Wilde About You (Weddings By Wilde Book 1)

by Deb Kastner

  “We should probably get everyone organized and on the move,” Riley suggested, once again breaking into his thoughts. Matthew hadn’t had this much to mull over all at once in forever.

  “Right.” He stood and whistled to get everyone’s attention. “It’s time for us to move out and make this wedding a reality. Does everyone know what they are doing?”

  “Everybody is paired up,” Brady assured Matthew, and then wrapped his arm around Chelsea and planted an overdramatic kiss on her forehead.

  “Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss!” The group laughed, hooted and hollered, and the gave the engaged couple a round of applause when Brady and Chelsea obliged with a proper smooch.

  Matthew clapped, but he couldn’t have made a sound if his life had depended on it. Seeing Brady and Chelsea so happy made his throat close so tightly he couldn’t even breathe.

  Everyone had paired off, some in more ways than others. Groomsmen working with bridesmaids.

  Brady and Chelsea.

  He and Riley.

  He scoffed inwardly and shook his head at where his thoughts had wandered.

  What was with him today? He was getting sappy in his old age.

  He turned to Riley and to the business at hand.

  “Take my truck?” he offered.

  “Sounds good.”

  She looked pensive, and he’d noticed she hadn’t been as gleefully expressive as he’d expected her to be when the others were cheering for their friends.

  Riley had mentioned the possibility of a confrontation with her brother. Was she troubled about meeting Ash again? If they hadn’t even spoken in a decade, this might not go so well.

  He wished he could help her, but he knew that if anything, his presence would be a hindrance. If it wasn’t for Brady and Chelsea’s wedding reception, Matthew wouldn’t even be concerned about the kind of reception he would get.

  He snorted at his own pun.

  It was too late for him and Ash to mend fences now.

  But for Riley?

  She had such a tender heart. It must be hard on her to be estranged from her brother.

  As they drove toward the Weaver’s ranch, Matthew surreptitiously watched Riley’s expression, his gut tightening when a frown creased her pretty lips. This was way more to her than just finding them a barn in which to hold a wedding reception.

  Ash was family.

  Without a second thought, he reached across the cab and threaded her fingers through his, giving her hand a reassuring squeeze. She glanced at him and offered a shaky smile.

  “Do you really think Ash will turn you away?” he asked, his voice low and throaty, with the consistency of gravel.

  Her gaze widened and locked on his. Her hazel eyes were glassy, and even in the darkness of the cab, he could tell she was blinking back tears.

  “Honestly? I don’t know. Ash resented me when we were kids because Daddy appeared to favor me. He sent me to private boarding schools and made sure I went to the best college my grades would allow for the digital marketing degree I wanted to pursue.

  “He was much tougher on Ash, always pushing him harder to do better and be the best at everything he did. Dad made Ash come straight home after school and sports practice and do ranch chores until well into the evening. If Ash wanted to study and keep up with his homework, he had to do it late at night.”

  “I suppose I can see your brother’s point of view,” he admitted.

  The portrayal Riley presented wasn’t at all the Ash that Matthew remembered. He hadn’t seen behind the popular jock façade, hadn’t realized the kind of pressure and drama Ash faced in his home life.

  It was a good reminder not to judge a book by its cover. People were complicated. Things might be going on behind the scenes that outsiders couldn’t see.

  Forgive me, Lord, he prayed silently, for all the times I’ve judged others without knowing the whole story.

  Matthew straightened his shoulders. This whole misadventure of a wedding was making him feel more vulnerable than he’d ever been before, even when he was cast off the Wilde land and made to fend for himself, burdened with an uncle who was totally broken by his divorce.

  “I do understand why Ash felt that way back then,” Riley agreed. “But things changed dramatically when Daddy died. It seems to me that the resentment should have died with him.”

  “How so?”

  “Daddy left everything to Ash.”

  Even the land that had once belonged to the Wilde’s.

  “Really? I find that hard to believe. After raising you rich, your father left you with nothing?”

  “That wasn’t how it was supposed to go down. Daddy didn’t realize how bitter Ash had become toward him—and me. Daddy had been extra hard on Ash when he was young, just as his father had done before him, in order to fully prepare him to take over the ranch as soon as he had graduated from agricultural college. So it made sense that Ash would inherit the whole ranch.

  No, it didn’t.

  Matthew didn’t share his opinion aloud.

  “Daddy assumed Ash would take care of me the way Daddy had always done. He never stopped thinking of me as his little girl and expected Ash to watch over me as Daddy had always done.

  “Needless to say, Ash cut me off without a dime the moment our father was in the ground, may he rest in peace. I was in my junior year of college at the time, and suddenly had no way to pay for tuition and books, never mind room and board.

  Matthew’s stomach was roiling with emotion. He didn’t know what to think. He understood Ash’s point of view, maybe far too well, having life’s circumstances dictating every move he made.

  But then again, wasn’t that exactly what Ash had done to Riley? In a way, she and Matthew had suffered very nearly the same experience, being completely abandoned with nothing to their name. Everything had been taken away from her and she’d had to find her way on her own.

  Maybe they were more alike than he’d thought.

