Chapter 4
ANNALISE
As if I’ve had my mouth shoved full of all this tulle and lace, my tongue grows dry, sticking to the roof of my mouth. The bridal shop is far more stocked than I was anticipating, and one look at the rows and rows of dresses has me fighting to keep from spinning back around.
I can hear the quick tapping of heels on the floor as the camera facing the door announces my arrival. And five minutes later, I blow out a long, strained breath when I’m left alone to try on the five dresses the associate deemed appropriate for my body and style.
The older, dainty woman who owns the shop is sweet and kind, but the longer I stand here, basking in the reminder of everything I’ve lost in the past few weeks, the harder it’s going to be to not lose the effort to do what I’m here to do.
A heavy, pastel pink curtain acts as a barrier for the dressing room, and it brushes my back when I spin to face the dresses hung on a rod.
According to Braxton, the bride of this wedding is a real stickler when it comes to her black-tie theme, so every dress hung before me is what I think is the most appropriate.
The longest of the five dresses has a slit that travels to nearly mid-thigh, and the shortest will hardly brush my knees at my five-six height.
I’m not awfully tall, so I don’t even want to know how short you’d have to be to not flash a bit of panty in that dress.
I shrug out of my clothes and start with the safest option—a shiny black dress with a sweetheart neckline and a laced bottom hem that should sit around my mid-shin.
A ball sticks in my throat when I tug it over my chest and let it swoosh along my legs.
The mirror is directly across from me, and I grow stiff as I take myself in.
I’ve never been ashamed of my body. With a sister who evokes such confidence about hers, it’s hard not to follow in her footsteps.
We both have our mother’s body type, with more meat on our bones than we know what to do with sometimes.
I was always a bigger girl growing up, but I slimmed out quite a bit once puberty hit.
I’ve never been able to get much smaller than I am now, though.
I love my curves, even if Stewart liked to hint at hitting the gym with him regardless of how many times I turned him down.
Yet another thing the asshole did that I didn’t pay attention to. A red flag that should have had me running for the hills long before he decided to cheat.
Lifting my chin, I shove those thoughts away and focus on the mirror. The dress is cute, but it isn’t me. It’s dainty and soft-spoken, and I am neither of those things.
The next option is another too similar to the one I’m wearing. I skip it, choosing to try the one with the slit in the leg instead. Go big or go home, Anna.
The small space grows hot with the effort of stripping and dressing again, but I push past it.
The moment the silk glides over my warm skin, I exhale, forcing myself not to look away from my reflection.
The neckline is lined with gems that sparkle beneath the small light above me and is swooped enough to show a good bit of cleavage.
It’s a sexy dress, one that says I’m single and ready to mingle.
Or at least that I look ready to mingle.
It’s still to be said if I will be or not.
A twist of my hips and I gawk at the length of exposed leg poking through the slit in the silk. Warmth blooms on my cheeks at the thought of others seeing this much bare skin.
I grab my phone from the small bench littered with my discarded clothes and snap a couple of photos of myself in the mirror before sending them all to my sister.
Me: Be honest. Maybe not brutally so . . . but still honest.
Her reply comes instantly. She’s most likely been waiting for it since the moment I told her I was heading to look.
Big Sis: H. O. T. *heart eye emoji*
Me: It’s not too much?
Big Sis: There’s no such thing as too much when it comes to you, Banana.
Me: What if I flash someone with the slit?
I would never get over that trauma.
Big Sis: They’re welcome.
Me: I’d scar the children.
Big Sis: Good thing children aren’t allowed at the wedding then. Buy the dress. You look stunning.
I hesitate with a reply, tapping the back of my phone instead of the screen. Another text comes through a beat later.
Big Sis: Don’t ignore me. BUY THE DAMN DRESS. IT WAS MADE FOR YOU!
Me: I need to send it to the planner first.
Big Sis: I almost forgot about that. Fine. But buy it regardless of what she says.
Nerves clamp down on me as I copy the phone number from our conversation into the New Message tab.
Me: Hi! Is this dress approved for the Morales wedding?
I attach the most modest of the pictures I took, only allowing a bit of my leg to show, and then send the message.
God, that’s such an awkward text. In my defense, who makes their wedding guests send their outfits for approval? I get wanting your wedding to be perfect, but holy. That’s a bit much, if you ask me.
