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

by Danielle Blair

  Jay shook his head, studied his clenched fists. His spine had the same curl as when she had driven him in the rainstorm. They had come so far together; and yet, not an inch.

  “G’on, Jaybird,” she attempted in her best brotherly voice.

  Jay’s tough veneer started to crack. “Jaybird?”

  “Show her how to ride so she doesn’t look like a praying mantis, all folded legs.”

  This time, Jay’s mouth twitched and pressed to a pucker.

  Suppressed laughter only made Freesia want to try harder.

  “Watch out, bruh. Might be illegal to ride a bike and be handsome at the same time.”

  A chuckle lifted from his throat, slid out in two rich notes.

  All she needed.

  Freesia brought back her teasing voice. “I’d let you sit in my basket, but I need somewhere to put my muffins—not your muffins.”

  He blushed. His lips sobered.

  “You’ve got this,” she whispered. “Just like you had my back when I was freaking out on the beach. Think of this as your walk.”

  “Will you be naked at the end?”

  His rogue was back. She laughed. They’d been intimate several times since the bedroom in the clouds, each encounter more evolved, more unguarded, more of everything than the ones before. She certainly wasn’t taking the possibility off the negotiation table. The last time they were together, he promised to hold her to her joke to sip wine from the navel and talk bondage.

  “Might be a little more nature than the tourists had in mind,” she said.

  Still, she exited the truck over his lap, straddled him, pausing briefly to give him a dose of hot courage in the form of a kiss while he cupped her tight boy-shorted backside, zero clearance between them. Before he could forsake cycling for sex, she gave his ear a sporty nip and climbed from the truck.

  Jay stayed put, head tipped against the headrest, muttering something about a crank.

  Freesia bit her lip, stifled a giggle, infinitely pleased with her art of distraction. The idea wasn’t to replace Jay’s memories with his brother, only crowd out the bad ones until there was room for nothing but joy. Inner peace.

  He joined her at the tailgate where she had already lifted the bikes down and had set their breakfast pack into her basket. Taffy was still none too pleased with Alex, but she had filled Freesia’s day pack with an array of fresh fruit, her banana-coconut-pecan muffins, and thermoses of juice and coffee on Freesia’s drive out of town.

  They strapped on their helmets—Jay’s preferred gear set aside by Riley the previous night—and walked their bikes to the trailhead.

  Jay paused, squeezed his eyes shut.

  “If he didn’t call you Jaybird, what did he call you?” she asked.

  “He called me Hooch. Illegal whiskey.”

  The sun conspired with the nickname, made her feel warm all over. “I love him.”

  Jay gave her a crooked half-smile. “Yeah, me too.”

  Freesia saddled up and took off, leaving him no time to think, to remember, to fear.

  “Try to keep up, Hooch,” she called over her shoulder.

  The challenge was empty. She was a praying mantis on a bike, all folded legs, winged out and inefficient, but before she could blink, Jay was beside her, spinning, grinning, and later, the sweetest kind of sinning.

  27

  Charlotte

  Pressed to explain how it came to be that Charlotte and Alex ended up on the shop’s bridal platform before the bay of mirrors, nibbling cinnamon-dusted nuts and chasing them with liquor, Charlotte would have said she lost all track of how the day had gone haywire. On this summer Saturday, they’d weathered a nursing mother lactating on a sample dress, a woman whose fiancé referred to her as “the Devil’s cupcake” and therefore wanted her gown in black, a trifecta of mothers uttering the absolute worst thing possible to a bride—So long as you like it, that’s the main thing—and one that would forever go down in Match Made in Devon history as the most bizarre last-minute gown glitch: a bride who took a tumble down the hill at her groom’s family estate and landed atop the grave of his great-grandmother, ripped bodice and all. Charlotte had scrambled out with a replacement dress and saved the day. A day and twenty squeezed inside eight business hours.

  Oh, and the bridal shop had finally reached a profit level such that each of the three sisters could pull a living wage and the shop would have leftover funds to scale. Alex’s word. Whatever that meant.

