Chapter Five Violet
Chapter Five
Violet
It smelled like garlic and warm bread, and my stomach growled. My pizza rolls weren’t sounding as appetizing as they did when I’d arrived here, desperate for an oven and some processed food.
We turned the corner into the kitchen, and Violet’s whole mood had turned around.
Hell, even mine had turned around.
“Daddy, what you got cookin’, good lookin’?” Harper giggled.
She was so cute it was hard for me not to unleash what I really thought about that mean girl, Denise.
I knew the type. I’d seen the girl in action more than once.
She picked on her little brother, all for attention that she never got, from what I could tell.
Her mother ignored her, and I was certain she was jealous of Harper.
Harper Huxley was the rare jewel of children. She was an old soul, and we’d actually had a very nice conversation. She wasn’t bratty. She was reasonable. She was sweet. And she was the cutest kid I’d ever seen.
So it was ludicrous to suggest that her physical appearance was the reason her mother had left.
Trust me, I’d experienced abandonment in a very similar way, and I knew it had very little to do with me. But it took me a long time to get here.
Charlie scooped up his daughter and hugged her, his eyes finding mine over her shoulder.
He didn’t say anything, and he didn’t need to.
I saw the gratitude there, and I nodded before making my way toward the oven to collect my pizza rolls off the pan and go back home to finish my pity party for one.
“I cooked your favorite, baby girl. You feeling better?” Charlie asked before setting her back down on her feet.
“I’m feeling all the way better. Can my best friend Violet stay for dinner?” she asked.
“Oh, I’ve got my pizza rolls here,” I said, dropping them all onto the paper plate I’d brought with me.
“We’ve got plenty, and I think our dinner looks a lot better than your dinner.” Charlie’s lips twitched the slightest bit, and I’d come to learn that was what he did when he was trying to suppress a smile.
“Says a man who’s clearly never had pizza rolls.” I tucked my lips between my teeth as I considered the offer.
His dinner did look much better than mine.
And Violet was standing there with her little hands in a prayer position, smiling up at me.
Charlie surprised me when he popped a pizza roll in his mouth and chewed. “Ours is definitely better than yours. Just have some pasta and some salad, and then you can head home and think of new ways to torture me tomorrow.”
“Fine,” I said.
“Fine.” He cleared his throat and made another plate.
“Fine! ‘Fine’ is my new favorite word.” Harper took my hand and led me to the table. “You want a beer, Violet?”
“Hey,” Charlie grumped. “Six-year-olds have no reason to ask that.”
“I’m almost seven. And I know adults sometimes drink it.”
I chuckled as Charlie set the plate down in front of me and then held up a beer bottle and raised a brow at me. I nodded, and he poured the bottle into a glass and handed it to me before taking his seat next to his daughter.
“So, is there anything anyone wants to talk about?” Charlie asked, clearly out of his comfort zone, because he stared down at his plate as the words left his mouth.
“Denise Quigley is insector, Daddy. So me and Violet think she’s sad,” Harper said as she twirled her fork in her noodles, preparing for the perfect bite.
Well, I personally think Denise Quigley is an asshole.
But I’d settle for “sad and insecure” because I doubted Charlie would want me to say what I really thought.
“Yeah? Why do you think she’s sad?” he asked, and I wondered if he’d stood outside the bedroom door listening to us, because I sure as hell would have.
“We don’t know, right, Violet?”
I could think of a few reasons, She’s a spoiled mean girl being at the top of my list.
“Right. We don’t know. But we know it has nothing to do with you,” I said.
“Right. And isn’t Daddy’s sketti the best?”
“It’s really good.” Possibly the best I’ve ever had, but we don’t want to give the man a big head.
“Better than pizza rolls?” Charlie asked, his voice lighter now, as he tipped his head back and took a pull from his glass.
His hair was longer in the front and shorter in the back.
His sapphire eyes were the color of the deepest sea, and his broad shoulders made it apparent that he wasn’t a stranger to physical labor.
Yes. So much better. “Hmm . . . I’ll have to think about it.”
Charlie’s eyes darkened as he looked at me, but he didn’t say anything.
“Daddy, Violet’s daddy is insector too.” Harper popped a large forkful of pasta in her mouth just as I took a sip of beer, and I coughed a few times at how blunt she was.
“Tell me what ‘insector’ means?” Charlie asked his daughter, and the way he looked at her made me look at him in a different light.
