Saying Yes to the Mess

by M. Kate Quinn

  Table of Contents

  Excerpt

  Praise for M. Kate Quinn

  Saying Yes to the Mess

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  A word about the author…

  Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  Also available from The Wild Rose Press, Inc. and other major retailers

  “Hi again, ladies,” he said.

  “Hi,” they said in unison and shared a look. God, this hunk of man needed to get out of her line of vision soon. An urge to bite something taunted her. She plucked a fry from her dish and bit off the end with her front teeth.

  “Enjoy the rest of your day,” he said with that slanty mouth of his.

  After he strode by, leaving a waft of pine-forest scent in his wake, Rylee pulled her gaze over to Kit, who stared back with round eyes. “What?”

  “You should see what you look like right now, pal.”

  Rylee reached up to touch her own cheek, which was hot from the flame of him.

  “I’ve never seen you react to a guy like that.”

  Now that he was gone, she swallowed hard and breathed in the leftover spiciness in the air. Yeah, that guy had to stay gone.

  Praise for M. Kate Quinn

  SUMMER IRIS was a Finalist for The Golden Quill Award;

  MOONLIGHT & VIOLET won The Golden Leaf Award; and

  BROOKSIDE DAISY was a (TWRP) Finalist for The Golden Leaf Award

  ~*~

  “M. Kate Quinn fully captures the reader’s heart.”

  ~Long and Short Reviews

  Saying Yes

  to the Mess

  by

  M. Kate Quinn

  Sycamore River Series

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Saying Yes to the Mess

  COPYRIGHT © 2018 by M. Kate Quinn

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information: info@thewildrosepress.com

  Cover Art by Kim Mendoza

  The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  PO Box 708

  Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

  Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

  Publishing History

  First Champagne Rose Edition, 2018

  Print ISBN 978-1-5092-2264-3

  Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-2265-0

  Sycamore River Series

  Published in the United States of America

  Dedication

  For Cecilia Christine Grassi,

  my beloved first granddaughter,

  a trailblazer, a maverick,

  a girl born to dance and destined to soar.

  Chapter One

  Rylee MacDermott dragged the point of a box cutter along the seam of a storage carton, spread the flaps open, and stared at the shipment of lacy garters. Yup, she’d done it again. Slit the top one right in half as if she’d meant to.

  “Un-freakin’-believable.” She kicked the carton.

  “Honestly, girl, must you talk like that?” Rosie Mandanello, Rylee’s grandmother and owner extraordinaire of Rosie’s Bridals, clucked her tongue. “It’s your birthday. Be happy.”

  No easy task being happy to turn thirty when life was a shit show. Getting evicted from her apartment was a nice way to start her week. She’d had a gut feeling about her roommate from the get-go, so it should have been no surprise when Melanie, a blue-haired girl who had enough studs pierced to her face to throw off a metal detector had pocketed six months’ worth of rent payments and disappeared, taking Rylee’s too-expensive turbo-charged blender with her. She hadn’t used the smoothie-making machine much, but still.

  Now it was back to her mother and stepfather’s house, back to her childhood bedroom where Paula Abdul was forever her girl in a giant poster on the wall. The image had been a teenage strategy of inspiration to stop eating peanut M&M’s at night before bed, a habit she did not break then or now.

  Was it too much to ask for things to fall into place for once? Freddie, her quote, unquote boyfriend, popped into her head. Bless his struggling-musician heart, Freddie had offered to move her into his place, share the expenses and cabinet space, which, of course, meant share life. Be a couple. A solution, yes, but something told her the prospect of moving in with a guy shouldn’t make her feel like waiting for her turn at the dentist’s office.

  She appreciated Freddie and his one-bedroom walk-up across town. Her biggest problem with him, aside from his crazy-musician schedule of always working weekends and their dates usually amounting to her sitting alone at a café table listening to him play acoustic guitar during his coffeehouse gigs, was that she just didn’t feel the zoom.

  Her closest friend, Kit, the best seamstress on the planet and a big reason why Rylee’s working at her grandmother’s bridal shop didn’t seem so lame, always laughed at her reference to the zoom. At the moment Kit was perched at her desk in the workroom of the bridal salon, hand-stitching delicate crystal beading on an illusion neckline of a client’s gown. She smiled as if there was no tedium in the task, it maybe even giving her a little zoom.

  Maybe she was idealistic to buy into the existence of the zoom, the chemical explosion between two people, the whoosh to your insides like an express-elevator ride from lobby to penthouse, that was the divining rod of all things relationship. But Rylee did. Granted, she’d watched a lot of old romantic movies with Rosie over the years, and despite her very good real-life reasons for skepticism, Rylee believed. And the fact was she and Freddie didn’t have zoom.

