The Butterfly Dream: Match Made In Devon Bridal Shop: Book Two

by Blair, Danielle

  The sight of it gave Charlotte pause, a little like turning off a spigot, a lot like a slow crawl to the realization of everything his offering meant. That he held the artifact of their courtship in the same esteem as she. That at some point, he had retrieved it from the case, prompted by God only knew what and laundered it so that it smelled like their lavender powder in the utility room below. That he would have had to place it on his person each and every day on the off chance she may need it. And that he was—according to Granddaddy Strickland’s criteria—the most caretaking and sentimental of gentleman, worthy of her cry-inducing romantic stories, that Charlotte had ever known.

  “When did you get this?” she asked.

  At the second-floor exhibit’s opening night, the bandana had been folded like a heart and put on display next to a wedding photo, her in a gown from Mama’s store, sitting on his tuxedoed lap, the 584 International beneath them.

  “Day after you asked me to date you again. Asked Alex if I could pick it up.”

  “That’s how she knew something was wrong.” Charlotte used the cloth to dry her cheeks. “She’s fighting for us.”

  “Not half as hard as I intend to.”

  This time, Nash didn’t wait for the moment to come. He seized it. His lips captured hers with a fire she didn’t remember he possessed. And she drank Nash’s intensity. Firm and soft, urgent and safe, their tongues danced inside long minutes, until the dash to sex fled and all that was left was the deliciousness of a drugging, slow intimacy that had her forgetting her place, the moment, all tears, and her current state of bizarre dress.

  One intoxicated thought surfaced. “I’m sorry I left you waiting.”

  “Why where you on the floor, so broken apart?” he whispered against her lips.

  Charlotte tugged at the lacy fabric at her waist. “I’m gone. It doesn’t fit.”

  He smiled, a gentle lift that strummed at every single one of her heartstrings.

  “It’s not meant to. Nature’s full of proof that nothing’s supposed to return to what it was before. Animals that molt out of skin and shells. Forest fires that feed the soil. Flowers, like your hydrangeas near the porch, that come back fuller and bluer every year.” His voice seemed to start with Silly girl and end somewhere close to I’ll prove you so very wrong. “Char, we’ll never be who we were back then, and I’m glad. Damn it all, I was a stupid kid, pretending to know more than I did, acting a man when all I felt inside was a scared boy with another mouth to feed. I wouldn’t trade those years of building up confidence, knowing who I am, what I want to leave behind in this world…I wouldn’t trade the years you helped me to discover all that, for anything.”

  She snatched a few desperate kisses in response, then snuggled up beneath his chin.

  “What do you say I go back to the barn, to wait…” He grabbed her behind the knee and nudged her leg up on top of his hip, splitting her folds outside the barrier of her panties, the hardened seam riding her intimate spot in an arousing way. “…and you put on something that makes you feel as beautiful as you are…” His fingertip, callused from manual labor but oh so inclined to expertly tackle any task set before him, took a meandering, unhurried path from the back of her knees higher, higher, like a gnat in the baking sun headed for an oasis. “…so that we can pick up with whatever you had in mind.”

  Firebolts of pleasure raced the gnat home. Molasses, lustful thoughts took over.

  He pulled his touch away. It took all she had in her not to grab his hand, the lip of his jeans, to beg him to complete his journey.

  “Five minutes, Char. After that, I come searching and we drop and make love wherever we are.”

  If there was one thing she could count on in this lifetime, it was a promise from Nash’s lips. She thought of all the places between here and the barn—the stairs, the entryway, the porch swing with no neighbors for miles. Charlotte found herself greedy. She wanted them all. His threat made her damp, her nipples ripe beneath the worn fabric of her bra.

  He slid from beneath her, a monumental erection reshaping his normally-straight, minimalist contours, hips down. The sight delighted her more than it should have. She knew his shape, his feel. Somehow, imagining all the ways he might have swollen to life, all the ways she made him squirm with unsated anticipation, made her entire body tighten with want.

  Nash slid from the mattress and nuzzled a chaste kiss at the rise of her backside.

