A Timeless Romance Anthology: Summer Wedding Collection

by Melanie Jacobson

  She strangled a laugh. That had definitely not come out right, but she could see that he was trying hard to be honest.

  He misunderstood the sound she made, and his head dropped. “I know. That sounds bad, like I didn’t think you were hot from that picture. I’m only going to get myself in more trouble for saying this, but I’ve had the chance to date some really good-looking women, and a lot of them are high maintenance and personality deficient. In all of our talks or emails or whatever, you seemed way too funny to be... Uh, I’m going to stop now. I don’t think I can go anywhere good with this.”

  She picked up and dropped several handfuls of sand. Her cheeks were still warm, but it had everything to do with his words. Staying distant would be safer, but everything he said was obnoxiously endearing. “I’m beginning to feel totally ridiculous about this whole situation.”

  “Don’t,” he said. “I think I’d be kind of ticked if I thought you’d blown me off. But I swear I didn’t. And I’m really praying that you’re getting my huge point in all of this, which is that it’s nice that you’re pretty, but I already thought you were pretty before, and that’s not why I’m into you. You’re funny, and quick, and laid back. Are you going to forgive me?”

  He was into her? The rest of her was warming up nicely too.

  These two days had only been awkward because she’d been so stupid about her insecurities. If getting healthy had quit being about looking good weeks ago, what was her problem? Grayson was long gone, and she needed to take back the last piece of control over her life from him, to end the grip his words had held on her sense of self, and to dictate her own happiness and well-being. Why stop at the scale?

  She stood and strolled toward him. A half smile appeared on his face. She reached down, slipped her hands around his lapels, and tugged. It was enough to send him scrambling to his feet. She gazed up at him and the grin lighting his face.

  “I forgive you,” she said, smoothing his jacket. “Forgive me too?”

  “For what?”

  “Being lame and high maintenance.”

  His smile softened as his gaze grew intense. He slipped a hand into her hair, cradling the back of her head and pulling her slowly toward him to give her time to break away if she wanted to. She didn’t want to.

  His lips brushed hers with a touch as light as the tropical breeze, but when she didn’t pull away, he pressed harder. She slipped her arms around his neck and returned the kiss. He groaned low in his throat, and his free arms slipped around her waist to pull her against him. She wondered if he could feel her heart pounding against the hard wall of his chest, but decided she didn’t care.

  He broke the kiss to drop his forehead against hers. “I’ve been wanting to do that since the first time you made me laugh out loud. I’m so glad that’s not the effect funny people normally have on me because I don’t think my guy friends would be into me kissing them every time they made a joke.”

  “I’m into it,” she said, clasping her hands tighter.

  “I’m into you,” he repeated, his voice quieter now and his smile gone. He leaned down and kissed her again, harder and hungrier. Heat exploded inside her, sweeping through her in seconds as he parted her lips with his and explored the kiss even more. Her knees buckled, and he held her tight. “I’m not letting go,” he said against her mouth. “We’re going to look really stupid trying to dig out wedding rings and do our wedding duties tomorrow like this.” He tightened his arms around her waist.

  She sprinkled kisses along his jawline, loving the scrape of his five o’clock shadow against her lips. “We’d better practice then, because I don’t think I could let go if I wanted to.”

  He kissed her until she had to pull away to breathe, and when she leaned her head against his chest to smile up at him, he brushed another kiss against her forehead. “I need to do something. Can you give me a minute?”

  Now? She straightened. “Sure.”

  He pulled his phone from his pocket and sat back down on the sand, his fingers tapping like mad on the screen. He stopped and smiled at her, and a second later her phone beeped. He tugged her down beside him but said nothing. She fished her phone from her clutch and read the text.

  This is how I hoped it would be.

  She smiled and sent her answer. How sad.

  He looked at her, startled.

  She leaned over and stole another kiss. “It’s even better.”

