The Butterfly Dream (Match Made in Devon Bridal Shop Book 2) 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.

  Match Made in Devon has been more than just a symbol of everything magical about matrimony; it’s also a physical reminder of true love’s power to conquer all obstacles, and how perfect the March sister’s parents’ marriage really was. But for middle sister, Charlotte, the pressure to maintain her carefully cultivated public face of perfection is beginning to take its toll…

  Charlotte is working overtime to balance home, family, and her marriage to husband Nash – and the weight of it all is more than she can handle. Nash makes it clear that something has to give, that he wants things to go back to how they used to be.

  But Charlotte knows she has changed too much to simply return to being Nash’s stay at home wife. She still loves him deeply, but she needs more now. Perhaps more than Nash can give…

  With their marriage on the line, there seems to be no way out of the endless circle of responsibility Charlotte has drawn for her life. Now craving freedom for herself, the only option she can see is one that could tear her own family apart.

  Three women bound by fate and family will have to struggle together to redefine family 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

  End of The Butterfly Dream

  Thank you!

  About Danielle

  Sneak Peek: The Family Wish

  Also by Relay Publishing

  1

  Charlotte

  The young woman reminded Charlotte Strickland of a butterfly trapped in a mason jar, flitting and zagging and beating against the storefront windows of Match Made in Devon like there were no holes punched in the heavens for breath. She wore the colors of a ruddy daggerwing: black winter coat, scarf as pretty as a glass of sweet tea in a sunbeam, neck tattoo emerging like veins on a wing. Her eyes were big and desperate.

  Charlotte looked at her watch. Seven o’clock. An hour past the bridal shop’s closing time.

  Shoot.

  Her husband Nash already had his tail up because she hadn’t been home for dinner in a week of Saturdays, despite being close enough to walk home if one had a mind to—which she didn’t. Right around the time the March sisters had found out they had a half sister from their daddy’s mistress in Georgia, and had done everything they could to turn the bridal shop into a profitable venture, Nash had begun calling her promises the sweetest lies—well-intended on her candy pink lips, but always leaving him with sugar stomach.

  Charlotte thought that a kept man this side of spoiled should just about get over himself.

  She went to the front glass and unlocked the door.

  The woman entered on an exaggerated exhale and a breathy “thank you” and Charlotte felt the poor girl’s relief clear to her toes. Either she had a bladder emergency or someone was chasing her. The closest the town of Devon, Mississippi had come to a police blotter was the great bakery theft of oh-one when Bernice’s terrier made off with a bag full of poppyseed bagels from Taffy’s Diner. Nevertheless, Charlotte’s motherly instinct kicked in and she relocked the door, just in case. Couldn’t be too careful.

  “Ladies’ room is past the row of dressing rooms to the right,” said Charlotte.

  The woman had a spray of thick hair, dark at the roots, blondish-orange at the tips. Prominent cheekbones gave way to a nose ring and burgundy lips, the color harsh, all wrong for her skin tone. A crowded ring of keys clanked along with her pacing steps. Her chin quivered; her eyes watered.

  “I need a dress.”

  Dress. The very thing that Charlotte and her sisters, Alex and Freesia, sold. During normal business hours. Not the hour when Charlotte’s marriage hung in the balance on Nash’s ultimatum: no more empty promises, Char, or I’ll rethink that very first one I made to you. She glanced at her watch. Her heart slipped out of rhythm.

  “Well, now, that’s hardly cause to be upset. I know wedding dresses can be a bit pricey—”

  “That’s not it.” The woman shook her head. Fat tears materialized and hung up on her cheeks. “I’m loaded. Well, my parents are.”

  Charlotte frowned and led her to the bawlin’ and stonewallin’ armchair and encouraged her to sit. Faster than the young woman could unzip her purse, Charlotte produced a tissue box and crouched before her. “I don’t understand.”

  “I thought I had time, you know? Perfect wedding, planned to the smallest detail. Perfect month, in time to get Matt—that’s my fiancé—out of school. Perfect season for peonies and cornflowers to be in bloom. Not too hot or sticky to dance out under the stars.”

  Charlotte’s awareness snagged on the word time. As in, time had run out. Coupled with tears, she knew the time they were talking about wasn’t the kind that could be snatched back. Ever. Bride, groom, or parents, Charlotte couldn’t say. And she didn’t. Sometimes a woman just needed someone to listen.

  “Part of me thinks he didn’t want me to worry. The other part thinks he just ignored the signs because he didn’t want to accept what was happening. He took responsibility for waiting so long to see about it, but I can’t spend one moment mad at him. Not when we have so few left.”

  Dear God in heaven, don’t be the groom.

