The BFF Bride (5 page)

The furnishings were a lot sparer. The couch looked like standard-issue hotel stuff, making him wonder where she’d gotten it. The simple side table and the lamp were straight out of the ’80s. Not that he cared. He didn’t plan to spend a lot of time here, anyway.

He just hoped the bed was big enough to stretch out on and comfortable enough to allow him a night’s sleep.

He found the thermostat on the wall in the hallway and turned on the heat, then checked out the two bedrooms. They were identical except one was outfitted with twin beds—which was never gonna work, since he was six foot four—and the other had a queen-size bed. Not perfect, but doable.

Only thing it was missing was the bed linens.

He looked in the closets, which were all empty except for little cedar blocks that hung from hanger poles. He found nothing in the dresser drawers, either.

Evidently, the term
furnished
only went so far.

He went out to the truck he’d borrowed from the Double-C for the duration of his stay and retrieved the suitcase holding his clothes. He left the other two suitcases containing the research materials locked inside the cab of the truck. Tomorrow he’d take them to the hospital, where his aunt had promised him some dedicated lab and office space that, truthfully, she hadn’t had to agree to. He was glad that she had, though, even though it would cost CNJ a nice chunk of change.

Maybe he was glad
because
it would cost CNJ a nice chunk of change. It made up, just a little, for the chaos his life had become there.

CNJ had millions to throw around. The Weaver Hospital—which served this entire region of Wyoming—didn’t.

It didn’t take him long to unpack. There wasn’t any need here for the suits and ties he typically wore to work in Boston on those days he wasn’t suited up in scrubs. He also hadn’t bothered bringing his heavy coat, just a few sweatshirts and his leather jacket. He figured if he needed something heavier, he’d borrow it from Erik or his dad.

And if he was honest with himself, it had felt good leaving that stuff behind. Stuff that Gillian had always had a hand in choosing, only because he’d never been interested in it himself.

The contents of his suitcase took up a third of the bedroom closet and one of the dresser drawers. He dumped his shaving kit on the bathroom counter.

The heater was running steadily, filling the cold air with a faint, burning odor that he figured would dissipate after an hour or two. From the smell, he doubted that the heater had been used in months.

He went out to the kitchen to verify he had running water. He did. Hot and cold, even. He pulled open a few drawers and cabinet doors. He hadn’t been able to find any bed linens. But there were dishes. A few pots and pans. Silverware. All clean and neatly stacked in their various spots. Next, he checked the refrigerator. It was cold inside, with only an opened box of baking soda occupying space on one of the shelves.

With a mental list forming of the basics he could pick up out at Shop-World, he left the apartment again and headed out to the truck. He couldn’t help looking toward Tabby’s place at the other end.

Despite the late hour, light was shining through the closed curtains over her front window.

He wondered if she was really awake this late when he knew she’d have been at the restaurant since around 4:00 a.m.

Even as he was looking, he saw the curtains twitch. A moment later, her front door opened, and for a moment she stood there, silhouetted by the light.

Then the door closed, and she was heading toward him, little more than a dark shadow against the darker night.

“Here,” she said, stopping a few feet away. She extended her hand. She was holding a square, plastic-covered package. “I meant to put them in your place earlier, but I fell asleep on the couch. It’s a new set of bedsheets.”

He took the package. “Thanks. One less thing to pick up at Shop-World.”

“That’s where you’re heading?”

“Somewhere else to go at eleven o’clock at night?” It was also the only place close by where a person could pick up bedsheets, a set of mattresses to put them on, pajamas to wear when you lay down on them and food to cook when you got up again. There was nothing fancy about the big store, but it did have its purpose around these parts.

She was shifting from one foot to the other and back again. Her hair was darker than dark, but he still imagined he could see the gleam of her eyes in the thin moonlight. He thought he caught a whisper of a smile on her lips. “Colbys, particularly when there’s a pool tournament going on.”

