The Mistletoe Wedding Read online

  “That’s enough!” she hisses, but there isn’t much heat behind it. It comes out far more flustered and breathless than anything, and I know I’m not wrong.

  That information nearly brings me to my knees. The boneless sensation is back and I have to stumble to the side and throw an arm out against the wall to support myself, though I try to look casual doing it.

  Meanwhile, it’s like time stops. Like we’re the only ones alive. Gravity isn’t working properly because it feels like our surroundings are swimming. I’ve never kissed anyone like that. I’ve never been kissed like that either. At least, I’ve never felt anything close to the current mess I have going on in my entire being.

  Breona’s seductive scent wraps around me and her dark eyes destroy me. I glance down and I notice, of course, that her nipples are puckered through the fabric of her dress.

  Bree’s hand reaches up and tangles self-consciously in her hair. “We should go back to dinner. Why are you out here anyway?”

  “You were taking forever.”

  She rolled her eyes. “No one sent you after me. Cozzie or Arla would have come after me if they were actually concerned. You can’t go into the women’s bathroom.”

  “Can’t I?” My left brow arches and I flash her a look that says she doesn’t know me at all. Her lips wobble, like she believes that I’m just crazy enough to do it.

  She stares back at me, trying to decipher and decode what’s going on between us. Trying to figure out how to get the upper hand back.

  “Some truce,” she snorts again. “You don’t want to mess with me, Karsyn. I’ll bite back.”

  I keep my smirk in place. “I’m counting on it.”

  That takes the winds out of her sails. She shakes her head at me and plunges past, but I catch up with her in the hall just before the restaurant opens up to all the tables with people eating their overpriced food, looking out wistfully at a beach they’ll probably never set foot on.

  Sometimes I wonder how a guy like me and someone like Jake are friends at all. His parents, at least his mother, is truly something else. They have money. So do my parents. Well, my dad still does. I just never talk to the bastard. I don’t think it was a coincidence that Jake’s fire-breathing mother stopped inviting me over for dinners and trying to schmooze my parents after they got a divorce. It was like she could sniff out the stench of poverty all over me. Unfortunately for her, Jake and I were tight by then. There was no way he was dropping me as his bud just because his mom was a giant cunt.

  “What are you doing? Don’t touch me!” Breona shakes my hand off her wrist, but her breath is all messed up. Shaky and wispy and her eyes burn with a fire I’ve never seen there.

  I drop my hand as she asks, before the flames can burn me. “Sure. Just wanted to ask you if you thought it was a good idea to go back together. Barbara is likely to ask if we really were in that bathroom with each other.”

  She snorts. “I dare her to ask me.”

  “Play nice,” I warn.

  She sends me the glare from hell. “I am playing nice. As nice as I can. That woman is hell bent on destroying this whole wedding by being the mother-in-law from hell. She won’t suggest we were doing something together. Which we were not. Everyone knows that I hate you.”

  “Do they?” I ask it in such a way that suggests it’s not common knowledge. “Maybe you didn’t get the memo, because I swear you liked that kiss back there.” I drop my voice to my best impression of a sexy, lazy, “I don’t give a shit” drawl.

  “I didn’t like anything about it. You startled me, that’s all.”

  “I’m sure. Denial is the first step to change.”

  “Nothing is going to change about you and me. You were a backstabbing asshole in high school. You’re still probably sharpening your knives and you’re still likely an asshole. We are getting through this wedding and I’m going back to North Carolina and that’s that.”

  I lean in a little because I can’t help myself. “Nope. No knives at home that I know of. At least none that I’m planning on plunging into anyone. If you’d stop and listen to me or anyone else, even your best friends, you’d realize that I never did a thing to you in high school other than be your friend.”

  “Right. Because friends steal from each other. Friends wreck each other’s lives.”

  “I didn’t wreck your life. You are what you always wanted to be. A journalist.”

  “And sixty thousand dollars in debt thanks to you, since you stole the scholarship that should have been mine. You never even told me you were applying for it. If that doesn’t scream underhanded, thieving, backstabbing asshole, I don’t know what does.”

  “You wanted me to review your essay,” I seethe. “I did. I tried to help you. You submitted it anyway.”

  “I didn’t get that scholarship because they said that my essay was too close in thematic material to something that had already been published. You go figure out what that means.”

  I realize that we’re having this conversation in the back hall of a restaurant and that it’s very public and that someone is bound to come down that hall at any time to use the bathrooms, but I can’t stop myself.

  “That’s news to me,” I growl. “Or maybe it’s not. I thought that there were a couple paragraphs that were too closely paraphrased to your sources where you didn’t give credit. I even told you that.”

  “Nope.” She shakes her head and her wild black and bright purple curls fly all over.

