Chapter 22 Periwinkle and Tuscany
TWENTY-TWO
PERIWINKLE AND TUSCANY
Late the next afternoon, after I’d prepped upcoming orders and delivered the birthday cake (I was right, saving that time driving home, parking and getting sorted at home to dive into more work seemed like I wasn’t saving twenty or so minutes, but instead hours, so when I could stop deliveries too, I was going to be golden)…
and while I was waiting for Mom and Robbie, Mike and Shelby to return from their day kayaking (but of course they made plans to do something—together—while Gabe and I worked), I sat at one of the tables in the courtyard with Alexis, going over cake stuff.
“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. ”
Oh, I knew the reason she decided to come right to me.
And it wasn’t fucked up.
She knew her son, and he’d have a few things to say about his mom butting into what we were building this soon after we started building it.
But she had to know.
She had to put her mind at ease.
So I understood her play.
“Oh, well then,” was all I could say.
“They didn’t go to shit, obviously, but you need to know why they’re here.”
“Thanks for letting me know.”
“No, Willow. I’m not explaining myself to you.
What I’m doing is sharing that my cousin went through hell with Denise.
Ariana was just an important lesson painfully learned.
But you know what he found when he found Denise by that river.
He’d loved her. He’d been inside her. He probably thought at one point he’d spend the rest of his life with her.
Seeing her like that would mark any man.
Gabe internalized it. He blamed himself for what she did.
Mike and Shelby, Kacie and Wyatt, me and Ava, even Denise’s parents tried to get him to understand he did everything he could do. ”
I just knew a dad who would put his foot down to get his daughter safe wouldn’t blame Gabe for that.
And I was glad to know I was right.
“Gabe was always an intense guy, but he could be a fun guy too,” Luke told me.
“When he found Denise after she took her own life, all that fun was wiped clean away, and the intense part got more concentrated. She’s been gone for years, and Gabe wasn’t back.
So you can imagine their relief that he’s back.
He’s pissed, but they told me last night he was chill with you, relaxed, smiling, and they were fuckin’ beside themselves I wasn’t lyin’ when it came to you. ”
Okay.
Back to needing to cry.
He glanced beyond me then came back to me. “So that’s what I came to say.”
I looked to my side to see Alexis approaching with two plastic wineglasses filled with white, and I went back to Luke. “Thanks for taking the time to say it.”
“Was I gone for long enough?” Alexis asked.
“Perfect,” Luke murmured as he stood.
“Yoo-hoo!” was called from the security gate.
I turned and saw a tall, lean man with a brown crewcut, next to a shorter Latino man entering the courtyard.
The tall man was carrying what looked like a stack of scrapbooks.
The Latino man seemed to be carrying half the stock of a Michael’s store.
They were strangers, so how they got through the security gate was a mystery, and even though they didn’t appear to be a threat—unless they were going to tie us all up with ribbon—their easy access possibly needed to be noted to the landlord.
Then again, the Nightingale Men came and went as they pleased, and only one of them officially lived there, case in point, Luke sauntering in like he owned the joint.
“Fuck,” Luke muttered.
“Do you know them?” I asked Luke.
“Brace,” Luke answered.
He knew them, which might explain why they knew the code to the gate.
“Luke Stark!” the tall man said, marching toward us with the other guy at his side. “I need to find a woman named Alexis. Do you know where she lives?”
Alexis made a gurgling noise that was half-confusion, half-curiosity.
The two men stopped at our table.
“Are you Alexis?” the crewcut guy asked me.
“No,” I answered.
He turned to Alexis. “You?”
She looked up at Luke.
“Tod, what are you doing here?” Luke asked, then he said sociably to the other guy, “Yo, Stevie.”
“Hey, Luke,” Stevie replied.
“What do you mean, what are we doing here?” Tod demanded. “I’ve been told someone is getting married.”
“You don’t have to plan every wedding of every woman who even breathes near someone you know, brother,” Luke said to Tod.
My eyes fell to the scrapbooks.
And then they went to the fabric swatches, trimmings and other stuff Stevie was juggling.
“Raye is getting married too,” Tod snapped. “We’ve already started on hers, and I know she’s just engaged, but you can’t begin preparations too early.” He dumped the scrapbooks down on the table, mumbling, “Now which one is Raye’s?”
I counted the scrapbooks.
There were five of them.
In my head, I counted how many women were hooked up with Nightingale guys.
There were five.
Including me.
Holy shit.
“Hi.” After also depositing his stuff on the table, Stevie offered a hand to me. “I’m Stevie.”
I took it. “Willow.”