the romance department.
Not that Thomas had been particularly romantic. He had inherited his dad’s pool supply company and spent his days peddling chlorine and water filters, but as a former high school football star, his true passions were following Summerville High’s football season and watching Falcon games with his buddies at the local sports bar. He and Lark had had a good time when they got together to grill catfish or catch a movie, but there had never been any fireworks between them.
Not like with Mason.
There had never been anyone like Mason. He was the only boy Lark had really loved, maybe the only boy she’d ever love. No matter how much she adored weddings, and secretly longed to be walking down that aisle as a bride, not a bridesmaid, it was hard to think about losing her heart that way again, not after what Mason did to her four years ago.
“Right, whatever,” Aria mumbled, pulling Lark from her thoughts. “Shouldn’t you two be cooking something? I thought I heard cars starting to pull up.”
Aria’s words had the desired effect. Soon, Melody and Lark were scrambling to get black-forest-ham-stuffed puff pastries and the other last minute appetizers in the oven, fetching the trays they’d prepared last night from the refrigerator, and rounding up the servers from behind the building where they’d gone for a smoke break and setting them to work carrying everything out to the buffet.
Aria finished prepping the white chocolate fountain, and started filling round serving trays with glasses of champagne and red, white, and pink wine (because Southern women love their White Zinfandel), while Melody worked on the sides and Lark fired up the grill for the steak and salmon.
Three hours later, Lark was covered in a fine sheen of sweat and smelled like a campfire, but the appetizers and sit-down dinner had gone off without a hitch. All that was left was to set up the desserts.
She started for the groom’s cakes, but Melody stopped her with a hand on her arm.
“Go on. Go dance with the others,” she said, tugging at the bow on Lark’s apron. “Aria and I can handle it from here on out.”
“Are you sure?” Lark asked, attempting to smooth her heat-frizzed hair back into her up-do. “I can stay, I—”
“Go. You deserve to have some fun after how hard you’ve worked this week,” Aria said with a rare smile. “And I don’t want any of you klutzes dropping my cakes. I’ll bring them out myself as soon as Manny and George get the fountain set up.”
“All right.” Lark tugged the top of her sleeveless red dress up, and decided to ignore the tiny grease stain on the bottom of her skirt—it would be too dark out on the dance floor to see the stain, anyway. She headed for the kitchen door, determined to get in a few dances before she succumbed to exhaustion.
She hurried across the ballroom where Manny and George—her two oldest employees, the ones who had helped her start Ever After three years ago—were setting up the dessert tables, on through the foyer, and out into the warm Georgia night.
Outside, paper lanterns hung laced between the trees, casting the dozens of large tables with their centerpieces of massive gardenia blossoms in a warm orange glow. Dinner had been cleared awhile ago, but several of the older set still sat in their chairs, nursing coffee and chatting, smiling as they watched the younger generations jump up and down on the dance floor beneath the trees.
If Lark had planned an outdoor wedding in May, she was sure it would have rained and forced everyone to cram into the too-small-for-three-hundred-guests historic home and the celebration would have been ruined. But Lisa had better luck, and her wedding had gone off without a hitch. The weather was perfect, the ceremony was perfect, the food was perfect—if Lark did say so herself—and everyone looked like they were having an amazing time.
Dodging two flower girls playing a rough game of tag with what was left of their bouquets, Lark headed for the dance floor. She could see Lisa and Matt in the center, surrounded by friends and family, and couldn’t wait to join them. All the exhaustion and stress of the day began to seep away as Celebrate Good Times cranked through the D.J.’s speakers and the people she loved let out a whoop of appreciation.
It was possibly the cheesiest of all wedding reception songs, but Lark couldn’t deny she loved it. She suddenly felt ready to dance all night.
If fate hadn’t stepped in and altered the course of her evening, she would have thrown herself into the fray and danced for hours, singing along and stealing Lisa from her new husband to swing her around during Dancing Queen, their favorite best friend song.
But fate did step in, in the form of six feet, two inches of old flame.
At first Lark couldn’t believe it was really him, but there was no mistaking that strong jawline or the shaggy brown hair that fell over his forehead just so. No mistaking those wide shoulders or that narrow waist or how utterly delicious he looked in a suit.
