Samantha arrived less than an hour after everybody else. I had Jordan call her in the midst of my labor, and she got the first flight she could. It was amazing to see her standing there with my daughter in her arms. My worlds had come together twice now. The first time was horrific with Ethan trying to wedge his way in again. This time, it was everything I ever could have wanted.
I woke up in the middle of the night to find Jordan sitting in the hospital rocking chair, cradling Bella. They looked so sweet I didn’t want to say anything and ruin the moment. Only a few seconds later, she started to fuss, and he looked over at me. I smiled.
“Bring her over and I’ll feed her,” I said.
He settled her into my arms so I could feed her, and as my hand rested on her back, I felt something under the first layer of blanket. Sticking my fingers down into the swaddle, I pulled out something hard. I gasped when I saw it was a gorgeous diamond ring. I looked up and found Jordan on one knee.
“Are you serious?” I asked, tears in my eyes.
He nodded. “Yes. I had the ring ready to propose at dinner, but those plans changed.”
I laughed and looked down at the happily suckling baby. “Yes, they did.”
“Hannah, will you marry me?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He jumped to his feet and came over to slip the ring on my finger and kiss me.
The End
His Best Friend’s Sister (Sample)
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1
Tyler
The door shut, and the last of the lunch customers made their way out, a cab waiting by the sidewalk to take them home, and Mason locked the door, watching to make sure he got in the cab okay. As soon as the car drove away, he turned to the bar, a grin stretching across his face, and nodded to Matt.
“Get the shots,” he said.
A cheer broke out from the three of us, and we gathered at the bar, myself and Jordan taking a seat and leaving one in the middle for Mason. The only one of us missing was Tom, who was back in San Francisco, working at his software company and being so blissfully in love that he barely seemed to be paying attention during the video conference we’d had earlier that morning.
“To a hell of a first quarter,” Mason said, raising his glass.
“Our bar might have burned down, and we might have had to move,” Jordan added, “but we’re back and better than ever.”
“Hear, hear,” Matt said.
“And,” I said, causing all three of my brothers to look over at me, “to even more success in the future.”
“Bottoms up,” Mason called, and we all downed our shots.
“Christ, what was that?” Jordan asked, coughing.
“We had to empty that bottle of the Japanese tequila,” Matt said.
“Those two words should never, ever be in the same sentence,” I added.
“I know, but it was a vendor gift, and I felt bad letting it sit around. At least it’s gone now,” Matt said.
“Can we have something else?” Jordan asked. “Something to make me forget that taste?”
“I got it,” Mason said, getting up and going around the back of the bar. Reaching up, he grabbed a bottle of the top-shelf Irish whiskey, bringing it down and pulling out larger glasses. Filling half the glasses with dark soda, he added the whiskey and passed them out.
“That’ll do,” Jordan said happily as he sipped on the drink.
“You’re paying for those,” Matt replied. “Tom said even we have to pay for the top-shelf stuff.”
“Tom, shmom,” I said. “Is he here to police us, right now?”
Mason laughed. “It’s fine, put it on my tab if you need to. We deserve this.”
It had been a good quarter. The meeting that morning with Tom had been primarily to go over the numbers. Since the quarter technically had begun with the old bar burning down, and then several weeks of nothing as we tried to find out who did it and rebuilt in a new space, we expected a pretty heavy loss. Especially when the advertising for the new spot and all the fees came in from the sale. But Tom had taken on a good portion of the up-front costs, and we hit the ground running with themed nights and a lot of empathy from the community over how the old bar went up in flames.
Yet, when it was all said and done, we actually cut a profit after all. It was unbelievable how busy we had been since we opened up, and the extra tables and booths the new space afforded us gave us more room for customers, resulting in more sales. A small uptick in price to offset the cost of moving, wasn’t even blinked at, and our sales were absolutely through the roof. When Mason said we deserved the extra drink, he wasn’t lying. We’d worked our asses off for that moment.
“When does Ava come in?” I asked. Ava was Mason’s wife and the mastermind behind our themed nights. Her work was essential to our success, along with her ability to run the bar like a magician.
“She’s coming in around six,” he said.
“Aw, man,” Jordan said. “I was looking forward to a nap.”
“Poor baby,” I said, and Jordan shoved me jokingly.
I stood up to follow Mason to the back when I heard a knock on the door. Figuring it was someone who left something, I turned back to tell them to come back later, but when I saw who was at the door, I broke out into a wide smile.
“Hey, Mason,” I called, “I’ll help you guys in a minute!”
I walked over to the door and opened it, pulling my best friend into a bear hug and ushering him inside.
“Hey, brother,” Nick Watson said, “do you have a few minutes?”
“Yeah, man, come on in,” I said, guiding him to a booth near the bar. “You want a drink?”
“Just a beer, if that’s alright. I still have to drive.”
“No problem.” I poured us both a glass of our favorite local porter. Something about the way Nick was acting said he might need more than one of these. Nick was a great guy and had been my best friend since grade school. Recently, with the death of our father and his recent divorce, we had been leaning on each other pretty hard.
