Chapter One
“But you have to come! The wedding’s on Saturday!”
The wail through Cheyenne Fortune’s cell pierced not only her eardrums but the seemingly endless hours she’d spent girding her willpower. Mindy Dubose had been her best friend since the second grade. Causing this disappointment was a physical pain inside Cheyenne’s gut.
She lowered her head, but the hair falling down around her face in a curtain didn’t provide all that much privacy from the bustling activity around the bench where she sat. Nurses. Patients. People with purpose coming and going.
She should have waited until after her volunteer shift at the hospital to call rather than trying to cram it in five minutes beforehand.
She slid her legs to one side, propping her elbow on her bent knee. “Mindy, you know I’d give anything to be at your wedding, but I think it’s best if I bow out.”
She could hear Mindy’s muffled cries and curled her free arm around her stomach, as if that would help alleviate the fresh twisting pain inside her. Maybe she was having an appendicitis attack on top of everything else.
If she passed out now, at least she was in the right place. Twenty feet away from the elevator that would take her right by the emergency room.
Her head pounded. She was ashamed of her own dramatics.
“Next to Rod, you’re the only one I care about being there.
” Mindy’s breath was an audible shudder.
“Please, please, please, you can’t do this to me.
You know what Mama’s like. I thought with a destination wedding we could keep her from turning everything into a circus, but—” She broke off with a choking, hiccupping sob.
Cheyenne pinched her eyes closed. Mindy’s mother was the whole reason Cheyenne was making this call in the first place.
I’m only thinking of you, dear. Binnie Dubose had probably been born with that kill-you-with-kindness tone. Naturally, Brad’s fiancée is part of the wedding party now. I know how hard it would be for you to feel like a third wheel.
Cheyenne didn’t give two flying pigs about Brad. Not anymore.
But he was Rod’s brother. His only family, in fact, since their parents had died when they’d been in college. And he was the best man.
Then Binnie’s final kicker. Anastasia will be a bridesmaid, dear. That’ll mean seven bridesmaids if you don’t step aside. You know how superstitious Mindy is about the number seven.
That was true enough. Mindy was superstitious. But only because Binnie was bat-crap crazy and had done her level best to raise her daughter in her image.
Since Cheyenne had her own version of crazy in her own father, was it any wonder that Mindy and Cheyenne had become lifelong friends? Not that she really classed her dad, Clemons, with Binnie in the bat-crap territory.
She nearly jumped out of her pastel pink scrubs when someone touched her shoulder.
Stella Montreal raised her heavily penciled eyebrows and tapped the nonexistent watch on her wrist.
Cheyenne nodded and mouthed, Two minutes.
The nursing supervisor nodded and headed toward the nurses’ station, her bejeweled tennis shoes squeaking slightly on the tile.
Cheyenne focused on her phone call again.
“…a marble fountain,” Mindy was saying. “We’re getting married in St. Thomas, for pity’s sake!
Why on earth do we need to add a fountain behind the minister?
We’ve already got a view of the freaking Caribbean!
It’s a wonder our wedding coordinator hasn’t quit.
” At least her sobbing had abated the more wound up she got about her mother’s latest excess.
“If Daddy were still alive, even he couldn’t have kept her under control.
Just the other day, I told Rod we ought to elope to Las Vegas and—”
Cheyenne jerked as genuine shock joined the turmoil churning inside her. “You can’t elope!”
“Why not?” Mindy demanded. “My best friend isn’t even coming to the biggest event of my entire life.”
Her shoulders slumped. “Fine,” she muttered. “I’ll be there. But only as a guest, okay? Too many tongues will wag if your future brother-in-law has two women he’s slept with in the wedding party.”
“What’re you talking about?”
Along the corridor, she could see Stella approaching with Mrs. Gentry in her wheelchair.
Since Cheyenne had been assigned to the geriatric unit, it had been her job to take Mrs. Gentry out for a shampoo and curl at a hole-in-the-wall salon located a block from the hospital.
She forced a smile and gave them both a little wave.
“Your mom said Brad’s new—” she couldn’t stomach using the term fiancée for her replacement “—girlfriend is in the bridal party,” she said instead.
“Bridal party!” Mindy screeched. “Since when? I’m going to kill my mother. Why would you think I’d agree to such a horror?”
Cheyenne pushed off the bench and gathered up her pink leather hobo bag, hitching it over her shoulder before tucking her phone in the crook.