  The nuts? Well, Charlotte’s craving to match the boxed wine hit pretty hard, and she had stashed the suckers in her desk for low blood sugar brides.

  As for Alex, the day marked the first that Maddie no longer nursed. What had been forbidden for so long seemed fitting on such an occasion. Daddy’s favorite whiskey got Charlotte to thinking. A most dangerous pastime after three trips to the box spigot.

  “Wait here,” she told Alex.

  “Where-er you goin’?” After a little nip and tuck, Alex’s speech always detoured from Boston back to her bumpkin roots.

  Charlotte made her way to a storage closet, becoming intimately acquainted and conversing with a few gown racks along her tipsy way, and wrestled a special, forgotten gown from its hidey hole. A dust bunny that had made itself at home atop the zippered gown cover landed on her lip. Charlotte mimicked a sputtering propeller all the way back to the bridal ta-da spot.

  “I have the perfect gown for you and Jonah.” Charlotte unzipped the cover and pulled Mama’s wedding gown out with a flourish, a sort-of twirl, and an “Ain’t it somethin’?”

  Alex looked like the whiskey on her tongue had turned to castor oil. “I can’t wear that.”

  “Of course you can’t. It needs alter-nation.”

  “No, it’s jinxed.”

  “Is not.” Charlotte draped the gown over the bawlin’ and stonewallin’ armchair and crumbled onto the platform step beside Alex to survey the beadwork, the cut, the memories crowded into all those beloved photos still occupying their childhood home. “Mama and Daddy loved each other.”

  “It was manipulation. Pure and simple.” Alex’s simple had the sibilance of a snake.

  “Noooo.” Charlotte shook her head, like Alex had suggested Stella Irene and Elias had never really been married at all. “No-no-no. When I look at this dress, I see courage. Mama’s. Daddy’s. After all that had happened between them, they still valued this dress—all it stood for—enough to make this place. To give others the prettiest start possible.”

  “Purdyest?”

  “That’s right, purdyest.” Charlotte laid back on the platform because the second floor decided to move. “Look how many couples found a lifetime partner, all because Mama made them believe in the silly legend. You can’t make happen what you don’t believe. She made people believe it was possible.”

  Alex lay beside her, staring up at the chandelier.

  “I’m scared I’ll mess up another marriage.”

  Darned if Charlotte didn’t hear crying in Alex’s words. She raised up on her elbows, grabbed hold of Alex’s arm, and shook it like she was resuscitating her.

  “Hey. Hey now. You’re an all-star.”

  Alex sputtered out a laugh. “Isn’t that a song lyric.”

  Charlotte gave this some good thought. “Maybe, but that doesn’t mean it ain’t true. Jonah loves you. Isabel loves you. What more is there?”

  “Love wasn’t enough for Mama and Daddy. And it wasn’t enough for Michael and me. Things still happened.”

  “So what if it wasn’t perfect? It was theirs—what they made of it. And your marriage to Jonah will be what you make of it, together.” Charlotte took another sip of wine because her mouth was dry as hay. “We aren’t our mistakes. We are our intentions.”

  Alex frowned at her. “That’s beautiful, Evangeline,” she said, her tone filled with amazement.

  “I got it off a greeting card at the Food Saver,” confessed Charlotte.

  A juicy bubble of laughter escaped Alex’s throat.

/>   Charlotte joined in.

  When the amusement died down and the shop settled around them, Alex spoke.

  “I love you, Charlotte.”

  Darned if Charlotte didn’t make a visit to the waterworks, after all.

  “I love you, too, Alex.”

  28

  Freesia

  Freesia curled up in the wingback chair beside her mother’s bed. Nash had moved it days earlier from the formal front room when it became apparent Camille and her bedroom would become inseparable.

  Her decline had been precipitous. Marie said that was the way of it—systems falling like dominoes, each interconnected, the miracle that was the human body reversing the life it had carried for so long. Freesia guessed that when someone was around death as much as Marie, it became necessary to sugar-dust the darkness with words like transition and gateway and birthday of eternity, lest it build enough strength to overcome the living. That was the place in which Freesia found herself. Living, overcome.