  She’s so firmly in denial that it makes me want to groan in frustration. Or slam my fist into the wall, far away from her, when she’s not around, so she won’t see how she makes me crazy. No. What it really wants to make me do is to turn her, back her up against the wall, and blister her mouth until she’s so discomfited that she doesn’t know left from right and she has no choice but to listen to me.

  At that moment, some frazzled-looking young mother dragging a snotty, red-faced toddler who looks to be in full-fledged melt down mode comes barrelling down the hall, rushing towards the sanctuary the bathroom provides.

  No one wants to make a scene at an overpriced, touristy, frou-frou restaurant. Though I’m not sure anyone would have the heart to comment on it. The whole place is decked out in Christmassy cheer. Isn’t that what the holidays are about, after all? Dysfunction and meltdowns?

  Breona breaks away from me, clearly done with the conversation. Clearly done with me.

  “We’ll talk about this again tomorrow,” I promise her in that same sinister tone filled with darkness and promise.

  She flips me off as she walks confidently away. Maybe in her mind, she’s let me speak and that’s the end of it.

  She’s dead wrong..

  I can’t fucking wait until tomorrow.

  By then I’ll have a plan in place. I have to. It’s probably my last chance to try to get her to listen. If she’d just listen, I know I could win her back.

  I wait a minute so that it looks like I really did just go to take a piss like I said, and head off towards the table. If not, I can always blame the need to escape Barbara later and everyone would understand.

  People always said I was resourceful, and I plan to use the next twelve hours wisely. They’ll likely be the most important ones of my life.

  Chapter 5

  Breona

  I walk into Arla’s hotel suite the next morning to the scent of expensive dark roast coffee and a pile of doughnuts on a table at the far end of the room where the kitchenette is. The hotel room is pretty normal for a suite. The only difference between it and my room is that it has a big kitchen area on one end, a living room with a pull-out sofa bed on the other, and the bedroom is tucked away from view. Arla might look like she loves expensive, shiny things, but nothing could be further from the truth. She’s an eco-advocate, planet saver, antique lover all the way.

  I sigh with delight as I slip out of my shoes, ready to face the music of a morning with a hair and makeup artist who has likely never done makeup or hair for anyo
ne a darker shade than pale ivory. Trust me, that’s not an insult. The struggle is seriously real. Like, try going into a drug store to buy some generic foundation. Some brands carry darker stuff, but usually there’s just one color that is so off it makes me want to curse and cry and laugh all at once. I actually brought all my makeup just in case they didn’t come prepared. They can put it on me if they want, since I’ve never been very good at it, but I wanted to have everything locked down.

  Coffee and a butt load of carbs are exactly what I need after spending a sleepless night in my hotel room tossing and turning and praying today would never come or that, by some miracle, I could clone myself and my double could endure the wedding and a full day with Karsyn at my side.

  He wrecked me with that kiss. Our first kiss. The one I’d dreamed about for so long. It shouldn’t have been in some stupid hallway of some stupid restaurant outside some admittedly very nice bathroom. It shouldn’t have happened at all. I should have kneed him in the crotch and told him to keep his paws off of me and his perfect lips way the hell away. I didn’t though. Not even when he had the nerve to ask me if I was wet. No. Tell me. I hate that Karsyn’s always had these eyes that seem to see right through me. Superhero eyes, like they can scan all the blood and bone and feeling inside.

  “Bree! I’m so glad you’re here!” Arla runs out of the bedroom in her purple fluffy cotton bathrobe and stops, with an actual screech of bare feet against shiny laminate floor, right in front of me. She wraps me up in a hug like she actually can’t believe I haven’t bailed on her yet. She gave me an extra key to her room the night before like an insurance policy.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I assure her while my head is tucked into the sweet-smelling crook of her neck and her hair flows all around me. I feel bad for having to say it after I did my best to try to figure out how to do just that.

  “Cozzie isn’t here yet,” Arla moans as she pulls away. She starts twisting her hands.

  “It’s eight in the morning. The wedding isn’t until seven tonight. Relax. She’s always late anyway.”

  “She’s probably over at Bryn’s hotel. They’re probably doing unspeakable things right now and he probably thinks it’s funny to make her late.”

  I roll my eyes. “First, gross. Second, did you do any unspeakable things with your fiancé last night? I doubt that having Jake in a different hotel kept him away from you.”

  “First, gross,” Arla mimics me with smirk. “Second, ladies do not kiss and tell.”

  “How did he manage to sneak away from his mom? Aren’t his parents staying at the same place so she can guard dog his ass?”

  “Oh god,” Arla groans. “I’m so sorry about her. She’s really gone full bridezilla and she’s not even a bride.”

  “You don’t have to apologize. Other than hoping she might have mellowed out in ten years, we all remember what she’s like. I guess some things never change.”

  “She actually has mellowed a little, but it’s stress that brings out the worst in her. I don’t know how Pat copes with it. He must get shit on at home all the time. I actually feel sorry for him. I never say anything, just so I can keep the peace. I really only have to see her like once a month and I can handle it.”