“Thanks, man,” Nick said as I pushed the beer over and sat down across from him.
“How are you, buddy?” I asked. In my periphery, I saw Mason come out into the main area, see us, and nod.
“Not that great, honestly,” he said.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, taking a long pull of my beer. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah,” he said, taking a big sip of his own. “I’ll be alright. I just have a hard time understanding what went wrong, you know? I feel like I did everything right, and it just fell apart anyway.”
“Sometimes people just aren’t meant to be together,” I offered. “It’s not anyone’s fault. But hey, you’re young still.”
“I’m thirty-seven, Tyler,” he replied.
“So am I, remember. And I refuse to consider myself old, and so should you. You’re a good-looking dude. Not as good-looking as me, but hey, you can’t win them all.” A smile cracked across Nick’s face, and I laughed. “There we go. Smile. Life might suck once in a while, but you have me, you have us,” I said, gesturing at the rest of the bar and my brothers putting up decorations. “You aren’t alone. You will get through this.”
Nick’s smile faded a little as he turned his drink in his hand. Then he emptied it in one pull and sat it down, turning his gaze back to me.
“Thank you,” he said. “You’re a good friend.”
“So are you. Do you want another?”
“No, like I said, I want to be able to drive tonight. Plus, I want to help you guys set up. I know it’s going to be a big night,” he said.
“Packed,” Mason said over my shoulder. He had just stepped up behind our booth to hang a sign above us that stretched from one side of the room to the other. “Sorry
, didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but figured I’d chime in. It’s going to be a long, busy night.”
“Ava outdid herself again?” Nick asked.
“As usual,” Mason said, finishing hanging the sign and moving to another part of the bar.
“I might stick around a bit after you open, actually,” Nick said.
“Good.” I smiled. “That’d be good for you. Maybe meet someone here?”
“Maybe. What about you. Maybe you should be looking for someone,” he said.
“After what happened to you? No thanks,” I said, and we both laughed. It sounded like a jerk thing to say, but it was a pressure valve that only a best friend could release. Being able to joke about pain helped you heal, I’d always heard.
“Oh, did I tell you what happened with Becca?” he asked suddenly, and I cocked an eyebrow.
“No, what’s up with her?” “She was supposed to get married a couple weeks ago.”
“Supposed to?” I asked. “That doesn’t sound good.”
“I can’t believe I didn’t tell you about this,” he said, almost laughing, though I could see something else in his eyes too. Something close to anger. “She got stood up.”
“Like at the altar?”
“Yup. The fucker didn’t even show up. Or if he did, none of us saw him. I wish I had—I’d have wrung his neck.”
“What happened?”
“Me and a couple other guys went looking for him, calling the hospitals and police stations, making sure he didn’t get arrested or wreck his car or whatever. Turns out, nope, he just left my sister at the altar.”
“That’s bullshit. I’m sorry to hear about that.”
“She’s understandably really upset about it, and I’ve been trying to help her while also dealing with my shit. I guess I just didn’t want to even talk about it, or else you’d know by now,” he said. “Sorry.”
“You have nothing to be sorry over,” I said. “Man, maybe relationships do suck.”
“What about Mason?” he asked. “And Tom. Isn’t he just stupidly happy now?”
“Exceptions to the rule,” I said. “They got lucky.”
“Perhaps. Maybe you would too, if you gave it a shot.”
I laughed. “What are you? Cupid? A walking Match dot com? Get out of here.”
He laughed, standing and bringing his glass over to the sink behind the bar and washing it out.
“I just want to see you happy,” he said.
“I already am,” I said. “Now let’s help Mason get this bar ready before he has my head on a pike.”
2
Becca
It seemed like the absolute longest flight of my life. I wasn’t the world’s best plane passenger. Despite every bit of logic reminding me air travel wasn’t exactly a new science, I always walked onto a plane with a sense of trepidation. It often made my stomach turn a little, and I tended to clench onto the arms of the seat right up until we were at elevation.
As soon as I sat down and hooked my seat belt, a man behind me laughed and my stomach tied itself into a knot. It sounded just like my ex. So much I almost turned around to see him.
That would have been the official end of my rope. If he was on the flight laughing like that, it would mean she was, too. No one wanted to see that conversation.
There was the anger.
But right on its heels came the sting of tears in the backs of my eyes as a fresh wave of sadness and embarrassment washed over me. I combed my fingers back through my hair, not for the first time noticing it actually felt different to do that without the ring on my hand. The ring Steven had the audacity to ask for before I left.
And there was the anger again.
By the time we got to elevation, I’d gone through another cycle of emotions, but at least my hands weren’t clenched into tight fists. The plane finally started circling the airport outside of Astoria, and I gathered up everything around me. In addition to being a nervous flyer, I was a messy flyer.
