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

  Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop

  Our Bridal Shop

  The Butterfly Dream

  The Family Wish

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  RELAY PUBLISHING EDITION, MARCH 2019

  Copyright © 2019 Relay Publishing Ltd.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United Kingdom by Relay Publishing. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  www.relaypub.com

  Blurb

  Every family has its secrets, and the March family is no exception.

  For the March sisters, Match Made in Devon, the bridal shop opened by their parents, was a real-world example of what true love was all about. But for Freesia Day, the shop represents the family and love she has been denied her entire life.

  Now, reluctantly accepted by her estranged sisters, Freesia still finds herself torn between wanting to know the truth about her biological family whilst believing they don’t deserve to know her at all.

  So Freesia does what she does best and plans to leave the painful past behind, setting her sights on a new life in New York, and the career she’s always dreamed of. But fate has other ideas in the form of Jay—a soul as lost as she is, and one with an even darker past.

  Freesia knows a future with Jay is impossible – they are two sides of a very different coin – and he is just another link that’s keeping her from running. But when Freesia’s past comes knocking at her door, she realizes that running won’t save her anymore. This time, in order to protect her heart, Freesia has to stand firm and face the past’s painful secrets head on… regardless of the consequences.

  Three women bound by fate and family will have to struggle together to redefine what ‘family’ means and discover the raw truth where forgiveness meets love.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  End of The Family Wish

  Thank you!

  About Danielle Blair

  Also by Relay Publishing

  1

  Freesia

  Freesia Day practiced what she would say to the police. The guy was wet. Like the wrong end of a firehose wet. For the purposes of picking him out of a future lineup: tall—his green eyes and soggy lashes had been level with the top of Elias March’s vintage black truck cab when she pulled up beside him; trim build; thirty-ish; beard stubble the color of coffee grounds and matched to his hair piled long and unruly and dripping atop his head; pasty skin—lighter than hers, certainly—but for two ruddy swipes, cheekbones to lips. Whether these were caused by exertion or stress, she couldn’t say, though he seemed out of breath. And yes, she knew that serial killers came in all tax brackets and sometimes looked like a black and white print ad for a timepiece and wore Etienne loafers, and that it was entirely possible that he had stolen the bumblebee-colored Lamborghini she had seen abandoned by the roadside a mile back, driver’s door popped open. But the stranger overrode her instinct for self-preservation the instant her tires crawled beside him, navigating the highway headed south, and he glanced up and his expression mirrored hers: incompatible.

  His very own storm.

  Don’t do this, Freesia.

  While she waged her internal battle—you judging him by appearance is no difference than them judging you for yours…Jesus, what people around here do, help strangers, ’cept you don’t belong here—Freesia braked and shifted the gear to park. She stretched across the seat and hand-cranked the passenger window down, her pulse already heavy.

  “Need a lift?”

  He squinted through the deluge, took his time answering, contemplating, as if he wasn’t on an isolated stretch of road that might not see another passerby for hours. His gaze did not waver from hers but for a brief detour south, to where her gauzy poet blouse hung away from her body. She scrambled back into the driver’s seat.

  That all-too-familiar edge unsheathed in her gut, a defensiveness that, of late, seemed unfounded the more she had relaxed into her Devon surroundings, an ever-present worry that held fast to old labels and best-forgotten practices. It was entirely possible that in a low-lying area prone to flash flooding, he might be of a mind that climbing into a vehicle with someone like her was his least palatable option. In light of his hesitation, handsome was in danger of treading backward and drowning in ugly.

  “I’m a mess.”

  Painful. Obvious. He peeled his collar from his neck, but he wasn’t talking drenched clothes against her vinyl seats. The whites of his eyes were pink, his eyelids bloated. Pretty boy had been crying.

  “Get in.”

  He climbed inside and sealed them off from the rain’s sibilance—door, rolled-up window, all of it. Colossal drops bombed the cab like pellets fired at a tin can, not quite hail but far from polite. Cedarwood and leather and the spice of something eternally classy lifted from the droplets on his skin and reached her nostrils. His disheveled suit had the unmistakable silk texture of a tuxedo. One final bump of Free, you’re gone tricked up her spine before a weak smile from his lips snatched away all her female intuition.

  Have mercy but he was beautiful damaged goods.

  “That your car back there?” Freesia glanced out the back window, mostly to look at something that didn’t steal her words and her breath like the man who sat next to her. She expected to see more of the endless cotton rows she’d passed, but saw only rivulets on the glass and the emerging fog of their combined body heat. Her gaze slid firmly to his. Now who was painful and obvious? Along these back roads, unless he was a sharecropper with a Swiss bank account, the yellow coupe with the vertical door wing was most certainly his.

