Rev's Runaway Bride (Copper Ridge Kings MC #1)

Prologue

Delaney

The dress cost eleven thousand dollars and I couldn't sit down in it.

That's the detail I keep coming back to, later, when people ask me how it started.

Not the church, not the guest list, not the four hundred hand-lettered place cards with the calligraphy Grantham's mother had approved and then un-approved and then approved again.

Just this: I had been standing for two hours in a room with a perfectly good velvet chaise in it, because the boning in the bodice was engineered for a woman who did not intend to bend.

I remember thinking, this is a garment designed by someone who has never once needed to tie a shoe.

The bridal suite at the Ashford Club had a wall of windows facing the ninth green and a wall of mirrors facing me, which meant that no matter where I looked, there I was.

Twenty-nine years old. Hair set in an updo so structurally ambitious it had required a diagram.

Lipstick in a shade the stylist had called Bisque, which is a soup, and I would know, because I make it.

I make a lot of things. That was supposed to be the point of me.

"Ninety minutes," Birdie said from the doorway, holding my phone, which she had confiscated at noon after I looked at it eleven times in a row.

My sister is six years younger than me and has been the adult in our family since roughly the third grade.

"You want water? You should have water. You've had a champagne and a mint. "

"I can't drink water."

"Delaney."

"There is no version of this where I get out of this dress and back into it without four people and a crochet hook."

She snorted. She's got our dad's laugh, quick and guilty, like she's getting away with something. "Okay. Noted. Dehydration it is." She hesitated in the doorway with her thumbnail in her teeth. "You okay?"

And I said yes. I want to be honest about that, because it matters.

Nobody made me lie. Nobody had a hand on the back of my neck.

I said yes the way I'd been saying yes for two years, smoothly, warmly, with a little laugh at the end to sand the edges off it, and Birdie believed me because I am extremely good at that particular trick, and she went to find the photographer.

Then the door didn't quite latch behind her.

I've thought about that door a lot. If the latch had caught, I'd have a different life.

I'd have a house in Bellhaven with a kitchen I wasn't allowed to cook in, and a standing Tuesday with a woman named Corinne who would tell me about her renovation, and I'd be forty-one and very thin and very tired and I would not know why.

But the latch didn't catch. And through the two inches of gap, in the hallway, I heard Grantham's mother say my name.

"—well, Delaney's little bakery thing, obviously, is a phase."

Somebody murmured. A man. Older, amused.

"No, no, she's sweet about it," Vivian went on, in the voice she used for waiters and for me.

"She gets up at four in the morning. Four!

It's very industrious. But once there are children she'll be relieved to put it down, and frankly the smell doesn't come out of anything, so.

" A pause. The clink of a glass. "Grantham, tell him about Zurich. "

And Grantham said, "It's a two-year post. We'd go in the spring."

That's it. That's the whole thing.

Not the phase. Not the smell doesn't come out of anything. Not even Zurich, which was the first I'd heard of Zurich, and which I would be moving to in the spring, apparently, along with the luggage.

It was the half-second after his mother finished. The little pocket of air where a man who loved me would have said actually, she's good at it, or actually, it's not a phase, or actually, Mother, shut up. Any of it. Two words. A cough would have done.

He filled it with Zurich.

I stood there in eleven thousand dollars of dress and waited for it, the way you wait for a stair that isn't there, and my whole body went strange and quiet and light.

Not angry. That's what surprised me. I'd have understood angry.

This was more like the moment you look up from a book and realize the room's gone dark around you and you have no idea how long you've been sitting in it.

Two years. I had been sitting in it two years.

I took off the heels first. Set them side by side under the chaise, neat, because apparently even my nervous breakdown has manners.

Then I took the phone off the vanity where Birdie had left it, and I did not take the ring, which I want on the record, because his mother later told people I stole it and I did not, it is in a soap dish at the Ashford Club to this day as far as I know.

The service stairs were behind a door marked STAFF ONLY, which I had noticed on the tour, because I always notice the kitchens.

Four flights. The skirt came up in both fists. Somewhere around the second landing a young man in a catering apron flattened himself against the wall to let me pass and said, "Ma'am—congratulations?" and I said, "Thank you," with real warmth, because he was doing his best.

The loading dock door opened onto a wall of heat like the inside of an oven, 104 degrees and rising off the asphalt in sheets, and the light was so white it hurt, and there was a dumpster, and a stack of pallets, and beyond that the service road, and beyond that the highway.

I have never in my life had less of a plan.

I walked. The dress dragged and picked up gravel and a bottle cap and I let it.

My updo failed somewhere near the county line in a slow structural collapse that took about a mile.

My feet blistered and then stopped mattering.

I passed a sign that said ROUTE 6 EAST and under it, smaller, a number of miles to a town I'd never heard of, and I kept going east because east was the direction the road went and I did not have a better system than that.

The sun dropped. The heat didn't.

And then, way back down that long flat empty stretch of nothing, a single headlight came up out of the shimmer, and I did the only thing left to do.

I put out my thumb.