  “Five. Minutes.”

  His voice, already weak with need, made her strong with want. He smiled against her heated skin, a deep-throated chuckle, if she was honest, then disappeared down the hallway. She heard him descend the steps in clusters and bolt out the front door.

  Charlotte launched off the bed like he’d struck a match on his way out and the only way to douse the flames was to meet his demands. She scrambled to her rack of the closet, his request fresh in her mind. Something that makes you feel as beautiful as you are.

  One thought pushed to the surface. Charlotte licked her lips in thought and turned to Nash’s side of the closet. A smile scorched a trail inside her mood and magnified her ache.

  Four minutes, fifty seconds…

  * * *

  Charlotte’s outfit of choice made her feel like a goddess: a hot pink gravity-defying bra she’d bought when clearance rack met whim the last time she and Mama had shopped in Jackson, every bit the engineering marvel it proclaimed to be since three children and a preoccupation for sweets had blossomed her to double-D cups; Nash’s tuxedo shirt from their wedding, the cuffs unfastened, the collar unbuttoned to just below her press of cleavage, the bottom hem skimming her naked thighs; and not a stitch more. No panties. No shoes. Not even a fastener for her hair. Her straight locks tumbled around her shoulders and down her back precisely where the wind had positioned it on her way to the barn.

  That wasn’t all the chill wind had touched.

  Never had she paraded her naughty bits so freely.

  Nash had changed the lighting in the barn, utilitarian to the 4 a.m. glow he preferred upon waking and stumbling out to milk Milkshake. As promised, he sat atop the tractor’s seat, his hands slung low in his lap, as if he’d already gotten a jump on pleasuring himself through his denim. The visual made her core feel leaden, a hive that begged for counterpressure, an idea wholly unsatisfying without the sling of silk between her legs for friction.

  A tall glass of tea in her hand, the ice chiming a sonorous note against the thick handblown craftsmanship, the rising heat of her body temperature already wicking moisture at her palm, Charlotte had far more in mind with the liquid than mere hydration. At sixteen, and parched from the sun’s rays, Nash had downed her tea in a steady rise and fall of his Adam’s apple. At sixteen years into their union, she had learned a thing or two about thirst. Denied, the craving was downright insufferable.

  She knew the moment he saw her. He froze, eyelids to toes, all but the seam of his mouth that parted slightly and the necessary rise and fall of his chest. In the three and a half minutes that had passed, his high-endurance physique should have recovered to a resting heart rate. Charlotte delighted that his labored breathing was all her fault.

  Nash slipped out one curse then another, a lusty exhale sandwiched in between. She likened the foul language to salt water. Normally she didn’t have a taste for it, but the more she drank in his reaction, the more she wanted. She closed in on his space and extended the glass.

  He refused by shaking his head.

  The game was on. She took a robust gulp of the tea, then offered him her wet lips on a pucker.

  Nash licked his lips. She was certain he hadn’t done it on purpose. He shifted against the seat. Again, he shook his head.

  Charlotte stifled a laugh. She placed the tea on the red housing to the engine, right next to the vertical exhaust pipe, fished out a single ice cube, and wedged it between her breasts.

  The jolt against her skin caused her to gasp. In retrospect, not her best plan, but boy did it surpass her intended eff
ect.

  Her gasp caused a low growl to erupt from Nash’s lips. He left discretion on the hay-strewn floor and shifted himself through his jeans, the peaked lines at his brow a measured pain in which she collected delight. He wanted her, maybe more than he remembered, maybe more than he ever had.

  She placed her right hand at the steering wheel to stabilize herself, her left foot where he had done the same earlier, then brought her other ankle up to twist around it, her belly eye-level to Nash. Her libido lobbed ahead to her straddling him backward, but he preoccupied himself with the melting cube, the swell of her high breasts, the stiff white lapel that curtained around her generous orbs, and she relaxed into his adoration.

  “Promise me you won’t ever wish your body could go back,” he said, his voice throaty, serene, reverent. “If I had fancy words, they still wouldn’t be enough.”

