Read Eight Second Angel: The Ballad of Lily Grace (Lonesome Point, Texas Book 7) Online
Authors: Jessie Evans
Eight Second Angel: The Ballad of Lily Grace (Lonesome Point, Texas Book 7) (13 page)
Wishing you many good reads, and thank you for the chance to tell you stories,
Jessie Evans
More about the author:
New York Times and USA Today bestselling author, Jessie Evans, gave up a career as an international woman of mystery to write the sexy, contemporary romances she loves to read.
She's married to the man of her dreams, and together they're raising a few adorable, mischievous children in a cottage in the jungle. She grew up in rural Arkansas, spending summers running wild, being chewed by chiggers, and now appreciates her home in a chigger-free part of the world even more.
When she's not writing, Jessie enjoys playing her dulcimer (badly), sewing the worlds ugliest quilts to give to her friends, going for bike rides with her house full of boys, and drifting in and out on the waves, feeling thankful for sun, surf, and lovely people to share them with.
Learn more at
www.jessieevansromance.com
Also by Jessie Evans
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Lonesome Point, Texas, Series:
Twelve Dates of Christmas: The Ballad of Lula Jo
Always a Bridesmaid Series
Taking You
(Series Ending Novella)
The Fire and Icing Series
Saving You
(Series Ending Novella)
Please enjoy this excerpt
From
BETTING ON YOU
Always a Bridesmaid Book One
About the Book:
He'd always bet on her, always...
Lark March is
over
Mason Stewart, so over him she's practically forgotten the cruel way he ended things four years ago. At least that's what she's told her sisters... But when Mason shows up at her best friend's wedding, talking sweet and looking even sweeter, Lark can't deny the man still gets to her in a major way.
Mason Stewart was a messed up kid, but he's a man now, a man who knows what he wants and won't stop until he's convinced the only woman he's ever loved that they are meant to be. He persuades Lark to give him seven days to remind her why they belong together. At the week's end, Lark may tell him to get out of her life for good, but Mason's betting on true love for the win.
But when old secrets come to light, Lark and Mason will find their rediscovered love tested, and happily ever after harder to hold on to than either of them wagered.
Chapter One
The night before her best friend Lisa’s wedding—and her seventh turn as a bridesmaid—Lark March had all of her weirdest anxiety dreams.
Every. Single. One.
Babysitting her sister Aria’s baby and she loses the eight-month-old in the stuffed animal collection?
Check.
Crawling through a miniature Dutch pancake house with doors too small for her to squeeze through while “It’s a Small World” plays on endless repeat?
Check.
Getting knocked over the head, blacking out, and waking up in the middle of the early church service her Nana hasn’t missed in thirty-five years, wearing nothing but a fine layer of caramel corn stuck to her body like a bad cat suit and a bubblegum bow in her hair?
Check and check.
(She’d had that one twice, because apparently one “naked and covered in candy in front of old people” dream wasn’t enough for her subconscious.)
As a result of all the panicked dreaming, Lark woke up exhausted.
Exhausted, on the biggest day of her best friend’s life, not to mention the biggest catering job of Lark’s career.
Ever After Catering
had been growing steadily since she started the business three years ago, but she’d never handled an event like Lisa’s reception.
There was going to be a twenty-foot appetizer buffet, a sit down steak or salmon dinner for three hundred people, and a dessert spread featuring a five tier wedding cake, three different kinds of groom’s cake—Lisa’s soon-to-be husband and his two brothers all had very strong, but very opposing, views on cake—cupcakes with sprinkles for the kids, chocolate pie for Lisa’s Gran, an edible ice sculpture, and a white chocolate fountain.
And, out of all that, the ice sculpture was the
only
thing Lark, her two sisters, and her staff of four weren’t making themselves.
Even knowing the cakes were mostly done and waiting at the venue, the salmon was marinating in her industrial fridge, and the salad was sitting in giant containers, just waiting to be tossed with homemade honey-lemon dressing, wasn’t enough to keep Lark’s hands from shaking as she shoved a change of clothes and her lucky apron into a duffle bag and snagged her bridesmaid’s dress from the closet. She was always a little nervous before a big job, but today was worse than usual. Today had to be perfect, not only for Lisa, but for all the guests attending the reception.
At least six of Lisa’s friends from college were planning weddings in the next year. Booking even three more “big time” receptions could help Lark take her business to the next level, allowing her to compete with more established catering companies in Atlanta.
She had to pull this off without a hitch. There was no room for error, and certainly no time for a nap.
Three cups of coffee kept her going through the epic beauty salon appointment, and crying like a baby as she watched her best friend since preschool get married kept her conscious through the receiving line and the wedding party pictures, but by the time she arrived at the venue—a lovely old home on the historic register about five miles outside of Summerville, Georgia—she was pinching herself to stay awake.
But as soon as she walked through the door to the new, super-sized kitchen the owners had added onto the home when they decided to rent it out for events, the job-in-progress adrenaline thankfully kicked in.
“How are the potatoes? Are they ready for the warmers?” Lark asked as she bustled into the room, tying her lucky apron on over her bridesmaid’s dress.
