“I drew pages and pages of dresses. The more I drew, the more original the gowns became. They started reflecting the core of the woman, her identity. It was fun. The next day I’d go back to whipping people in court, blasting the other side, inwardly knowing my life was rotting and something had to give.”
“I’m sorry, June.” Reece wrapped his arms around me, folding me into his warmth as if I’d been there a million times before.
“I’m over it.” My voice wobbled. “I am. It was a long time ago.” I sniffled.
Then he sniffled.
I snuggled into his warmth and sniffled and he sniffled again. I felt a tremor in his chest.
I pulled back and studied those green eyes, through the tears of mine. “Are you ... you’re not crying, are you?”
He coughed, then wiped a hand across his face and turned away. “A few tears only.”
“What?” I scooted around in front of him. “Why are you crying?”
“Why? Isn’t that obvious?”
“What? What is obvious?”
“You were married in a courthouse, on a lunch break, in a work suit, without your family. That’s sad, June. That’s sad.” He gave me another comforting hug. “He never should have allowed that, June. You deserved more.”
I couldn’t even see through the hot water in my eyes, not because of the lunch-hour wedding but because Reece, my Reece, my friend who I was trying ridiculously hard not to fall in love with, was upset
for
me.
“You should have had your dress, your family, the whole huge, fluffy thing.” His voice dipped and split, pained.
My shoulders shook. I tried to hold it in, tried to control myself, tried to wrap up the pain and put it back in the sewing box, slamming the lid tight, as I’d done hundreds of times ... but it didn’t work.
I burst into tears.
Yes, it had been sad.
It was still sad. I was still a mess because I’d caused the mess.
And yet, what was making me really cry was how compassionate Reece was. He understood, he grasped the pain and the loss, and he was upset
for
me.
He wrapped me up tight again in his arms, his chest heaving a bit, and soon all thoughts of my cold and lifeless past with Grayson left, whizzing out the French doors and into the frothing ocean, where I imagined they drowned in the waves, and I smiled.
Yep. I smiled through my tears.
Leoni, Estelle, and I worked for endless hours on August’s wedding dress, the bridesmaids’ dresses for September and me, and other orders.
We had fittings, calls, e-mails, some frantic, some panicked, some utterly grateful for their beaudacious dresses ...
And in between the crush and the rush, I smiled.
I felt it.
Happiness.
Seven Things I’m Worried About
1.
Since I am still, technically, married, I can only be friends with Reece, but there is no way I can be “just friends” for much longer because he is delectable and that is a problem.
2.
But! I don’t want to be involved with any man. I don’t trust myself. I don’t want to get hurt. I am not all together, I’m still emotionally wobbly.
3.
Besides! He is only here for eight weeks total. I will not get involved with a man for eight weeks and then be discarded. I am not a beach toy.
4.
How poor will I be by the time I get divorced?
5.
What if the reporter giggles in a mean way at my dresses?
6.
Earthquakes. Strange diseases. Weird sounds at night.
7.
Morgan. Leoni. She works so hard. I want her to be happy. I’ll make her and Morgan matching lace skirts.
I played Scrabble. I spelled these words: “ache,” “alone,” “lace.”
I lost.
I ate a cream puff. Okay, two cream puffs.
C
HAPTER
7
Reece and I headed down to the beach one sunny, golden afternoon to visit the sea anemones in the tide pools for yet another date.
He picked up a black, broken butterfly shell and tossed it back into the ocean.
“I have never found a butterfly shell in one piece,” I mused.
“And you want one?”
“Yes. I’m down here all the time and mostly I see half of the shell, not the whole one, and if it is whole, it’s chipped.”
“I’ll find a whole beach butterfly for you.”
He grinned at me. He was so overpoweringly masculine he, well, overpowered me. Sometimes I think our society has beat the man out of men, but this one, no. He still had all the man roaring around in him.
He hummed a few notes, soaring and light. “I’ve found my butterfly girl, between the sand and the sea ... but she keeps running away from me ... baby we can be together, if you’ll trust in me ...”
The man was too much. Too much for my poor heart, which was pitter-pattering on high speed.
He took my hand and I ceased to be able to think. When you’re holding hands with a singing cowboy, it’s hard to think.
“Remember I’ve told you that since we’re friends, we can hold hands,” he told me.
“Yes. You told me that.” I was breathless.
“Let’s dance down to the tide pools, June.”
“Dance?”
“Yep.” He wrapped an arm around my waist, my hand in his, and pulled me close. His heat burned me, head to heart to toe, those bright eyes flirty, sexy ... disastrous.
I should say no!
Say yes, June!
“Okay, cowboy. I’ll dare it.”
I put my hand on his huge shoulder, not an inch between our bodies ...