“Already spent enough time there for one day.” He was surprised she’d given him the sheets, much less remained there, voluntarily speaking with him about anything at all. “Look, Tabby.” He gestured with the package. “I appreciate the place. I know you’d have rather—”

She cut her hand through the space between them. “Let’s just not talk about it. For everyone’s sake, we can pretend everything’s hunky-dory. Same way we’ve done when you’ve been in town before.”

Pretending for several weeks would be harder than pretending for a few hours. But he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. “So. Truce?”

She laughed. The sound was soft. And entirely unamused. “Pretense doesn’t mean truce, Justin. But I love your family as much as I love my own. Just because you and I—” She moistened her lips and shifted restlessly. “They all think we’re still the same kids who played together in the sandbox. That belief makes them happy, and I see no reason to rock that boat. Particularly when there’s enough of that going on with your family already.”

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?”

She exhaled. “Your grandfather’s reaction to Vivian Templeton moving to town.”

“Oh. That.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “Erik mentioned it.” Frankly, he failed to see what the fuss was about. There’d always been a lot of Clays on the family tree. Now there was just another branch they’d never known about before. It was hardly the end of the world.

“Anyway, it’s not like we have to sit down to a holiday meal with everyone every day. So—” she crossed her arms and shrugged “—you’ll go your way and I’ll go mine. We’ll hardly see each other. And before we know it, this’ll all be over. You’ll go back to Boston and Gillian.” She started to turn away.

“Not Gillian.”

Tabby looked back at him. Her skin was as creamy as the cameo his mother had let him play with during church when he was a kid so he’d sit still in the pew.

“She’s not part of my life anymore,” he said bluntly. “We broke up. For good this time.” He wasn’t sure what reaction he expected. But he did know it wasn’t the musing little “hmm” he got. “Six months ago,” he added for good measure.

“She’s still your boss’s daughter?”

He didn’t answer. Obviously, Gillian was still Charles’s daughter.

Tabby wasn’t done, though. “You’re still both working at CNJ?” She started walking toward her doorway. “Then she’s not out of your life,” she said without looking back.

Justin opened his mouth to argue, but he didn’t.

Tabby reached her door. Opened it and disappeared inside. A moment later, the light shining through her curtains was extinguished.

He stood there in the dark for a long while, listening to the silence.

In Boston, where he had a dinky apartment with an exorbitant rent in the South End, there was never such a wealth of silence.

He’d always thought that was a good thing. Everything about Boston had energized him. The city. Grad school. His work. His tumultuous relationship with Gillian.

He looked up at the sky. It was mostly cloudy, allowing only a stingy stream of moonlight. But on a clear night, he knew the stars would be laid out like a thick, sparkling carpet.

When they’d been young, he, Tabby and Caleb had often camped out behind her parents’ house. They’d pitch a tent and everything, though they usually ended up pulling their sleeping bags out of the tent. They’d fall asleep under the stars, amid ghost stories and trying to figure out the constellations.

Caleb had been the best at identifying them. Tabby’s artistic eye had usually seen something else in the stars—a bunch of dancing fairies and such.

Justin had seen cities. And skyscrapers.

Even then, he’d been thinking about someplace else. A place where everyone in town didn’t know the name of everyone else in town. And certainly didn’t know their business. Where a person could walk down the street in complete anonymity if he wanted. Where tumbleweeds didn’t travel down the center of Main Street more frequently than cars.

He shook the thoughts out of his head.

Then he unlocked his truck, tossed the bedsheets onto the bench seat beside him and drove out to Shop-World.

He could have survived a night without sheets. But in the morning, he was gonna need coffee. And even though he had ample justification to stop by the café to get a cup on his way to the hospital—they were spitting distance from one another, practically—he figured he and Tabby both would be better off if he gave Ruby’s a wide berth.

At least for a while.

Chapter Five

O
n Monday, Tabby dragged the box of Christmas decorations out of storage and turned the radio station to one that played only holiday music.

It would drive some of her customers a little bananas at first. But after a week or so, they’d be humming along with the music, too.

