Canyon Weddings

by Julie Jarnagin

  Cassie held her breath and braced herself for everything to fall apart. He stared straight at Cassie as he spoke, but she broke his gaze.

  “I’m pleased to say we’re here to offer our time and our combined years of experience to make sure this camp survives. We’ve decided that it’s important for the area to have a place like Sunset Camp, and I think we can help.”

  Cassie looked up at Will, her mouth open in disbelief. He nodded at her.

  “I think there are some opportunities for additional income for the camp if we just take advantage of them. I’ve done some research on camps with similar facilities bringing in about half of their income by making the facilities available for renting and even catering from the cafeteria. With the facilities and talented staff already here, I think it could be a smooth transition, and we wouldn’t have to sacrifice the original vision for the camp.”

  The board members nodded as he spoke. Will continued to explain all the ways he had mapped out for the camp to get back on its financial footing. Cassie struggled to hold back the tears.

  When Will finished his presentation, Mr. Hartley asked them to leave the room so they could discuss the item and vote. Cassie, Will, Connor, and Leonard filed out of the room. Connor and Leonard flipped open their mobile phones and headed out in different directions.

  When she and Will walked toward the grass, Cassie reached out and wrapped her arms around him, almost knocking him backward. “I don’t know how I could ever thank you for what you’ve done.”

  He hugged her back. “This is enough.”

  She pulled back to see his face. “I mean it. I turned you away so many times. I couldn’t have blamed you if you hadn’t bothered to help me.”

  His eyes were warm, and his face relaxed. “I’m really sorry I didn’t tell you I would be here.”

  She smiled at him. It was impossible for her to be irritated after what he had done for her. “Why didn’t you?”

  Will shook his head. “There was no time. I didn’t want to say anything until I was absolutely sure, and it took every minute I had to convince Mr. Hartley and my father that it was the right thing to do.”

  Cassie looked to the window of the meeting room. The faces at the table all turned up to Mr. Hartley. “What made Mr. Hartley change his mind?”

  “Well, Hartley had a hard time with the concept of a developer working with one of his camp directors.”

  “Why?” Cassie asked.

  “According to him, Henry Mason was letting the camp crash because another developer agreed to cut him in on the deal.”

  Cassie shook her head in disbelief, but it explained all the incorrect books and the unpaid debts. “I can’t believe he would do that.”

  “It made Mr. Hartley extra cautious about us working together, and from what I hear around town, everyone thinks we have a relationship outside of camp business anyway.”

  They would have plenty to talk about now. Cassie laughed. “What about your dad?”

  Will stared out toward the nurse’s cabin where Will’s father stood on the porch on the phone. “It took him a few days, but he came around. It’s not hard to see how many lives this place has changed.”

  Cassie thought about how much his family must have given up for Will to do what he did.

  “Plus, I told him how I feel about you. You wouldn’t ever guess it, but he’s a romantic at heart. Just ask my mom.”

  A charge of electricity raced through Cassie. “So what did you tell him about us?”

  Will stepped closer to her. “That if you ever gave me another chance, I would be a fool to mess it up. That you were the kind of girl I’ve been searching for.”

  She reached for his hand and intertwined his fingers with hers.

  Will motioned at the meeting room with his head. “Are you nervous about what’s going on in there?”

  Cassie shook her head. “It’s in God’s hands now.”

  Epilogue

  Cassie sat straight up in bed and looked around, disoriented. Her eyes fought to adjust to the dark room. Then someone pounded on her front door.

  She groaned as she climbed out from under the covers. She pulled her bathrobe off the hook on the door and slipped it around her. “Just a minute,” she called.

  She shuffled through the house, turning on lights on her way to the front door. Through the peephole, Beth stared back at her. She opened the door. “Come in. What’s going on?”

  Beth looked wide awake. “We have campers out of their cabins again. Up for a hike?”

  Cassie groaned. “I guess there’s not much choice.”

  “I’ve already told the counselors where they need to look,” Beth said.

  Cassie yawned. “Let me change.”

  Cassie and Beth walked silently toward the canyon wall. As they trudged through the darkness, she thought about Will. She couldn’t wait to call him in the morning and tell him that she had hiked through the darkness looking for teenagers again.

  Will and Cassie had been together for just over a year now, and it had been an amazing journey.

  Mr. Hartley had offered Cassie the permanent director position after the meeting, and with Will’s help, almost twice as many people had visited Sunset Camp this year than the last.

  Weddings, family reunions, and corporate retreats had taken place in the canyon. The weddings had been held in the tabernacle, in the chapel, and outside under the trees. Beth had catered most of them and was beginning to be well known for her food. She had even made a few of the wedding cakes.

  Most importantly, Cassie had fallen more in love with Will than she could have ever imagined.

  Cassie and Beth turned on the trail leading up the canyon. When Beth nudged her and motioned toward the steep incline, Cassie nodded.

  She followed behind Beth in the dark slowly, making sure her footing was solid as she pulled herself up with the rope.

  When she reached the top, she took the hand that reached for hers. She flinched when the hand she held wasn’t Beth’s.

  “It’s okay. It’s me.”

