Saving You (11 page)

“
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.

Three hours later, Lark was covered in a
fine sheen of sweat and smelled like a campfire, but the appetizers
and sit-down dinner had gone off without a hitch. All that was left
was to set up the desserts.

She started for the groom cakes, but Melody
stopped her with a hand on her arm.

“
Go on. Go dance with the
others,” she said, tugging at the bow on Lark’s apron. “Aria and I
can handle it from here on out.”

“
Are you sure?” Lark asked,
attempting to smooth her heat-frizzed hair back into her up-do. “I
can stay, I—”

“
Go. You deserve to have
some fun after how hard you’ve worked this week,” Aria said with a
rare smile. “And I don’t want any of you klutzes dropping my cakes.
I’ll bring them out myself as soon as Manny and George get the
fountain set up.”

“
All right.” Lark tugged
the top of her sleeveless red dress up, and decided to ignore the
tiny grease stain on the bottom of her skirt—it would be too dark
out on the dance floor to see the stain, anyway. She headed for the
kitchen door, determined to get in a few dances before she
succumbed to exhaustion.

She hurried across the
ballroom where Manny and George—her two oldest employees, the ones
who had helped her start
Ever After
three years ago—were setting up the dessert
tables, on through the foyer, and out into the warm Georgia
night.

Outside, paper lanterns hung laced between
the trees, casting the dozens of large tables with their
centerpieces of massive gardenia blossoms in a warm orange glow.
Dinner had been cleared awhile ago, but several of the older set
still sat in their chairs, nursing coffee and chatting, smiling as
they watched the younger generations jump up and down on the dance
floor beneath the trees.

If Lark had planned an outdoor wedding in
May, she was sure it would have rained and forced everyone to cram
into the too-small-for-three-hundred-guests historic home and the
celebration would have been ruined. But Lisa had better luck, and
her wedding had gone off without a hitch. The weather was perfect,
the ceremony was perfect, the food was perfect—if Lark did say so
herself—and everyone looked like they were having an amazing
time.

Dodging two flower girls
playing a rough game of tag with what was left of their bouquets,
Lark headed for the dance floor. She could see Lisa and Matt in the
center, surrounded by friends and family, and couldn’t wait to join
them. All the exhaustion and stress of the day began to seep away
as
Celebrate Good Times
cranked through the D.J.’s speakers and the people she loved
let out a whoop of appreciation.

It was possibly the cheesiest of all wedding
reception songs, but Lark couldn’t deny she loved it. She suddenly
felt ready to dance all night.

If fate hadn’t stepped in
and altered the course of her evening, she would have thrown
herself into the fray and danced for hours, singing along and
stealing Lisa from her new husband to swing her around
during
Dancing Queen
, their favorite best friend song.

But fate did step in, in the form of six
feet, two inches of old flame.

At first Lark couldn’t believe it was really
him, but there was no mistaking that strong jawline or the shaggy
brown hair that fell over his forehead just so. No mistaking those
wide shoulders or that narrow waist or how utterly delicious he
looked in a suit.

It was Mason Stewart, all right. Mason
Stewart, back home and brooding at the edge of the dance floor with
a beer held lightly between two fingers like he’d never left town
in the first place.

Mason hadn’t been back to Summerville in
four years, not since the night he asked Lark to marry him, then
ran off to New York City to do his residency at some hospital in
Queens the very next morning. He had been offered a residency in
Atlanta, only an hour away, and he’d promised to take it. To take
it, and to take Lark with him when he left Summerville. They’d
planned to get an apartment and Lark was going to get a job cooking
at an amazing restaurant and Mason was going to start saving the
world, one family practice patient at a time, and after three years
of dating, they were finally going to live together.

Finally live together, and do all those
other boyfriend-girlfriend things they’d never done because Lark
was waiting for marriage, and Mason was deathly afraid of saying “I
do.”

By the time Mason turned sixteen, his mother
had been married eight times. Shortly after his sixteenth birthday,
she had left town with husband number nine and Mason went to live
with his Uncle Parker, a man who made it clear he wasn’t thrilled
to be saddled with his sister’s kid. Mason blamed his mom—and the
ridiculous, outdated, backward institution of marriage—for the
roughest years of his childhood.

Lark had known how he felt about marriage.
She should have been suspicious the second he dropped down on one
knee.

Instead, she had wept with happiness,
slipped the ring on her finger, and stayed up half the night
calling everyone she knew, telling them the happy news.

But instead of coming by her parents’ house
for Saturday brunch the next morning to celebrate the engagement,
Mason had run for it, leaving Lark to explain that all her giddy
“I’m getting married” phone calls had been a mistake.

A mistake.

Like leaving the kitchen.

Like heading for the dance floor.

Like getting close enough to see Mason’s
blue eyes flash when he spotted her across the lawn, frozen like a
deer in the headlights.

***

“
Betting on You” by Jessie
Evans is available now.