  “So a few days ago, there was a break in the rain. Daddy and I walked up to the highest point on the land where I grew up and buried a sealed bottle of bourbon—you know, for good weather when Mark and I exchange our vows—but all I could think of…”

  True to form, the chair lived up to its name. The velvety softness seemed to catch people unaware and conjure up all the ugly stuff from deep inside. Charlotte pulled the young woman into an embrace, her voice rollicking on hiccupping waves of sound until the final three words might have been another language.

  “…was…bur-rr—ee—ing...hi-hi-himmmm.”

  The language of grief. Filled with extra syllables and emphasis in all the wrong places. Over the past few years, Charlotte had become fluent in that language—first Daddy, then Mama. Only Nash knew how crippling her grief became at times. If there was one thing he’d done right, amidst all th
at had gone wrong in their sixteen-year marriage, it was skirting clear around her when the darkness rolled through her. A notable exception was when he stood beside her on Sunday mornings with his hushed responses to well-meaning folks. Then he’d send the kids off, to run home and change out of their best clothes and be gone by the time he pulled the truck in front of the house. Several Sundays, Charlotte considered tumbling out of her car door when they got up to some speed, the possibility of being reunited—even for a minute—with her parents tempting, but Nash always kept a hold of her left hand, like he knew her thoughts. They’d reach the farm and Charlotte would take to the fields barefoot, like she was on fire. After, he’d wash her feet in the basin on the porch, not a word spoken between them.

  “A friend told me this place was special.” She mopped the delicate skin beneath her eyes with a heavy hand, then blew her nose. “That you could help me.”

  The young woman needed a now-dress, not the one she had ordered from some high-end boutique in Jackson for a wedding that would no longer happen when the cornflowers bloomed and all the days would rain gray, bourbon be damned. Charlotte took a breath to consider Nash—the same tired words he would use when she broke another promise, the same loaded stare through the shaggy slant of his hair, the same ripe flush at his forehead, no sign of the laugh lines that marked his features like parentheses, cleft chin to once-warm eyes. All it took—one breath—for her to decide that there were moments in every woman’s life that had the capacity to tumble her out the door of a moving truck and all that was needed to keep that from happening was taking hold of a hand. Nash, of all people, would understand.

  Charlotte dialed up the chandelier lights, turned on some new country music, and courted at least a dozen gowns before the woman landed on the one that would help her daddy to see the woman she’d grow into during the years he would miss. By the time Charlotte saw her out the door with a garment bag, an extended hug, and the best advice she had for the special day—to make sure the photographer captured her daddy’s first look at her all gussied up—the winter winds had stirred up a hornet’s nest of stinging cold, and darkness had made itself comfortable.

  Outside, too.

  One look at her phone confirmed it. After a message that explained why she’d be delayed—the shop, bride, emergency—a good ten from Nash.

  The last one: I’m done.

  Charlotte was pretty sure comeback sauce, a mayonnaise and chili sauce made famous at every decent one-star eatery in the state of Mississippi, was so named for the spicy return esophageal trip cresting a belly full of deep-fried whatever. Native males of the species often used it as a punch line to absolve their poor manners—brawwwoop, either end, then “Come back!” But when her husband, Nash, had requested a meal that night that included Charlotte’s nearly-famous chicken strips and comeback sauce, she was pretty sure the condiment had been one request shy of a divorce.

  Come.

  Back.

  In the kitchen, she found the evidence of his line in the sand—a Styrofoam to-go container with takeout shrapnel of grizzled chicken ends and congealed sauce from the diner Nash always said made a poor man’s Charlotte’s special. Beside the greasy food sat a bottle of cinnamon whiskey with a dancing red bull on the label, half empty. Nash had only ever broken out the fire liquor on two occasions: once when a childhood buddy-turned-Marine named Mark was killed when his helicopter went down in Pakistan and once when his nostalgic bet on cotton acreage had forced them to take out a second mortgage on the farm. That Charlotte’s broken promise to dedicate this night to him, to their marriage, had made this a third such occasion made her feel like a poor man’s Charlotte.

  The house was quiet; their three children ghosting, if not already asleep. Though he was youngest, Gabriel would be awake, whispering to the handful of critters he kept in his room—a turtle, a salamander, three fish—or reading the latest Rats of the Realm book, glasses smudged and crooked on his nose. Gabe was just as Charlotte imagined his namesake in Longfellow’s Evangeline poem—brave and curious and tenacious. Nash had balked at naming him after the wandering kid in some dumb old story—his words—but Charlotte insisted they couldn’t go wrong with a boy named for such love. The twins—Natalie and Allison—would be splayed on their beds in the dark, earbuds in place, the screens of their phones illuminating their features blue. Most said they were a perfect hybrid to Nash and Charlotte, but Charlotte saw it differently. In Allison first, later in Natalie, Charlotte saw her sister, Alex—the disregard of conventions, the tenacity, the fast thinking. In her mind, this translated to girls who would grow into women courageous enough to know themselves, speak without caution, and form opinions based on their needs, not what someone needed them to be. On any other night, she would insinuate herself into her children’s nighttime rituals, insist on a forehead kiss or snuggle, but not this night. What little she had left to give she had to save to smooth things over with Nash.