  Which didn’t help that tonight Freddie was taking her for a birthday dinner to Rob’s Steak House, the most expensive place in Sycamore River, where entrees cost as much as a cell phone payment. And for sure, he was going to bring up her moving in. She just knew it. And a big fat no waited in the back of her mouth like a canker sore oozing for release.

  She strode across the wide-planked floor of the shop, put the box cutter back in its box, and flipped the latch. “You can’t trust me with sharp objects, Rosie,” she said. “I ruined another garter. This time I mean it. Take it out of my paycheck.”

  “Nonsense.” Her grandmother waved a hand.

  Rylee sighed. This was pity employment, although nobody would admit it, especially Rosie. Turning thirty just made it all the more humiliating t
o be back working at Rosie’s Bridals, as she’d been doing off and on all her life since age fifteen. At her age it sucked to be her grandma’s glorified clerk who regularly ruined merchandise.

  Rosie, in her favorite sweater with the big pockets and the appliquéd rosebuds along the edges, came over to Rylee and pointed her letter opener at her like a weapon.

  “Listen, you,” she said in all her octogenarian feistiness. “Snap out of it, would you? You’re giving me agita.”

  With two fingers, Rylee held up the sliced-in-two garter. “The churning acid in your belly aside, grandmother of mine, if you wanted to kick me to the curb I’d understand. It’s not your job to provide me with employment anytime I get fired.”

  “Are you talking about that damn poodle again?”

  “I got fired from dog walking.” A caustic laugh popped out of her mouth. “You tell me who does that besides me?”

  She’d tried her hand at dog walking when the opportunity presented itself on the bulletin board at the Shop-Rite. Who knew that walking somebody’s pet could be that tricky? Yes, she’d underestimated the strength of a standard poodle, and yes, there were a few minutes when she couldn’t exactly find dear Snowball, but it had all turned out okay. Snowball wound up fine, dirty and her coat matted with pine needles but unharmed after a romp near the river, and when Rylee had to cough up the money for a new grooming session that cost more than a day at the spa, if Rylee even knew what that might cost, that little job had set her back even further. So here she was back at Rosie Bridals, tearing garters to shreds. Nice.

  “Kit”—Rosie pointed her pearl-handled weapon at her seamstress—“talk to your friend here before I give her a poke.”

  Kit, her long black hair piled on her head in a sloppy knot, reading glasses low on her nose, looked up from her handiwork. A crooked smile claimed her mouth. “Okay, let’s see. New topic. What are you planning to wear tonight to dinner with Freddie?”

  “I’m more concerned with how to tell him I don’t want to be his roommate.”

  “Be sure about that before you turn the boy down.” Rosie was back at her desk, slicing through a stack of mail, her spotty hands adept in the task. “Nice guys don’t grow on trees, you know.”

  “Uh-oh.” Kit lowered her head to her beads and thread.

  “I know that, Gram.” Rylee blew out a lungful of air. “But you and Grandpa Sal were the Barbie and Ken of your generation. Everybody envied your relationship, so you speak from a very high place, Rosie, my love.”

  “Oh, stop.” Rosie waved a hand. “You’re the one who put us on that pedestal. We were a normal couple who fought and made up and got on each other’s nerves and loved each other no matter what. We weren’t made by Mattel. Maybe you need to get your head out of the clouds.”

  “Let me ask you. When Grandpa Sal kissed you, did you get that zooming feeling inside here?” Rylee pointed to her chest.

  Rosie took off her rhinestone-trimmed glasses, and her gray eyes twinkled with a hint of youth. “To his dying day.”

  “I rest my case.”

  “So what are you going to do, then? Break up with the guy because you’re not zooming?” Rosie shook her head, tight gray curls unmoving. “You want to zoom? Ride a roller coaster.”

  “I don’t want to stop seeing him. I mean, Freddie’s nice, cute and all with that dimple in his chin and everything, and who doesn’t like a guy who can play guitar, right? I just don’t feel like that about him. So fingers crossed he doesn’t put pressure on me.”

  Kit’s mouth twisted into a bunch. “You think he will?”

  “I just have a feeling about tonight. It’s not going to go well.”

  Chapter Two

  Darius Wirth sat across the mahogany table from his senior producer, Jake Richards, who in his custom-made shirt with the french cuffs, fidgeted, his gold links tapping a staccato against the wooden surface. The rest of the production team for their syndicated TV show, Wirth More, filed into the room and took their seats. The typical morning chitchat was absent today. This was a weighty meeting, and the tension in the air was electric, crackling.

  With one more episode left to film for his business-rescue-themed reality show, they still hadn’t found an ideal candidate for the finale. The show assisted floundering businesses, either those that were trying to get off the ground or those that, for whatever reason, had taken a downturn or stalled in their success.

  Wirth More received some decent reviews during this first season, and the whole team hoped for renewal, but word was that their main sponsor, Parker Paper, was grumbling. If they pulled out, the gig was all over. That look on Jake’s face this morning was testament.