  Cassie’s stomach fluttered. “Will? What are you doing out here in the middle of the night?”

  The darkness gave way to a soft glow of light. Cassie looked over to a beaming Beth lighting votive candles lined up on a log.

  Cassie’s heart pounded so hard she was sure Will and Beth could hear it. “What’s going on?” But when Cassie looked into Will’s eyes, she knew. Cassie pressed her hand against her chest and took a deep breath. They weren’t there to find campers. Will had planned out every detail of this for her.

  Will dropped to one knee on the orange dirt. “Cassie Langley, I love you. I thank God every day for bringing you into my life. Your spirit and your strength are beautiful. I want nothing more than to spend the rest of my life with you.”

  Cassie clasped her hands over her mouth. Tears ran down her face.

  Will pulled a little square box out of his pocket and opened it to reveal a ring that sparkled in the moonlight. “Will you marry me?”

  Cassie nodded her head, no words coming out. She pulled him to his feet, and he wrapped his arms around her.

  “Yes,” she whispered in his ear. “A million times, yes.”

  CANYON CROSSING

  Dedication

  For Mom, who taught me what true love looks like.

  Chapter 1

  Laura Dobson squeezed her eyes closed, but the cloud of dust behind her fiancé’s sports car confirmed this wasn’t a nightmare.

  The glass vase chosen for the wedding reception centerpieces slipped from her numb fingers and shattered on the floor of the front porch.

  Thomas’s words still rang in her ears. “I can’t marry you because I’m not in love with you.”

  No explanation. No apology. One sentence, delivered like a well-aimed punch to the stomach, left her gasping for air.

  Laura’s knees buckled. She gripped the rough wood of the old porch railing, but it wobbled under her weight. The boards creaked as she lower
ed herself to the top step.

  Laura covered her mouth, fighting back the nausea that rippled through her.

  Thomas had interrupted her as she deliberated between lilies and roses for the centerpiece arrangements. Then he had broken her heart and, without a second glance, walked out as she begged him not to leave.

  Footsteps crunched in the gravel driveway beside the house.

  She jolted upright, hope rushing back to her, but it wasn’t Thomas with his arms open in regret. Connor Overman, the sole witness to her world falling apart, gave her a sympathetic nod.

  Her lungs deflated. “Oh,” she said, unable to keep the disappointment from her voice.

  Laura had met Connor, Thomas’s oldest friend, when she arrived in Wyatt Bend two weeks ago. According to Thomas, Connor was the key to renovating this farmhouse into their dream home.

  Connor looked from her to the dirt road in front of the house and rubbed the back of his neck. “I wanted to see if you were okay.”

  Her fiancé had just dumped her six weeks before their wedding. Laura was far from okay. She opened her mouth to answer, but a sob threatened to escape from the back of her throat. She swallowed it and whispered, “I’ve had better days.” She refused to cry in front of him.

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …”

  She waved her hands in front of her to signal him to stop talking.

  Connor held up a pink binder and inched toward her. “I found this on the back porch and figured it belongs to you.”

  The sight of the binder turned her stomach. Laura’s hopes and dreams, created in painstaking detail, lay between its covers. She had planned every aspect of her wedding to perfection. Color-coded tabs separated pages of her own sketches of dresses, flowers, and cakes. She clutched the book and pressed it against her chest.

  Connor swept shards of glass from the porch with the side of his boot and sat beside her. “What can I do?”

  She cringed at the pity in his deep voice. “You can tell me why he’s doing this.” Her voice trembled. “Apparently, you know him better than I do.”

  Connor rubbed his hands together. “I wish I had known. I would’ve tried to talk him out of it.”

  Had she put too much pressure on Thomas with the house and the wedding? “He didn’t say anything to you?”

  “He mentioned being freaked out about coming back here and working for his dad.” Connor shielded his eyes from the late-afternoon sun as he looked toward the barn. “So, what are you going to do?”

  The directness of his question rattled her. She had given up everything in Florida—her job at the ad agency and her apartment—to move to this tiny Oklahoma town. “I don’t know. I’d planned to continue staying with Thomas’s parents until the wedding.”

  Connor sucked air through his teeth.

  The weight on Laura’s chest threatened to crush her. Staying with Thomas’s eccentric parents had been a disaster. She’d shared a room with their four ferrets and a stuffed cat that passed away years earlier. The sun hung low in the sky, and she didn’t have a place to spend the night. She covered her eyes with her hands. “I know, I know.”

  Connor’s hand squeezed her shoulder, and Laura lifted her eyes to his. His short hair was almost black, a stark contrast to his steel-blue eyes. Despite their friendship, Thomas couldn’t be more different from his rugged friend. The muscles in Connor’s arms told her he did more than delegate on the construction site. Laura and Thomas looked like they could be related with their fair skin and thin frames.

  Connor’s hand fell away as Laura stood and dusted slivers of glass from her linen skirt. She turned around and surveyed the deteriorating farmhouse—the house that was supposed to be her dream home. Thomas hadn’t only abandoned Laura. He’d walked away from the future they’d planned together.

  Thomas had promised he would spend every day until the wedding working on the house. Maybe she had pushed him too hard.

