Addicted to Love

by Addicted to Love (lit)

  Smiling, Brody went up the steps to the side door of the library where the Romanceaholics usually entered. He stepped inside and saw a big banner stretched across the empty room that read: just peachy? or does your lover have what it takes to become peach preserves?

  What the hell?

  “Rachael?” he called out. “You in here?”

  His voice echoed back to him over the sound of Bonnie Tyler emanating from the boom box on the stage.

  “Brody?” Rachael’s head popped out from the closet behind the stage.

  “Yep.”

  She came out of the closet holding what appeared to be a giant papier-mâché peach.

  “What’s that?”

  “Prop for the Peach Festival,” she said, as if that explained everything, and sat it down on the stage next to the podium.

  “Oh.”

  “You’re too early. You’re not supposed to be here yet.”

  He cocked his head and grinned. He’d grown accustomed to her seemingly nonsensical conversations. He’d learned how to read and interpret her. “When was I supposed to be here?”

  “I’d imagined you coming in during the middle of the meeting while —” She raised a hand to cover her mouth. “I’m doing it, aren’t I? Projecting a romantic fantasy. I should just let reality happen the way it’s going to happen. You’re here now. It’ll do.”

  “Okay,” he said, knowing if he waited she’d explain herself.

  She wore a green-and-red festive Christmas dress that made her eyes look even greener than usual and her cheeks were flushed. She smelled sweet and fresh, just like summer, even in the dead of winter. She sank her top teeth into her bottom lip and then she told him her theory about peaches, peach preserves, and love.

  “What do you think?” she asked and anxiously knotted her fingers together.

  “Sounds like a solid hypothesis to me.” He went toward her, pulling off his leather jacket and Stetson as he went. When he was close enough, he put them on the lectern. “The peach analogy appeals to me.”

  Her eyes were wide. They were only a couple of feet apart. He wanted to touch her so badly his hands stung. He wanted to push his fingers through her hair, dip his head, and kiss her with all the passion he’d been holding back.

  “It’s what I’m going to tell the Romanceaholics.”

  “Is it, now.” He wanted her to come to him, to bury her face against his neck and tell him how much she wanted to be with him. Instead, she swayed there, just staring into his eyes.

  “I’ve come to realize everyone is entitled to a little romance in their lives, just as long as they don’t mistake it for the real thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Great love,” she said on a whispered sigh.

  “Rachael,” he replied, and then he couldn’t say another word because his chest was so knotted up.

  “Brody, I said you were just casual sex to me, but that was a lie. From the moment you risked life and limb to haul me down off that billboard, I knew you were a true hero. A good man. A man who wouldn’t leave me standing at the altar while my bouquet wilted. I knew you were the kind of man who fought for what you believed in. I knew you’d never pick a sports team over me.”

  “What took us so long to get here?”

  She moistened her lips. “I was so scared of making another mistake that I couldn’t trust what I knew about you deep down inside.” She knotted a fist and placed it against her belly. “I was terrified of getting hurt again.”

  “I was pretty terrified, too,” he admitted. “I’d convinced myself it was better to stay away from great love than to take a chance on losing it. But ever since I came back to Valentine I’ve felt like I’ve just been waiting for something big to happen to direct the rest of my life. I think that big thing was you.”

  Rachael brought both hands up to cover her mouth. Her heart was pounding and her eyes burned with unshed tears of joy.

  “Hang on,” he said. “I’ve got something for you. I was saving it for Valentine’s Day but the time feels right.”

  He left her standing there and sprinted out the door. She felt off-balance and scared. Did he have a ring? Was he going to ask her to marry him?

  Don’t romanticize it. Just let the moment happen the way it’s going to happen. Be present. Get out of the castle in your mind.

  And there he was, back inside the library, breathless, his hair mussed, his cheeks reddened from the cold night air.

  “It’s early,” Brody said, extending the envelope toward her. She noticed his hand was trembling. “No, it’s late. In fact, it’s almost twenty years overdue. I know it doesn’t make up for not giving it to you all those years ago, but here I am, asking you to be my Valentine.”

