12 Steps to Mr. Right

by Cindi Madsen

  Abigail thanked me, hugged me good-bye, and then she practically skipped out of the store, her head up in the clouds where it should be. Because she’d found a guy who cared about her, who showed signs of being her Mr. Right.

  That hypocritical guilt came for me as I walked home, tapping me on the shoulder and asking how I could tell other people to trust their heart when I wouldn’t even let mine speak.

  But mine wasn’t trustworthy anymore. It was broken.

  As if to prove it, sorrow radiated from my heart and flooded my body. Crippling doubt came on its heels, along with the heartbreak punishment for straying from my rules in the first place. Stepping out of line had left me vulnerable again, and I had no one to blame but myself.

  The darkness whispered to me once more, and I knew I should fight it, but I was so damn tired of pretending to be okay.

  So I let go and let it tug me under.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Mason’s voicemail was more of a guilt trip than a message, about how he’d taken off a week so we could spend time together before he flew back to D.C., and I’d been MIA the past few days.

  “I get that you’re busy with your job, but they can wait. I’m only going to be here a few more days, and we need to discuss your visit to D.C. so we can get the ball rolling.”

  I tossed the phone onto the cushion next to me and ran a hand through my hair. I kept thinking I’d wake up to find my sorrow had faded and that I felt differently about everything. I wanted to, I did. In some ways, it’d be quite convenient to realize Mason was still the one, the way I used to think he was. But it’d been four days since he’d shown up, four days since that final soul-crushing fight with Linc, and the blue-eyed baseball player was the one I couldn’t stop thinking about.

  I’d ignored a few phone calls from my family, and since both Mama’s and Aunt Velma’s voicemails included a suggestion about inviting Linc to next Sunday dinner so they could all get to know “that nice boy” better, I was going to avoid a few more. Guilt-laden voicemail messages would be next. If they didn’t show up at my door.

  Guess I better text and say I’m busy this week, even though they never seem to believe that, and then call Mason back. We’ll go to dinner—at pretty much anywhere besides Azure—and at the end of the night, hopefully I’ll know what to tell him.

  My phone rang, and for a brief moment I allowed myself to hope it was Linc. That he’d give me a crossword clue to solve and everything would be okay, even though I knew we’d crossed too many lines for that to be possible.

  When I picked up my phone, though, a number I didn’t recognize flashed across the screen. “Savannah Gamble,” I said.

  “It’s Amy Lynn.” The breathlessness in her voice made it sound like she’d just run a marathon.

  Maybe she was crying. What with her sister getting married this weekend, it was probably a rough week, emotionally speaking. Considering how I felt, I thought a cry-fest with lots of chocolate might be a good solution for us both. “Are you okay? Do you need me to come over?”

  “It’s not me. It’s Annabeth.”

  The hair on my arms and neck rose, that instinctual intuition telling me I wasn’t going to like what came next. “Is she hurt?”

  “She’s freaking out about the wedding,” Amy Lynn said, and then I noticed the muffled sobs in the background. “She says she can’t do it. All the politics and being in the public eye. She keeps asking me what she was thinking, and I’m trying to calm her down, but she’s just getting worse.”

  “Where are you?” I asked, launching into crisis mode. I wasn’t quite sure what to do or how exactly to fix it, but Amy Lynn had called me, and if she had faith in me, I needed to find some in myself. I could fix this. I had to fix this.

  “We’re at her place.” Amy Lynn gave me the code to the gate and told me she’d tell the security detail to let me in. “Please hurry.”

  …

  Annabeth lived in the part of town where people’s mailboxes needed mailboxes. I’d been there a couple of times, once when she had a dinner party and invited me so she and William could introduce me to Mason. Mason, who was going to get ignored for at least one more night.

  Sorry about that, dude. But it’s not like it’s my fault we haven’t seen each other in months. Crisis mode must stir up my feisty side, because I didn’t think I’d been holding on to that anymore.

