Accidental Wedding Night (Wedding Season #8)

Chapter 1

PANDORA

The GPS said fourteen minutes.

I'd been in the car for three hours, and now I had fourteen minutes. I focused on that number instead of everything else pressing in around the edges.

Fourteen minutes, and I'd have answers.

The dress was a problem. I'd tried to bunch the skirt around my hips when I got in the car, but there was only so much you could do with twelve yards of tulle in a sedan.

The bodice was still perfectly intact—all those tiny buttons up the back that my mother had fastened one by one that morning, both of us quiet in the way we got when we were pretending everything was fine.

The fabric at the waist had started to cut into me somewhere around the midway point, but I hadn't stopped.

Stopping meant thinking, and I wasn't ready to think yet.

Dane's voicemail picked up again.

“You've reached Dane Howell. Leave me a message.”

I hung up without leaving one. That was the ninth time. I'd stopped counting after seven but then started again because I needed something to do with my brain.

Nine times.

There was a reasonable explanation. There had to be. He hadn't shown—that was a fact I'd been sitting with for two hours—but people didn't simply vanish from their own weddings without a reason.

Something had happened. An emergency. A crisis. Something that explained why his phone went straight to voicemail and why my mother's expression had gone the way it went and why the whispers started filtering through the door around the forty-five-minute mark.

Then the text came.

Go to the cabin. I'll explain everything. Address below.

So I went.

I wasn't crying. I'd noticed that somewhere around the second hour of driving. I kept waiting for it and it kept not coming, and I didn't know what to do with that either.

Eleven minutes.

The mountains were dark around me. The road had narrowed about twenty minutes back, the kind that didn't forgive inattention. I was grateful for it because it forced me to keep my eyes forward.

Trees pressed in from both sides. My headlights carved out maybe thirty feet in front of me, and nothing beyond that existed.

That was fine. I only needed the next thirty feet. Then the next thirty after that.

My phone rang, and my heart lurched sideways in my chest.

Unknown number.

I let it ring. If it was Dane calling from someone else's phone, he could leave a message. If it wasn't Dane, I didn't have anything to say to anyone.

My mother had called four times. I'd let those go to voicemail too. Whatever she had to say, it would keep until I had something to tell her, and right now I had nothing.

The GPS told me to turn left.

The road got narrower.

Seven minutes.

I thought about what I was going to say when I got there.

I'd run through versions of it the whole drive, the words rearranging themselves every time I tried to pin them down.

What happened? Why didn't you call? What was so important that you left me—?

But I kept stopping before the end of that sentence because finishing it made it real, and I wasn't ready to make it real yet.

I'd make it real when I got there. When I had his face in front of me and an explanation in his mouth.

Five minutes.

The dress shifted, and the bodice dug in harder. I reached up and worked two of the top buttons loose with one hand. My mother had been so careful with those buttons that morning, her fingers steady and unhurried where mine would have shaken.

I turned that thought off.

Three minutes.

The GPS said I'd arrived before I could see anything, and then the trees broke and the cabin materialized in my headlights. Smaller than I'd imagined. Dark wood, a covered porch, a truck parked out front that I didn't recognize. A light on inside.

Someone was here.

I sat in the car for a moment with the engine ticking around me.

The light in the window was warm and still.

I'd driven three hours in a wedding dress to knock on a stranger's door in the North Carolina mountains because a man who hadn't shown up to marry me told me to.

Now I was here, and the only thing left to do was go find out what any of it meant.

Okay.

I got out of the car.

The tulle caught on the door handle, and I yanked it free without looking. Gravel shifted under my heels—heels, because I was still in my wedding shoes, because I hadn't thought to grab anything else—and I picked my way toward the porch steps.

The night air hit my bare shoulders all at once. I hadn't been outside since the church. I'd forgotten what outside felt like.

The porch steps held. I crossed to the door.

I knocked.

For a second, nothing. Then footsteps, unhurried, moving toward the door from somewhere inside. My hands found each other at my waist, fingers laced tight, and I stood up straight the way my mother had taught me to stand when I didn't want anyone to see that I was falling apart.

The door opened.

The man standing in front of me was not Dane.

He was taller than Dane by several inches and wider through the shoulders, with the kind of build that came from actual work, not a gym membership.

Dark hair. A jaw that hadn't seen a razor in a few days.

He was in a flannel shirt with the sleeves pushed to the elbows, one hand wrapped around a mug.

He took in the whole of me in one long look—the dress, the shoes, the mascara I could feel dried in tracks under my eyes, the way I was holding myself together with nothing but locked knees and laced fingers—and his expression didn't do what expressions usually did.

He didn't look surprised. He didn't look uncomfortable. He didn't look like a man working out what to say.

He just looked at me like he already knew what he was going to do about it, and then he stepped back from the door and held it open.

"Come inside," he said.

And I did.