  So much remained unanswered, unasked, but there seemed to be little room for all that now. The days were an exercise in pursuing her mother’s comfort. At night, when darkness arrived, it was about being a physical presence. The fears of childhood, it seemed, came full circle—only this time, the boogieman was the angel of death.

  On this night, restful sleep eluded Camille. Some nights, music helped. On this night, she settled with spoken words. Freesia read her Longfellow’s epic poem, barely above a whisper, because Charlotte had started it and it was near, but she found the part where the Acadians had been wronged, driven from their home, adrift, brought to mind heartache.

  Freesia paused.

  Camille shifted.

  Likely, she won’t understand what you say, just that you say something, Marie had said.

  Freesia continued reading aloud.

  Evangeline stood like one entranced, for within her

  Olden memories rose, and loud in the midst of the music

  Heard she the sound of the sea, and an irrepressible sadness

  Came o’er her heart, and unseen she stole forth into the garden.

  In the garden, Evangeline was overcome with longing for her lost Gabriel and the oaks told her to be patient and lied about answers that would never come. To-morrow! All lies. All missed opportunity.

  Freesia glanced up at Camille, then marked the book page and took her mother’s hand.

  “You remember Gary, Mama? Head of hair, that one. Alligator hands from digging trenches all day. Voice like Wilson Pickett. I suspect the reason he caught your eye. God, he could sing. I thought he’d be different. Had a job, steady paycheck, not too proud to admit when he did wrong—usually. But he did wrong, Mama. You always thought you had to worry about DeAndre, having his way, doing what boys do when there isn’t anyone around to tell them different. But Gary…he was the one you should have worried about. Sometimes, he’d get close and sing and I’d close my eyes and pretend I was in a place where no one could touch me. He wasn’t the first, and he certainly wasn’t the last, but it cost him the most. Remember those break-ins that summer, up the beach? I told the police it was Gary, planted evidence so I’d be free of him, so we’d be free. I don’t think we spoke beyond that for months, but I’m only sorry because I didn’t know the value of all that time, wasted, like I do now.”

  Freesia studied her mama’s face, looked for signs—of what, she wasn’t sure.

  “I’m okay. All that, back in Georgia, you see, gave me courage to go all over the world, find out who I was without anyone telling me who I should be. I won’t thank Gary or the others, but I guess it worked out the way it was supposed to. I forgive you for always wanting that castle, that return of love you’d been denied. I realize now why you put love before family, and I won’t push you away anymore. Whatever you’re still holding on to, I won’t push you away.”

  She meant to sit back, enter Evangeline’s garden again until sleep stole in for her too, but Camille squeezed her hand. Reflexes, Marie had told her, leaving the body.

  Freesia knew different.

  She squeezed her mother’s hand gently. Felt a whole lot more like anger, leaving the body.

  Charlotte’s magic was not just relegated to prayer. As it turned out, she had a fondness for photo albums and found the one in Stella Irene’s stash that chronicled the summer road trip to Louisiana with Camille. The images were black and white. Handwritten dates and names and ages crowded the thick border. At a rest stop somewhere in the boot toe of Louisiana, Camille had celebrated her fourteenth birthday with Stella Irene’s family, complete with pointy hats and cupcakes and hot dogs. And at the home where two little girls had made so many memories, Charlotte recreated a similar gathering of family in Camille’s honor—minus a pin-the-tail donkey poster fastened to a tree in the background.

  Today, Camille was remarkably alert, closer to the way she’d been when Freesia had first brought her back to Devon. She had requested to leave her wheelchair behind, sink her toes in the fresh-cut grass, so Jay had carried her to the Adirondacks they had moved away from the firepit to capture shade.

  “I’m sorry Uncle Patrick couldn’t make it,” Charlotte told Freesia when they had a moment alone near the refreshments. “He would have liked to be here. His bad heart keeps him from much travel, but he remembers Camille well. Said she always stuck up for him. I can’t imagine the life she had under her father. She ever talk about him?”