In the end, she’d been too nervous to take the time to change before heading over. She was just going to have to cook in floor-length red taffeta.
“Are they done?” Lark asked again, squinting at the stove. “We’re going to need the oven for the last minute apps in less than ten minutes.”
“Hello to you, too,” Aria, Lark’s older sister, grumbled from the far corner of the kitchen, where she was bent over the wedding cake with a tube of frosting, adding a few last minute iced tulips.
At five-seven and barely one hundred and twenty pounds, Aria was the slimmest of the March sisters, unreasonably scrawny for a pastry chef, and, lately, about as sweet as a packet of damp Sweet’N Low. Ever since she had separated from her husband and moved back to Summerville five months ago, she seemed to have misplaced her sense of fun.
Lark had learned to put up with Aria’s new and
un
improved personality transplant, but she had to admit she missed the big sister who used to play pranks on their parents and stay up all night giving her sisters makeovers and telling silly stories about the guys she dated.
“You’re here!” Melody, the youngest March daughter, bounded across the room with a squeal, clapping her hands. “How was the wedding? Oh my gosh, was it amazing? Was Lisa beautiful? Did Matt cry? Did
you
cry?”
“Great. Of course, a little, and of course,” Lark said, laughing as Melody pulled her in for a giddy hug.
Melody loved weddings almost as much as she loved to cook and only slightly less than she loved to eat. Her commitment to all things culinary meant that she had graduated from culinary school only one year behind Lark, even though Lark was two and a half years older.
The sisters shared a love of preparing food, the same long, sandy blonde hair and brown eyes, and the same gently rounded figures that gave testimony to the fact that they hit the cheese board more often than the gym. When they were younger, people often mistook them for twins, until Melody hit a growth spurt and left Lark behind. Now, when five-foot-two Lark stood between her taller sisters, she looked like a book with a pair of mismatched bookends.
No one knew where Aria’s red hair and green eyes had come from. There were rumors of a ginger-headed great-grandmother on their father’s side, but they were unsubstantiated. If Aria didn’t have their dad’s nose and freakishly long fingers—or if all three of the Summerville postmen weren’t actually post
women
—Lark knew there would have been jokes made.
“I hated to miss it,” Melody said with a sigh as she released Lark from her embrace. “Did you tell Lisa I was thinking of her?”
“I did, and she said thank you for holding down the fort here so I could be her maid of honor.”
“Of course!” Melody waved a hand in the air. “You
had
to be her maid of honor. It would have been a sacrilege if she’d picked anyone else.”
“Though it might have been nice to give someone else a turn,” Aria said, ducking between her sisters as she headed for the sink. “You know what they say about the March girls…”
Lark wrinkled her nose. She knew exactly what “they”—the town gossips, the women in their mother’s Bible study group, Nana’s friends at the DAR, and all the been-married-forevers who had nothing better to do than predict who was,
or wasn’t
, going to get married next—said about the March girls.
Too many times a bridesmaid, never a bride.
Between the three of them, the March sisters had been bridesmaids no less than twenty-seven times. Melody held the record, with ten bridesmaid appearances and three turns as maid of honor, all before her twenty-third birthday. At this rate, she’d have a dozen plastic bins full of old bridesmaids dresses in their parents’ garage before she was twenty-five. Lark and Aria weren’t far behind her, both of them tied with seven stints in a wedding party.
“Well, I think it’s nice that so many people want us in their weddings,” Melody said. “It means we have a lot of good friends.”
“Besides, you already proved
them
wrong, anyway,” Lark said to Aria’s back. “One March girl has been married, even if it didn’t stick. There’s still hope we’ll have fancy weddings of our own someday.”
Surely there must be
, Lark thought, a little wistfully. Since breaking up with her on-again-off-again boyfriend, Thomas, last year, things had been pretty quiet for Lark in the romance department.
Not that Thomas had been particularly romantic. He had inherited his dad’s pool supply company and spent his days peddling chlorine and water filters, but as a former high school football star, his true passions were following Summerville High’s football season and watching Falcon games with his buddies at the local sports bar. He and Lark had had a good time when they got together to grill catfish or catch a movie, but there had never been any fireworks between them.
Not like with Mason.
There had never been anyone like Mason. He was the only boy Lark had really loved, maybe the only boy she’d
ever
love. No matter how much she adored weddings, and secretly longed to be walking down that aisle as a bride, not a bridesmaid, it was hard to think about losing her heart that way again, not after what Mason did to her four years ago.
“Right, whatever,” Aria mumbled, pulling Lark from her thoughts. “Shouldn’t you two be cooking something? I thought I heard cars starting to pull up.”
Aria’s words had the desired effect. Soon, Melody and Lark were scrambling to get black-forest-ham-stuffed puff pastries and the other last minute appetizers in the oven, fetching the trays they’d prepared last night from the refrigerator, and rounding up the servers from behind the building where they’d gone for a smoke break and setting them to work carrying everything out to the buffet.
Aria finished prepping the white chocolate fountain, and started filling round serving trays with glasses of champagne and red, white, and pink wine (because Southern women love their White Zinfandel), while Melody worked on the sides and Lark fired up the grill for the steak and salmon.