“No offense, Mindy—” she murmured a nonsensical aside to Stella as she took over the wheelchair “—but sounds like you’re getting married with a fountain blocking your oceanfront view. ”
Her supervisor rolled her eyes. “Honey child,” she whispered knowingly, “I knew you’d cave in.”
Cheyenne lifted her shoulders and barely caught her phone before it slid loose and conked Mrs. Gentry on her 92-year-old head. “Mindy, I’ve got to go. I’m at the hospital.” Cheyenne’s friend knew she’d been volunteering there for over a month now.
“I wish you were still here in Dallas,” Mindy lamented.
Sometimes, so did Cheyenne. She’d relocated to Emerald Ridge because of her dad, who had discovered—and embraced—his birth history as a member of the Fortune family.
But the act hadn’t been without its challenges.
Clemons was still prone to flying off the handle at the least provocation and Cheyenne—who’d also taken on the surname of Fortune along with the rest of her siblings as a show of solidarity with their dad—kept forgetting and signing her name as Cheyenne Frost. Her father’s adoptive parents—Ted and Tamara Frost—were the only grandparents that Cheyenne had known.
Sadly, they were both gone now, but she liked to think they would have been happy about Clemons’s attempts to forge a relationship with his newfound birth relatives.
Maybe, if he could only stop alienating them at nearly every turn, some sort of relationship would have a chance to actually emerge.
“I’ll get this misunderstanding straightened out about Anastasia,” Mindy said.
“Just promise me again that you’ll be there.
Thursday night’s casual fun and we have nearly a full day of activities planned on Friday before the rehearsal dinner.
I might’ve let you convince me that my cousin Summer ought to be my maid of honor, but I’m absolutely not going to walk down that aisle without you as my bridesmaid. We pinky swore, if you’ll remember?”
Cheyenne did. When you were best friends with someone from second grade on, you shared a lot of dreams and tragedies and pinky swears.
And while Cheyenne didn’t want to be the odd girl out, more importantly, she did want to be there when Mindy married Rod Trent.
They loved each other. Mindy deserved her happily-ever-after.
“I promise I’ll be there. Just…maybe don’t tell your mama yet.
At least not until my plane’s in the air on Thursday.
” She wasn’t up to another earful of Binnie any time soon.
The woman had been harping on Cheyenne in that saccharine way of hers ever since she and Brad had ended things—apparently ruining the symmetry of her wedding vision.
And she had serious doubts that Mindy, no matter how much she wanted to, would actually be able to buck her mother when Binnie was in full steam.
“Won’t say a word. Love you bunches.” Mindy’s voice was all daisies again.
Cheyenne couldn’t help smiling. Even the pains inside her stomach were abating.
“Bunches back.” She dropped the phone inside her voluminous hobo bag alongside her water bottle and the Pilates gear for the class she took right after her volunteer shift.
Inhaling, she quickened her pace with Mrs. Gentry’s chair, catching the elevator in time before the doors started to close. “How is your day going, Mrs. Gentry?”
“Purdy good, seeing how I woke up on the right side of the grass.”
Cheyenne smiled and pushed the button for the first floor. “My daddy says that’s always a good sign.”
“How is your daddy? Has his cat come home yet?”
“Not so far.” Mewington had been missing for a week now.
And even though Cheyenne privately thought the eighteen-pound Maine coon was probably out exploring his freedom, she knew how upset her dad was over his missing pet.
If there was one thing Clemons Fortune was good at, it was getting upset over things.
She and her siblings had thought they were doing some good, recently giving their dad the cat. With more enthusiasm than any of them had expected, he’d even built an outdoor patio enclosure for Mewington—a catio—and proceeded to spoil the massive cat at every turn.
They should’ve stuck with a tame little kitten too timid to go anywhere. But Mewington’s irascible personality had seemed a perfect match for their irascible father.
Until he’d escaped and not yet returned.
Then she peered around at Mrs. Gentry’s face. “I don’t remember mentioning Mewington to you. How’d you know he got out?”
The old woman snorted slightly. “Lorena Bellweather heard all about it at the Riverside Café yesterday. Does Clemons really think someone would steal his cat right out of his own backyard? What’s he imagining? A cat burglar ring?” She chuckled at what she obviously considered her own wittiness.
Lorena was one of Mrs. Gentry’s church friends who visited routinely. Usually, she complained about Lorena’s propensity for gossip. Which, of course, Mrs. Gentry never indulged in.