Our Bridal Shop (Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book 1) 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, JANUARY 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 and run by their parents, was a real-world representation of what true love was all about. But for eldest sister Alexandra that kind of perfection has always seemed unreachable.

  Alex has spent over fifteen years in Boston, building up an impenetrable shell of confidence and taking control over her own destiny. If there’s anything missing from her life, it isn’t important anyway. But with her mother’s unexpected death Alex is forced to leave her life in the big city behind and return to her hometown of Devon…and a past she’s been running from for years.

  As the March sisters try to salvage the bridal shop their parents loved, Alex is forced to confront her painful past and the real reason she left Devon so many years ago…including childhood sweetheart Jonah Dufort.

  Jonah represents everything Alex has tried to forget and conceal. But sometimes secrets demand to be revealed, and when the past returns again in the form of a long-lost sister, it’s a shocking reminder to Alex that even a perfect marriage can have something to hide.

  With her world falling apart around her, Alex loses control of the perfect life she has built for herself. Now, the only thing that Alex can be certain of is that things will never be the same.

  Bound by fate, three sisters will have to redefine the meaning of family and discover the raw power of forgiveness and 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

  End of Our Bridal Shop

  Thank you!

  About Danielle

  Sneak Peek: The Butterfly Dream

  Also by Relay Publishing

  1

  Alex

  Weddings don’t wait for death; you have to get on with the living.

  That’s what Alexandra March’s mother would have said had she not been in the earth beneath her feet. Fat, ambitious blades of grass tangled and clawed from the dirt, dusted with the rarest of phenomenon in lower Mississippi: snow.

  Hell had, in fact, frozen over.

  Beside her, Alex’s sister Charlotte mined her purse for a tissue and settled on one of those congealed bundles that only mothers ignore. Six weeks on and she still unraveled. Alex supposed it was what came from being the youngest, the one who didn’t get out of town, the one who dutifully fit brides into their dresses at the family bridal shop, Match Made in Devon, even though that dream had been their mother’s happily ever after. Charlotte was also the one who had walked through the front door of their childhood home one week before Christmas—as she had nearly every day for the past thirty-five years—saw Mama’s red boots on the linoleum at all the wrong angles and dropped two dozen eggs at once. Heart attack, they said. Alex knew better. Had there been such a thing as functional-grief syndrome, Stella Irene March would have died from it. Maybe it would have taken them all.

  “The flowers are beautiful,” Alex said.

  Daisies dyed artificial purple. A clearance-rack bridesmaid’s dress against a landscape of virgin lace. Slipped into the tubular stone appendage Charlotte insisted they add to their parents’ tombstone as a flower receptacle. It looks like an erection, Alex had whispered in her sister’s ear at the funeral home over their ala carte grief menu, to which Charlotte had promptly pressed a well-aimed heel into the leather toe of Alex’s Guiseppe Beneventi boot.

  “They’re hideous. All they had at the F—F—oooood Saver.” Charlotte’s thick drawl navigated her grief like a hummingbird landing in molasses. “Said delivery drivers got wind of the snow and turned right back toward Alabama.”

  Alex put a stiff arm around her sister. At the gesture, Charlotte disintegrated into grand, hiccupping gasps. Wet bubbles of words that required subtitles. Alex pulled her close, rested her cheek against her sister’s chilled, blonde strands. Charlotte was dressed in thin layers, a reluctance to accept the cold bite of snow. She had always been like that. Believing in something to make it so. Ill-prepared for what the world outside Devon brought her but always warm, like summer. Unlike Alex, who was nothing but winter inside.

  As she held her sister, Alex realized she hadn’t touched anyone since the guy from Wooster, Gary—or was it Grady? He’d had a mass of curly brown hair, a doctorate degree and a taste for pretentious music. She thought his penchant for social causes might reach past her numbness, catch her unaware and shine a light in her dormant corners. Mostly, Gary just reminded her of a wheel of Brie, in more ways than one. But this…this felt closer. Less screaming into a blinding whiteout. More the promise of a thaw.

  And the reason Alex needed to be back on a plane to Boston.

  Alex broke the embrace. Charlotte straightened and returned to herself as silence settled around them.

  “We should go,” said Alex. “The lawyer is expecting us in fifteen minutes.”

  Charlotte blew her nose, dabbed at her lashes, and returned the tissue to her purse. “Bless his heart. Clement Grant, Esquire, would be late to his own birthday buffet. Doesn’t take but five minutes, anyway. This ain’t Boston.”

  No. Devon, Mississippi, population four thousand, muddy truck and cheese grits capital of the world, home to a man who had convinced the town of his importance by whispering Esquire after his name like some kind of gassy punctuation, most certainly wasn’t Boston.