  Even though he and Jake were friends going back to their college days at Rutgers where they’d been roomies and fierce competitors when it came to grades and club football and girls, he hadn’t given Darius a hint about today. That was how Jake operated. He liked being the only one in the know. Gave him power. e HHIt was annoying, but Jake had been the brainchild of the show and had lobbied for Darius to come on board as its host. So no complaints. But today Darius’s stomach churned with anticipation.

  “Okay, so,” Jake began. “I got a heads-up from that chick Jennifer at Parker Paper. Tomorrow when we meet with the suits, they’re going to chastise us about the choices we made in the previous eight episodes.”

  “Chastise? Why?” Emma, the station manager, looked up from her tablet. “Wirth More came in fifth in its timeslot for the week. Not stellar, granted, but still not bad.”

  “Yeah, but how did we compare to the other shows in Living Loud’s lineup?” Darius asked. “We had to do better than that inane show with the two old ladies who make soup.”

  Jake laughed. “Two Crocks does better than you’d think. People love soup. Who knew?”

  “I’d like to see the numbers.” Darius liked working with numbers, the one thing his accounting degree had cemented into his brain. They could debate plenty when it came to the viability of their show. But the numbers were the numbers, and even if it could be that they sucked, at least they were accurate, true, real.

  “According to Jennifer at Parker Paper—she wants me, by the way, so be grateful your producer is irresistible—the feedback is that they love the concept of the show, but there’s a problem with the types of businesses we’ve worked with. Too male.”

  “Too male.” It wasn’t a question. Darius just felt the need to repeat the absurd comment.

  “Dar, think about the shows we filmed. Bicycle shop, fly-fishing store, dry cleaner, pizzeria run by three brothers, small-engine repair, a printing place, and a leather guy.”

  “But, Jake, when we pitched Parker, their main concern was the thirty-to-forty-year-old demographic. We didn’t pitch gender. And we’ve stuck to the plan. Each one of these businesses is operated by Generation Xers.”

  “Yeah, well, they’re squawking. They say their main consumer is women, from the millennials to the baby boomers and beyond. Their products, paper towels, toilet paper, tissues, all that stuff, speak to women. Until now our episodes have spoken to men. That has to change. And it has to change now. They won’t agree to a second season, even with our decent numbers, until we guarantee we’ll select businesses that will appeal more to the female audience.”

  Darius pulled in a breath in order to unlock his chest. “So what’s going down tomorrow when we meet with them? Did your ‘girlfriend’ tell you that too?”

  Jake snorted, clearly loving that he had a leg up due to his so-called charm. “Let’s put it this way, Darius. When your main sponsor threatens to pull the plug, you play their way unless you want to be out of a job. And none of us wants that, do we?” He wagged a finger. “How’re you supposed to pay for that waterfront pad of yours in Hoboken, huh, Darius? We do what our sponsor asks, that’s how.”

  His place on the river had been a pricey purchase. It was also fact that he and Jake had vied against each other in a silent bidding war on the prime two-bed, two-bath unit with balc
ony. But when they’d learned they had been bidding for the same property, the old rivalry accelerated. Jake did not lose well—that was for sure—so he took every opportunity to throw it up in Darius’s face that his place had cost a lung.

  Darius had paid more money than he’d wanted, had gotten wrapped up in the competition. No way would he admit just how much he needed Parker Paper to remain in place as the show’s main sponsor. Losing his job would be ugly.

  “Darius, we need to work our magic, okay, buddy? We’ve got to tell Parker Paper we’ve found a female-friendly business to use as our final episode of the season. After it airs, if the numbers indicate that more women are tuning in, they’ll sign on for season two.”

  Darius scanned the faces around the table, all eyes on him. “Okay. I’ll pull an all-nighter searching the internet. Believe me—I’ll come up with something.”

  His cell phone sounded, and he muttered an expletive but was quick to connect the call from The Memory Center, the facility in his hometown of Sycamore River, where his father lived.

  Toni, the woman who handled the finances at the top-notch Alzheimer’s facility, chirped in his ear. Just hearing her birdlike voice brought back the agonizing finagling it had taken to arrange for Pop to become a resident.

  “Is my father okay?”

  “Yes,” the voice chirped. “No changes. But there is an issue we’d like to discuss with you. Would you be able to come out and meet with me?”

  “What’s this about?”

  “It’s a financial matter. When can you meet with me?”

  He looked at his watch. The train trek to Sycamore River from Hoboken was only forty-five minutes. “I’ll be there at four o’clock. That okay?”

  “See you then.”

  Jake’s gaze was locked on him. “Everything okay with your father?” His ability to make himself sound concerned was impressive. The only thing the man really cared about was money.

  “I’ve got to head over to the nursing home for a meeting.”

  “Don’t let it eat up your whole night, Darius. You’ve got work to do.”

  This was going to be a long one.