  She took the envelope, yellowed with age, opened the flap, and slipped out the handmade card. It was a red construction-paper heart with lace — faded yellow like the envelope — glued around it. In the handwriting of a twelve-year-old the card read:

  Dear Rachael, I made ya this Valentine card for your birthday. Hope you like it. Your friend, Brody.

  She jerked her gaze up to his face. “You made me this? When you were a kid?”

  He nodded. “I found it in one of my mother’s keepsake boxes.”

  “You saved it. Why would you save it?”

  “I’d like to take credit for that, but it was my mother’s doing. I’m glad she was a packrat.”

  “Oh, Brody.” She sighed. To think the first boy she’d ever loved had been the right one all along.

  “You were my great love even back then,” he said. “I just didn’t realize it.”

  “I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to understand the difference between show and substance.”

  “I’ve missed you,” he said, wrapping his big, strong sheriff-y arms around her and lifting her off the ground. He squeezed her tight and kissed her hard. She could feel the strength of his love, every inch of it, as he let her slide gently back down the length of his hard body until her feet were firmly on the ground.

  “Is this the happily-ever-after?” she asked.

  “Nope.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Nope.”

  “I dunno,” she teased, “it feels dangerously like happily-ever-after to me.”

  “Can’t be,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “This is the happily-ever-before.”

  “Before what?”

  He put his forehead against hers and she stared deeply into those delicious brown eyes she knew so well. “Before the greatest adventure of our lives. Full of ups and downs. Laughter and tears. Romance and sorrow. Joy and pain. And love. Always, forever, love.”

  The door opened just then and several of her group members appeared in the room.

  “Meeting’s canceled, folks,” Brody called out to them. “Your fearless leader has learned the true meaning of love. She’ll let you in on it at your next meeting.”

  Then he swept Rachael off her feet, and to the sound of the romanceaholics clapping and cheering, and Bonnie Tyler singing about a hero, he carried her out of the library and into their newfound love.

  Epilogue

  On Valentine’s Day, Brody and Rachael got married where they’d met cute: underneath the Valentine billboard. Yes, it was nostalgic and romantic, but Rachael didn’t care. It might not have been the wedding she’d dreamed of since she was six years old, but it was absolutely perfect in spite of the chilly breeze and the big fat rain clouds bunching up overhead.

  Brody looked handsome as all get-out in a Texas tuxedo and a black Stetson. The man took her breath away.

  Rachael wore a brand-new wedding gown and the magical wedding veil, which in the end had granted the deepest wish of her heart, if not the actual wish she’d made that day on the cement bench in the Valentine jail. She hadn’t exactly gotten that love monkey off her back. What she’d gotten instead was a new, liberating view of love, romance, and all the myriad emotions in between.

  Judge Pruitt
presided over the proceedings and almost the entire population of Valentine was there, including Kelvin and his bride, Giada, who, according to rumors down at Higgy’s Diner, was already pregnant. Delaney and Tish and their husbands and babies, along with Jillian, had driven from Houston. Selina served as Rachael’s matron of honor, wearing the same silk, peach-colored dress she’d worn when she and Michael had renewed their wedding vows the week before. Her father stood up as Brody’s best man in a Texas tuxedo of his own.

  “If anyone knows any reason these two should not be wed, speak now or forever hold your peace.”

  Silence fell over the congregation and then Rex, who was standing with Deana and Maisy, said, “Hell, Judge, marry them already. Everyone in town knows these two were meant for each other.”

  The crowd laughed.

  Rachael passed her bouquet to her mother, then turned back to Brody. He took her hands in his and stared deeply into her eyes with a love so strong and true it took her breath away. This, then, was real love. Friendship, sexual attraction, steadiness, community. Rachael felt herself enveloped in the power of it.

  “I now pronounce you man and wife.”

  And with that, Rachael and Brody were married. The romantic equation was completed. She’d at long last found her hero and he’d found his romantic heart.