  Freesia refilled her mason jar with berry lemonade that Charlotte had made special. The woman made everything special. Even chose Camille’s favorite color—orange—for the paper straws and tablecloths.

  “Not often. But it sure informed her view of men. What was normal, accepted.” Freesia washed down the twisted thought on a cold, sour wash of lemons and sugar. “Her mother died when she was four, almost five. Back then, they used to lay out the deceased in the house so people had time to travel, pay their respects. Every night, after the house was dark, she’d sneak downstairs and curl up beside her mother in the casket. Long about night three, her Daddy caught her. Beat her senseless.”

  Charlotte covered her mouth with a hand. Behind it, her face was a mask of disbelief.

  “Mama told me she saw her father. A few nights ago. That he came to sit beside her bed.”

  “Must have upset her so,” Charlotte said, this time, her hand over her heart.

  “He told her that everything was going to be all right. That if there was a good place for a man like him, there surely was a kingdom waiting for her. And just like that, she let it all go.”

  They glanced across the lawn. Camille held Maddie on her lap, adjusted her sun bonnet, smiled weakly. Alex sat beside them, chatting up Maddie’s latest accomplishment.

  “Would you look at that?” said Charlotte. “Looks like Camille isn’t the only one to let things go. Babies have that power. New life, new possibilities. Way they’re always changing, they’re a good reminder that the present is a gift.”

  Jay walked over then, asked Alex if he could hold Maddie. Freesia would have thought he’d hold a baby like a quarterly-loss earnings report, but he was a natural. Someday, his tenderness would translate into an excellent father.

  She hoped that someday wasn’t now.

  Freesia put her hand to her belly. She was late. Stress, grief, the monumental task of bettering herself in record time, to rising above what would no longer matter when her mother was gone—all shouldered temporary blame. As was typical in her life, the moment she decided to move forward, to run toward something instead of away, a reminder of all the ways she brought the storm to others’ lives stared her down and made her rethink everything.

  If she was pregnant, she would do as Camille did. Send Jameson back to his family, to protect them, to protect all this would mean. The parallels made her light-headed, slightly ill.

  “You okay?” Charlotte put a hand to her shoulder, rubbed gentle circles, all mother-like.

  “Just tired. Was up with Mama late last night.” Fr
eesia forced a smile, but her voice betrayed her, quavered and died. She cleared her throat, took another lemony sip and tried again. “Think you could get Nash to carry Mama back upstairs? She needs her rest.”

  “Sure, honey. Whatever you want.”

  Charlotte wasn’t convinced all was well. Freesia heard it in her guarded voice, saw it in the pronounced lines at her eyes.

  “I’ll turn her bed down. Tell Jay that I’ll rest with Mama. Thank him for coming.”

  Charlotte nodded.

  Jay’s gaze tracked her to the house. Before she climbed the steps, she raised her hand, an acknowledgement more than a wave. He waved back, his brow asking more questions than she had answers.

  She needed distance. From everyone and everything but the one person she’d soon not have back. She wondered about the way of it all those years ago in a shack on the Georgia beach—whose idea it had been to go, whose idea to stay, had they been in agreement, and who possessed the strength to rebuild walls and make the hard choices she prayed she wouldn’t have to repeat.

  Hurt before being hurt.

  Free, you in the storm now.

  29

  Alex

  Charlotte had insisted Alex and Freesia attend church services the next morning—and stay until the last devout dog had howled. Alex hadn’t known why until the final hymn wrapped up, the congregation spilled out into the already-stifling summer day, and none other than Clement Grant, usher, wobbled up the aisle to put the church back in order.

  The three sisters made eye contact.

  “He can’t lie in the house of the Lord,” Charlotte whispered.

  She chased after him. Didn’t take but a mild effort in heels to catch up to his labored gait. Alex and Freesia were right behind her peep-toe wedges.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Grant?” Sweet as pie. Charlotte never failed to turn on the sugar when necessary. “I was hoping for a smidgen of your time.”