I had everything collected and was back in my seat belt in time for the descent. Finally, we touched down, and I let out a sigh. I was back in Astoria. My childhood home and a place I never saw myself moving back to once I left for college.
And yet, here I was, walking out of the plane into the little airport with that disoriented feeling coming back. I had been in this airport before, of course. But I still felt like I was out of touch and couldn’t quite decipher where I was or what I was supposed to be doing.
Maybe that was because I wasn’t supposed to be here. I was supposed to be in an airport, just not this one. It made me feel like I had managed to get on the wrong flight somehow and ended up in Oregon rather than the Bahamas.
Of course, if I was in the Bahamas, I wouldn’t be tossing my carry-on over my shoulder and walking by myself to the luggage claim. I would have Steven beside me and a wedding ring on my hand. It seemed like such a good idea when we were engaged to delay our honeymoon. We wanted to take some time after the wedding to settle down and really enjoy being freshly married, then head out on our dream trip at the perfect time. To the perfect island and to the perfect hotel.
Three weeks after the wedding I ended up attending solo, I wasn’t landing on a picturesque island for my dream vacation. I was dragging myself home to lick my wounds and figure out how I was going to start over.
As I approached baggage claim, a familiar face looked back at me from the crowd, and I felt the tension and stress drain out of my body. My brother, Nick, was waiting by the luggage carousel for me, my bags already at his feet. He opened his arms to me as I walked up and pulled me into a warm embrace.
“Thank you for coming to pick me up,” I said.
“Of course,” he said. “I wasn’t going to let you get a taxi to bring you home.”
He reached down and picked up my luggage. I looked at it, then back at him.
“How did you know those were my bags?” I asked.
“You didn’t exactly make it difficult to identify,” he said. “The colors gave you away.”
Each of my suitcases had several brightly colored ribbons and a garish luggage tag so it was easy to identify them when they were swirling around the carousel. We left the airport, and I followed him through the parking lot to his car. He waited until we had pulled out and we were on our way to look at me with concern in his eyes.
“How are you doing?” he asked. “Seriously. Just you and me talking.”
“I’m okay. Honestly, that’s about the most I can say. It’s getting easier every day, but it’s still a lot. Like there are times when I can’t figure out exactly how I’m supposed to feel about it all. Or like I think it didn’t actually happen and anytime now I’m going to wake up. That always sounded so stupid when I heard it on a TV show or a movie. But now I can absolutely understand why people say it.”
“Have you had much contact with Steven?”
“Not a ton. I’ve kind of been doing my best to avoid him as much as possible. But I have definitely heard a lot about him. Apparently, I’m the only one in town who didn’t know he was cheating on me and lying to my face every time we spoke,” I said. “Now all of a sudden people are coming out of the woodwork to let me know all of these awful things he did.”
“Helluva lot of good it’s going to do to you now,” Nick said.
“Exactly. They see him out with girls who are supposed to be my friends, then getting particularly cozy with my former next-door neighbor, and they decide it’s a good idea to wait until after he leaves me at the altar to let me know,” I said. “That has been one of the most eye-opening things of this whole experience. I used to think people should leave well enough alone and mind their own business when it came to other people’s relationships. That it wasn’t somebody else’s place to talk about people cheating.”
“Not so much anymore?” he asked.
“No. Definitely not. Now all I can think is that if one of them had spoken up about something they noticed before, I could have avoided this whole debacle.”<
br />
“Absolutely,” he said.
“You know what, though? As much as it hurts and as much as there are still times when I feel sad, I really kind of feel relieved. Like I dodged a serious bullet. It’s not that I’m sad that he’s out of my life. It’s more just sad for what I thought we had,” I said.
“I absolutely think you dodged a bullet,” Nick said. “You never should have agreed to marry him in the first place.”
I laughed. “You’re just saying that because you’re my big brother and would say it about anybody.”
He nodded. “I’m not going to argue that.”
Nick pulled up in front of our parents’ house, and I was surprised at how short the drive felt. Being with my brother again and being able to talk about everything that was going on felt good. Now the reality of what was happening settled in again. I really was back in my hometown and getting ready to move in with my parents again because my marriage fell through before it even started.
That definitely wasn’t where I thought I would be at this juncture in my life. It wasn’t where I thought I would be at any juncture in my life.
I let out a sigh, and Nick looked over at me.
“Are you sure you don’t want to stay with me?”
I shook my head. “Thanks, but it’s okay. I’ll be fine with Mom and Dad. Besides, they’re expecting me.”
“Alright, but if Mom gets overwhelming and you just can’t take it anymore, you can always change your mind and come stay with me,” he said.
“Thank you. I might hold you to that.”
I took one more second to brace myself and opened the door. Just as I was climbing out of the car, the front door to my parents’ house opened and Melissa came bounding out. My best friend ran toward me with her arms thrown out open to her sides and flung them around me when she got close enough. She held me tight, rocking me back and forth like I’d just come home from war.
Boss Daddy: A Secret Baby Romance Page 23