  And everything, Rachael realized, was just peachy.

  For a preview of the next book in the Wedding Veil Wishes series . . .

  Jillian’s Story

  Chapter One

  Houston Assistant District Attorney Jillian Samuels did not believe in magic.

  She had never thrown pennies into a wishing well. Had never plucked a four-leaf clover from a springtime meadow. Never blew out the candles on her birthday cake to make a wish, mainly because as far back as she could remember there’d been no birthday cakes.

  For Jillian, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny had always been myths. As for Santa Claus, even thinking about the jolly fat guy in the red suit knotted her stomach. She’d tried believing in him once and all she had gotten in the pink stocking she’d hung on the mantel were two chunks of Kingsford’s charcoal — the kind without lighter fluid. On Christmas morning, while the other kids rode bicycles, tossed footballs, and combed Barbie’s hair, Jillian received her message loud and clear.

  You’re a very bad girl.

  No, Jillian didn’t believe in magic or fairy tales or happily-ever-after endings, even though her three best friends, Delaney, Tish, and Rachael, had supposedly found their true loves after wishing on what they claimed was a magic wedding veil. Her friends had even dared pass the damnable veil along to her, telling Jillian it would grant her heart’s greatest desire. But she wasn’t falling for such nonsense. She snorted whenever she thought of the three-hundred-year-old lace wedding veil shoved away in a cedar chest along with her winter cashmere sweaters.

  When it came to romance, Jillian was of the same mind as Ernest Hemingway: When two people love each other there can be no happy ending. Hemingway had known what he was talking about.

  Not that Jillian could claim she’d ever been in love. She had decided a long time ago love was best avoided. She liked her life tidy and from what she’d seen of it, love was sprawling and messy and complicated. Besides, love required trust, and trust wasn’t her strong suit.

  Jillian did not believe in magic. What she did believe in was hard work, success, productivity, and justice. The closest she ever came to magic was in those glorious courtroom moments when a judge in a black robe read the jury’s guilty verdict.

  This morning in late September, dressed in a no-nonsense navy blue, pin-striped Ralph Lauren suit, a cream-colored silk blouse, and Jimmy Choo stilettos (to show off the shapely curve of her calves and add three inches to her already imposing five-foot-ten-inch height), Jillian stood at attention waiting for the verdict to be read.

  On the outside, she looked like a dream prosecutor — statuesque, gorgeous, young, and smart. But underneath the clothes and the makeup and her cool, unshakable countenance, Jillian Samuels was still that same little girl who’d never rated a Christmas visit from Santa.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict in this case?” Judge Atwood asked.

  “We have, Your Honor,” answered the foreman, a big slab of a guy with carrot-colored hair and freckled skin.

  “Please hand your decision to the bailiff,” the judge directed.

  Jillian drew a breath, curled her fingernails into her palms. She felt slightly sick to her stomach, the way she did before the reading of every verdict.

  The bailiff, a gangly, bulldog-faced middle-aged man with a Magnum P.I. mustache, walked the piece of paper across the courtroom to the judge’s bench. Judge Atwood opened it, read it, and then glared at the defendant over the top of his reading glasses.

  The defendant, twenty-three-year-old Randal Petry, had shot Gladys Webelow, an eighty-two-year-old great-grandmother, in the upper thigh while robbing a Dash and Go last Christmas Eve. Gladys had been buying a bottle of Correctol and a quart of two percent milk. He’d made off with forty-seven dollars from the cash register, a fistful of Slim Jims, and a twenty-four pack of Old Milwaukee.

  “Will the defendant please rise?” Atwood handed the verdict back to the bailiff, who gave it to the jury foreman to read aloud.

  Head held high, Petry got to his feet. The man was a scumbag, but Jillian had to admire his defiance.

  “Randal LeRoy Petry, on the count of armed robbery you are found guilty as charged,” the foreman announced.

