Currant Creek Valley(47)

“I’ve still got her wedding dress hanging at the shop,” Claire said. “I have no idea what to do with it. Genevieve told me she never wants to see it again.”

“There you go, Mom. You could wear that.” Alex grinned.

Even when she scoffed, Mary Ella managed to make the sound classy. “My bust is a little bigger than Genevieve’s. And can you just see me in that lovely designer white gown, veil and all, at my age? I would look completely ridiculous!”

“You would look beautiful,” Claire said stoutly. “At least that way, all the work I did—twice—of custom-beading the bodice wouldn’t completely go to waste.”

“Who knows?” Mary Ella argued. “Gen’s young. She might want to wear it again in a few years.”

“Seems to me, wedded bliss is the last thing on her mind,” Alex offered. “Did I tell you I saw her one night last month, shooting pool with some pretty rough customers at The Speckled Lizard?”

Had it only been a month ago when she and Sam had spent that first evening together? When they had gone for a walk through the quiet streets of Hope’s Crossing and laughed together and shared that first kiss?

She had only seen him a couple times in the past few weeks, once at the restaurant when she had delivered a celebratory lunch for him and his crew on the day they finished the kitchen and turned the work over to the interior design crew, and once when she had bumped into him briefly at the grocery store in town.

Both had been short, stilted encounters—on her part, mostly, she suspected—and had left her unaccountably depressed.

She knew he had moved into the house down the street. For the past week or so, she had seen lights burning at all hours. She couldn’t seem to escape the man. Every time she drove past, she thought of him, wondered how he and Ethan were getting along, remembered the sizzle and churn of her blood when he kissed her.

Though she had been tempted several times to drop by and welcome him to the neighborhood as she would any other new move-in, she kept telling herself she would do it later, after the restaurant opened.

She was a coward. She knew it, but the truth was, she hadn’t yet recovered from the bombshell he had dropped that Saturday afternoon.

All along, she had been thinking he would be out of her life as soon as the restaurant was finished, only to discover the man was moving in down the street...with the son he hadn’t bothered to mention.

Had she ever been so completely wrong about a man before?

Well, okay, once. Horribly, disastrously. She turned her attention away from the past and back to the conversation when she realized Claire was asking her a question.

“You saw Gen here in town?” Claire frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. I thought she was working in Paris.”

“Last I heard, she had some big hotshot public-relations job with a fashion design company there,” Maura added.

With that tight clothing and her heavy makeup, Genevieve had looked pretty far removed from someone in the Parisian fashion design world, but that was none of Alex’s business.

“It was definitely her. If I had any doubt, it would have disappeared when I saw the way she turned up her nose when she saw me, like a family of skunks had just wandered past.”

“Have you heard any news about what she’s doing lately from her mother?” Claire asked Mary Ella.

“Laura tends to avoid me these days.” Mary Ella didn’t look particularly upset by that development. No surprise there. The ill will between the McKnights and the Beaumonts was deeply rooted in the events of the past two years.

Genevieve’s brother Charlie had been driving impaired in the accident that had killed Maura’s daughter Layla. While Maura seemed to have made her peace with the boy, Alex wasn’t as forgiving a person as her sister.

Then the previous year, the scandal erupted about Maura’s other daughter, Sage, having a brief affair with Gen’s fiancé, who happened to be the son of a very influential Denver family, and Gen had broken off the engagement and sent back all her wedding presents.

Alex had her own opinion about the social-climbing Beaumonts as a whole, but she still couldn’t get over Gen standing up for her future like that.

The result of that unexpected pregnancy—the beautiful little boy on Mary Ella’s lap—started to fret and rub at his eyes.

“You’re tired, aren’t you, little man?” Maura said.

He stuck out his bottom lip and held his hands out to his mother, who swooped him out of her mother’s arms.

“I should probably take off,” Maura said. “I’m hoping I can get him down for a nap before I have a conference call with a couple distributors later today.”