I didn’t plan on having a theme for my wedding . . . but I guess that doesn’t matter anymore, does it? I’m done with weddings for the rest of my goddamn life. No more.
I’ve only begun to take another look at my reflection when my phone buzzes. One look at the screen has my cheeks on fire, the dressing room suddenly too stuffy.
17805559540: Yes.
17805559540: What do I have to do to get plus one approval?
brODY
My back aches. Fuck, all of me does.
The bar smells like frying oil and sweat. Something sticky tugs at the bottom of my boots beneath the table, like a drink was spilled earlier but never mopped up. It’s too damn loud in here for a Saturday afternoon.
I keep my face hidden beneath the brim of my hat and tap my fingers on the side of my whiskey glass. It’s grown warm in the time we’ve been sitting here, slick with dew.
“You’re one surly son of a bitch today,” Caleb notes, not hesitating to gulp down his cold beer.
Wearing his Cherry Peak Fire shirt and an easy grin despite the long day of volunteering at the station, he rolls his neck and finishes his drink.
Peakside is usually our location of choice to get dumb drunk after a long day, but ever since Caleb and his wife had their daughter nearly a decade ago, these evenings have grown few and far between. It’s why I took him up on his invite after lunch.
A few of the men who volunteer alongside him joined us after ignoring the withering glare I shot Caleb when they appeared. Just us , he promised. Bullshit.
“Yet you still invited me,” I reply smugly.
“Wouldn’t kill you to smile once, though. You’re scaring the waitress.”
I ignore him, raising my glass to my mouth and finishing the whiskey off. It burns the entire way down, hot in my stomach.
One of the new volunteers decides to chime in. “Told you not to invite him, Caleb.”
“Caleb doesn’t go anywhere without his ball and chain,” another puts in.
“You talk a lot of smack for a virgin,” Caleb tosses back.
I should know the names of these guys by now, but I don’t give enough of a shit to try.
Reclining back in the booth, I peer behind the head of the man beside me and flag over the waitress.
She doesn’t look scared of me. Maybe intimidated, but that’s not unusual.
I’m not exactly the friendliest person, especially not to strangers.
“Another?” she asks me, voice too timid for a rowdy place like this.
Caleb responds for me. “Might as well bring him the whole bottle, Jewel. He’s in a mood today.”
I attempt to soften my scowl, but when Caleb barks a laugh at me, I know I look like a fucking idiot instead. “A water, please.”
She scurries off with little more than a tip of her chin. I ignore the brief slash of guilt that follows her quick disappearance and tighten my stare on the deep gauges in the table instead.
Peakside has been around since before I was born, and it hasn’t changed at all in the twenty-eight years since. The twin gouges on this table are from a teenage Brody and Caleb, though, our mark on the place courtesy of my pocket knife the first night we ever came here.
“Water?” It’s Caleb’s turn to frown.
I nod. “Gotta be up at the ass crack of dawn tomorrow.”
My grandpa has been planning our trip to the auction a few hours north of here for weeks now. He’d swat me across the back of the head with the newspaper hard enough I’d see stars if I cancelled on him because I drank too much whiskey the night before.
“The auction,” Caleb says before I can tell him. “Why does he need you to go with him again?”
“Wants me there to look at whatever he decides to buy before pullin’ the trigger on it.”
“Haven’t forgotten how to work beneath the hood of a tractor yet, Popstar?” Darren asks, another of the volunteers, but one I can stomach having a conversation with.
His subtle dig annoys me, but not enough to have me picking a fight with him.
“Couldn’t forget if I tried,” I grumble.
Caleb smirks. “Brody has spent more time beneath hoods than he has women.”
“Not includin’ your mother, right?” I ask, reaching up to flex the brim of my hat.
Caleb’s not even all that wrong. I’ve been beneath more hoods than I could ever think to count or remember. Before life took me down a different path, I thought I’d still be working on heavy equipment when my bones turned brittle.
The table breaks out in loud, howling laughter, and the waitress stumbles a step while approaching with my water.
With a flash of a smile, she sets it on the table, and one of the volunteers pushes it toward me before starting a new conversation about how he found a stray cat beneath the wheel of the fire truck last week.