  Melanie Bennett Jacobson is an avid reader, amateur cook, and champion shopper. She consumes astonishing amounts of chocolate, chick flicks, and romance novels. After meeting her husband online, she is now living happily married in Southern California with her growing family and a series of doomed houseplants. Melanie is a former English teacher and a sometime blogger who loves to laugh and make others laugh. In her down time (ha!), she writes romantic comedies and pines after beautiful shoes.

  Other Works by Melanie Jacobson

  Click the covers to visit the author’s page on Amazon.

  Chapter One

  People who say that everything looks better in the light of a new day are total liars. Sometimes a new day means misery.

  Adam called the wedding off exactly fifty-two minutes before my wedding dress showed up on my doorstep. The doorbell for the delivery rang in the middle of me running his pictures through my paper shredder. I didn’t even check the peephole before opening it. Would it matter if it had been a serial killer? I still held a couple of pictures in my fist when I answered and saw the UPS man standing there.

  He had his little handheld delivery scanner held out to me and a smile on his face. “Hi there. I have a delivery for Juliet Moore. Are you Juliet?” His cheery voice made my hand tighten. The pictures crumpled into little balls. He must not have really needed me to confirm my identity, because before I could answer, he said, “If you could sign for this, ma’am...” He nudged the scanner thing my direction.

  I blinked, making no move to sign anything. “Do you know what’s in that box?” I asked.

  His brow furrowed, not that it had far to furrow—‌the man in brown was dangerously close to a uni-brow. “I don’t really—”

  “It’s a dress.” I cut him off and felt guilty for not feeling guilty about it. “A wedding dress.”

  His face contorted somewhere between the furrowed brow and a smile he wasn’t sure he should offer. His mouth seemed to be forming the word, “Congratulations.” But he never actually said it. Apparently he had enough intelligence to notice I wasn’t smiling. Or maybe he noticed the black mascara trails streaking down my cheeks. His gaze slipped to the wrinkled pictures in my hands.

  “A wedding dress,” I repeated. “For my wedding. I spent two months’ worth of wages on a gorgeous, perfect Reem Acra gown—‌one that would have made Cinderella’s fairy godmother look like a fashion-challenged tightwad. But do you know what happens now?”

  He shook his head—‌a slight shake. He seemed terrified to move.

  “Nothing. Nothing happens now, because Adam, the groom, has a girlfriend, a girlfriend who isn’t me. He has another girlfriend, or I guess just one girlfriend now, since I am no longer part of this equation. I am also no longer his fiancé. I will never, ever be his wife. So the dress you’re so keen on me signing for? It’s for nothing. Nothing at all.”

  We stared at each other. With my lips pressed tightly together, I tasted salt from dried tears. Finally, when it seemed I’d ranted the UPS man into a mute statue, I threw my arms in the air and said, “Give me that.” I pulled the scanner from his hands, scrawled a vicious mark into the screen, and shoved it back at him.

  He scampered off my steps without a goodbye or backwards glance. The box sat on my porch, a pathetic little tower of shame.

  The dress would hang in my closet. Which would be a good thing, I supposed. No sense wasting the perfect dress on him—‌cheating, lying, son of a—

  The phone rang.

  I didn't answer it—‌couldn’t answer it. What would I say? I’d just sobbed the m
ost personal details of my life to a complete stranger. What would I say to someone who knew me well enough to call?

  With my fingers still tightly fisted around his pictures, I managed to wrap my arms around the box and heft it into my entryway. It slipped and fell against the little table by the door and knocked over the bone china vase I’d been given at a bridal shower.

  I kicked the box at the same time little white shards of pottery showered my feet. Stupid Adam! Stupid wedding! Stupid, stupid me for spending that much money on a dress I’d never wear.

  The phone rang several times more.

  I didn't answer it. Not once.

  In my more honest moments of the entire after-break-up agony, I recognized signs of relief. His lunatic, racist mother would never be my mother-in-law. Score one for me. His creepy brother would never leer at me again. Score two. I’d never have to sit through another dinner at his favorite French restaurant, even though he knew I hated French cuisine. Score three.