  Now, in the cold light of reality, she could see the house for what it really was—a shack that should be condemned. A shack she owned. It had made sense for her to take on the mortgage because even with his father’s financial help, law school had left Thomas with significant debt. Once Thomas started working as an attorney at his dad’s law office, he would have more than enough to cover the house payment and repairs until she got her freelance graphic design company started.

  Beyond the shutter hanging by one loose hinge and the peeling paint that revealed every color of the home’s history, Laura could still envision the husband and children she had imagined living happily within the house. That future was dissolving in front of her. It brought her tears back to the surface, but she blinked them away.

  She couldn’t walk away from it as easily as Thomas had. She needed to be alone in the space where they would’ve lived as man and wife, if only to come to terms with everything that had happened. “Actually, I want to stay here tonight.”

  Connor scoffed.

  She turned to face him. “I’m serious.”

  “You can’t stay here,” he said, throwing his arms toward the house. “What kind of person would I be if I let you stay in this place?”

  “Let me?”

  He rubbed his fingers across the dark stubble on his chin. “Come on. I understand you’re upset, but don’t be stupid.”

  Now he had the nerve to insult her? “Excuse me?”

  “You know what I mean,” he said in a quieter voice. “Stay with Thomas’s parents one more night or at the little motel in town. It’s nothing fancy, but it would be a safe place to stay until you figure things out.”

  Nothing was going to talk her out of it now—especially one of Thomas’s friends. “The house has plumbing and electricity, and it’s furnished. That’s all I need.”

  Connor lifted an eyebrow.

  “Okay. The furniture is a little … dusty,” she said. After the previous owners moved into a nursing home, the home stood empty for four years. Then the house sat on the market three more years after they’d passed away. Laura had purchased it from the owners’ only child. He lived in California and sold the home with all its contents, only taking some boxes of photos and a few family mementos.

  Connor stepped toward Laura. “I know practically every person in this town. There are a hundred little old ladies from my church who would help. I’ll find somewhere for you to stay.”

  But Laura’s mind was made up. She was going to stay in the house whether he liked it or not. She stared up at the house, which looked about as devastated as she felt. “Thank you, but no. I need to do this—at least for one night.”

  Connor looked at his watch. “Maybe I’ll stop by here later tonight, just in case you change your mind.”

  Laura gasped, annoyed at herself for giving Connor the impression she needed rescuing. “Don’t you dare check on me. I’m a grown woman.” But she couldn’t really blame him. She was a wreck.

  Connor let his hands drop to his sides. “Then I guess it’s already settled.”

  She pulled at the single pearl hanging from her necklace. “I can survive one night.” Was she trying to convince him or herself?

  He thrust a glossy black business card toward her. “Listen, if you need anything, call me.”

  Laura read the card. OVERMAN REAL ESTATE.

  “The cell phone service is kind of sketchy out here,” he said. “You should be able to reach me from the hill over by the barn.”

  His eyes said he was sincere, but Laura had just learned she wasn’t a great judge of character. She folded the card in half. “I’ll be fine.”

  Letting out a deep sigh, he turned and headed for the large silver truck in the driveway.

  Seeing Connor walk away sent her pulse racing. She couldn’t afford to alienate him completely. Unfortunately, he was the only person who could get the answers from Thomas she needed and who could give her advice about how to handle the mess with the house. There was no way around it. She clenched her teeth together. “Connor, wait.�
��

  He stopped, resting one hand on the door handle of the truck.

  The words stuck in the back of her throat. She swallowed hard. “There is one thing I need you to do for me.”

  Chapter 2

  Connor found Thomas’s little red sports car, a gift for finishing law school, parked in front of the high school baseball field. Thomas’s dad had given the car to him when he returned to Wyatt Bend two weeks ago.

  Only a sliver of orange and pink remained above the horizon. Connor squinted through the shadows at the outline of Thomas sitting on the pitcher’s mound. Nostalgia crept through him. He and Thomas had spent most of their teen years on this field. Now Connor was back to clean up another mess Thomas had made, just like old times.

  Connor walked through the dugout and across first base.

  Thomas’s lanky arms rested on his knees, and his head hung down. “What took you so long?” he asked without looking at Connor.

  No matter how hard he tried, Connor continually found himself smoothing out conflicts between family members or resolving disputes on the job site. He cleared his throat. “I was talking to Laura.”

  Thomas’s face whipped up to Connor. “Why would you talk to Laura?”

  It had taken everything Connor had to leave her standing there alone, her skirt fluttering in the wind and heartbreak all over her face. “Well, you walked out on the girl. She was crushed. What was I supposed to do?”

  Thomas dug his heel into the dirt on the mound. “So, you’re still Mr. Nice Guy. I thought you’d grown out of that by now.”

  Connor shrugged off the remarks. The glassy tears in Laura’s baby-blue eyes had made it impossible for him to turn down her request to get the answers she deserved. “What happened back there, man?”

  Thomas groaned and fell onto his back. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t marry her.

  Connor crouched down beside his friend. Thomas’s face was relaxed, a stark contrast to the pain he had seen in Laura’s eyes. “Why not?”