I zone out, drinking nearly the whole glass of water in one gulp.
The whiskey scorched away the lingering ache in my throat from singing after avoiding that strain for a couple of weeks, but it’s already coming back.
The water coats the rawness with another flash of relief that I know won’t last. The pain will disappear by the morning, so long as I don’t let Caleb convince me to get drunk and sing karaoke all damn night.
But the odds of that happening are so low they’re nearly non-existent.
“You gonna tell me what’s got you in such a terrible mood before you leave?” Caleb asks, the question quiet enough across the table that I know it’s meant just for me.
“Rita was here this morning. Wanted to hear how the vocal rest was coming along.”
His eyebrow twitches but doesn’t lift. “And?”
“I’m still here.”
“You pushed yourself too hard on that damn tour. I’m glad you’re home. I think the whole town is, honestly. So, you won’t find me disappointed that your voice hasn’t even healed yet for you to take off again.”
The stark honesty in his words rattles my chest. “It’s nice being back at the ranch. My grandparents need the help anyway.”
“I’m going to assume Rita didn’t share our opinion?”
A gigantic understatement. “She wants me to finish Killian’s tour. I agreed to open for the entire thing, and then I just left. It makes my entire team look bad. Pissed off the fans too.”
The angry messages and emails are now being filtered through people Rita hired over the past couple of weeks. I don’t have the passwords to anything anymore.
“It’s for your own well-being,” she said.
I didn’t disagree. Still don’t.
“If you had finished the tour, you could have damaged your voice bad enough that a small break wouldn’t have been able to fix shit,” Caleb hisses.
“I know. That’s why I’m still here.”
Some of the anger leaches from his expression but still gleams in his eyes. We’re like brothers. One willing to fall on a dagger for the other. His protectiveness doesn’t surprise me. I would be the same if he were in my position.
“Next time Rita slithers into town, send her to the station. We’ll have her running back to Nashville faster than she can say Carrie Underwood.”
“Who are we sending back to Nashville?” Darren asks, shoving himself into the conversation.
I finish off my water as Caleb says, “None of your business, Nosey Nelly.”
My phone vibrates on the table, screen facing up, and Caleb zeroes in on it. That brow arches now, amusement curling his mouth.
Snapping out his hand, he sets it over my phone. “Is there another reason you’ve stayed in town that you haven’t told me?”
“What?”
“Don’t try and play coy.”
My mouth hardens as he grabs my phone and guesses my passcode on what seems like the first try. “Don’t go lookin’ through my shit, Caleb.”
He doesn’t reply. His lips part in silent surprise instead. The other guys seem to clue in to what’s happening, and we become centre of their attention. One by one, they lean toward Caleb, trying to sneak a look at whatever he’s found on my phone.
“Does he have Shania Twain’s number in that thing?” one of the volunteers asks.
I rub my temple and lean back in the booth.
“Well, this is a first for me,” Caleb finally utters. When Darren tries to look at the screen from over his shoulder, he angles the phone away and stares at me. “Looks like we’ve got an accidental text on our hands, guys.”
Interest skims beneath my skin. I lean forward again, resting my forearms on the table. “What?”
He flips the screen, and alarm replaces that initial interest. The photo of the woman on my screen is a Rita-classified nightmare. I swipe my arm out to take the phone when Caleb tugs it back to his chest, shaking his head.
“No fucking way. I’m rolling with this,” he decides.
“You’re not. Delete the message and the picture. Nobody should have my number.”
Especially not the woman who sent me a photo of herself—or I assume it’s her—in a dress with a long pale leg peeking through a high slit and her cleavage on display.
It doesn’t matter that both of those things were blaringly attractive even after only a millisecond of view.
The photo didn’t even show above her shoulders, which raises more than a few alarms.
Caleb’s fingers fly across the screen far faster than if he were doing what I told him to.
I push myself over the table as far as I can go without climbing onto the fucking thing and try to take the phone from him.
His laugh is rough and loud and a massive fuck you that I don’t plan on forgetting anytime soon.
By the time he finally tosses the phone toward me, I look desperately at the screen and feel my stomach turn hollow. He’s replied to her not once but twice.
Me: Yes.
Me: What do I have to do to get plus one approval?