  “My brother’s.”

  “Won’t he be upset? All that leather and…” She couldn’t imagine the interior. Diamond-encrusted gear shift? Twenty-four carat gold dials? Seats crafted from the foreskin of a blue whale?

  “He’s dead.”

  Again, words and breath vaporized.

  “I’m sorry.” Ninety-nine percent for the guy’s loss; one percent for thinking about whale penises during what was clearly the throes of a nervous breakdown. He curled his shoulders, a protective measure that exaggerated his slouch. Never had it been more apparent to Freesia that money didn’t solve all problems.

  The stranger nodded absently, his five-yard stare out the windshield whisking him ten-thousand miles away. In her head, she sampled conversational follow-ups—something along the lines of boy-it’s-really-coming-down, a mileage estimate to
the nearest gas station, a confession that she couldn’t decide if he was unbelievably attractive because or in spite of him being soaked.

  “Did you call roadside?”

  He blinked free of his daydream. “What?”

  “The car?”

  “It works fine.”

  A sarcastic huff of what the hell? slipped free of her lips, dangerously close to a laugh. “Won’t after the locals get ahold of it.”

  “It’s insured.”

  Her mood bunched. “Are you for real right now?”

  He went from studying the crystal cross hanging from the mirror, the stack of sketch materials beside her, to studying her. “I’ve been more real with you in the past two minutes than I’ve been in my entire life. Than I ever can be again.”

  His words gathered the day and deposited the bleak landscape at her core. She might have blocked the darkness, but her own gray had settled inside at the prospect of leaving Devon in two days with more questions than answers, of letting go of one dream to follow another because life didn’t let you have both. The aches mingled and swelled and traveled her body, together.

  Free, you’re gone. Don’t make his storm yours.

  “We could trade cars. Extend that real.”

  The sun came out in the form of a smile while the cloudburst flexed, the storm close enough to touch. Laughter rolled through his chest.

  “This truck is real,” he said. “Carburetor-fueled engine. An old tune slipping free of the speakers. Bench seat…”

  The stranger’s chest lifted, stretching free from bad posture while his voice became animated clear of bad head space. He splayed his manicured hand on the vinyl, little space between them. His only ring, a silver and onyx tribal-esque symbol, weighed the last finger of his right hand.

  Incompatible.

  “It’s breaking down all the time…” Freesia added.

  It wasn’t lost on Freesia that Elias’s truck picked this moment in time to idle strong beneath them while it seemed to hold this broken man. Her stepsister, Charlotte, swore that was the way of it, was why she had asked her husband, Nash, to fix the old clunker time and again instead of selling it. She swore the old truck brought people back from where they’d lost themselves.

  “Is it yours?” he said.

  “My father’s.”

  “Won’t he be upset? All this water…”

  “He’s dead.”

  Though she echoed the stranger, she paused less. The gap meant something. Less time, less attachment, she supposed.

  “I’m sorry.” Ninety-nine percent sincerity. One percent solidarity on the shitty hand life had dealt them both. His gaze trained to the photo of Elias and Stella Irene when they were twelve, held in place by the vent slats, no doubt running through the math, wondering why someone who looked like Freesia kept two pale children from the 1960s on the dash.

  She surveyed the clouds, low enough to skim the hood. Unable to guess the storm’s natural end but unwilling to let it go just yet, she asked, “Where were you headed?”

  “No idea. I barely remember climbing out of the car.”

  Freesia knew that discord between the head and body. “Like you became a bystander to your life but didn’t care enough to fix the moment.”

  “Exactly.” His voice was reverent; his eyelids tight as if he strained to understand how she had read his mind.

  “I was in Chora once, in Greece. It’s this town at the foot of a hilltop monastery, laid out like a maze—tiny shops, white walls, confusing passageways. During my time there, I learned it was the only place I could go to forget, like a puzzle that forced me to engage to find my way back. One day I heard the distant clanking of a goat-herder bell. I had walked a valley all day and burned in the sun. I didn’t remember leaving Chora.”

  Freesia had turned to face the man beside her, her knee propped on the seat, her back to the world outside the truck. He had mirrored her pose.

  “What did you do? After?”

  “I shared bread with two Orthodox monks in heavy robes who were climbing the trails. I told them what had happened, that I supposed I had wanted to disappear. One of them said he was sure I had missed the point of it all, that I had wanted, instead, to be found.”

