Blissed (Misfit Brides #1) (7 page)

She rescued the stuffed animal and set it on the edge of the desk. “Sorry, Cindy,” she muttered to the orange stegosaurus.

Cindy stared back with disgusted accusations in her dark button eyes.

“Fine,” Natalie said. “
You
make sure Mom’s boutique doesn’t fall apart.
You
keep her Games going.
You
play nice with the man who destroyed your marriage so the Queen General doesn’t make you the victim of her next voodoo cake.”

Cindy had the grace to look properly chastised.

It was entirely possible Natalie needed a shrink.

How had Mom done this all?

One step at a time, Mom would’ve told her. Natalie hadn’t known how big those steps would be, or how many obstacles she’d have to overcome.

This time, it wasn’t an obstacle she could beat. It was an obstacle she had to walk away from.

Nat triple-checked a draft of an e-mail to the chief about Husband Games security. She wrote e-mails back to the trophy shop, the high school booster club, and the hardware store, assuring them their contracts hadn’t been awarded elsewhere and suggesting they approach Bonnie and Earl Phillips at their flower shop this week with proposed agreements in hand. The QG, as head of all of Knot Fest, got to choose Mom’s replacement for the Husband Games subcommittee. She’d appointed the Phillipses, and now everything was falling apart. But Nat knew the Knot Fest treasurers would handle payments so long as the vendors’ contracts were signed, so Bonnie and Earl couldn’t let that slip through the cracks too. Thank God Mom had gotten the sunflower field contract finalized before she died. Now if only the weather would hold up for the planting this week, and the rest of the spring so the plants could survive.

When her e-mails were done, Natalie considered curling up on the couch and waiting for Dad—they needed to have a rational, honest, heartbreaking discussion about the shop—but her usual second wind had kicked in, and she couldn’t sit still.

So she pulled out her copies of Mom’s notes about the Golden Husband Games and set to work making her own notes about what she needed to subtly put in motion next—permit applications, bus reservations, invitations, door prizes for the crowd, schedules, manipulating the weather, and a host of other things that weren’t getting done—all without the Queen General getting wind of her involvement.

Natalie had made mistakes, but it felt good to be helping. Doing something right.

Honoring her mother—who had been Nat’s strongest public and private supporter after her divorce from Derek—by finishing the work that had been the highlight of Mom’s year.

After twenty-seven years of leading the Husband Games subcommittee, a position she’d inherited from her mother before her, it wasn’t fair that Mom would miss the golden anniversary. But Nat was doing everything in her power to make sure the Games were as beautiful and brilliant as if Mom had done it all herself.

Dad still wasn’t home when Nat finished her notes, and a book wouldn’t cut it for relaxation tonight. She switched desks, grabbed her sketchbook, and powered up her sewing machine. Jeremy would drop off Gabby’s dress tomorrow, but Nat had another project to work on. The same kind of projects she’d done anytime she got an urge to sew the last few months. Before long, though, her eyes itched like her lashes were made of the starched lace she was adding to a Cindy the Stegosaurus-shaped yellow bridesmaid dress. A veil-like haze ringed the edges of her vision. She set the dress aside.

Headlights flashed through the blinds.

Natalie’s heart fluttered. “Please let us both be reasonable adults,” she murmured to the ceiling.

She hadn’t meant to belittle Dad’s offer of the shop. She’d spent her entire childhood dreaming about the day it would be hers. Of the glittery accessories she’d order, of all the dresses she’d have in her own closet, of all the dresses she’d design to make her the richest, most famous, most envied shop owner on The Aisle. Possibly in the whole wedding industry.

Such a selfish dream, all wrapped up in ribbons and bows and blinders. She’d never considered that the price of owning the shop would be her mother’s life.

Yet, she still wished she could keep it. That she could give Noah a stable childhood here. That she
could
successfully compete on The Aisle.

But she wasn’t meant to have a fairy-tale ending.

The car lights cut off outside. A car door slammed. Then another car door.

She whipped around to peer through the gauzy drapes. That was her dad’s voice, but he wasn’t alone. Two bulky figures moved past the window.

Wait—was Dad
singing
?