He was softer around Harper. He was everything a dad should be to his daughter.
And now my curiosity was getting the best of me, wondering where Harper’s mother was.
She was clearly alive, because she saw her every year on her birthday, which was weird as hell.
Even my father had better stats than that, and he was an epic failure in the parenting department.
Who sees their kid once a year and only on their birthday?
Harper looked at me as Charlie told her to take a few bites of salad.
“Insector, or ‘insecure,’ is someone who isn’t happy with themselves, so they make others feel bad because they’re so miserable,” I said, reaching for a piece of garlic bread.
Damn. The man could cook.
“Ahh . . . I know a lot of insectors.” Charlie laughed. I rarely heard the man laugh, and when he did, it felt like a gift that you were lucky enough to witness it.
“Daddy, we need to feel sad for all the insectors.” Harper was coming up with that all on her own.
I wanted to tell her to put up boundaries with people who weren’t kind to her, but it wasn’t my place.
And she quickly changed the subject. “Can Violet come to my Pinkalicious party? It’s going to be so fun. ”
“It’s here at the house in a couple weeks, and you’ll probably still be living out in the guesthouse at the rate you keep changing your mind on every finish, so if you want to stop by, you’re welcome to.” Charlie smiled the slightest bit.
“That was the worst invite to a party ever. You insulted me while extending the invite.”
Harper’s eyes widened, and she wiped her mouth. “But Daddy’s not insector, right, Violet?”
“I assure you. Daddy’s a lot of things, baby girl, but he’s not insector.” Charlie’s voice was gruff, and his gaze locked with mine.
Yeah. The man was a lot of things.
But insecure was not one of them.
I chuckled. I hadn’t thought this night could turn around, and here I was having a good time at dinner with a man I normally despised and a kid I liked more than I ever thought possible.
Life was full of surprises.
“I’ll for sure stop by,” I said as I cleared my plate, and Charlie stopped me from rinsing it in the sink.
He said I’d done enough, and I knew there was a compliment in there somewhere.
“That’s the best present ever, Violet. And you can even see Denise at the party.”
“Sounds great. I hope she doesn’t pour orange juice on my food.” I looked at the little girl staring up at me as she burst into giggles.
I wondered if I’d meet her mother at the party.
But I wasn’t about to ask. I just thanked them for dinner and made my way back across the yard.
And I didn’t even feel the need to return to my pity party when I got home.
The Blushing Inn was our new venue for hosting weddings, and we were partial owners of the property.
Montana’s ridiculously wealthy fiancé, Myles St. James, had purchased the old farmhouse and allowed the Blushing Bride to invest in it, and Huxley Construction had done the renovations to make it exactly what we wanted.
It was nice that we had control over the venue where we hosted the majority of our events now.
And today was wedding day for Jacoby and Geneva Whitacre, from Pennsylvania.
Like many of our clients, they were not local, but they wanted to get married in the quaint town of Blushing, Alaska.
My best friend and I worked well together.
Like a fine-tuned machine. She liked dealing with the clients more than I did, and I preferred all the behind-the-scenes excitement.
Blakely, our executive assistant, would oversee things and let us know when issues came up, so the bride and groom could enjoy their day and we could handle every challenge without a hiccup.
And when it came to weddings, we always had some sort of unexpected challenge.
I loved it. One could never be prepared, and just when I thought I’d seen it all—the shit would hit the fan.
Literally and figuratively.
Blakely’s voice came through the radio earpiece, which was how the three of us communicated when it was game time.
“Uh, we’ve got a, er, issue in the main bathroom,” Blakely said, and what followed sounded like she was dry heaving. “The FOG just dropped a bomb in there, and the toilet has overflowed. And let’s just say that things are not contained to the toilet area.”
The FOG was code for “father of the groom.”
Serves him right, because who eats two chili dogs a few hours before their son’s wedding?
Thankfully everyone was still getting ready for the big event, and guests hadn’t arrived yet. I’d get this fixed immediately.
“Heading your way. Can we get Wayne over here pronto?” I asked.
“I already called. Wayne is down with the stomach flu,” Blakely said.
“Shit. Pun intended,” Montana groaned, and we all laughed, because that was the perfect description of the situation.
“How bad is it? Can we use a plunger?” I asked as I walked through the main entertaining space and down the hallway toward the guest bath.