  I recounted all the reasons for relief instead of anguish, surprised that there were so many reasons to be relieved as I fed photos, playbills, tickets, and notes into the shredder. While the shredder did its job, I systematically deleted everything off my hard drive as well. If I could have taken an eraser to the man himself, I’d have done it.

  And somewhere between the delivery of the box holding my wedding dress and the next morning, I had a mental breakdown with the realization that all of Adam’s pictures had made it through the shredder, including a few where I’d actually looked good.

  Why hadn’t I just cut him out? Why had I shredded the whole photo? Why had I been so careful in deleting everything?

  Idiot!

  I fell asleep amidst piles of shredded photo paper, tape, and failed attempts at piecing one of those pictures back together.

  I awoke to the chimes of my doorbell, and swiped at the shredded bits of photo paper stuck to my face. It took a moment to realize what the noise was until the chimes went off again.

  “I’m coming!” I shouted in the quietest way possible; the light streaming in from the windows slashed my eyes like cat claws. A crying headache. I wiped at my eyes to remove the leftover saline granules and opened the door.

  I stared at my best friend and roommate, trying to focus on her between the blur and the headache. “Alison? Don’t you have your key?” She was a buyer for several major chain stores and travelled all over to view new clothing lines.

  “Key’s on the counter in my bathroom.” Her eyes narrowed as she really looked at me. “What happened?” She said the words in that sympathetic voice people used when dealing with small children or the mentally impaired.

  “Why would you assume something’s going on?”

  She tugged her suitcase into the apartment. “Juliet, honey, it’s obvious. You look hung over.”

  I shut the door. “I do not.”

  She reached at something attached to my head. Feeling like she’d yanked out half my hair, I threw my hands to the offended spot as she held up a long strand of hairy tape. She shook it in front of my face. “Your eyes are puffy and bloodshot, your cheek looks like the victim of a bad tattoo artist, you’ve got tape stuck in your hair, and what is this? Am I walking on glass?”

  She looked down at the white shards crunching underfoot as she shifted her position.

  I shrugged before she could complain that we’d lose the deposit if we scratched the floors and led the way to the living room so I didn’t have to explain out loud. She could see the remnants of my ruination and figure it out for herself.

  A gasp sounded from behind me as she stepped into the living room. I turned to watch her as she surveyed my own personal ground zero.

  Her mouth hung open, and her eyebrows bunched up into a knot above her nose. Her pity face. I both hated her pity face, and needed it at the same time.

  “You didn’t even open the dress to look at it?” She acted intensely more scandalized about the unopened box than the fact that Adam had dumped me.

  “What’s the point of looking at a dress I don’t get to wear?” I slumped onto the couch, shredded photo paper falling off the cushions in a fluttery snowfall of pathetic.

  She sat next to me, but I could tell from the way her feet were placed on the carpet and the way her muscles tensed that she was ready to pounce on the box and open it herself if I’d let her.

  But I didn’t want to see anything.

  She finally realized that the permission she wanted wasn’t coming and settled back against the cushions. “So what now?”

  I leaned back too, rolling my head so I could stare at the ceiling. “An excellent question.” It seemed I should probably cry some more, but no more tears came. I felt hollowed out and useless, like a pumpkin the day after Halloween.

  “What do I do with all the shower gifts?” I asked after several minutes of us staring at the ceiling.

  She turned her head towards me. “Keep ’em. If anyone asks, have them call Adam so he can explain everything. Besides, the new blender is fabulous, and now I get to share it with you.”

  I ignored her joy over the blender. “This was so not part of my plan...”

  “You can’t plan life. Life is that thing happening while you’re busy making plans. It just is what it is.”

  “It just sucks.”

  She smiled. “That, too.”

