The Family Wish (Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book 3)

by Danielle Blair

  “Who’s Landon Pearce?”

  “Podcaster who got his own show on satellite radio. He’s pretty annoying, says outrageously offensive things, but he still shows up everywhere.”

  “What does he do with bad publicity?”

  “He makes people feel sorry for him. Talks about how he has to take prescription drugs and sometimes the combination makes him all weird.”

  “That works?”

  “Allison loves him.”

  “Do not!”

  Allison’s flush told a different story.

  “Sympathy, huh?” Charlotte frowned. “Let me see those comments again.”

  Natalie passed her the phone with the video cued. Charlotte scrolled down.

  Breaking up in a bridal shop? Classless. Better she finds out now.

  Happened to me at a family reunion. Hope she finds her forever love.

  Mine broke up with me in a fancy restaurant. Waitress sat down with me while I bawled.

  Ski lift here. I wanted to push him off.

  I’m losing faith in marriage. Please tell me there are men out there who would never do this.

  Sympathy, in spades.

  Even if Peyton Habersham wasn’t a saint in all this.

  “So we pull a Landon Pearce,” said Charlotte. “Embrace the video, link the shop’s social media, invite women to share their stories, make it into a contest.”

  “A contest for what? A wedding dress?” said Allison. “Won’t that be an awful reminder for a dumped bride?”

  Charlotte’s brain circled the possibilities. A trip giveaway wasn’t in the budget. “Not if the dress is a Freesia Day original. Her designs can be worn for any special occasion.”

  “You’re both forgetting Auntie Free is in the video,” said Natalie. “She’s the one the rich guy ran after.”

  “It’s a flash, from the back,” said Charlotte. “No one will know.”

  “And she was running away,” Allison added. “If it ever came out, she could say she was disgusted by the whole thing.”

  Natalie popped to her feet, grabbed her sister’s wrist, and tugged her toward the shop office. “We should start now.”

  “We could add an entry pop-up on the shop’s website.”

  Allison’s dulcet chatter only got them so far before Charlotte chased them down and plucked at their shirts to halt their progression.

  “Nice try, but you’ll start after school.”

  “Landon Pearce wouldn’t wait, Ma. Just sayin’.”

  Charlotte shooed them toward the door, backpacks in tow. “Landon Pearce doesn’t have a calculus test this afternoon.”

  “How do you know?” Natalie sassed her with her most endearing grin.

  She pulled both girls into a hug and sent them out the door. Allison ducked back, cued up something on her phone, and dropped one last bomb.

  “You might want to see this too,” she said.

  On her screen, Jon Yu’s latest post: Over the moon to announce the young and talented Grace Betcher has joined my design team. One to watch.

  Allison’s inner eyebrows creased. Hundred percent sympathy. Forever, the most tender of her kids to navigate life’s curves.

  “Let’s keep this between us,” Charlotte said.

  Her daughter’s lips pressed to a frown. She nodded, then jogged to catch up with her sister.

  In a year’s time, Freesia had become, for them, an entire wardrobe of apparel: revealing, thermal, wraparound, as graceful as Jackie O, as weatherproof as nylon taffeta. She was elastic and flexible and durable, but even the best garments tatter when worn. Charlotte hoped Freesia’s latest snags didn’t strip her of her gifts.

  11

  Freesia

  The building wasn’t much more than a second-floor room on stilts. At one time, the space below had been something with multiple bay doors, possibly an auto repair shop, but had since been bricked in with glass panes that had seen less-grimy days. The windows displayed mostly farm equipment, inexplicably co-located with a range, a golf cart, a barbecue with enough grill space to feed all of Devon in one round, and a proliferation of dust bunnies that already had a vague sneeze gathering behind Freesia’s sinuses at the sight.

  A sign in the window read: If Hiram Can’t Fix It, We’re All Screwed!

  It was the singular most un-Jay like place she could imagine. So why had his text sent her here?