  I parked my car and rushed to the door. Amy Lynn answered and jerked me inside. Then she slammed the door and engaged the lock. It made me feel like we were part of a Mission: Impossible scenario, and that sent my blood pressure skyrocketing.

  “I just wrestled the phone away from her so she wouldn’t call William and tell him the wedding was off.” Several strands of hair hung loose around Amy Lynn’s face, and her ponytail sat askew.

  When I walked into the other room and saw Annabeth, my jaw dropped. Her hair was pulled into a sloppy bun, her face was flawless but makeup free, and she had on an oversize college T-shirt and ratty pajama bottoms that made my yoga pants look like red-carpet wear.

  “She didn’t go to her nail appointment today,” Amy Lynn said, and I noticed the chipped red polish. Funny, because on anyone else, chipped polish wouldn’t seem like a big deal, but usually Annabeth was the image of southern royalty.

  I sat next to her and placed my hand on her shoulder. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

  Annabeth raked her hand through her hair, got halfway through and realized it was in a bun, and gave up, leaving a huge bump of hair on the top of her head. “It’s just too much. I thought I was prepared, but yesterday William’s advisors were going over his schedule for right after the honeymoon—which was only going to be three days—and I saw what my life would be like if I married him. I excused myself, came home, and…” She gestured around, like that would explain the rest. Considering the candy bar wrappers, open pizza box with grease spots and a few congealed cheese pieces, and crumpled tissues, I suppose it did.

  “She was like this when I arrived.” Amy Lynn cast a worried glance at her sister. “I thought it was just cold feet, but the more she talked, the more upset she became, and I didn’t know what to do. So I called you.”

  I nodded to give myself time to think, but Amy Lynn sat on the other side of Annabeth and gripped both of her shoulders. “Get it together, Annabeth! You’re supposed to be the steady one. I’m no good at it—you’ve seen the guys I date. The decisions I make.”

  “That’s another thing,” Annabeth said, her voice monotone. “You’ve seen all those headlines and shows about politicians who cheat. It’s like they can’t help themselves.”

  That made my spine go stick straight. “One, that’s bullshit, and two, you know the difference between the good guys and bad guys.”

  “Do I? How do you really know?” Annabeth’s wild eyes came back to me. “How can you be 100 percent sure? Because you can think a guy’s a good guy, and maybe he shows all the right signs, but that doesn’t mean that someday he won’t turn into a bad guy.”

  If she’d asked me a month ago—hell, a week ago—I’d assure her that I could be sure. That I knew. But right now…my lungs filled with lead. I didn’t know anymore. I’d been wrong about Mason. In theory he’d realized what he was missing, but he’d left me once. What would keep him from doing it again? Then there was Linc…

  “He’s not a Jacob,” Amy Lynn said, a note of sadness tingeing her words.

  At least that much I could agree with. “The fact that he asked you to marry him proves he’s not a Someday Guy. That he’s in it for the long haul.” I knew I should add more, but I came up blank.

  My world had tipped off its axis, and as much as I struggled to get a grip again, I couldn’t. I spun and spun, trying to find anything to reach for to right myself so I could right her.

  Come on, you’ve got to say something. You’re the one who led her to find William. Usually it made me happy. Gave me hope.

  I thought about the article in the paper
, and how I’d proudly taken some of the credit for their upcoming union. If she called off the wedding, yes, it’d be bad for my business, but more importantly, Annabeth would be crushed, and that heartbreak I worked so hard to keep women from would hit her hard.

  Right now I could really use some proof that I wasn’t a fraud. That my program worked.

  Otherwise I’d walked away from Linc for nothing, and I couldn’t accept that.

  Maybe I was a little bit broken, but I didn’t have time to be broken—not with Annabeth’s happiness on the line. I reached deep down, to the part of me that hadn’t been beat up or confused this past month. My belief in what I did—in my program—was somewhere in there, I knew it was.

  I thought about those meetings in the Daily Grind after Annabeth had met William. She’d said over and over that she was certain she’d stepped into a fairy tale she’d wake up from.