She was hoping that the decorations and the music would immediately put her in a more cheerful state of mind. Ordinarily, once she got past the hurdle of Justin’s brief Thanksgiving visit, she would throw herself into the Christmas spirit. She was determined that this year was going to be no different.

Even if the hurdle happened to be a living, breathing obstacle temporarily residing all but next door to her.

So what if her humming along with “White Christmas” sounded a little manic? She was the only one who knew the reason why.

By the time Bubba arrived and fired up the grill, she had green garland strung around all of the windows. By noon, she’d rearranged a few of the tables to accommodate the Christmas tree. It wasn’t a live tree; she didn’t want to have to deal with needles dropping on the floor in the restaurant. But it was a nice artificial one all the same. And by the time she closed up again at two, everyone had had a hand in decorating it. Even some of her customers had pitched in.

And the Christmas tunes she was humming had become a little less frantic sounding, even to her own critical ears.

It probably helped that Justin hadn’t shown his face at the diner. Not that she’d expected him to, but still.

She left the locking-up duties to Bubba and walked the till from that day and the weekend over to the bank to deposit.

Then, considering it
was
officially the Christmas shopping season, she stopped in one of her favorite shops, Classic Charms, to see if anything struck her fancy. She figured she’d run into either Sydney or Tara, who owned the eclectic shop. But neither one was there. The cash register was being manned by a teenage girl Tabby didn’t know.

Tabby’s mother, Jolie, however, was browsing the racks.

“Honey!” Jolie smiled broadly and hastily tucked a hanger back on the circular rack of clothes. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

“Same goes.” Tabby gave her mom a quick hug and tried to spy what she’d been looking at. “Thought I’d get a start on Christmas gifts. What was that you were looking at? Anything good?”

Jolie gave the rack a whirl. “This place is full of many good things,” she said, smiling serenely and almost evasively. “I just came from lunch with Hope. Why didn’t you tell me Justin was staying at your place?”

Tabby’s smile felt suddenly wooden. “He’s renting the empty unit.”
Staying at her place
had an entirely different connotation, as far as she was concerned. “Just wants somewhere to crash while he works on some project. Haven’t seen much of him, actually.”

“Well, that won’t last,” Jolie said with certainty. “Bring him by for dinner this week. Your dad and I would love to see him.”

“I think he’s got a lot of work—” The words died when her mom gave her a curious look. Tabby knew the more she made excuses, the more curious Jolie Taggart would likely become. “But I’m sure he’d take a break for you guys,” she finished.

“Wonderful.” Jolie glanced around the shop. “Now, we could both save a lot of time and effort if we just told each other what in here we’ve had our eye on.”

Tabby couldn’t help but chuckle. “Yes. But where would be the fun in that?”

Her mother sighed dramatically. “You are your father’s daughter.” She glanced at her watch and made a face. “I’d stay and pump you for gift ideas, but I’m meeting a new client this afternoon.”

“Designing another wedding dress?” Her mother was a seamstress, and in the last several years, wedding dresses had seemed to be one of her most frequent requests.

Jolie shook her head. “A ball gown, actually.” She glanced around the shop that sold bits of everything from clothing to furniture. “She doesn’t want it getting around before she sends out invitations, but Vivian Templeton is planning a Christmas party. It’s a little short notice, but she asked me to make her gown.”

“Flattering.”

“I thought so. Heaven knows the woman could hire any designer in the world if she felt like it. I was surprised she didn’t request Izzy, though. When it comes to doing the fancy stuff, she’s a lot better at it.”

Before moving with Murphy to Weaver, Izzy had been the costume designer for a ballet company based in New York. She’d waited tables for Tabby for a while, and she’d been a good worker. But designing clothing was clearly more up her alley, and since she’d helped Jolie out with one particularly difficult bride, the two of them had done several more jobs together.

“Izzy’s married to Erik, though,” Tabby reasoned. “Maybe Vivian was trying to be sensitive to the fact that she’s part of the Clay family.”