  “Just pray you never have kids.”

  Arla rolls her eyes. “I know. The obligations will go up then. Although, they say grandchildren really change people.”

  “Your kids would be so beautiful people would probably put them in a zoo.”

  “Thanks,” Arla laughs. “I seriously needed that. And doughnuts. And coffee. Right now.”

  “I agree. Is that your secret? Lots of carbs and lots of coffee?”

  “No,” she sighs as she turns back towards the kitchen. “I just try to remember that she’s the one at least partly responsible for making and raising Jake. I love him. I love everything about him. I’m trying not to let her ruin this day. It’s just basically for her anyway. We’d be happy to live in sin forever.”

  “You’re a better person than I am. Now. Pass me that one. With the raspberry filling.”

  Arla does. She also pours me a cup of coffee and even adds cream for me, since she knows me too well. I glance around the kitchenette.

  “Your hair and makeup people coming soon?”

  “At noon. I wonder if that’s too early. Maybe I booked them too far ahead of time. What if I get all sweaty and nervous and ruin everything way before the wedding even starts?”

  I guess this is what being a maid of honor is about—calming the full-on meltdown before it even has a chance to start.

  “Don’t worry. It will probably take them a couple hours to have you done up anyway. And good luck to them with this mop.” I grasp my curls and grin at Arla. “By the time they’re done it won’t be so long before we have to get you into that dress and over for pictures. I know it seems like a lot of time, but I’m sure you booked everything just right. You’re a way better planner that I am.”

  Arla considers that while she stuffs a chocolate donut into her mouth. She follows it up with huge sips of black coffee, which is likely still pretty hot given that my own mug has steam tendrils curling from it. I wince. She’s nervous. She downplayed the whole thing, but I’m starting to understand that she’s close to being a wreck on the inside.

  “Where did you and Karsyn disappear to last night?” Arla keeps right on eating like it’s the most casual question in the world.

  I nearly choke on my own bite of doughnut and swallow my tongue all at once. An uncomfortable warmth spreads through my veins like liquid fire. I wish I could blame it on the coffee or the stuffy room, but the temperature in the place borders more on cold and I haven’t even tried the coffee yet.

  “Disappear? I just went to the bathroom. Sorry. Couldn’t take any more of Barbara. I needed a few minutes. I was also jetlagged as all hell.”

  “You were gone for, like, twenty minutes.”

  “Yeah. Like I said. Jetlagged.”

  “Karsyn was gone for at least ten of those twenty.” Arla pegs me with a no-nonsense stare.

  “Oh, come on. I have no idea where he was. Maybe he was jetlagged too.”

  “He drove.”​

  “Maybe he was trying to hide from the Dragon too.”

  “I can’t believe you guys still call her that.”

  “Come on. Like you’ve never wanted to.”

  Arla’s nose wrinkles. “Of course I have, but I would never. Word would probably get back to her and then I really couldn’t face her. I’ve always been nothing but sweet. She has no ammunition against me. But we aren’t talking about her. You looked all flustered when you got back to the table.”

  “Oh, well, I was just tired.” I make a big production of staring down into my coffee.

  “You know…” Arla starts, but her tone tells me she’s treading carefully. “There isn’t any harm in forgiving him. It’s been ten years. That’s a long time.”

  “Forgive him? Not a chance. First of all, he never asked. Second, he tried to ruin my life. He stole my scholarship when he was rich enough that he didn’t need a free ride. His parents would have paid for him to go wherever he wanted. I had to work my ass off and I’m drowning in student loans. Plus, he stole my essay. I know he did. What kind of friend does that? Oh, right. Only the kind of person who isn’t actually a friend at all.”

  Arla sighs. “Right, well, I just want you to know that he’s sorry. He’s told Jake a thousand times that he feels bad about what happened. He wanted to tell you that he was going for the scholarship too, but he didn’t know how. He didn’t actually think he’d get it.”

  “There were twelve other kids in our class going for the scholarship. Or more. Twelve that I know of. He could have told me. We all had the same odds.”

  “You would have been pissed that he was even trying.”

  “Right. And I wouldn’t have given him my essay to review and he never would have stolen it.”

  “What if he didn’t?” Arla stares at me from
across the counter.

  “I just don’t see how he couldn’t have. I got a response back that stated while the rest of my portfolio was good, my essay was problematic because there were passages that were too close—”

  “You really think he would do that? This is Karsyn we’re talking about. The same kid who has been in love with you for as long as I can remember.”

  “What?” I screech. At the same time, my hand jerks, knocking my mug of untouched coffee off the lip of the counter and onto the floor.

  It shatters, the explosion of glass spraying shrapnel all over the kitchen area while coffee splatters up the side of the tall counter next to the three barstools tucked underneath.