  Coming was a mistake. She should go home and wait for her mother to awaken. But Charlotte had insisted, came over bright and early with pastries from Taffy’s place and told her the Sunday morning walk would do her some good. Half a mile, maybe more, gave Freesia time to think past the falling numbers of Camille’s weight and which combination of pills gave her the best sleep and trying not to self-destruct in her mother’s lucid moments when things begged to be said. In these upside-down days, where the temptation to leave was only staked in place by the burdens she would leave behind and the wheels she had already set in motion, thinking past the most immediate fire wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

  Increasingly, her thoughts went to Jay. Sometimes, highway-and-rib-sandwich Jay. Sometimes, casual-meant-pressed-khakis Jay, who had parted with an obscene amount of cash simply to name a flower for her. And in the four days since she found out his engagement collapse had gone viral and Charlotte had leveraged it for business, she was pretty sure Jay would never speak to her again. A positive development.

  So why hadn’t the part of her detached by his kiss gotten the message?

  She glanced down at her phone and reread the text. Coco Chanel learned to sew in an orphanage. Armani was a window dresser. 245 Ash Street. Sunday mornings.

  Her gaze zeroed in on the building’s address over the door. Two-four-five Ash.

  Beyond the free-hanging rack of gas-powered weed eaters, Freesia saw movement. She tried the door, found it gave way easily, hoped the top-heavy old building didn’t do the same.

  A bell overhead announced her.

  With no counter to speak of and only a cluttered desk pushed to one corner, the shop’s belly could only be described as methodical chaos. The contents were clustered by category—kitchen, lawn, toys, and a surprisingly large inventory of bicycles suspended from hooks in the ceiling. Two large fans circulated air tinged with the smell of gasoline and coffee. From a back room, the lonely blues of Otis Redding’s These Arms of Mine glazed a warm shiver on Freesia’s neck.

  Her eyelids slipped closed.

  Impossible.

  Maybe Charlotte had told him. For Freesia, lonely blues were a siren’s song that twisted on the air currents and led her down the arteries of her life. That he might share those same tastes shifted the earth beneath her until she remembered the truck, the highway, the radio that had played a Percy Sledge song. She made it back to the door, but there was the bell, and she had roused from the backroom a voice that was youthful, breezy, outgoing.

  “You must be Freesia.”

  He looked familiar, in that way of small towns when everyone had no more than two degrees of separation from everyone else, though had she laid her eyes on him before, she would not have forgotten him. His head was shaved to a close-cropped mohawk that was curly and flopped when he moved. He was short, with an ambitious sleeve of tattoos, and moved with a casual toes-out sway and absolutely no hips to hold his jeans in place. A friendliness about him belied his aggressive appearance.

  “I am.”

  He introduced himself as Riley, made a special effort to navigate the junk to shake hands. “Jay said you might stop by. Been begging me to fix the old player back there for days so he could listen to this album. I’m more of a Skynard man, myself.”

  The room at the house, the flower, the music. Jay was trying too hard, coming on too strong, money never teaching him a lesson in restraint.

  “Is he…here?”

  “He’s in the workroom.” Riley nodded over his shoulder. “Straight through that door, hang a right at the god-awful singing.”

  A smile overcame her.
She paused at the threshold to the back room. “You seem familiar.”

  “My great aunt Bernice talks about you all the time. Says you’re brilliant and plucky. What this tired town needs.”

  The hair, the tats, the wry humor. All that was missing was a sarcastic t-shirt. Freesia should have known.

  “Her husband had this place most of his life,” said Riley.

  “Hiram?”

  “If he couldn’t fix it—”

  “Everyone was screwed.”

  His laughter had a goofy, hiccupping quality. Made her laugh too.

  “Exactly.” He shoved a rag back in his jeans, picked up some kind of greasy cylinder, and headed to the store’s lawn section.

  Freesia continued down the hall.

  And I, I, I need your, I need your tender lips…

  The notes penetrated her heart like the needle against the LP’s grooves, whining and crackling and breathing against Redding’s soul. She had never heard the song in quite the same way. Vinyl was closest to how the artist—and God—intended.

  …to hold me together when I’m right with you…

  She shivered.

  If Jay meant to seduce her with music, he was off to a damned fine start.