Jolie tucked a runaway curl of blond hair behind her ear and pursed her lips. “Possibly. Hope and I were talking about all that over lunch. She says Squire’s more adamant than ever about having nothing to do with Vivian.

“Obviously I never knew Squire’s first wife, Sarah, since she died before I was even born. But Vivian was Sarah’s sister-in-law. I know she interfered somehow and prevented her husband from having any sort of relationship with Sarah, but that was years ago. You know that old man is all about family. And learning now that there’s a passel of them living practically under his nose ought to count for something.”

Tabby frowned. “I hadn’t heard that Squire wasn’t willing to acknowledge the family connection at all.”

Jolie waved her hand dismissively. “I wouldn’t go that far. But he’s sure got a grudge, and is dead set against meeting Vivian face-to-face. Evidently, she’s asked him several times, but he flatly refuses.”

“They all seemed okay when I was over there for Thanksgiving dinner. Of course, nobody mentioned Vivian’s name within his earshot, either. At least not while I was there.” A customer came in, and Tabby slowly twirled the display rack. There was a goldish-brown blouse she spotted that exactly matched the color of her mom’s eyes, and as soon as her mother left, she planned to get a closer look at it.

“Well, the only thing I know directly from Vivian herself is that she’s planning a formal party the weekend before Christmas,” Jolie said in a low voice. “And now I’m going to have to hurry, or I’m going to be late.” She bussed Tabby’s cheek and headed for the front door. “Let me know what night you’re bringing Justin by,” she said as she left.

Tabby’s shoulders sank. She’d
almost
managed to forget that particular request.

She pulled the hanger off the rack and looked at the pretty blouse. It would suit her mother very well.

But Tabby’s spurt of holiday shopping spirit had abruptly dissipated, and she replaced the hanger.

She didn’t have to examine the reason why.

Justin.

* * *

The office space his aunt was able to allot for him at the hospital lab was considerably smaller than what he was used to, but Justin didn’t care. He had room for all materials he had to go through, a safe to lock them in and a lock on the door. Not that he was particularly worried about industrial espionage. Not in Weaver.

But he knew stranger things had happened.

So when he finally left the office late that Monday night, he packed up his laptop to take with him, closed the research logs in the safe and locked the door behind him.

“Finally heading out?” Scott Brown, the only lab tech on duty that night, barely glanced up from his microscope.

“Yeah.” Justin slid his laptop into his messenger bag and slung the strap over his shoulder. He didn’t know much else about the technician besides the guy’s name. “When do you get off?”

“Two o’clock in the morning.” Scott replaced the slide he was studying with another. He looked about Justin’s age. Maybe a few years older. “Hate the swing shift, but I like the extra pay that comes with it.” He tapped his foot on the metal rung of his high stool to the beat of the country music coming from a radio sitting on one of the steel shelves lining the walls. Walls that would be opened up soon, effectively tripling the current space.

Justin stopped at the locked door that controlled access to the lab and signed out. “You’re not originally from around here, are you?”

“Braden.”

Weaver’s nearest neighbor. A good thirty miles away. It wasn’t as if there were any handy public transportation methods around. No subway. No commuter train. And maybe the drive wouldn’t be considered that much of a commute to some, but it was only a two-lane highway that got you there and back.

When the weather was good and there were no accidents or semitrucks to slow you down, the trip wasn’t difficult. But when the snow and ice came?

Different story.

“Don’t envy you that,” Justin said and lifted his hand before leaving.

Even though his borrowed truck was in the parking lot, Justin could have walked from the hospital back to Tabby’s.

It was no farther than walking to the diner from the triplex.

Knowing that she did so—regularly—annoyed the hell out of him. Weaver was still a small town, yes. But it wasn’t the same small town in which they’d grown up.

The streets weren’t the same streets where they’d raced around on their bicycles when they were ten. These days, you were just as likely to encounter a stranger on the street as you were a person you’d known your entire life. And a weekend pool tournament like the one his cousin-in-law had just thrown didn’t have to be going on to draw strangers to town.

These days, strangers were actually
moving
to town.

