Kiss the Bride (40 page)

Seeing how happy the bookend made her, he’d promised he would search the Internet and haunt garage sales
until he found the missing Jack and reunited him with his Jill.

An empty feeling settled in her stomach. That was another promise Shane hadn’t kept.

Tish shook her head, shook away Shane. Water under the bridge.

She peeled off a strip of adhesive tape and carefully taped the price tag up inside the sleeve of her suit jacket so she could return it to Nordstrom’s for a refund on her credit card once her meeting was over.

Then, she took another spin in front of the mirror. Yes. She exuded money, polish, and sophistication. Never mind that deep inside she still felt poor, tarnished, and from the wrong side of town. “Please, please, let me get this job.”

Her car payment was two months overdue and she’d been eating Ramen noodles at every meal for the past two weeks. She was hoping to procure a down payment from Addison so she could zip it to the bank before the check she’d written for the stilettos ended up costing her thirty bucks in overdraft protection.

For five years now she’d been struggling to get her fledgling business off the ground. She was a damned good videographer and she knew it, but she couldn’t seem to catch a break. She wasn’t one to give up on her dreams, but at some point didn’t prudence step in? When did common sense shout that your dreams were going to destroy you and you’d better let go of them before you lost everything that was important to you?

Like Shane.

Tish winced and bit down on her bottom lip. The love of her life. The man she’d foolishly allowed to get away. But she wasn’t going to think about him. Not today, dammit.

Sometimes, in spite of her best attempts to look on the
bright side of life, it felt as if everything was slipping, spreading, festooning headlong into a disaster she could neither name nor predict. Her throat tightened and she shook her head against the dark, creeping thoughts.

No, no. She wasn’t the sort to dwell on unhappy things. Onward and upward. That was her motto. She was just about to shut her closet door when she caught sight of the wedding veil in her peripheral vision.

The three-hundred-year-old veil was carefully folded and sealed in a special bag. Her best friend in the whole world, Delaney Cartwright, had given Tish the veil for good luck after her own wedding the previous December.

Tish remembered the day they’d found the veil in a tiny consignment shop. Delaney had immediately fallen under the spell of it, but Tish had been skeptical. Then the mysterious shopkeeper, Claire Kelley, had told them a fantastical tale about the veil that Tish did not believe.

Still, it had been a compelling fable and she recalled it with clarity. For some reason, the story had stuck with her.

Once upon a time,
according to the legend,
in long-ago Ireland, there lived a beautiful young witch named Morag who possessed a great talent for tatting lace. People came from far and wide to buy the lovely wedding veils she created, but there were other women in the community who were envious of Morag’s beauty and talent.

These women made up a lie and told the magistrate that Morag was casting spells on the men of the village. The magistrate arrested Morag, but fell madly in love with her. Convinced that she must have cast a spell upon him as well, he moved to have her tried for practicing witchcraft.

If found guilty, she would be burned at the stake.

But in the end, the magistrate could not resist the
power of true love. On the eve before Morag was to stand trial, he kidnapped her from the jail in the dead of night and spirited her away to America, giving up everything for her love.

To prove that she had not cast a spell over him, Morag promised never to use magic again. As her final act of witchcraft, she made one last wedding veil, investing it with the power to grant the deepest wish of the wearer’s soul.

She wore the veil on her own wedding day, wishing for true and lasting love. Morag and the magistrate were blessed with many children and much happiness. They lived to a ripe old age and died in each other’s arms.

Claire Kelley had gone on to claim that whoever wished upon the veil would get their heart’s deepest desire.

Delaney had believed. She’d wished upon the veil and ended up finding her true love in Houston Police Department undercover cop Nick Vinetti.

Tish was truly happy for Delaney, but magical wedding veil or not, she wasn’t sinking all her hopes into happily ever after. She’d thought she’d found true love with Shane, and look what had happened. The old familiar misery rose up in her, the misery she’d struggled for two long years to exorcise.

She took the veil from the bag and fingered it, wrestled with the idea of making a wish. It seemed silly.

But what would it hurt? Even if you don’t believe?

Good point. Tish slipped the veil from the hanger. The lace felt strangely warm to the touch.

Tentatively, she settled it on her head and examined herself in the mirror. The design was constructed of tiny roses grouped to form a larger pattern of butterflies. The veil was so white it was almost phosphorescent.

Her scalp tingled. Her pulse quickened. There was something undeniably magnetic about the veil, even to a die-hard cynic.

“I wish,” Tish said out loud. “I wish, I wish, I wish…”

Her voice tapered off. Oddly, the veil seemed to shimmer until it looked like butterfly wings were fluttering all around her.

Eerie.

She swallowed hard. Goose bumps danced across her forearms. “I wish to get out of debt. I wish I didn’t have to struggle over money. Oh hell, I’m just going to come out and say it. I wish for my career to skyrocket into the stratosphere and I’ll become rich beyond my wildest dreams.”

Instant heat swamped her body. The tingling at her scalp intensified. Her lungs felt at once both breathless and overly oxygenated.

She almost ripped off the veil, but something held her back. She stared into the mirror. Stared and stared and stared.

The looking glass blurred.

She’d skipped breakfast that morning. Was that why she was feeling weak and a little dizzy?

Tish blinked, shook her head. Her reflection swept in and out, her mirror image fading before her eyes as if she were in a slow, dreamy faint.

A face appeared. Indistinct at first. Fuzzy.