  At the workroom, Freesia crossed her arms and leaned her shoulder against the doorjamb. Jay’s back was to her, as he worked an overturned bike on a table. His broad shoulders shifted inside an Oxford, cuffs rolled past his elbows, moving the material as efficiently as the ratchet in his hand clicked and tightened the equipment before him. She shook her head at his khakis. The man was wrist-deep in wheel grease. Probably didn’t own a pair of jeans. Lord help her if he did. The slight swell and musculature of his backside was a perfect marriage to the pliable cotton-blend. On the heels of that thought, he was nude and she was two degrees off from full-on arousal.

  The song ended. The needle’s journey took its sweet time into the opening up-tempo horns of Louie Louie. Jay circled the workbench, caught sight of her. His smile was a slow stroke of light to his complexion.

  “How long have you been there?”

  “Long enough for Otis to take me to church,” Freesia said. “Who told you he was my favorite?”

  “Charlotte.”

  Right.

  “She’s quite…helpful. Great, actually.” He wiped his hands on a rag, reached for the turntable’s volume knob, and tweaked it down. Then he settled on a stool opposite her, legs braced wide. “I see you got my text.”

  “You are full of surprises.” Freesia glanced around the workroom: impeccable tools, a fedora and Burberry scarf on a hat rack in the corner, a vintage Jameson whiskey sign on the wall. Preposterous, but the space seemed all him. “Looking pretty real, if you ask me.”

  This statement seemed to please him.

  “Your text said Sundays, plural.” A question more than a statement.

  “Haven’t missed a Sunday in two years,” he said.

  In all her time in Devon, how had she not seen him? But she knew. She rarely walked anywhere; and, on every occasion she had driven past the decrepit building, she’d considered it abandoned.

  “Your church,” she said.

  He grinned. “Now with the right music.”

  “And what do you do here every Sunday for two years?”

  “Fix what’s broken. Bikes mostly.” His shoulder lifted in a half-hearted shrug. “Whatever comes through that door.”

  Freesia’s mood shifted slightly. She didn’t hear whatever; she heard whoever.

  “I’m not broken,” she said, careful to leech any hint of defensiveness from her tone.

  He gave the wheel in his hand a spin, spoke to the fragmented bike. “No, but the guy in front of you is.”

  Her heart felt punctured. That someone responsible for the financial health of one of the largest petroleum manufacturing companies in the world felt broken left her speechless. She thought to go, reasoned that she had enough broken in her life without adding one more thing, but he had wanted her here for whatever reason and, for whatever reason, he had tapped into her gravity. Around him, she lost her desire to turn away, flee. She settled atop a companion stool, grateful that the now quiet music occupied seconds she didn’t know how to fill.

  “You ride?” she asked, the topic of bikes safe, innocuous.

  “No,” he said, barely audible. “Not anymore.”

  “So why the preoccupation?”

  “Jack loved bikes. Taught me how to ride, how to repair them. See, when you have parents like we have, wildly successful at everything but being parents, certain rites of passage fall through the cracks. Learning to swim. Driving. Jack stepped in for it all.”

  “He sounds incredible.”

  Jay gave the spokes another spin like he was uncomfortable with how the wheel had settled. In motion, lines blurred. She knew that more than anyone.

  “What about you?” he asked. “You a bike rider?”

  “When you have a mother like I have, certain rites of passage fall through the cracks—well, sand—but, eventually, a friend taught me.”

  Tire treads carved in wet sand, salty Atlantic spray at her bare heels, tipping over into the high tide, her first kiss at sunset. DeAndre West had twisted curls and soft lips for days and she was there, inside a rare happy childhood memory, an unexpected gift in an unlikely place. It was possible she sighed.

  “Must have been some ride by the look on your face.” He smiled, pinned her to that moment.

  “I fell.” In love, hard.

  “What? No story this time?”

  She thought to share the August day with Jay, part of their agreement to be recklessly honest in pursuit of real, recklessly honest to keep him at arm’s distance, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t keep pieces to herself. Especially the ones that weren’t jagged. “Nothing that could compare to Otis.”