  ***

  Still sitting in the cab of Matthew’s truck, Riley and Matthew had been parked out in front of the Weaver ranch house for at least five minutes. Riley was staring at the unlit and unwelcoming front porch, but she hadn’t yet roused up enough courage to actually exit the vehicle and climb the stairs, much less ring the doorbell.

  This was a really bad idea.

  Ash probably didn’t want to see her, and even if he was willing to bury the hatchet somewhere other than in her back, she would be asking him for a very large favor, considering they hadn’t spoken in ten years.

  “Do you want to leave?” Matthew asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

  “Yes, but I’m not going to. I have to see Ash sooner or later, and we need that barn.” She opened the truck door and glanced back at him. “Are you coming?”

  “No.”

  Her breath caught in her throat and her adrenaline pulsed.

  No?

  Then what was he here for, if not to support her in what was sure to be an uncomfortable situation?

  “I’ll wait for you in the truck,” he continued. “I’ll be right here if you need me, but I suspect things are going to go better for you if I’m not standing at your elbow.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because he’s a Weaver, and I’m a Wilde.”

  Riley sighed loudly, aggravated by his broken-record excuse for everything.

  “No, really,” he insisted. “I think you’d better hear this story before you meet with your brother.”

  “Go ahead, then.” Stress was eating her alive. She had enough on her mind just having to confront her brother, much less deal with Matthew’s issues. But he appeared determined to tell her whatever it was that had been bothering him all evening, so she leaned against the truck’s door frame and met his gaze. “I’m listening.”

  “Many years ago, when your Aunt Heather divorced my Uncle Travis, your dad hired a top-of-the-line lawyer to draw up the papers. My uncle was so devastated by what was happening that he signed them without g
etting legal counsel of his own. He was a broken man. He should have been treated by a psychiatrist, not signing his life away, which is exactly what he did. He gave away his land—the land I stood to inherit—over to Heather.

  “What I didn’t know until recently is that your dad was manipulating both of them. He’d hired a phony P.I. to feed Heather a lot of false information. They had her convinced that Travis was cheating on her.”

  “Which he wasn’t.” It wasn’t a question.

  “No. He wasn’t. He adored Heather, and when she divorced him, it shattered him. She obviously had no interest in the land, but Dirk did. And me? I ended up wrangling for somebody else’s outfit my whole adult life instead of running my own ranch.”

  “I didn’t know,” she whispered through a clogged throat.

  “Yeah, I figured that out somewhere between the moment we met and when we ate pizza at dinner. Sorry I was accusing you of stuff you didn’t even know about. I shouldn’t have assumed you were guilty by association.”

  “Well, thank you for that. And I am really sorry about what happened to you. And Auntie Heather and your Uncle Travis, for that matter. How awful.”

  “He never married again. Never even dated, that I know of. He started drinking heavily. I don’t see him much anymore. He works on a ranch in Wyoming.”

  “Heather got her cosmetology license and works in a salon in Highlands Ranch,” Riley said. “She never married again, either. Now I think I understand why.”

  Matthew gripped the steering wheel with both fists and blew out a breath.

  “How much of this does Ash know?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe he knows the whole story. Maybe he only suspects what happened. He would have been—what? About seven when Travis and Heather divorced? So he might remember suddenly gaining double the ranch land they’d once had. But then again, he might not. He might have grown up thinking all that land belonged to him from birth. And I have no idea whether or not your father shared anything with Ash when he got older.”

  “Wow. Maybe I should have known all this before we drove all the way out here?”

  Matthew grunted. “I didn’t know what to say.”

  “Well, we’re here now. I need to talk to my brother either way. I’ll leave out the part about you being out in the truck waiting for me unless he asks.”

  “I hope I didn’t just ruin everything.”

  “If it’s a messed-up situation, it isn’t because of you,” she assured him.

  He scoffed.

  “Just hang tight. I’ll be back in a few with a barn available for our wedding reception.” She paused and shrugged. “Or not.”

  She shut the truck door and took a deep breath as she ascended the porch steps. The lights were off. Maybe Ash wasn’t even home.

  She half didn’t want him to be home so she could avoid an immediate conflict, but then she thought of Brady and Chelsea and rang the doorbell, simultaneously offering a silent plea to God for guidance.

  For a moment, there was no sound or movement. Riley was about to leave it at that, and she had actually turned back toward the truck with the intention of calling it done. Ash wasn’t home and they’d have to settle on a Plan B. But then she felt the tiniest niggling in her gut to turn back and ring the bell a second time, just for good measure.

  A light flipped on inside the house, and then the porch light came on.

  The door opened, and Riley stared, silent and stunned, at the man standing before her. Ash had aged a lot since she’d seen him last. His golden hair was shorter now, contoured into jagged peaks as he combed it back with his fingers. His face was weathered by years of working outdoors, and he’d put on a few pounds.

  But his familiar blue eyes widened in recognition.

  “Riley?” His tenor was coarse but recognizable.

  “Ash,” she said, barely above a whisper, her eyes burning with unshed tears.

  He stepped forward and wordlessly opened up his arms to her.

  She stepped into her brother’s embrace and let the tears fall. They were both so stubborn. Why hadn’t she tried to reconnect with him before?