  Nash dipped his face forward, his nose skimming the satin-covered swell of her breasts, the material damp from the melting ice. He sucked the cube into his mouth, spit it out in an impressive arc over his shoulder, then lapped the droplet remnants, paying meticulous attention with his tongue to the water trapped in the crevice of her cleavage.

  The gooseflesh he raised at the back of her arms and legs was rivaled only by the prickly heat below the skin.

  Nash’s powerful hands gripped the two sides of his shirt and strong-armed their way down the buttons until they had no choice but to pop free.

  His gaze even with her spray of pubic hair, his eyelids dropped heavy at her unexpected nakedness. Another curse slipped free.

  Immediately, a river of heat surged to her lady parts, creaming the valley between her legs, left the tight twist of her ankles impossibly hot, craving the night air. She lifted her right ankle and balanced herself on the tractor’s tiny platform, facing him.

  The tight spread wasn’t enough. Not by half. As soon as the planes of her belly were revealed, uninhibited, his palms mapped her hourglass. When she gripped the steering wheel at her back and leaned against it for stability, Nash hiked her knee over his shoulder and pretended this level of witchcraft was normal for them. It wasn’t. Charlotte lost herself.

  As it turned out, her tractor idea, though wildly hot, was ill-conceived. Sparse operator room on the machine was not at all friendly to sex, leastways not the grown-up kind that wasn’t all rushed pawing and reaching satisfaction before clothes were even shed. Charlotte did her best to reciprocate every generous stroke, every worshipful span—minus the cursing, but ultimately Nash turned all caveman, hopped down, his pants riding low enough for a monumental peepshow, swept her off her already climaxed and shaking limbs and carried her to the barn stall reserved strictly for fresh replacement hay. Charlotte spread a nearby blanket and they continued inside one of those scenes that rivaled nearly every soft-cover, dog-eared, flowy-scripted book on her lonely shelf—the place she went when tiredness crashed over Nash.

  He proved himself capable of working her the way he worked the land, his attention to detail nearly unmatched thus far. Words he used earlier—’we drop and make love wherever we are’ became the order of the night. Charlotte had imagined the stairs, the entryway, the porch swing. Darned if Nash didn’t set those to reality and add in a few of his own ideas, without one iota of care that he’d forsake an entire cycle of sleep.

  A storm whipped up a few hours later. Wind rattled loose shingles overhead. Dead leaves pressed against the window, the space inside warm and close, nothing at all like life beyond the glass. This sleep, instead of visions of butterflies and vans to carry her from Devon, Charlotte dreamed nothing.

  Not one solitary thing.

  * * *

  If Charlotte had a mind to, she would have set a wake alarm on her phone. But sleep had come deep and fast on the tail end of an evolution of sorts—of relationship, of closeness, of preserving time in a mason jar—magical. She could no more say where her clothes were, much less her phone, and the farm animals seemed to have been in some kind of cahoots to ignoring the sunrise. It seemed they, too, had a hangover from witnessing the night’s amorous activities.

  But the light through the barn slats seemed all wrong—not enough yellows and pastels, a bit too advanced. Charlotte slipped out from inside the cocoon of blankets and tiptoed toward the tractor—the most likely place to find clothes. Hay crunched beneath her steps. Charlotte slowed on tippy-toes, felt a bit ridiculous. Didn’t change her weight any. Just concentrated it all at the balls of her feet and made her breasts feel like jostled water balloons.

  Milkshake tracked her movements with her head and blinked slowly as if to say, “I hear you, girl,” then went back to her feed.

  Charlotte found Nash’s tuxedo shirt strewn across the dusty radiator. She took a good precious minute turning it right-side out and untangling it, then remembered at no time during the previous night had she tucked her phone inside her pink bra.

  Shoot.

  She issued a strong directive to her brain to wake the heck up.

  Guess it worked. Her next thought was the old battery-powered face clock near the tool boxes. She pushed her arms through the sleeves and wrapped the biggest parts around her grime like a mummy. A few steps gave her a new angle to take in the time.

