“They’ve been located,” the QG said with a dismissive wave, “but the summer Guide to Bliss Brides has already gone to print.”
“You’re telling me Bliss Bridal isn’t in the Guide.” The mailing went out to thousands of brides all across Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. Exclusion meant even less visibility.
“That’s correct,” the QG said.
There went another full quarter to Noah’s college fund. “But we’re still listed on the Web site and in the e-mail newsletter.”
Because they had to be. Three quarters of the boutique’s Web site traffic came from BRA referral links. Bliss Bridal’s Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter presences were solid, but most of their followers were past customers. Mom had never invested in other ads because they’d always had support from the BRA. Natalie didn’t have the budget to play around with any advertising that wasn’t a sure thing.
Marilyn’s lips made a calculated turn toward mock regret. “Bliss Bridal was removed from the Web site when the dues didn’t appear to have been paid in time.”
“But we can be put back,” Natalie said.
“Whenever Mr. and Mrs. Gregory have time to work on the Web site again. And the e-mail newsletter has already been sent this month. Very busy time, with Knot Fest just around the corner, of course.”
“Of course,” Natalie said. But only because fix it, you evil bat wouldn’t help.
She would call the Gregorys’ son, Max, to get Bliss Bridal re-listed. They’d grown up together and were moderately friendly. He did most of the web stuff in his parents’ place.
A whole new generation was being groomed to take over The Aisle.
“Rest assured Bliss Bridal will be in the fall mailing,” Marilyn said, but Natalie heard the unspoken if you’re still here. The And you won’t be Marilyn silently added was deafening.
Which meant it didn’t much matter if Max got Bliss Bridal listed again.
“We look forward to it,” Natalie said. Because it was what Noah needed to hear.
Marilyn conveyed a firm No, you don’t with the barest waggle of her eyebrows, then disappeared back into Heaven’s Bakery.
And Natalie breathed a sigh of relief.
Because if the Queen General had heard about CJ and Natalie last night, there would’ve been a bigger issue than Bliss Bridal’s being excluded from the BRA’s advertising.
Her skin prickled, and she cast a covert glance around the parking lot and across the street. Paranoia, maybe, but the only thing worse than the QG hearing about something would be the QG witnessing something, and Natalie wouldn’t rest easy until long after she’d heard CJ was gone.
She shivered.
“Mommy?” Noah whispered.
She herded him toward the door. “Hmm?”
“I wish I was big as a dinosaur.”
For all her personal problems in the last five years, she’d gotten the best reward in him. She dropped and squeezed him in a hug. “Me too, sweetheart. Me too.”
Inside the shop, Natalie shook off the feeling of being watched and put on coffee in the small kitchenette. She and Noah dashed across the street to the teahouse for fresh scones to serve as today’s refreshments for their brides’ entourages. Then she got Noah set up with crayons and a dinosaur coloring book at his little table in the corner of the office and powered up the computer. She had three brides to connect with on Pinterest so her bridal consultants could get a feel for their styles before their appointments this week, inventory to tackle and a certain kiss to not think about.
Two of those tasks proved easier than the third.
Amanda arrived just before eleven to get the rest of the shop in order. At noon, they opened for business.
Natalie jumped every time the door chimed.
She had no reason to think CJ would come here, but she had no reason to think he wouldn’t either.
It had been a lot easier to dislike him before he brought Dad home. Before he made a point of demonstrating he was more than just the moment her marriage had fallen apart.
Before she’d caught on to the fact that he was a man.
That kiss had been unexpected.
Unexpected and thrilling and horrifying, just as it had been five years ago. And, like five years ago, thoroughly guilt-inspiring.
At least this time, they were both single. As if that were any consolation, given the mess that was Nat’s life.
But for all the problems he’d brought into her life, the man was right.
He didn’t kiss horribly.
“Mommy!” Noah said.
She jumped and dropped her fingers from where they’d been rubbing her lips, heat gathering in her cheeks. She’d meant to switch over to the inventory software, but instead, she was staring at the last bride’s honeymoon Pinterest board. Noah was practicing his inquisitive half squint on her.