Yep, that was “Itsy Bitsy Spider” in a familiar baritone. Except when Natalie learned the song, the Itsy Bitsy Spider was supposed to go up the spout again, not sit and pout in his gin.

A second voice spoke low and deep. Dad laughed. Natalie heard the distinctive sound of keys being tested in the lock, and Dad laughed harder. His companion said something else.

Natalie darted to the front door and flung it open. 

Dad grinned at her, one eyeball pointing more toward his nose than toward her. “Look, it’s the top of my shit list.”

He swayed, and his companion steadied him.

Natalie’s stomach flipped inside out. A few expletives flew through her head, but this time, she didn’t immediately calculate what she owed Noah’s college fund.

Nope, this one was free.

Because her father, her own flesh and blood, had brought
him
home.

Look, Nat
, Dad may as well have said, this
is what I always wanted in my children.

Dad knew what had happened, and he’d brought CJ home anyway.

Everyone
knew what happened, and they still glorified him. They picked him over one of their own.

Because he hadn’t married the wrong person. That was all that mattered, wasn’t it?

CJ stood there, unblinking, unhurried, and arrogant as if he’d been a Highland laird in that book Natalie had hidden from herself. He was copper-haired, tall and broad as the door, cocky as hell. While one side of his mouth hitched up, his grass-green eyes made a slow, intentional perusal of her body, from the headband holding her hair back, to her lips, to her black tank and cardigan, to her yoga pants, to her pink-tipped toes, and then all the way back again.

Sizing up the enemy.

She wished she had the luxury of sizing him up too. Instead, she swallowed her pride, and opened the door wider. “Come on, Dad. Let’s get you to bed.”

Dad took two Captain Jack Sparrow steps into the house, and his knees buckled. CJ snagged him before he hit the wood floor. “Whoopsh,” Dad said on a chuckle.

Natalie’s jaw locked down, but she forced it to unclench.

This was her fault too.

She reached for Dad. “Thank you for bringing him home,” she said to CJ’s lapel. “I can take it from here.”

Dad swatted in the general vicinity of her hand. “Itshy bitshy shpider don’t need girl help,” he slurred.

CJ cleared his throat. Natalie instinctively looked up. A dangerous amusement flickered from his eyes to his lips, and she felt an inexplicable pull low in her abdomen.

Inexplicable, unwelcome, and not as surprising as she wanted it to be.

“He’ll be okay soon,” CJ said.

Maybe someone else’s dad would be okay soon, but the liquor cabinet over the fridge held the exact same booze her parents had received as wedding gifts.

Except for those few open bottles she’d refilled as a teenager.

“How much did he drink?” Natalie said.

CJ’s grin turned a color of delicious that perfectly matched every last put-together inch of his solid, male body.

She disliked him more by the minute.

“Aw, Mom, can’t a guy have a night of fun every once in a while? This man here”—he slapped Dad on the back, then shifted to prop him up again—“hasn’t gotten shitfaced in
years
. When a man loses the love of his life, there’s nothing like a night or two to drink until you forget. Then you move on. All he’s been dealing with, he’s had it coming.”

Drool slipped out Dad’s mouth. He swiped at it, clocked himself in the nose and knocked his glasses crooked, then laughed like Noah had told a bad knock-knock joke.

Natalie’s roots radiated more heat than the heater. She stepped up to Dad’s other side. “Bedtime. Let’s go.”

He swatted at her again and banged the entryway table instead, knocking flat his wedding picture that had been there since Mom passed—one of the few photos that had survived the flood. “Can’t hold the fam’ly, can’t hold me. Man gots friends, time like thish.” Dad punched CJ in the ribs.

CJ didn’t flinch. His gaze flicked to Natalie, and a fleeting memory of her own guilt at that long-ago Knot Fest tickled her conscience.

“Might want to get him a bucket,” CJ said. “Sound good, Arthur? Bed and a bucket? Let’s go, buddy.”

With CJ’s help, Dad made it farther into the house.

The Queen General would read Natalie the riot act when she got wind of this. And she’d get wind of every bit—how Natalie was a shithead to Dad at the shop, how Dad went who-knew-where to get drunk, how Natalie welcomed CJ Blue into her home in the dead of the night.