He dumped his messenger bag on the passenger seat and headed home. His cell phone buzzed before he got there. Half the time, the cell service didn’t work around Weaver, so he was surprised enough that he glanced at the display.

The sight of Gillian’s name had him grimacing. He silenced the thing, not answering, and shoved the phone into the messenger bag. Two minutes later, he turned onto Tabby’s street and parked in the driveway next to a gunboat of a vehicle left over from a dozen decades ago. Mrs. Wachowski’s, no doubt.

He wasn’t sure if Tabby still drove the sporty little coupe she’d had years ago. He hadn’t seen it around. But he also hadn’t seen any other car he could peg as hers, either.

When he got to his front door, there was a piece of paper taped to it, and he peeled it off and unfolded it.

Tabby’s handwriting was as illegible as it always had been. For a girl who’d been able to draw circles around his stick figures from way back, she’d always had the most atrocious penmanship. And no amount of trying was going to help him decipher the scratchings. He was too far out of practice.

He went inside long enough to dump off the messenger bag, then walked down to her door and knocked.

And knocked.

And knocked.

He’d given up and was turning to go back to his place when the door finally squeaked open and Tabby stood there, several paintbrushes threaded through the fingers of one hand. Her hair was haphazardly pinned on top of her head in a messy knot, and she had a smear of red paint on her cheek.

“Looks like you still throw yourself entirely into your painting,” he said and swiped his thumb over the dab of paint, holding it up to show her.

She tossed the rag that was hanging over the shoulder of her misshapen T-shirt at him. “If your plumbing’s stopped up, call a plumber.”

“Nice landlady you make.”

She made a face at him and turned on her bare foot. “Come in and close the door. You’re letting out the heat. I suppose you’re here about the note,” she said, heading out of the living room.

He wiped the paint off his thumb and pushed the door closed with his shoulder before following her. “Since I could only make out about three words of it, yeah.” He stopped in the doorway of the bedroom she’d entered and stared. “Damn, Tabby.” There seemed to be dozens of paintings stacked up against the walls. Large canvases. Small canvases. And every size in between. “Do you paint instead of sleep these days?”

“Sometimes,” she muttered. She’d sat down on a tall wooden stool in front of her easel positioned near the window but remained facing him. She took up another rag from a stack of them and started cleaning her brushes. “Any night’ll work.”

He tilted the nearest stack of paintings away from the wall so he could look through them. They were all abstracts. “Looks like Jackson Pollock and Georgia O’Keeffe had a baby.” He glanced at her. “Any night’ll work for what?”

She turned to set aside her brushes on her worktable, and her T-shirt slipped off one shoulder. “Dinner. Did you read the note or not?”

He tossed the note next to her brushes. “It’s harder to figure out than your paintings.”

“My mom expects me to bring you around for dinner this week. I couldn’t come up with a good reason to tell her no.” She folded her arms across her chest. She was wearing narrow blue jeans with stains and rips on them that he knew came from years of use rather than some deliberate fashion style. She had one knee bent to prop her foot on the base of the revolving stool and one leg stretched out in front of her, and her toes were painted as brilliantly red as the smear he’d wiped off her cheek.

Over the years, he’d noticed lots of things about her, but he couldn’t remember ever really noticing her toes. They were decidedly...cute.

Shaking off the thought, he started looking through another stack of paintings. “I don’t care what night. Just pick and get it over with.” He lifted the canvas closest to the wall to look more closely at it. “Reminds me of a blizzard. Remember that time we got stuck at the high school during that February blizzard?” Twenty kids and one adult, sleeping on gym mats in the auditorium with no lights or electricity.

The corners of her lips barely lifted in acknowledgment. “How about Wednesday? Six o’clock. If you can manage an hour, I’m sure they’ll be satisfied. We probably won’t have to play this charade again until Christmas Eve.”

When his family had always gone to her folks’ place after church. When they’d been kids, they’d all bedded down together in the basement, whispering about what Santa might bring, while upstairs, they could hear their parents laughing.