  Jay set down his ratchet. He brushed his palms together while his stare riveted, bold and crackling, like he’d stepped close in thoughts and was enjoying the proximity.

  That something baby,

  Is deep down in my heart.

  And as if on cue, the beats knocking inside her ribcage quickened. She pushed aside a thought to give the front spokes another spin, set motion to her body, occupy the space between his thighs, lines blurred. Redding, while trying to avoid whatever it was between them, was like Marvin Gaye’s Lets Get It On at a nude beach. Ill-advised.

  Bikes. She recaptured the conversational thread. Safe, innocuous.

  “What happens to all the repaired bikes?”

  “They’re donated. Through charities, churches, schools. Jack used to keep a count on that wall over there so he could match the donations with a helmet.”

  Freesia glanced at the stained drywall. Clusters of four hashes crossed by a diagonal filled one corner. For the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, the tally system was crude and inefficient and wholesomely sweet. Every so often, a date divided the count, the latest two months ago.

  “He would be proud to know you’ve continued.”

  “I wish I could do more. There’s these fat-tire, off-road bikes—sturdy suspension, almost never need air, take a real beating. They’re perfect for remote areas of developing countries.” His voice picked up speed, intensity, animation. “Sometimes a person’s ability to cover more ground than can be walked makes all the difference between medical attention or an education or clean drinking water.”

  Jameson Scott wore passion extraordinarily well.

  “I’d love to run a non-profit someday that would ship bikes overseas, get them in the right hands. Make a real difference. Balance out the Scott legacy for petroleum greed.”

  “What’s stopping you?”

  “Responsibility. Commitments. Time.” As quickly as the fire sparked, it extinguished. He glanced at his Swiss-movement watch. “Speaking of which, I go wheels-up in an hour. The shareholders summoned me to an emergency meeting.”

  Emergency, on a Sunday, sounded serious. Bad press serious.

 
“Public relations?”

  On the precipice of honesty, he colored. “Something like that.”

  “Charlotte thought it best to get ahead of it. I can have her back off—”

  “Nonsense. If some good can come of it, then the tabloid cycle was worth it.”

  He winked at her in good humor, as if such a cycle had happened a hundred times before. “Give me a minute to wash up. I want to show you the upstairs.”

  Freesia watched while he washed his hands in a hallway basin. He scrubbed the grease away with a grainy-orange soap, followed it with a thick white lather that smelled intensely masculine, then lifted a towel from a folded stack. All this, in order to take her hand, thread her fingertips. He led her out a back door and up a weathered staircase that led to the building’s second floor, then paused halfway up.

  “The one leaning against the rail is yours to use.” He nodded back, toward the bottom post. “So you can come and go as you please without having to ask anyone for a vehicle.”

  Her gaze trailed to an old-style Schwinn bicycle with a front basket and a coat of creamsicle-striped paint. It was old-school and considerate; and, because it was likely cast out as trash at one time, perfect.

  Jay tugged her higher, upward. She tried to focus on the handrail, the morning clouds that looked like stacked flapjacks drizzled in butter, her feet—anything but their joined hands and the eyeful of his trousers before her.

  For someone who claimed to be broken, he sure had a knack for reconstructing her.

  He pulled a key from his pocket and unlocked the half-wood, half-glass door at the top landing. Had the scent of lemon and ammonia not prevailed, Freesia might have thought the space as forgotten as its downstairs counterpart. Had the inside not held the silhouettes of dress forms, the space might have seemed additional storage for boxes. Had she not been wondering after the meaning of his cryptic text—Coco Chanel learned to sew in an orphanage. Armani was a window dresser—since she had arrived at two-four-five Ash Street, the second floor would have been just another show and tell, another surprise, another manifestation of his bank account.

  But the upstairs housed every bit of what once occupied her sewing room in the March household, with a few additions: a sawhorse table, a freshly-painted white backdrop that set off her unboxed fabric like gemstones, a futon piled with pillows. It was an expansive room with hardwood floors, exposed industrial rafters, and a bank of windows on three sides worth a small fortune in morning light.