If she could start this day over, she’d poke herself in the eyeball with a sewing needle to avoid having to live through it.

But she didn’t have that luxury. Instead, she had to attend to a drunken father and the QG’s poster boy. A drunken father who’d earned his night out, and a poster boy she now owed for not allowing Dad to drive home drunk and possibly causing Natalie to bury both her parents within a year.

The thought made her breath hitch.

And maybe her general dislike of CJ thaw.

But only a little.

She gestured toward a short hallway beneath the stairs. “His room’s that way.”

With the men headed to Dad’s room, Nat ducked out to the garage, sucked in enough chilly air to numb her lungs, snagged a bucket, and wondered how the hell she could minimize tonight’s damage.

She needed to stuff her pride back into the shadows and be a good little divorced daughter of Bliss, but when she got back inside, CJ was taking up Dad’s entire doorway with his tallness and broadness and inherent male Neanderthal-ness.

She might’ve gone a little tingly in some formerly dormant parts.

Residual cold from the garage. Her dormant parts were defrosting. Totally normal after going outside for less than a minute in early spring. Yep. That was all it was.

Nothing related to having an attractive, apparently capable, single man in her house.

Or related to thinking about what might’ve been her own role in the demise of her marriage. But she had enough problems without going there.

She put the bucket between her and CJ—a girl had to give
some
indication she didn’t like having strange men in her home. Until he acknowledged recognizing her from the confessional incident or introduced himself, she would absolutely call him a stranger.

She hovered just beyond the door.

“Here, let me.” CJ gave her an even more delectable grin. Hints at laugh lines creased the corners of his mouth.

“Arthur’s not decent.” CJ winked, and then the bucket was gone, her mouth was dry and she was staring at the closed bedroom door, wondering how the man who symbolized the worst wrong of her life was suddenly so manly.

She retreated to the living room and paced, rubbing her palms and listening to the occasional snort of laughter or verse of “Itsy Bitsy Spider.”

CJ appeared a few minutes later. “All set.” He plopped down on the couch and bent to untie his shoe.

Untie his shoe?

“You know what?” he said, seemingly oblivious to her sputters at his intention to make himself comfortable.

“I just realized,” he continued, pulling a long, black-nylon-socked foot from his shoe and flexing his toes, “I didn’t catch your name.”

Wait.

He didn’t catch her name?

He was playing, that much was certain, but an even more mortifying thought occurred.

He didn’t remember her from the Husband Games five years ago.

Just when she thought she didn’t have any ego left to bruise.

He had ruined her life, and he didn’t remember.

Worse, he had ruined her life, and now he was making himself at home in
her
home, right beneath where her son slept. “What are you doing?” she blurted.

He dangled a set of keys. Car key, house key, shop key, all on the Bliss Bridal key ring Dad had used since the 1990s. “In case you hadn’t noticed, your dad’s not in any shape to drive me back to my car tonight.” He plopped the keys on the end table, then went to work on his second shoe.

“You can’t stay here.”

He couldn’t. The things the Queen General would do to Natalie if the Exalted Widower did the walk of shame from this house in the morning. 

How could Dad not realize the implications of bringing CJ here?

Oh, right. Because CJ had gotten him drunk.

CJ gave her a look that clearly said she was the fool who didn’t realize he was the king of this castle, then patted the leather couch that was at least a foot too short for him. “Slept on a lot worse. You got a blanket?”

She gaped at him. There was a quaking in the pit of her stomach that she couldn’t clench. “You can’t stay here.” She lunged for the keys. “I’ll drive you back to your hotel.”

Not the best option to leave Dad drunk and home alone with Noah, but she had to get CJ out of here before someone saw him. She’d be back in ten minutes. Noah and Dad would be fine.

CJ scoffed at her. “Lady, I have eleven sisters. No way in hell I’m letting you drive.”

Did he just—he
did.
The
bastard
.

She curved her lips into a tight smile. “I’m more grateful than you could know that you brought my father home safe, but I’d hate for an honored guest of Bliss to get pulled over smelling like you do.”

“If my choices are the couch or you behind the wheel, I’ll take the couch.” He lifted a speculative eyebrow. “Unless there’s a bed you wanted to show me?”