Total pages in book: 120
Estimated words: 121755 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121755 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
“I really want Jacob to have what he wants, and he likes chocolate and peanut butter,” Alexis was fretting to me. “But that isn’t everyone’s taste. And peanut butter doesn’t exactly scream ‘Wedding!’ so I don’t know what to do.”
“Okay, first, and most importantly,” I instructed, “this is Jacob’s and your wedding, so nothing anyone else likes should come into consideration. People can support you and help you find your way to what you want, but if they start telling you what you should do, file it away as advice and stick with what you want. Bottom line, Alexis, it’s your day. Yours and Jacob’s. Nothing else matters. Okay?”
She nodded.
It was uncertain, but I’d get her there.
“And second, when it comes to cake, we need to start with how many guests you think you’ll have. You might need a two-tier, or three. Or I could do smaller cakes to give you three if you don’t want the guest numbers to go that high, but you want a taller cake. Or we could do a smaller cake and some cupcake towers. And each tier can be a different flavor profile. That means Jacob can have his favorite, you can have yours, and we can pick something universally liked for the last.”
“Ohmigod, that’s perfect!” Alexis exclaimed. “I didn’t think about it like that, but it totally makes sense.”
“Right.” I smiled at her. “So, moving forward from that, we’ll need to do a cake tasting. You give me some ideas. I’ll make cupcakes for, I don’t know, five or six of those ideas. You come over and taste them. Once we have the flavors, we’re in the perfect position. We just have to pick the decoration.”
“I couldn’t ask you to make five or six batches of cupcakes just for us to taste them,” she said.
“I can sell the rest of the batches at SC. So it’s no problem.”
Her eyes drifted from me, her gaze got fuzzy, and she mumbled, “Right.”
I turned to see what she was looking at and watched Luke Stark striding toward us.
Luke moving, standing, walking, sleeping, possibly even snoring would make any girl fuzzy, so I got that.
But…
Oh boy.
What now?
“Don’t want to disturb,” his deep voice rumbled toward Alexis when he made it to us. “This will only take a minute. You mind if I talk with Willow?”
“Nope!” she squeaked. “I’m gonna go grab a glass of wine. You want a glass of wine, Willow?” she asked me.
“Sure,” I answered.
She turned to Luke.
“None for me,” he said.
“Okay,” she replied, left her laptop with its dizzying array of wedding Pinterest boards and pins that she’d amassed, and she made her graceful way to her apartment.
Luke folded his long body into the chair beside me.
“I assume, if this was something I had to worry about, you wouldn’t be so cajz,” I remarked.
“He smiles.”
I blinked. “Sorry?”
“And actually laughs.”
My heart stuttered.
“They worry,” Luke continued. “I told them Gabe was smiling and laughing again, so they’d stop worrying. They didn’t come down here to see if you were going to put him through the wringer, like the other two did. They came down to meet the woman who made their son smile and laugh again.”
Ohshitohshitohshit.
I was going to start crying.
“Mike was just fucking with you about that hooked-up-with-another-Ariana shit,” Luke explained. “He’s like that. He shovels shit. But we’d just heard you run that bitch down, as you should, and talk Gabe up, as you should, so that’s where his humor went. You don’t know him, but you’ll learn.”
You’ll learn.
“Okay,” I pushed out.
“We met Denise. Ava was torn up, saying ‘she needs a man just like Gabe, I just wish that man wasn’t actually Gabe.’ That’s how we were all feeling. And in the end, what we felt was right.”
It really was, tragically.
“Okay,” I repeated.
“Didn’t meet Ariana. Ava didn’t either. She didn’t last as long as Denise. Still, Ava would talk with Shelby, and the woman got a nickname in our home. That Bitch.”
Sounded familiar.
Luke kept going.
“Shelby couldn’t stand her, so my wife couldn’t stand her. It took everything Shel had to be nice to her. But I reckon, Gabe needed to work his way through a woman like her so he’d recognize what he was getting when he found a woman like you.”
A woman like you.
My breath left me.
Whoosh.
Gone.
This might seem bad, but my need to concentrate on breathing helped me not burst into tears.
Luke, however, was breathing fine.
“Gabe ripped me a new one this morning for my part in that ambush. I told him he better stop underestimating his woman, or shit was gonna go south. He saw the wisdom of this. That said, he was also right. But they got down here the evening before, and Shelby was wound up about how Gabe would react that they showed, and then, for some fucked-up reason, she decided to go right to you. So Mike called me because he couldn’t talk her out of it. I couldn’t either. But at least someone was there to intervene if things went to shit.”