Chapter 2
Chapter Two
She was almost a hundred percent sure that she could feel him watching her.
A certainty that made absolutely no logical sense.
Of course she couldn’t feel him watching her.
You couldn’t feel the gaze of another person, she was almost entirely certain.
That was the stuff of horny novels, the kind that she didn’t even read, and she wasn’t going to start believing in that sort of thing now, whilst sitting on the lawn at her bridal shower.
Everything was perfect, she had to give him that.
It had to be. If it wasn’t perfect, then it felt like an omen for the wedding.
Walker was impossible to agitate, and she should know. Back when she had been a moronic teenager who hadn’t had the sense that God gave a parsnip, she’d made it her mission to agitate, irritate and otherwise infuriate him, and she’d never managed to do it.
Walker was untouchable, impenetrable, and far too handsome for everyone’s own good.
As long as she’d known him, she’d felt the urge to needle him, though, she didn’t really know why.
He was there, and it was like his presence demanded a response from her and she’d never been able to figure out quite what that response was.
Not that she needed to litigate that right now. She wouldn’t be thinking about Walker, not in any capacity, if it weren’t for the wedding being held here.
Maybe she should’ve pushed back against this as a venue.
But her father and her fiancé had both identified it as the most visible location for a wedding in Mustang River, and she had been planning on having her wedding over in Bend, but given the mayoral race, her father had felt that it was really important she do something in the community.
Really important that her wedding be local, and bring money into the local economy, which she understood, she would’ve been happy to have local people go out to the venue in Bend, but she could also see where her dad was coming from.
It was good optics for the campaign. She needed to get better at that.
She really felt like she was suited to the position. Her father had been the mayor for years, and then he had retired, and the current mayor was passive. Coasting on the progress her dad had made with tourism, and just letting it all stay the same.
And this wasn’t the moment to be passive.
It was a changing economy, and when tourism had really started to catch on in Mustang River about a decade ago, she could remember being surprised. More than surprised, she had been baffled. Because she had grown up here.
As disaffected youths they’d called it Mustang River, Boregon.
No one had been impressed with this place. No one had been able to imagine why anybody would come there for a vacation.
Now, with some maturity, she could understand.
Now that she had spent a little bit of time away, having gone to college down in California, she could understand the charm of the small town and four seasons.
Then, once she had gotten into business on the town’s main street, she had really found herself invested in contributing to that tourism economy, making it healthier, helping it thrive, and the Painted Ridge Resort was one of the biggest assets the community had gained in these last ten years, so having her wedding there made sense.
She couldn’t deny it.
It was just the Grayson of it all.
“Are you okay?”
She looked at her friend Anna, whose brow was wrinkled with concern.
Anna had been her best friend since high school and was her maid of honor.
She also had a couple of friends in town for the bridal shower that she had gotten to know when she went to UC Davis, and they seemed to be enjoying themselves.
She was really worried that they weren’t enjoying themselves, and even now, as Anna looked at her like that, she was concerned that she was somehow letting down the group.
“Everything is okay,” she said. “This is beautiful. It’s perfect.”
“I love the peacocks,” Lydia said.
“So do I,” Denisha added.
“They really are good. They’ve done… an excellent job. With all of this.”
“Honestly, I wasn’t really thinking of a destination wedding, but maybe when Carl and I get married we should do it here,” Lydia said.
And this was exactly what she was supposed to be doing.
She was supposed to be creating a sense that this ranch was a destination.
That Mustang River itself was a destination.
Her wedding was half travel log, honestly.
And when she thought of it that way, when she thought of how it was going to benefit the community, it was all better.
She had a very popular social media account for the boutique.
And she knew that when she posted wedding things, it was going to bring a lot of eyes onto the venue as well, so it was going to reach beyond just her guests.
It had the makings of a real viral moment.
She didn’t like to call herself an influencer.
She didn’t go out of her way to be one, but her social media gained traction because she was a young woman in a small town running for mayor, and who owned a main street boutique.
People often left comments about how she was the perfect small town romance heroine, how she belonged in a Hallmark movie and so did her boutique.
She played into that. Because it got views. It got business. It drew people to Mustang River.
Maybe back in the day a brochure, or a listing on a website was enough to get people to travel somewhere, but now a viral video showing food that people wanted to try, a hotel they wanted to stay in, a view they desperately wanted to get a picture of on their phone too, that was the way to do it.
And she had dreams, no, fantasies, of taking over the official account for the town. Of growing it. Of making this a haven for younger tourists looking for an aesthetic, relaxing vacation.
It could be both.
And it would serve the broader community. She was practically a philanthropist.
Everything just had to go perfectly. That was all.
She felt, as ever, a sword dangling over her head with the word disappointment branded into the blade.
If there was one thing she knew she didn’t want to be, it was the hometown letdown. And that had always been very clear.
Her mom was the hometown letdown. The woman that had married the town’s most eligible bachelor, only to leave him and her children when they were small.
Her mom was the one who was whispered about, who was talked about in hushed tones of disapproval, and the idea of having that happen to her made her want to die.
She had spent her life proving to her father that she was not her mother, however much they might look alike.
It wasn’t fair, and she knew that. It was automatically assumed that Jackson would take after their father because he was a boy.
Automatically assumed that she was one to watch, to keep a close eye on, because what if she was her mother’s daughter?
A woman who had run away from her family, and not just that, had run off with the help.
Her stepfather, Thomas, had once been the gardener on the estate, and apparently, he and her mother had had a torrid affair right beneath her father’s nose.
Her mother had been absent from her life for years when she was small, and it wasn’t until college that Addison had reconnected with her at all. She would be coming to the wedding, along with Thomas, but that was… strained.
It was all strained.
Jackson didn’t have a relationship with their mother at all, and Addison couldn’t say that hers was healthy.
Again, it was difficult to forgive that abandonment. It was one thing for a marriage to end, it was another to leave during your children’s formative years.
It was another to skip out on everything entirely.
Maybe that was why Addison felt responsible for everything. For her father’s happiness, for her younger brother’s reputation, for the health of the town, even, overburdened by responsibility because her mother seemed to have none.
But she was almost there. She was at the finish line.
She was doing the thing. And all the signs pointed to the fact that it was supposed to happen. She had been watching, closely, as doubt and fear had crept up inside of her.
But all that doubt was foolish.
Alan was a good man. He was the right man.
Perfect to take to fundraisers. Perfect to have on her arm anywhere. His family owned a golf course in Sun River and it was a fantastic venue for large events – not that she was marrying him for his venue.
He had been the football star back in high school.
They had dated junior and senior year, then gone their separate ways at college.
She had dated a few guys down in California, but she knew that she needed to come back home to Mustang River.
And with most of them, their ambitions had lain far away from there, so she had known there couldn’t be a future.
But it was easier to date and not worry over much about how it looked when she was away from the town.
When your mom had a reputation for being a tramp who got carried away by passion, you felt like you had to watch your visible body count.
At least, that was what had happened with Addison.
When she had returned home, Alan had returned too. And it had made sense to pick up where they left off.
Not right away. They had started dating again seriously about four years ago and gotten engaged a little over a year ago. Addison wasn’t in a hurry, but she wanted her life plan to be mapped out.
And this was very much the five-year plan in a nutshell.
Now she was ready to lock it down. She would run for mayor, get elected, get through a term, and then they would have kids, giving it a fair amount of time.
At that point, she would have solidified her reputation as being a very good mayor.
Because she had a plan to help everyone’s business, and who didn’t want that?