  She loved him. She’d been counting down the days to her wedding, and this was just like anxiety over a date. Only, like, anxiety on crack, a hundred times bigger and the potential to be a hundred times more devastating.

  No pressure.

  But in a way, looking at it like that cleared my head. I’d done this numerous times on a smaller scale. I knew how to deal with it.

  “When was the first time you realized that your and William’s relationship had future potential?” I asked. “That he could be the Mr. Right you were looking for?”

  “Well, you know I was taken with him from the first meeting, but the moment I knew he wasn’t like the guys I used to date was when…” Annabeth’s bottom lip quivered as her hand came over her heart.

  I grabbed her hand and sandwiched it between mine. “When what?”

  “When he canceled all the interviews he was supposed to do because my cat had to be put to sleep. I called him crying, and I could tell he had a hundred things going on—I just needed to hear his voice. But he dropped everything and came to the vet’s office with me.”

  The press had followed them and they’d eaten it up, but I knew he hadn’t done it for political gain. He’d wanted to be there for Annabeth. When I saw those pictures in the paper—the way he looked at her despite the countless people who were no doubt calling his name—I knew she’d found a keeper.

  A smile spread across her face and a dreamy look entered her eye—if I could kiss that look, I would, but since kissing eyeballs would be weird and would most likely scare my client, I settled for giving her hand a squeeze. “I know you love him, and I know he loves you. So what’s really going on?”

  “I just started thinking about how my whole life would be dictated by others. There are meetings he can’t get out of. People depend on him. They look at everything I do, too, and there are days everyone loves him, and days they hate him. It weighs on him, and he’s so caught up in this bill he’s trying to push through, and I…I just thought he’ll never really be mine, so why am I doing this? So that I can live in a big house alone?”

  Tears ran down her cheeks and her watery gaze lifted. “That makes me sound horribly selfish, doesn’t it?”

  I shook my head. “No. It makes you sound human. Weddings add stress, too—all of the planning and the families coming together. It’s perfectly normal to have a bit of a freak out. Add William’s job and the role you’re about to marry into, and it’s a big deal, I’m not going to lie.”

  Amy Lynn widened her eyes, using the gesture to ask what the hell I was doing. At this moment, all I could do was trust my gut, even though it’d proved rather untrustworthy as of late. But again, in other people’s lives, I was the coach. I saw the whole field. Saw their potential, and the path that’d win them the love game.

  “The question is, are you going to let all the ups and downs and added stress keep you from the man you love?” I paused for emphasis. “The same man who dropped everything for you that day you needed him?”

  I held my breath, Annabeth sucked her bottom lip between her teeth, and if someone felt like it was necessary to drop a pin—even though I’d never understood why anyone would—you could’ve heard it drop.

  “Step Twelve,” she said, and it was so opposite of what I’d expected that it took me a moment to realize she was referring to my Step Twelve.

  Step Twelve: Realize there are ups and downs in every relationship. When you inevitably hit road bumps and wonder if it’s worth fighting for, ask yourself if you’re a happier, better person because of him. If so, love means accepting someone for who they are, the same way you want them to do for you. Strong relationships are built, not stumbled into.

  “I am a happier, better person because of him,” Annabeth said. “You know I love him, and I’d do anything for him, even if it means I don’t get him all to myself.”

  Amy Lynn muttered, “Praise the Lord,” and relief flooded me.

  My program worked.

  After staying long enough to ensure Annabeth was back to her old self, and the wedding plans were still on-track, I wished the sisters good night and drove back to my place.

  When I stepped inside, my loft seemed so empty. Not just seemed. I could shout and my voice would echo around the room and then fade into nothing. Living alone had never bothered me before, but tonight I wanted someone there to wrap his arms around me and tell me it’d all be okay, even if it’d take a while.

  Correction: I wanted Linc to wrap his arms around me and tell me I’d be okay.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid. I wouldn’t even be feeling this way if I hadn’t strayed from my program.

  I kicked off my shoes, sat on my couch, and punched on the television. Nothing caught my interest, and as I leaned back in an attempt to get more comfortable, I heard a crumpling noise.