“Yes, sweetheart?” she said.
He pointed his purple crayon through the slats of the blinds on the back window. “Aunt Lindsey’s here.”
Lindsey—the taller, blonder, non–childbearing-hipped Castellano sister—finger-waved through the back window. Her nails were tiger-striped with neon green and pink, and they stood out over her fingerless ivory gloves. Natalie slipped to the back door and let her in. “No clients this week?” She gestured to Lindsey’s nails.
“Hot date.” Lindsey fanned herself. “Smoking, actually.”
Her relationships resembled the life cycle of a fruit fly in hell—short and scorching. Most ended with her assistant breaking things off for her. Yet most of the guys she’d dated treated her like an old friend. She’d even been in a couple of their weddings.
“So he’s getting dumped tomorrow?” Natalie said.
“Pretty much.”
Lindsey knew how to pick ’em. No complications there.
She wiggled her fancy fingernails. “I’m painting them back to normal tonight. Want to come over? I have sour mix.”
“Can’t. Knot Fest meeting.”
“Aunt Lindsey, what’s a hot date?” Noah leaned out of the office, wiggling a foot behind him.
Lindsey winked at him. “It’s when you turn up the heater really high in your house and pretend you’re at the beach.”
His little dark brows furrowed over the crease between his eyes. “Did it catch on fire?”
“Fire?” Natalie repeated.
“There was smoke,” Noah said. “Right, Aunt Lindsey?”
The things Noah learned from his aunt. “How do you explain that one, Aunt Lindsey?”
Lindsey’s grin would’ve inspired jealousy if Natalie hadn’t known the bags beneath Lindsey’s eyes came from too many hours at work rather than one night of adult activities.
“My electric s’more maker overheated,” Lindsey said. “It was ugly, little man. Ugly.”
His lip trembled. “Can you get a new one?”
“Are you talking to the awesomest aunt in the whole world or what? Of course I can get a new one.”
“And it’ll make big huge giant marshmallows?” Noah’s pure hope made Natalie believe marshmallows were the way to world peace.
Lindsey scrunched up her nose and twisted her lips to the side. “We’ll see what we can do. You drawing pictures today? Think you can draw me a picture of a dinosaur in a wedding dress?”
Noah’s cheeks split into a grin almost as bright as his eyes. “Yeah!”
He darted back into the office, taking a bit of Natalie’s heart with him. For all the trouble she’d had in the rest of her life over her failed marriage, she wouldn’t trade her past for the world. Because she’d gotten Noah. He was a damn good kid. And that was another dime she’d happily part with.
She wanted to scamper back to the office with him and color dinosaur pictures, but she had grown-up issues to face instead. She propped herself against the wall. Lindsey tucked her hands into the pockets of her ivory knit overcoat and leaned against the opposite wall. “You could’ve warned me Dad was hungover,” she said.
“Is
he still mad?”
“Mad is such a nebulous term.”
“Shit.”
“You charge yourself double on Sundays?”
She needed to start charging herself half before she went broke. “I should’ve just said thank you when he offered me the shop.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“I appreciate that he believes in me.” Nat didn’t need to add the but.
Because Lindsey knew. She wasn’t very popular in Bliss either.
“He’s packing for a little fishing trip right now,” Lindsey said. “He’ll cool down, you’ll cool down, and maybe when he gets back, you two can be rational adults putting the pieces of your lives back together. Things change. Give him some time to get used to it.”
Natalie gave Lindsey the seriously? look. Dad had spent four years denying Lindsey’s law specialty until she marched into the house with police photos of a battered woman. Is the sanctity of marriage more important than her life? Lindsey had said. Society needs me to terminate unwanted marriages. Deal with it.
Since that day, he’d told everyone who asked that his younger daughter was in the family business and his older daughter was on a mission to save the world. Lindsey handled other cases too—adoptions, child support, prenuptial agreements—but when you grew up in the Most Married-est Town on Earth, the only thing that mattered was your respect for and participation in holy matrimony.