  The stranger clung to her words, eyes pinched, as far away as he’d been earlier, only this time, beside her on that rolling, green hillside. And when she fell silent, he inhaled as if he’d only just remembered to breathe. He glanced out the windshield, straightened, cranked the window down and sampled the air, then placed his ringed hand on the door handle, more like a proper passenger who had overstayed the kindness of a stranger.

  Freesia wanted the rain to return, to keep him inside the truck a moment longer, but it had moved on.

  “Looks like the storm has passed.”

  Painful. Obvious.

  “I should let you get on your way.” He popped the door ajar. “Thank you.”

  His thank you was throaty, glum, tender, everything and nothing to do with shelter from the elements. A different variety of lost surfaced in his eyes. He made no move to leave.

  “I might need a name if this story about a yellow sports car is to be believed,” she said.

  “So that you know you weren’t a bystander but didn’t care enough to fix the moment?”

  His smile transformed his face, left her with all the humidity beneath her skin.

  “Jay.” He poised his hand for a shake.

  She clasped his hand. His ring was warm, substantial, filled her palm. “Freesia.”

  He didn’t release her hand.

  She didn’t mind.

  “Keep it real, Jay.”

  He nodded, the same early smile haunting his lips. His hand slid from hers. When he had exited the truck, closed the door, that same hand made a fist, twice bumped the seam where the window hid inside the door, and walked away.

  Freesia’s heart floated to her throat. She watched his retreat in the truck’s massive side mirror, knowing that reflected objects were smaller, less significant, than they appeared. Leave it, Free. But she was unable to block the words gathering on her tongue or the speed with which she hustled to the passenger window and poked her head out.

  “Jay?”

  His gait slowed. He turned and took a few steps backward.

  “You like short rib hot dogs with spicy slaw? Place about three miles up the road. Hole in the wall. Might miss it driving by in that sports car.”

  Jay stopped, his stance wide. “Then I guess it’s a good thing I have this fine truck to slow me down, show me what’s important.”

  Freesia smiled, a bystander to the moment and all the ones to come. She had a flight to LaGuardia the day after tomorrow; a new job, her dream job, in New York; Charlotte saying “We’ll miss you,” including her sister, Alex, in that sentiment, though they both knew it wouldn’t be true; Freesia spending the rest of her life wondering if what she’d learned about her father in her short time in Devon would be enough. And perhaps, one moment with a wet stranger in a Mississippi spring that she didn’t care enough to fix. She was here, in this moment, simply a finder to someone who was lost. Nothing more than the monk in the heavy cloak had been for her. Completely incompatible. His very own storm.

  Except now, it was entirely possible his storm had become hers.

  Freesia’s original plan had been to drive to her favorite meadow, where she saw no signs of life other than what came to her in nature, settle in the truck bed on the quilt Charlotte kept behind the driver’s seat and sketch her most important dress to date, the one she believed to be worthy of a Costume Institute exhibit at the Met in New York or a perfectly ordinary woman captured in a happenstance photograph doing something extraordinary. Worthy. She had thirty-six hours before the rural inspiration that had served her well would be gone, replaced by car horns honking and the bowling alley sound of the subway as it whooshed past and the city’s energy monopolizing every inch, every thought. The plan had been to draw her most inspired dress to date, the one
she knew she had inside her. That had been the plan before the stranger.

  Plans change.

  Least, that’s what Charlotte was always telling Alex in her Charlottesque way: “Life is what happens while you’re busy doodling a chart to capture how many times you’ve piddled in that bullet journal of yours.”

  Within the first moments of Jay climbing back into the truck, the Ford’s arthritic frame clattering along pavement that now steamed in the sun, Freesia sensed change. Maybe it was the way she insisted they circle back and—at the least—lock his expensive car, send a text. “So your family doesn’t worry,” Freesia had said.

  At the suggestion, he had looked at her as if she might have been responsible for the shift in the weather and he was puzzling out her witchcraft. Plans change. He might have folded himself into his car and thought better of getting out again and leaving with someone he didn’t know to indulge in ordinary, decadent roadside fare. She might have made up an excuse to get home on the pretense of packing, because the remaining creative hours alone were precious. But he spared little more than seconds attending to his left behind vehicle and shedding the skin of his silk jacket in the afternoon’s rising heat. And she wanted him beside her again, perhaps more than she wanted New York or anything of any consequence for a long time. At his words, “Let’s go. I’m starving,” she exhaled as if they had roamed Patmos and built an appetite, together.