  I pulled the tiny slip of paper from under the pillow, and when I noticed it was a fortune out of a cookie, I wondered how I’d missed it before. I smoothed it out and my heart dropped.

  It wasn’t my useless one about the weather. No, it was Linc’s. The greatest risk is not taking one.

  And when I complained he’d gotten the good one, he’d said, “Then I guess you’ll just have to tie your future to mine. We can take a risk together.”

  When it came to gambling, I was much better at going all in after I already knew what cards I held and if most of the other cards were on the table. I supposed that was barely considered gambling, but I didn’t like risk. I liked cold hard facts.

  Right now the cold hard part was devastatingly accurate. I wanted to take all the facts and rearrange them so they made sense and made me happy, but there wasn’t a way to do both, and my logical side was sick of fighting against what my heart wanted.

  I thought of Ivy, the most cynical love skeptic of all, and how she’d told me that my head wasn’t supposed to be straight when it came to love, and the rest of what she said mixed in, too. Think about what you really want. Without the rules, and despite the past.

  I knew what I wanted—and who I wanted it with—but it didn’t make me less scared of what’d happen if I went after it and it didn’t work out. How could I possibly pick myself up again? I wasn’t sure my heart could take any more breaking before it ended up damaged for good.

  My phone chimed, and despite myself, I once again hoped it’d be Linc. That he’d somehow know I needed him. That he’d promise we’d make it, so the risk part could fall away.

  I swiped the screen to open the text from Abigail. The picture was of her, Reid, and Me-Mow, who looked rather pissed at being thrust in front of the camera. I grinned at the image.

  Underneath the picture, Abigail had added a comment.

  Abigail: This is because of you. Because you told me to not let the past jerks get in the way of opening up to the right guy. To be open to the possibility of someone great, and he’s so, so great. I met his friends and they told me he talks about me. I didn’t spill anything and I laughed so much my cheeks hurt. Seriously, just THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!

  I lifted my phone higher and looked at how happy they were—well, how happy Abigai
l and Reid were. Me-Mow, not so much. But that happiness wound through me, too. Abigail had found a guy who appreciated her and treated her the way she deserved.

  I read through the message again and the words niggled at my brain. I’d been so focused on all of my rules and how Linc broke them, but…I hadn’t followed my program at all. And not because I’d fallen for him, either.

  Because of our history, I’d stubbornly held on to past Linc. Yes, he’d hurt me. No, he wasn’t a relationship type guy in college. But I’d let my past get in the way of opening up to him, even after he spilled his guts about his dad and the note. I wasn’t open to the real possibility of us.

  Tonight Annabeth had mentioned Rule Number Twelve, too. Another one I’d broken, because if I asked myself if I was a happier, better person because of Linc, the answer would be yes.

  After Mason, I tried not to be cynical, but it’d crept in and made me blind. When I was with Linc, I did feel loved. He restored my belief in it, even as I fought it. He met my emotional needs, and we had passion like I’d never experienced with anyone else.

  “Shit. I screwed it up this time.”

  My choice of swearwords made me think of crossword puzzles, and how I wanted to spend as many days as possible filling the damn things out with Linc, no matter how frustrating I found them. I wanted to go to baseball games with him and watch his eyes light up. I wanted to read his articles, and when he traveled, I’d call and remind him of what he had here.

  For the first time in years, I wanted to take a risk more than I wanted to be safe.

  And in order to convince him to even consider giving us another shot, I was probably going to risk even more.

  Chapter Thirty

  During my last session, I really liked to hammer home the main points of the entire class, and tonight each point I made further rubbed in how much I’d messed up with Linc.

  I’d been the one not fighting fair and not dealing with stress well. I hadn’t taken into account that the universal need to be loved for who we were applied to him, too. If he were one of my clients, I’d probably tell him that he shouldn’t settle for me. It was all I could do to cover what I needed to before announcing it was time for our final field trip to Azure to apply everything that my attendees had learned. Scratch that. Everything we’d learned.