Lindsey shrugged. “What else can you do?”
Noah popped around the corner. “Aunt Lindsey? Do you want a pink or purple or green or red or blue dinosaur?”
“Pink with blue polka dots,” Lindsey said.
Noah giggled and disappeared again.
Natalie scrubbed her hands over her cheeks. “Do you think he’ll forgive me for leaving?” Once the shop was packed up and sold, she would leave. Bliss was no place for a divorced woman to raise a son.
“Dad?”
“Noah. He’s finally adjusting without Mom here. What happens when Dad’s not there every day for him too?”
The last six months had taught her what she was capable of, but it also helped her realize something else.
One day Dad wouldn’t be around to be Noah’s role model anymore.
What would she do then?
“You two will be fine,” Lindsey said. “You’re already doing a great job with him. Besides, you know I’ll fix whatever you screw up.”
Natalie squinted at her. She gave an unexpectedly bright smile, the kind of smile that usually meant she was wearing her favorite smiley face panties, and some of the tension left Natalie’s chest and windpipe.
“So,” Lindsey said. “The confessional, huh?”
“Oh, shut the hell up,” Natalie grumbled. No sense asking where she heard.
Everyone would’ve heard by now.
Lindsey’s grin got bigger, but there was a sympathetic bent to it. “So did you two have a nice chat? The story I heard was a little fuzzy on details.”
Thank God. Double bonus that Lindsey hadn’t heard about last night’s kiss either. “Let’s just say I said a few things I wouldn’t have if I’d known who I was talking to.”
“You didn’t know it was him?”
“He was behind a screen. I thought I was talking to one of the guys in Billy Brenton’s band and that he was out in the foyer.”
“Billy who?”
“The country rock—never mind.” Lindsey hated country music. She wouldn’t care who CJ’s sister had toured with. “Point is,” Nat said, “I’m never speaking to anyone again about CJ Blue.”
Lindsey pursed her lips and repositioned herself against the wall. “How much cussing did you do?”
“Are we counting Oh, gods?”
“You were in a church.”
“And Noah’s college fund is about full for the year.”
“You could just watch your language.”
Natalie gave her the shut up eye again.
“Or,” Lindsey said, “you could quit the Knot Fest committee.”
And there, Natalie suspected, was the real point of Lindsey’s visit.
But she was wrong. Nat couldn’t quit. Not with the shape the Golden Husband Games committee was in. Then there was her morbid desire to withstand Marilyn Elias’s mental bruisings as long as she could. “I owe it to Mom to see the Games through.”
“Mom would understand.”
“Mom always understood.” Natalie thumped her head back on the wall. The wall that had been in the family for three generations. The wall that had survived decades of bridezillas, a few tornado scares and the flooding three years ago. The wall that would never belong to her.
Natalie had grown up here, prancing about the floor in oversize bridal shoes, modeling tiaras, dreaming of the day she’d graduate from homecoming and prom dresses to her wedding dress. The beautiful wedding dress, special ordered just for her—with intricate bead- and lacework on the strapless, drop-waist bodice, the yards and yards of bunched white organza making her look as though she were floating in a cloud—then modified to add sequins and sparkles into the skirt.
The dress she’d burned three months later.
But it had been almost five years now. Five years, and a few lifetimes’ worth of lessons from her parents and her son. Without Mom, Natalie had come to realize that the shop wasn’t something she should take for granted.
It was something she needed to own. Not the shop itself—she would never own the building, never own the dresses and accessories in it. But she needed to own her own history as she faced her future.
She needed to fit into herself again.
Hard to do when she didn’t much like herself. “You know I never thought to tell her thank you while she was alive?” she said.
“She knew, Nat.”
“Maybe. But there’s no one else who knows these Games as intricately as I do.”
“So they’ll learn.”