  “It’s the Weaver blood,” Ash said, as if he’d read her mind. “We get something in our head and that’s that. We don’t budge.”

  She chuckled and dabbed at her cheeks with the palm of her hand. Was it really going to be this easy?

  No resentment? No arguments?

  “I’m surprised to see you here,” he admitted. “Last I heard, you were in L.A., but I didn’t have a forwarding address so I couldn’t get ahold of you.”

  Riley’s heart stopped cold. Why hadn’t she thought of that? She’d been so angry that Ash had cut her off, and so determined to make it on her own, that she hadn’t even thought that after years had passed, he might want to reach out to her to make amends. Maybe it was a subconscious thing, a way for her not to have to deal with her past. Even with her recent job loss and decision to move back to Colorado, she hadn’t been positive when or if she would have the courage to reach out to her brother.

  And all this time, or at least for part of it, he had been wanting to reach out to her.

  “I’m so sorry. I held on to my resentment for so long it just became second nature to me. I needed to make peace with my past and I didn’t.”

  Ash scoffed. “Why would you? I was the one who cut you off without a cent. If you look up the word resentment in the dictionary, my face is right there in black and white.”

  “You shutting down my cash flow turned out to be the best blessing ever,” she admitted. “I needed to find my own path. If you’d paid for everything, who knows where I’d be right now? And I don’t blame you for the way you felt about me back in high school. Daddy’s treatment of you was hardly fair.”

  “It wasn’t. But that’s no excuse. By the time I realized I needed to man-up and put our struggles behind us, it was too late.”

  “I hope it’s not too late now,” she whispered into his shirt.

  He gently took her shoulders and held her at arm’s length. “It’s not too late. I promise. But tell me, what brings you by tonight? It’s a little late—in the evening, I mean—for a reunion, isn’t it?”

  “You’re right,” she admitted. “I need something.”

  “Name it.”

  Even knowing this was just the beginning, and that they’d still have issues to work out in the next few days, her heart soared at finally being reconciled with her brother. She sent up a silent prayer of gratitude.

  “I have someone I’d like you to meet,” she said, turning toward the truck and gesturing for Matthew to join them. Surely, he could see her smile from there.

  Matthew evidently hesitated, because it took him a full minute to exit the cab and walk up to the porch. His hat was pulled down low over his eyes and his hands were jammed into the front pockets of his jeans, as if he didn’t know what to do with them.

  Or maybe he didn’t want to give into the impulse to throw a punch at Ash.

  But they’d discussed this in the truck. The underhanded transfer of land had been her father’s fault. Ash had only been seven at the time. Matthew could hardly blame him for what had happened.

  He skipped every other step and stopped next to Riley, his lips pinched into a grim line.

  Ash’s eyes narrowed. He glanced at Riley with a stunned expression on his face, and then returned his gaze to Matthew.

  “Wilde,” Ash said, his voice suddenly cold and hard. “What are you doing here?”

  Chapter Five

  MERRIMENT AND MISTLETOE

  He’d ruined everything.

  Matthew knew he shouldn’t have accompanied Riley to her brother’s house. He should have insisted that someone else go along. But in the back of his mind he’d imagined a scenario quite different than what had actually happened.

  What if things had gone downhill when Ash had answered the door? What if he hadn’t welcomed Riley with open arms?

  Riley would have needed a shoulder to c
ry on, and for reasons even he didn’t understand, he had wanted those shoulders to be his. He’d been prepared to comfort her when Ash turned her away.

  Except Ash hadn’t turned her away.

  Their reunion couldn’t have gone better. Ash had taken one look at Riley and that had been that. The ten years that had stretched between them had disappeared in an instant.

  And he was glad for Riley. He really was.

  Plus, with as well as this filial reunion seemed to be going, getting Ash to agree to let them use the barn for the reception would be a given.

  Until Riley had turned and gestured for him to join them.

  He’d known it was a mistake, even as he’d exited the truck and joined them on the porch.

  He just hadn’t realized how bad a mistake it was.

  Ash was glaring at him as if he’d been the one who’d lost his land. If anyone had reason to be angry here, it was Matthew. But he had put all that aside for Riley’s sake.

  “He’s with me,” Riley said, her strained tone suggesting her hackles were up.

  Matthew didn’t want her to risk another rift with her brother on his account.

  “I’ll wait in the truck.”

  He turned to leave, but Riley snagged his sleeve.

  “You are most certainly not walking away.” She turned back to Ash. “He is with me because we have a favor to ask you.”

  Ash shrugged. “Fine. Whatever. I just didn’t expect a Wilde to ever venture onto my land.”

  His land? Half of his holdings had once been possessed by a Wilde. He was intentionally rubbing it in. Matthew might have planted a fist in his face, were Riley not standing there.

  A shiver ran through him as he capped his adrenaline. He’d known what he was doing when he drove Riley out here, and it wasn’t to start a fight.

  “I’m not here to make trouble,” Matthew said aloud. “I just want to help.”

  “Help?” Ash turned his gaze on Riley. “Help what?”

  She took a deep breath. “We need your barn.”