I dared to dance in the arms of a singing cowboy, on the beach, in Oregon, on a summer day, my blond curls flying in the breeze, my white lace, ruffled skirt swirling around my knees.
Later I reminded myself,
again
, that I was not falling in love with Reece.
No, I was not.
I was not going to fall in love because I am not divorced and Grayson has turned my life into a relentless nightmare that he controls. I told myself it was lust, I was rebounding. I was passionate and needed attention.
I could not fall in love.
No, I couldn’t.
Heck no.
Reece twirled me through the sunshine, sand between our toes, singing a song about a butterfly girl.
Baby, we can be together, if you’ll trust in me.
“This article is going to be huge for my career.”
“Good. Hopefully for mine, too,” I said. The reporter from
Couture Fashion
and I clinked our glasses, filled high with pink lemonade. Her name was Virginia Bescotti, named after her grandmother. “All the girls in our family are named after grandmas, great-grandmas, or great-aunts. Tradition. Our other tradition is marrying bad men the first time around. We call them starter marriages. The second marriages always work out.”
She was about twenty-eight and wore red-rimmed glasses, her dark hair piled on top of her head, where it refused to stay. She had a toothy smile, a dimple, and had been divorced for a year.
We sure had a lot to talk about. By the end of the interview and photo shoot, after the photographer left, we were well into our sisterhood, my nerves calm, my laughter back. And I’d been so worried!
“My article on all your wedding dresses is going to get about six pages of coverage in
Couture Fashion
. It’s gonna set your business on fire. Flames flyin’. We’ve got a style-busting national audience, with a zillion international readers, plus we’re online, and this is gonna be big-ola. Big-ola. You need to get the snake to sign the divorce papers before it comes out.”
“Don’t I know it.” I thought of all the bills I’d paid during my marriage with the snake. The mortgage, food, utilities. How Grayson had always said, “I’ll write you a check, sugar, you don’t think your own husband is going to cheat you on that, do you?”
I learned quickly that, yes, he would. He did.
When this article came out, he would realize I’d made it, instead of sensing there was success there, or would be there, and he’d hold on to our marriage with sharp claws, as Cherie predicted. Would he win in court? Probably not. Did I want to risk it? No.
“Get him to sign if you have to sit on him and prod him with a smokin’ hot cattle brand,” Virginia said. “I hijacked my husband’s boat until he signed.”
“I need a cattle brand,” I muttered.
She flipped through my wedding scrapbooks. “You are an out-of-this-orbit talented designer and that is a freakin’ awesome dress. A white wedding dress with feathered wings. Who would have thunk that up?”
“The bride worked at the Audubon Society. She loved birds. Her husband worked there, too. I made matching wings for his tux.”
“And this prancy-dancy one!” She pointed again. “The tutu effect. How long did it take you to sew the gauze?”
“The gauze was endless. See how it sparkles?” Think of Sleeping Beauty’s flying fairy godmothers in blue, purple, and pink and you have the dress.
“This is my favorite, this gold sheath, Cleopatra-y style, with the white veil and long train. Makes me want to climb a pyramid.”
“That was an Egyptologist. Studies Egypt. Has a doctorate. Her husband is a neurosurgeon. Better to make a dress from her studies than his.”
Virginia laughed. “You could have sewed a brain and cranium dress, but yuck. If I had known what was going to happen to me during my marriage, I would have walked down the aisle with my wedding dress on fire.” She tapped her forehead for a second. One of her quirks. The other quirk was cracking her gum. She’d chewed an entire pack while we were sitting together. She tapped her pen on my table. “Maybe an enflamed wedding dress would have gotten my attention.”
“Well,” I quipped, “then you might have danced a jig for Teresa Terrio’s dress. Within the folds we placed tiny white lights. It was a night wedding, all the lights were off, and she made quite a statement walking down the aisle.”
Virginia blinked at me. “You are so funky in the head. Make sure you forward me that photo, too.”
“I’ll do it. I think of her as the Firefly Bride.”
“You just wrote my caption.” She cracked her gum. “You’re gonna be busting out with work soon, June. Get ready and remember to get those papers signed pronto; hip hop to it.”
The next morning I dealt with a Bridezilla.
She came for her fitting with her bridesmaids from Portland.
I could tell that her frazzled bridesmaids had come to hate her. She was bossy, abrupt, and gratingly difficult. I told her bridesmaids to go downstairs and handed them a bottle of wine, even though it was only 10:00 a.m. They practically skipped down my stairs. I kept the screechy bride upstairs and told her that unless she wanted a bridesmaids’ revolt, she needed to start pretending she was a human. She started to protest and I held up my open scissors quite close to the bodice of her dress.
“Calm down, Elise. Be nice. This is one day out of your life. One—”
“It’s my day, my wedding! My day! My wedding! Me and my wedding! I’ve planned it for years, since I was a little girl. It’s about me!” She actually stomped her feet and clenched her fists, tears bursting forth.
