My Big Fat Texas Wedding (Wedding Season #1)

Chapter One

Jules

THE BOOKING EMAIL FROM Bobbie-Jean Hightower had been enthusiastic, personalized, and only slightly misleading.

She'd found me through the Town pets weren't what they'd had in mind when they paid for Parsons.

I work alone in the field. Always have. Olivia runs the studio back home — the billing, the bookings, the escalating situation with Mrs. Whitestone's Persian, whose portrait session I'd postponed for this job and who was apparently not taking it gracefully.

The field is me and one camera bag and whatever animal has decided today is the day to make me earn it.

Animals read a crowd and shut down. I'd learned this in year one.

I'd never regretted the policy. Animals, in my experience, are considerably more legible than people.

The vendor van turned off the highway onto a live-oak-lined drive, and Texas started happening.

Wide first, then mid, then detail. Photographer's instinct: the way you break down a new location before you understand what you've walked into.

Wide: four hundred acres of rolling green so vivid it looked retouched, and a sky so large it made Manhattan's look underexposed.

The light came straight down with full conviction, no glass to negotiate with, no steel to catch it back.

The silk of my blouse was processing this information in ways I wasn't prepared to address.

Mid: three white catering tents on a rise, two working barns, a ceremony meadow being laid out with white folding chairs by a crew in branded polos and lanyards, familiar enough from a hundred venue setups that I relaxed, briefly.

Past all of that, two ranch hands on horseback were moving a small herd along the far fence line, unconcerned that a wedding was being assembled forty yards away from them.

Detail: a mini donkey alone in the nearest paddock. Head down. Ears at half-mast. Looking at nothing with complete conviction.

I had a capture list. Contingencies A through C. Backup drives in the camera bag, which I was going to have to carry through this gravel in the wedges I'd packed because I'd planned for Manhattan and apparently thought Texas was a different kind of Manhattan.

I did not have a contingency for the mini donkey.

The van stopped on a gravel drive in front of a sprawling ranch house with a wraparound porch. I gathered my camera tote, confirmed the lens cap was on, and climbed out.

The heat was immediate. Eighty degrees of early May Texas, full sun, the kind that doesn't negotiate. My blouse felt it first. My hair, flat-ironed that morning and protected through all of JFK, was already reconsidering at my temples. Biggest fee of my career. I’d talked a Persian off a $4,000 credenza. I could do this.

The macaw got me before I'd taken six steps.

"About damn time."

I froze. My camera bag swung. On the porch, perched on a wooden stand with the authority of a sitting judge, a Blue-and-Yellow Macaw fixed me with the focused displeasure of someone who'd been waiting for a meeting to start and had opinions about how long it had taken.

It was enormous and vividly colored and clearly the senior-most person on the property.

"About damn time," it said again, in case the first one hadn't registered.

Then it switched to Spanish. I don't speak Spanish. The tone covered the gap.

Laughter came from twenty feet to my left. Real laughter, not the polite kind that checks whether it's appropriate first. I turned.

A man leaned against a fence post at the edge of the gravel drive, hat tipped back, arms loose on the rail.

Tall — something over six feet, the kind of height that doesn't feel the need to announce itself.

Lean the way that comes from actual work and not a gym: wide through the shoulders, forearms on the fence rail with a farmer's tan that stopped exactly where a work shirt's sleeves would end.

Dark brown hair, thick, a little too long on top, already doing what it wanted in this heat.

Fine lines at the corners of his eyes from years of squinting into exactly the light we were both standing in now.

Blue eyes. Bright and entirely too amused, even across the gravel.

"Don't take it personal," he said. "Judge Judy doesn't like anybody."

I had a client-voice. I'd developed it at twenty-three for the specific purpose of making anxious Pomeranian owners feel their dog was in the hands of someone who had handled this exact situation seventeen times before and remained completely unruffled.

I'd used it on socialites, on their Pomeranians, on a man in a Park Avenue co-op who'd tried to direct his Maltese's nose mid-session.

"It's lovely to meet you," I said. "Are you the groundskeeper?"

He laughed harder.

I was still working on my footing when whatever I'd just said caught up to me a beat late and cringed somewhere in the back of my chest. He hadn't given me his name and I'd already managed to condescend at him. Excellent professional start.

A man came around the corner of the house with his hand already out.

"Jules! You made it." Built like someone who'd spent years getting thrown from horses and choosing to get back on: wide through the chest, easy in the way of someone who'd never had a reason to be tense on his own land. "Stoney Ralls. The groom."

The groom. Which meant the man at the fence post was—

Stoney reached back and clapped him on the shoulder. "This is Dutch Lovett, my best man. Dutch — Jules Tully. She's here for the animals."

Dutch was already coming off the fence, easy, and held out his hand.

I took it, rough at the palm, steadier than anything I knew what to do with. I pulled mine back faster than I'd meant to, and the flush — the one that lives at my throat first and climbs to my cheekbones without asking — climbed, and he was watching it happen.

His expression didn't change. One corner of his mouth moved, small and deliberate.

STONEY WALKED ME TOWARD the house and I got my first real look at the scope of the thing. The Dallas wedding photographer was handling the ceremony, the reception, and all the guests. I had the animals. It was a clean division of labor and I was good at it.

A tall, blond woman came down the porch steps in expensive jeans and a smile that had apparently been her default setting since birth, moving with the easy authority of someone who spent more time in the saddle than anywhere else and had never once been bothered by this.

"Jules!" She caught both my hands. "I'm Bobbie-Jean.

I am so glad you're here." At her heels, on a ribbon leash, walked the largest dog I'd ever encountered outside of a nature documentary: a brindle Great Dane, measuring approximately four feet at the shoulder, proceeding with the measured dignity of a dog who understood she was the whole point.

"This is Princess FiFi. She absolutely loves meeting new people. "

FiFi demonstrated this by pressing her entire head into my sternum with great sincerity. I held my camera bag out of range and didn't step back.

"She likes you!" Bobbie-Jean said, delighted.

I smiled the smile I use when an animal has made a decision about me without my input. "She's wonderful," I said, and FiFi looked up at me with the expression of a dog who knew that and intended to keep proving it.

On the porch, in a rocking chair, sat a tiny woman in her mid-seventies: birdlike, silver-haired, in a pale blue short-sleeved sweater with a strand of pearls at her collarbone and frosty coral lipstick applied with the cheerful confidence of someone who'd decided lines were a suggestion.

Penciled brows over sharp eyes that had watched the whole thing, fence post to handshake, with the attention of a woman keeping score.

Cowboy boots on feet that didn't quite reach the porch floor.

"Groundskeeper," she said, from the rocking chair, before I'd reached the steps.

She said it like she was tasting a particularly good piece of news.

"'Are you the groundskeeper?'" She shook her head with the slow delight of a woman who intended to enjoy this for quite some time. "Lord, I like you already."

She stood up from the rocking chair with the speed of a woman who had never once been slowed down in her life, came down the steps, and pulled me into a hug that smelled like Chanel No.

5 and cedar and something that had recently been deep-fried.

"I'm MeeMaw. Welcome to the family, sugar.

Don't worry about Judge Judy — she only screams at people she's going to warm up to eventually. " A small pause. "Mostly."

She released me, stepped back, and looked me over with the warm certainty of a woman who'd already decided. "You'll do," she said, with the authority of a verdict not subject to appeal, and went back up the porch steps and sat back down.