  “I still don’t see why he insisted on a personal meeting. Hasn’t he heard of couriers and video calls?”

  Charlotte’s expression shifted ever so slightly, a master of southern woman decorum to hide judgment. One favorite but unuttered word from her lips—typical—rushed to mind.

  Her sister turned her attention back to the tombstone and straightened the artifacts of the living: rocks painted with ladybugs from Charlotte’s twin girls; a diecast black and cream F-150 from her son, the kind of late-70s vintage truck their father, Elias March, had driven; various coins—each denomination holding a different meaning based on their father’s inscription of military service; and an unopened bottle of beer from Nash, Charlotte’s husband. As if Daddy had some kind of eternal bottle opener in heaven. Somehow, this altar of the dead had become Charlotte’s domain. Geographical proximity, Alex supposed. Her sister brushed freshly-fallen snowflakes from the sentimental offe
rings. All Alex wanted to do was take a trash bag to the clutter.

  And get out of the cold.

  She didn’t belong here in Devon, any more than Charlotte belonged in Alex’s high-finance world of data analysis and logistics. Alex rescued the bottom lines of million-dollar corporations. Charlotte rescued spoiled, southern bridezillas from polyester. The sisters would forever be fairgrounds apart with one shared ticket: a blanket fort on the balcony of their childhood bedroom where they had waited, together, for Daddy to come back and the world to right itself. Two weeks and an iron-clad pinky-swear to always return that had proven itself magic.

  “Five minutes, Evangeline.”

  Charlotte’s lips twitched into a smile. Her younger sister’s middle name was a nickname between them, but so much more. Evangeline was the name of an old oak in Louisiana, the place where the story of Stella Irene and Elias March began, the place that gave Alex and Charlotte hope and allowed them to sleep those sixteen lost nights beneath a carousel-horse-patterned blanket and the stars.

  As they walked back to Charlotte’s minivan, Alex’s attention snagged on a distant figure: young, willowy, olive skin, a wide-brimmed hat caught somewhere between a floppy and a fedora; clothes layered and earthy and cinched in the right places. Had she been dressed in white, Alex might have thought her a spirit, a dalliance of the mind, a figment of the snow. But for the breeze that rearranged her long, dark hair, the stranger was a statue, looking at them.

  Cold cantered up Alex’s spine.

  “Who’s that?” She nodded toward the woman.

  Charlotte squinted toward the crest of the cemetery hill. “No idea.”

  For all the frigid moments in Alex’s life that she wanted to leave, always to leave, the stranger compelled her to stay. She couldn’t say why—the visual warmth she brought from the nothingness, her compelling stare, her absolute proximity to perfection. The woman was there one moment and then she was gone.

  “Clement Grant, Esquire.”

  Alex shook the lawyer’s offered hand and suppressed an eye roll.

  He had arrived in town the same week that, at aged eight, Alex had her bike stolen and came to him for advice. She once saw him as handsome, educated, someone who had choices in the world and exercised them in Devon. Only God knew why. But nearly three decades in a town caught between the north’s prickly-soft cotton fields and the south’s sticky bayous had taken its toll on the lawyer. Stray threads unraveled from his blazer cuffs. Sunspots chased away his hairline, and his unfortunate size was, no doubt, related to the publicity photo on his wall marking an investment in Big Auntie’s Chicken and Waffles and Soul Eatery.

  Still, Alex remembered the way he’d once sat beside Jonah on the bench outside the sheriff’s office, a personal favor to Elias March because the boy was seeing his daughter, seeing an inadequate term that failed to capture just how much Jonah had seen of her. After a night of stolen beer, a railroad switchback, and an irate landowner with a dead cow, all the boys involved had been bailed out but one. Grant had looked at Jonah in that stagnate dawn humidity, the kind that forces a choice between breathing and talking, and told him that those blue and red lights turning down that dirt road was his moment—that everybody got at least one in a lifetime—a moment to figure out who they wanted to be, all-out clarity.

  About that, Alex was sure Clement Grant had been wrong.

  Those moments in Alex’s life had never brought clarity. More a choice between breathing or doubting.

  Maybe it was the heat of his office, the scent of old law books lining the shelves, or the absolute perfection that was Grant’s polished mahogany desk—no fingerprints, no water rings—but in that moment, Alex’s lungs found the space to expand. Nothing to do with the memory. Jonah Dufort was not a highway she wanted to travel, today or any day.

  “Alex?” Charlotte looked at her, expectant. An entire conversation had passed since they sat in Grant’s office, the gentle lilt of Charlotte’s voice rounding the dormant edges of Grant’s Cajun upbringing. A word coma of platitudes and excuses for running late.