  Seven forty-five.

  Her heart did the whole water balloon-jostle thing right up against her throat. Shoot-shoot-shoot. Fifteen minutes to open the bridal shop and she looked and smelled like she’d had sex in a barn. And though her brain was as slow to get up to speed as a diesel engine, her options dwindled almost as fast as they surfaced. The twins and Freesia were out. Nash was snoring in the stall. That left the Silver Swarm, likely unreachable as none of them had mastered cell phones, or Alex.

  Shoot-shoot-shoot-shoot.

  Man, Charlotte would hear about this. On the flipside, Alex might be happiest of all that Charlotte never came home last night.

  She made a beeline for the barn door. Almost made it when she heard Nash behind her.

  “Where are you going?”

  Charlotte wouldn’t categorize his tone as angry, necessarily. Had a bit of volume and a lot of brash mixed in with the grogginess. Stopped her to a statue.

  “It’s late. I’ve got fifteen minutes to shower and get to the shop.”

  “What do you mean ‘the shop’?”

  Her brain may have been a diesel engine but Nash’s was slower than cream rising on buttermilk.

  “The bridal shop? You know, where women try on white dresses and part with their money like they were born to a Rockefeller?”

  “I know what shop, Char.”

  If Nash wasn’t annoyed the first time he spoke, he sure as heck ramped it up on standing, his giggly man parts not so giggly in the light of day. If he hadn’t sounded like he’d kicked a hornet’s nest into a grizzly’s backside, she might have reconsidered the whole rush-into-work thing. After she called Alex, of course.

  “I thought after what happened last night…”

  “That what? I wouldn’t go to the shop anymore?”

  “That you’d be here more. That you’d remember that you have family that depends on you and that Alex can start taking up some of the slack again. That you’d at least have breakfast with me. The way we used to before kids came along.”

  Charlotte had known Nash long enough to decipher his male-speak. ‘Have breakfast with me’ was husband talk for whip me up something nice and hot and stacked—preferably with some of that gravy that doesn’t come from a powder.

  “What’re you making me?” asked Charlotte.

  Nash’s expression shifted from beautiful man to confounded man faster than Charlotte’s diesel brain revved into high overdrive. Nash wasn’t feeling used like some kind of sex toy she’d had her way with. He was simply feeling hungry and inconvenienced.

  Charlotte stomach twisted, but good. The roll of nausea that followed was swift, reminiscent of the early days with her twins, the lean days she worried they would lose everything, the days when there was an abundance of
family discord. The day Freesia came into her life and the days after when Alex asked Charlotte to choose between them. Breathing the crisp morning air through her nose did little to stop the spin cycle past her navel and when she put a label to it all—how stupid she’d been, how she believed that sex would somehow fix what ailed them, how they had come so far but still ended up six steps behind the start line, how she’d become Charlotte again, not C or Monarch girl or Yours truly, her mouth started watering, her sure-tell something was planning a repeat visit.

  The cheap wine they’d broken out long about round three.

  She hightailed it out of the barn, headed for the corner with the brush. When her gut finished emptying, she leaned against the barn to hold her upright. Hair curtained her face. Somehow, the hay sticking out of it made everything worse.

  Before she saw him, she sensed him. Twenty years ago, he might have held her hair back, brought her a towel or some water. On this day she’d believed them to be back to perfect—or at least on their way—he simply stood, hastily dressed from the waist down, watching her.

  Charlotte straightened, gagged back the vileness left on her tongue.

  “I’ve done everything you’ve asked. I’ve put in an effort here, Char.” Nash spoke to the ground, the barn slats, everything and everywhere but Charlotte. “I’ve taken on every chore, too much for one person, for weeks now, trying to keep us afloat, trying to ensure this family’s survival. I’ve taken you on dates. I’ve shown you in every way I know how that I love you and that you mean the world to me. I’m sorry if that’s not enough for you anymore, but I don’t think it’s fair for you to lay the life we created together on my doorstep. I’m about full-up on trying.”