  As the foreman kept reading the verdicts on the other charges leveled against Petry, Jillian waited for the victorious wash of relief she always experienced when the word “guilty” was spoken. Waited for the happy sag to her shoulders, the warm satisfaction in her belly, the skip of victory in her pulse.

  But the triumphant sensations did not come.

  Instead, she felt numb, lifeless, and very detached, as if she were standing at the far end of some distant tunnel. Waiting . . . waiting . . .

  For what, she didn’t know.

  People in the gallery were getting up, heading for the door. The court-appointed defense attorney collected his papers, stuffing them into his scuffed briefcase. The guards were hauling Petry off to jail. Judge Atwood left the bench.

  And Jillian just kept standing.

  Waiting.

  It scared her. This non-feeling. This emptiness. Her fingernails bit into the flesh of her palms, but she couldn’t feel that, either.

  “You gonna stand there all day, Samuels, or what? You won, go knock back a shot of José Cuervo.”

  Jillian jerked her head around. Saw Keith Whippet, the prosecutor on the next case, waiting to take his place at her table. Whippet was as lean as his name, with mean eyes and a cheap suit.

  “Chop, chop.” He slammed his briefcase down on the desk. “I got people to fry.”

  “Yes,” Jillian said, but she could barely hear herself. She was a bright kite that had broken loose from its tether, flying high into a cloudless blue sky. Up, up, and away, higher and higher, smaller and smaller. Soon she would disappear, a speck in the air.

  What was happening to her?

  She looked at Whippet, a weaselly guy who’d asked her out on numerous occasions. She’d shattered his hopes every single time until he’d finally given up. Now he was just rude. Whippet made shooing motions.

  Jillian blinked, grabbed her briefcase, darted from the courtroom.

  Blake.

  She had to talk to her mentor, District Attorney Blake Townsend. He would know what to do. He’d tell her this feeling was completely normal. That it was okay if the joy was gone. She would survive.

  Except it wasn’t okay because her job was the only thing that gave her joy. If she’d lost the ability to derive pleasure from putting the bad guys behind bars, what did that leave her?

  The thing was, she couldn’t feel happy about jailing Petry because she knew there were thousands more like him
. Knew the prisons were overcrowded and Petry would be released on good behavior after he’d served only a fraction of his sentence to make room for a new batch of Petrys.

  She realized Petry would eventually be back on the streets to start all over again. The realization wasn’t new. What was startlingly fresh was the idea that her work didn’t matter. She was insignificant. The justice system was a turnstile and her arms were growing weary of holding open the revolving door.

  She was so unsettled by the thought she found it difficult to catch her breath.

  Blake. She needed to speak to Blake. Other than Delaney, Tish, and Rachael, Blake was the closest thing to family she could claim. He never lied to her, so she desperately needed to hear him say everything was going to be okay.

  Anxiety pushing her, she rushed from the courthouse to the district attorney’s office across the street, heels clacking a rapid rhythm against the sidewalk.

  By the time she stepped into the DA’s office, she was breathing hard and sweating. She caught a glimpse of her reflection in a window and saw that her sleek dark hair that she kept pulled back in a loose chignon had slipped from its clasp and was tumbling about her shoulders.

  What was happening to her?

  The whole room went suddenly silent and everyone stared in her direction.

  “Is Blake in his office?” she asked his secretary, Francine Weathers.

  Francine blinked. It was only then that Jillian noticed her reddened eyes. The woman had been crying. She stepped closer, the anxiety she’d been feeling morphing into real fear.

  She stood there for a moment, panting, terrified, heart rapidly pounding, staring at Francine’s round, middle-aged face. She knew something bad had happened before she even asked the question. “What’s wrong?”

  The secretary dabbed at her eyes with a Kleenex. “You haven’t heard?”

  A hot rush of apprehension raised the hairs on the nape of her neck. “Heard what? I’ve been in court. The Petry case.”

  “I . . . ” Francine sniffed. “He . . . ”

  Jillian stepped closer and awkwardly put a hand on the older woman’s shoulder. “Are you okay?”