  “Can we…” Alex hesitated. Southern manners and Yankee efficiency rarely coexisted. When forced to choose, she pulled a hard, northern stance. “I’m sorry. It’s just the last flight out of Jackson...”

  “Likely canceled,” said Grant. “Looks like you’re stuck here. Least ways, tonight.”

  Perfect. The largest distributor of the nation’s blood supply was counting on her to save an eleventh-hour logistics solution—in person—effectively guaranteeing her promotion to vice-president of network solutions in her firm, and she was stuck in the flypaper capital of the Deep South. Not because Devon manufactured the sticky ribbon but because the town’s sweet magnolia fragrance was deceptive. Everything stuck—gossip, reputations, ambitions. Arsenic and rosin to those who returned. Alex considered tugging her scarf over her mouth and screaming.

  “I asked you down here under some…out-de-way circumstances.”

  Stella Irene and Elias March were the least out-de-way people for counties. Alex hoped this was part of Grant’s courtroom theatrics, spilled over. He outlined their life insurance policies, death benefits from their father’s army service, papers to indicate they had borrowed against the house on two distinct occasions: the month they’d opened the bridal shop and the semester Alex had entered Brown University—neither of which resulted in a full financial recovery. Nothing unexpected. Nothing unusual but for Charlotte’s silence. She’d had the same opportunities of higher education as Alex. She’d simply chosen to marry and start a family almost before the ink on her high school diploma was dry.

  “When do we get to the out-of-the-way part?” asked Alex, her slight echo of Grant’s accent mildly intentional.

  Charlotte shot her a look.

  Grant raised an index finger as if to say wait, it’s-a-comin’. Alex anticipated an unsatisfied debt, a rogue investment from younger days, a winning lottery ticket, a substantial donation to Wish Upon a Wedding, Mama’s charity of choice. Alex did not anticipate Clement Grant, Esquire, to stand up, walk out into his waiting room, and usher in a stranger.

  Not just any stranger.

  The stranger. From the cemetery hill. Just as captivating. More, because she was no longer at a distance. More, because, like Alex, she didn’t belong here.

  “Alex, Charlotte, this is Freesia Day.”

  Her name fit: wiry stem, an abundance of colors in strong alignment. Confident in the way she accepted Grant’s gesture of an additional chair, the way she acknowledged them as if she had waited on the inevitability of the union, the way she sat attuned to coming words. Younger and more beautiful than Alex first thought, the woman brought with her a foreign, though not unpleasant, fragrance from another time and place. Familiar but not. One perfect snowflake remained on her scarf. Alex was mesmerized, watching it melt, while Grant’s words—out de way, out de way, out de way—set on repeat in her brain.

  From his file, he produced two white envelopes—sealed, the names Charlotte and Alexandra written in black ink on the front.

  Daddy’s handwriting.

  “Your father’s instructions were specific. In person. After the second of them to go.”

  For a moment, blood circumnavigated Alex’s chest and lungs and pooled behind her eyes. Her head was thick with the hushed, winding notes of Grant’s accent—them more like dem, with what this meant, with what her father—the only one to ever call her Alexandra—could possibly say, five years after his death. She saw the word, the way his hand always looped the l and d, the slanted way he always came back to cross the x, but the pressure behind her face blurred the lines.

  Alex thought she might go the way of Charlotte. Lose it. Right there in front of Grant and the flawless woman who sat beside them. And she knew Daddy was there, in the corner, the only space left for standing, watching. She felt him there, in the heaviness of her chest, waiting to see how his Alexandra would puzzle through this one.

  “I don’t understand
why we needed an audience.” Alex’s voice came out more pointed than she intended. “This is a family matter.”

  Grant glanced down at his interlaced fingers then at the stranger. The two envelopes remained where they had been placed.

  “Miss Day is listed in a codicil to your mother’s last will and testament, dated August of last year, as one-third owner of the property at 102 Bethel Lane.”

  A pocket of silence opened up. Charlotte no longer cried, no longer rummaged in her purse for a snotty tissue, no longer chanced to draw air. Alex, however, had not neglected her best shot at company vice-president to be subjected to lies.

  “Impossible. We’ve never seen this woman before.”

  Grant tapped two fingers against the paper before him and nudged it across the polished mahogany surface, no longer perfect because they revealed letters from a dead father and lies about everything.

  “August? Of last year?” She glanced at Charlotte. “Wasn’t that when Mama had a spell? She was light-headed, and you had to lock up the shop to go get her from in front of the old closed-down drug store? She was sitting on the sidewalk, her heart racing?”

  Charlotte said nothing.

  “Don’t you remember?” asked Alex, more insistent, to her sister, to Grant because suppressing gossip in a small town was like trying to ignore hot wind against a church pew. “She had a spell when she just wasn’t herself.”

  “Mrs. Leighton…”