It was Mason Stewart, all right.
Mason Stewart, back home and brooding at the edge of the dance floor with a beer held lightly between two fingers like he’d never left town in the first place.
Mason hadn’t been back to Summerville in four years, not since the night he asked Lark to marry him, and then ran off to New York City to do his residency at some hospital in Queens the very next morning. He had been offered a residency in Atlanta, only an hour away, and he’d promised to take it. To take it, and to take Lark with him when he left Summerville. They’d planned to get an apartment and Lark was going to get a job cooking at an amazing restaurant and Mason was going to start saving the world, one family practice patient at a time, and after three years of dating, they were finally going to live together.
Finally live together, and do all those other boyfriend-girlfriend things they’d never done because Lark was waiting for marriage, and Mason was deathly afraid of saying “I do.”
By the time Mason turned sixteen, his mother had been married eight times. Shortly after his sixteenth birthday, she had left town with husband number nine and Mason went to live with his Uncle Parker, a man who made it clear he wasn’t thrilled to be saddled with his sister’s kid. Mason blamed his mom—and the ridiculous, outdated, backward institution of marriage—for the roughest years of his childhood.
Lark had known how he felt about marriage. She should have been suspicious the second he dropped down on one knee.
Instead, she had wept with happiness, slipped the ring on her finger, and stayed up half the night calling everyone she knew, telling them the happy news.
But instead of coming by her parents’ house for Saturday brunch the next morning to celebrate the engagement, Mason had run for it, leaving Lark to explain that all her giddy “I’m getting married” phone calls had been a mistake.
A mistake.
Like leaving the kitchen.
Like heading for the dance floor.
Like getting close enough to see Mason’s blue eyes flash when he spotted her across the lawn, frozen like a deer in the headlights.
2
There she was.
Right there, close enough to see the flush in her cheeks and the shock in her expression. Close enough to see that she still filled out a dress like no woman he’d ever seen, with curves so perfect his hands ached to hold her, and the rest of him ached to do a lot more.
Mason’s stomach knotted around his last drink of beer. His heartbeat slowed for a second only to kick into overdrive, slamming against his ribs.
He had known there was an excellent chance he would see Lark tonight. He’d counted on it, in fact. There was no other reason to agree to be Lana Tate’s plus one to a wedding where he knew he wasn’t wanted—Lisa was Lark’s best friend and surely hadn’t appreciated Mason running off after popping the question.
Seeing Lark was the entire point of being here. But now that it had happened, now that their eyes had met and he could see first hand how hurt and angry she still was…
Now Mason wasn’t sure a surprise meeting was such a good idea.
Maybe he should have called first.
Or emailed.
And what would that have read like, jackass?
Remember me, the guy who ripped your heart out four years ago? Well, I’m back and hoping you haven’t fallen in love while I’ve been gone. I mean, you said there would never be anyone else for you, and there’s been no one in New York who could hold a candle to Lark March for me, so…
What do you think? Ready to pick up where we left off?”
The thought of Lark reading an email like that made Mason cringe.
She deserved better.
She deserved him groveling on his knees in front of her, begging for forgiveness, and that’s exactly what he intended to do.
That had always been the plan: get out, get some space, get his head on straight, and if Lark was still single and interested afterward, then he would give himself permission to believe in love. To believe in promises and vows and happiness and forever with the woman who had captured his heart back when they weren’t much more than kids. He hadn’t imagined he’d stay away four years, but getting his head on straight had taken more time on his therapist’s couch than he’d expected.
He only hoped four years wasn’t too long, and that Lark would be able to find it in her heart to forgive him.
Well, she’s not going to forgive you if you keep standing there, staring like an idiot. Go say something!
Clutching his beer in a death grip, Mason started toward Lark.
He made it three steps before she turned and ran.
Flat out ran, like she was running away from a rabid dog escaped from quarantine. By the time Mason called for her to wait, she had already woven her way through the tables and launched herself into the darkened field beyond, heading for the shadowy hills in the distance without any sign of slowing.
Mason cursed beneath his breath and started after her, abandoning his beer on an empty table as he went. Within a few moments, he moved beyond the tables and out into the field of knee-high grass. Spotting Lark a hundred yards ahead, he poured on a burst of speed.