  “I have to tell my parents. What do I tell them? And I have to cancel everything. The flowers, the invitations, the caterers, the reception center. All those deposits—‌down the toilet.” I moved to my feet and began to pace, energized by the fury of this realization. I was going to end up losing a small fortune on this not-happening wedding.

  “That slithering snake!” I shouted, glad to be able to channel the anger. “He insisted on the very best of everything. Only the caterers his mom approved of. A reception hall that wouldn’t shame his father when his business buddies showed up. The very best, which translates into the very most expensive! On everything! And I was the one who paid the deposits on all of it!”

  I kicked the shredded remnants of our relationship. “I’m going to kill him. Kill him, resuscitate him, and kill him again!”

  “Killing people is against the law.” Alison reminded me, her eyes carefully tracking my movements as I paced and kicked and threw punches into the air, imagining Adam’s face.

  “Not if they don’t find the body!”

  Alison frowned. “I still think it’s against the law. It’s just harder to try the case in court. You’re the lawyer; you should know that.”

  I let fly another kick, this one landing solidly against the box with the dress.

  I sank beside the box, my hand resting reverentially against the side. “Next week was going to be the big photo shoot for my bridal portraits. I was going to get my hair done, my nails done, and wear this dress.” I let out a bitter laugh. “It was the only thing Adam actually paid for. He insisted we had to use this guy because he was a friend of the family, and it would upset his parents to snub their friends. I told him if he wanted that guy, he’d have to pay for it. So he did. He paid for several locations and sittings. But because they were family friends, the photographer was the only thing fully refundable.” I blinked and looked up at her, shaking my head.

  Alison had on her pity face again. “Oh, hon. I am so sorry.” She moved down from the couch to sit next to me and my box of failed possibility, and put her arms around me.

  I shook my head. “He not only ruined what should have been a great day of pampering, he doesn’t even have to pay the deposit.”

  She stiffened and pulled back, her eyes no longer filled with pity, but something else entirely.

  I knew that look. It was the one that got me constant after-school detentions back in high school. It was the one that ended up with both of us taken into police custody after she talked me into helping her spray paint her ex-boyfriend’s car with the word “liar.” The reason we weren’t actually arrested was the same reason she’d been a
ble to talk me into carrying out her devilish plans in the first place.

  And that look was back, the one that promised vengeance of the four-horsemen variety.

  “What?” I should have known better than to ask.

  “He already paid for it?” she asked.

  I nodded slowly.

  “What happens if you show up at the photo shoot?”

  I pulled farther away from her as if she had a disease I didn’t want to catch. “What kind of loser gets bridal portraits done when they aren’t going to be a bride?”

  “Don’t be so dramatic. Of course you’re going to be a bride. You’ll just have a groom upgrade when it happens. And it isn’t loser-ish to think ahead. He’s just giving you a wedding present for when you marry a real man.”

  “No!” I put all my remaining energy into that one word so she’d know I meant it.

  But she acted like she hadn’t even heard as she soldiered on. “Yes. You need to do this. He owes you, and you need to stand up for yourself. Do you think he’s going to offer to pay his half for all the deposits you lost?”

  “No...” This time the word was one of defeat, not conviction.

  “Exactly. No. Which means it’s only fair. He can’t get a refund on a photo shoot that took place already.”

  She stood and slid her finger under the packaging tape, tugging it free from the cardboard. Big fluffy plastic bags of packaged air floated out as she opened the side wings of the box. And there, in a dress bag so elegant, it could only have come from Reem Acra, waited the most incredible gown ever designed.

  Alison pulled the bag from the packaging and unzipped it. Her smile went from something feral to something soft. “It’s perfect, Juliet.”

  “It’s perfect for an actual bride.” I countered.

  “It’s perfect for a strong, talented woman who carries herself like royalty. It’s perfect for a princess.”

  That was the point I stopped arguing with her. I wanted to have my spa day, with my hair and nails done. I wanted to wear the dress that had made me smile for several weeks after placing the order. I wanted to feel pretty and elegant and special.