  She found him some distance from the house, in the barn. He attacked cobwebs with a homemade telescoping handle outfitted with gauzy rags and industrial tape. Especially in winter, when light and heat sources were used more often, the ritual reduced the risk of barn fire. This particular chore was Nash’s treadmill of choice—mindless, soulless, futile.

  His flannel shirt lifted clear of his waistband, exposing a strip of pale skin above his still-trim waist and weathered leather belt. Physical labor had been kinder to his appearance than hers in the eighteen years since she had first spotted him on his daddy’s tractor. His facial features had fleshed out a bit, accommodating recesses deep enough to dive into, jaw to temples, when he laughed. Trimmed or grown out, his hair remained earthy brown, polished daily by the sun. And the slight cleft at his chin that so often looked misplaced on other men still gave Nash a memorable foundation of sexiness.

  At a dizzying apex in the roofline, chin pointed to ceiling, Nash stumbled backward. She hated when he drank. His words were loud, bold; his hands took firmer possession of her body, his drives far more insistent. Not once had Nash ever hurt her. At least, not bodily. But, she supposed, each time they made love and she wasn’t really present, she shed part of herself in the sheets and laundered it away until she was a faded, pilled, worn version of her original.

  “Thought maybe you’d be asleep,” Charlotte said into the void. Nash’s pre-dawn ritual usually had him crashed at day’s end before Gabe snuggled in for his next chapter.

  Nash didn’t react.

  “You should have heard her. The girl I texted you about. So young to lose her father. I can’t imagine.”

  Back and arm muscles played beneath his shirt, shifting the geometric pattern. The rag tied to his pole continued to brush past raw wood, raising splinters.

  Charlotte bristled. She was too tired to play their familiar game—chatty wife to stoic farmer. She no longer wanted to ply their empty spaces with words, but she did owe him one thing.

  “I’m sorry, Nash. I know what this dinner, this night, meant to you.”

  “This is the part where you say you’ll make it up to me. That next time’ll be different.”

  He didn’t stop his motion, just spoke to the barn’s cross timbers as if his agenda was most important. Always, that seemed the way of it. As if he stopped moving before his head hit the pillow, it would be game over. A sort of occupational narcolepsy that left little room for anyone or anything else.

  The raised splinters, the way the barn amplified sound, its loamy warmth, all conspired to hasten her blood pressure, to make her reconsider offering him anything of herself. “Your world is structured. Same chores each day, dictated by the land and the animals, but fully within your control. That’s not how my world works, Nash. Not anymore.”

  A sharp, corrosive laugh erupted from a well in his chest. “It’s funny. Our worlds used to be the same.”

  “They still are. It isn’t fair to give an ultimatum on one night and not hear me out.”

  “Tonight, it was a bride whose father was dy
ing. Last night, it was Alex and the baby. A few nights back, it was Gabe’s science fair project.”

  “Gabe is your world, too.”

  “Maybe if you’d let him choose his project without interfering, I could have stepped in. But the whole sound waves and animal psychology angle was your idea. It ain’t enough for him to do what comes naturally, you always have to add and make it more to prove something to God-only-knows who.”

  “He wanted to read to pigs, Nash.”

  “Then you shoulda let him. How else is he gonna learn things on his own?”

  “He needs a good grade to get into that summer program.”

  “No, you need that grade to get him into that summer program. He’d be just as happy working around here.”

  “Don’t you want more for him—for all of them—than this life?”

  Her voice rang out like a capture gun loaded with tranquilizers, one dart to his heart, one to his nuts. Nash lowered his hands then, fully focused on her in a way she had craved since she darkened the barn door, but he looked struck, sick. She hadn’t meant the slight. Or maybe, deep down, she had.

  “That’s not what I meant.” Her voice matched his injury. Lame.

  He thought for a good bit. Hiked a loose hand low across his denim-clad hip. He was a formidable man, but restrained his power of voice and presence. It’s what she’d always admired about him—his capacity to gather up perspective and make up his mind before injecting himself into any situation. When he finally spoke, the timbre of his voice rumbled through her chest.