“And you’re a little girl throwing a temper tantrum. You need to make your wedding day the day people remember you as being the kindest, most peaceful bride ever, not the day that your bridesmaids drank themselves under the table because you unleashed a drooling monster with sharp teeth.”
She cried, told me all her problems.
I wiped her face, gave her lemon sugar cookies and a glass of white wine. (No red wine allowed in my studio.)
“Now shape up, Elise. You need to enjoy this time of your life, not tear your hair out, or worse, your bridesmaids’ hair out, by the roots.”
“Oh, I know! I love you, June! And I love my dress! Have I violated the Bridezilla contract?”
“If you stand still so I don’t deliberately poke you in the boobs with this pin, I’ll pretend you were docile today. Last warning, though.”
I dealt with other brides and bridesmaids, I sewed on supersonic speed, I e-mailed and took phone calls.
And not for a second did I forget about my dear and smokin’ hot
friend
Reece.
He’d done it all, that’s why I teared up.
A bonfire on the beach would keep us warm as the sun dipped into the sunset, sparks flying, shadows dancing. Reece had laid out a red-and-white tablecloth on the sand for us and our pasta Alfredo, garlic bread, clam chowder, salad, and chocolates. He opened a bottle of wine, placed daisies in a glass mason jar, and lit two candles.
I couldn’t even speak.
“Hey,” Reece said, slinging an arm around my back. “What’s wrong, June?”
“Nothing.” I turned my head and studied the white caps of the waves, dusk drawing handfuls of liquid blues and crimsons across the horizon.
“There is something wrong. Tell me, June, please.”
I wiped a tear from my eye, and another one, bending my head so my curls would cover my face.
“June ...”
So embarrassing.
“Did I say something wrong?”
“No, oh no, Reece. You didn’t say anything wrong.” I sniffled and snuffled and he made sympathetic sounds and that made me cry more. I used my sweatshirt sleeve to wipe my tears. “I try not to cry and blubber about too much.”
“Why do you do that? Let it rip, that’s what I think.”
How do you tell someone that you tried to stop crying a long time ago because you were so hurt, so despairing, that tears didn’t work anymore? How do you say that without sounding pathetic? How do you say you try not to cry because you’d taught yourself not to when the loneliness was about to kill you, without sounding completely closed off emotionally? How do you say that for a long time anger has burned all of your tears away without reminding him of an anger freak?
He turned my face toward him and wiped my tears with his thumbs. “Tell me why you’re crying. It can’t be the food, because I didn’t cook it. If I had cooked, that would be a reason to cry.”
I laughed, then let the tears flow again, and his fingers caught them.
“I’m crying because you put so much effort into this dinner for us.”
His face grew quizzical. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s so thoughtful.” I made a weird gulping sound in my throat. “It’s so considerate and kind.”
“I wanted to do this for you. You work too hard. You make me tired watching you work. And I wanted to hang out with someone funny who knows a lot about lace and sewing needles, so you’re it.”
“Oh, Reece.” He had walked straight into my heart that first day. “I love pasta Alfredo, you know that, so you brought it.”
“You have good taste.”
“And I love chocolates.”
“A woman needs chocolate in her life.”
“She does, she does.”
He handed me the golden box of chocolates. “Enjoy.”
“And I told you that I love daisies, too, because they’re so simple, and there they are.”
He clipped off the stem of a daisy and tucked it behind my ear, then stuck a daisy behind his ear, too. “June MacKenzie, you are the most open, sincere woman I have ever met.”
“And Reece O’Brien, you are ... you are ...”
You are a man I could wear daisies with each day for the rest of my life.
“You are a man who needs a daisy chain crown and I’m going to make you one.”
“Good. I’ll wear it. But first, let’s eat. There’s hardly anything on this planet that can’t be made better by pasta Alfredo.”
Later, when the stars were twinkling, scattered with magical abandon across the heavens, and after we ate the pasta Alfredo, which did make everything better, and talked as if we’d known each other forever, as usual, Reece said, “Here, hon, snuggle in.” He lifted up a blanket, crawled under it, then pulled me toward his chest. “Let’s rest.”
I scrambled under the blanket. He pulled two more over us as the fire sparked, the waves crashed, and the moon glowed bright and white.
Let’s rest.
That’s what I needed to do. I needed to rest. Not worry. Not fret. Not analyze him or us or the future that I was still so scared to step into.
“June, I think you’re the only person I could talk to forever.”
“Same here, Reece, same here.” I readjusted his daisy crown.
I ignored that blast of pain in my chest that said forever wasn’t going to happen with Reece. I lived at the beach. He lived in eastern Oregon. I was an emotional crackpot with a pile of anger and a long divorce.