Since her divorce, Natalie had known she wouldn’t take over the family business when her parents retired. Divorced people didn’t own shops on The Aisle. Period. Maybe if she’d gotten remarried, she could’ve kept the boutique, but Nat’s short marriage had shown she wasn’t cut out to be a wife. Natalie had still been her mother’s biggest helper in planning the Games every year though. They’d all thought they would have more time before Mom needed to worry about a real replacement for both the Games and the shop. “They can learn next year. But there will never be another golden anniversary of the Games. This is the first year since the flood that the hotels are booked solid. Bliss is finally back in the destination wedding game. Everything has to be right this year. And it’s not. Not even close.”
Little boy giggles carried into the hallway.
Lindsey looked toward the office, then back at Natalie.
Pointedly.
“Are you sure you’re doing this for Mom?” she said softly.
Of course. Who else would she do it for? No matter how badly Nat wanted to still fit in Bliss, the QG had made it abundantly clear that Natalie was wasting her wishes. “How will Dad feel if the Games fall apart?” Nat said. “Mom’s not the only one I’ve let down. I can save Mom’s Games. I can do it for both of them.”
“And then what?” Lindsey said.
“And then—” Natalie’s throat clogged up and her breastbone ached as if her ribs were caving in.
And then she would be done. It would be time to move on.
To truly say good-bye.
She inhaled and licked her lips. “I’ll worry about that after the Games.”
“Nat—”
“I’ll never have another chance to do this, Lindsey. Please don’t be one more thing standing in my way.”
Lindsey crossed her arms. “You’re still only one person. Mom had a team behind her. You can’t—”
“I can. I’m the only person who can do this right, and I’m doing it.”
Noah darted out of the office. “Aunt Lindsey! I made you two dinosaurs!”
“Saved by th
e preschooler,” Lindsey murmured. She went down on her knee to his level while he launched into the story of the epic tea party the dinosaurs were having.
Natalie ruffled his hair—he was adorably irresistible this morning—then caught Lindsey’s eye. “Send him back in when you’re ready to go. I have some work to do.”
Lindsey nodded, but Nat had known her sister long enough to get the message behind the nod. Don’t work too hard.
She’d take that into consideration.
After Knot Fest.
Chapter Six
CJ STAGGERED back into St. Valentine’s rectory early Monday evening after spending the day cleaning Bob and Fiona’s gutters over in Willow Glen. The rest of his family had scattered back to their respective homes and jobs, leaving just him and Basil in Bliss.
Him and Basil and the Queen General, who was perched as delicately as a Queen General could be at the edge of the stiff pleather sofa in the rectory living room. She held a basket of cake balls that were decorated like little brides and grooms. The fact that CJ even knew what cake balls were gave him serious concerns about his own balls.
“You have a visitor,” Basil said.
His Holy Wimpiness snagged his newspaper and retreated across the creaking floorboards to the kitchen.
Never a good sign.
CJ took a step into the room. “Mrs. Elias.”
“CJ, my dear, do call me Marilyn.”
With those predatory eyes killing the effect of her blinding white smile, he could think of a few other things to call her.
Like batshit crazy or scary as hell. Basil had God on his side, and even he was hiding.
“Nice of you to stop by,” CJ said.
She rose and offered the basket of cake balls, and CJ instinctively jumped forward and cradled the gift.
“By the power vested in me as Knot Festival chairwoman and as a direct descendant of the founders of Bliss,” Marilyn said with every ounce of authority necessary to pull off the bizarre statement, “our community formally welcomes you into its loving folds.”
CJ could see how God would be kinda helpless against this woman. “Ah, thank you,” he said.
“As you’ll be with us for a while, I wanted to offer my assistance in anything you might need.” The Queen General gestured to the basket. “You’ll find coupons and brochures for all of Bliss’s best restaurants, nightlife, relaxation services, and adventure opportunities tucked in there. I’ve also prepared a job reference and character recommendation form, should you decide to seek employment or alternate living accommodations. Drop my name, and you’ll have no issues with anything your heart might desire. We simply want you to be happy and comfortable as long as you’d like to stay with us here in Bliss.”
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