A man’s face.

Not just any face, but a familiar one. A face she loved. Joy, full and unexpected, filled her heart.

“Shane,” she whispered breathlessly. “Shane.”

And then she could see all of him. He was dressed the way she’d seen him last, in his Secret Service black suit, white shirt, and black tie. Her man in black. Even through
his clothes she could see the steel of his muscles and she knew that beneath the tailored material his body was ripped, perfectly defined.

His jaw was clenched, his brow furrowed. Some who did not know him might think him angry. But she knew that look. She saw it in the edges of his mouth, the corner of his eyes. He was in pain.

“Tish, I need you. I’m lost and I can’t find my way back. Help me, Tish, help me.”

Mesmerized, she reached out a hand to touch him, but her fingers met the hard surface of the looking glass.

Tish gasped as if she’d been splashed with cold water.

The vision vanished.

She stumbled backward, her temples pounding, eyes wide with awe and terror. She was back in her bedroom, back in the closet, gaping at the mirror, struggling to breathe.

The cursed veil lay on the floor at her feet.

Her stomach pitched. Her knees swayed. Impossible.

She stared into the mirror, but nothing was there except her own frightened reflection. Tish couldn’t explain what had just happened, but her body hummed and ached with raw energy, rattling her to the very core of her soul.

“Holy shit,” she exclaimed. “Shit, shit, shit. Today of all days, I certainly didn’t need this.”

Consciousness filtered in by degrees.

First, Shane detected sounds. Distant, muted. He tried to make sense of them, but when he concentrated too hard the fog in his head thickened.

Squeaky wheels on a rolling cart. Voices dark and soft. A rough scratchy kind of noise, like Velcro pulled apart. He heard a steady blipping. A heartbeat. Was it his?

Where was he? What had happened? Was he dead? Was this hell? He tried to think, but his memory was a curtain, heavy and black. It hurt too much to think. His brain burned. He willed himself back down from where he’d climbed. Willed the pain away and slept once more.

Time passed.

During his second swim up from unconsciousness, his nerve endings swarmed with feeling, buzzed with pain.
Fuck-o-fuck
, his head hurt like there was a steel beam jammed through it.

And his hand. What in the hell had happened to his hand?

Then a wisp of memory was there. Tenuous as a broken spiderweb. Free-floating and sticky. Something bad had happened. He didn’t know how long he’d been out, but his body identified the minutes, hours. Days? Surely not weeks. Please, God, not weeks.

His skin ached. His joints were stiff. He tried to move, but his mind did not seem connected to his limbs.

Move your hand,
he commanded, but he didn’t want to move it because he knew it was going to hurt like seven levels of hell. He gritted his teeth. He concentrated, but he could not feel his fingers respond to his brain’s demands.

Open your eyes
.

Nothing.

The air smelled foreign—like hard plastic mattresses and sterile sheets, like powdered eggs and stale blood. The thick earthy scents made him want to gag. What were these smells? Where was this place? Why couldn’t he move?

He found no answers to these disturbing questions. Abject despair propelled Shane to dive back into the pool of darkness, seeking solace in the oblivion of drugged sleep.

All the way to the restaurant Tish’s mind kept drifting back to the vision she’d had in her closet and the awful feeling that something bad had happened to Shane.

“You’re imagining things. Shane is perfectly fine,” she told herself, but her gut didn’t believe it.

Tish nibbled a thumbnail, then forced herself to stop. Chipped nail polish would not earn her any brownie points with Addison James.

At an intersection, she missed the green light and had to sit through the red. Shriners made their way through traffic, soliciting donations from passing motorists. Tish dug in her purse for change. She only had a ten-dollar bill. She rolled down her window and waved the ten. The man in a tasseled fez thanked her for her donation just as the light changed and she zoomed off.

She pulled into the parking lot of La Maison Vert, gathered up the things she needed for her presentation, and rushed inside. The hostess escorted her to a back table where Addison and her daughter were sitting.

“You’re three and a half minutes late,” Addison said coolly, glancing at her Rolex. “Not an auspicious beginning.”

“My deepest apologies for keeping you waiting.” Tish slid into her seat feeling as if she was already behind the eight ball.

After they’d eaten and the dishes had been cleared away, Tish set up her DVD player in the middle of the table and ran the wedding montage she’d put together to showcase her work.

Addison was nodding and Felicity was smiling, and Tish thought she might be close to winning them over.

Don’t do anything to screw this up.

If she were selected as the James-Yarobrough
videographer—following on the heels of documenting Delaney’s wedding to her dreamy hunk of a husband—Tish would be in with the elite of Houston’s crème de la crème. And all her money problems would disappear.

“So when’s the big day?” she asked Felicity.

“Next June.”

“Good thing you’re starting early. I book up quickly,” Tish fibbed and hoped God wouldn’t hold the little white lie against her. Sometimes in this business you had to stretch the truth to get what you needed, and Tish badly needed this wedding.

“We’re starting right on schedule.” Addison James pulled a checklist from her purse. “Nine months before the wedding, book the videographer,” she read.

Tish kept smiling. Clearly, Addison was one of those by-the-book people. Just like Shane. Tish didn’t do well with sticklers.

Beggars can’t be choosers; you need this job.

“If we hire you,” Addison asked in a snotty tone, “will you be three and a half minutes late for the wedding?”

“No, no, of course not. I’ll be there hours before the wedding,” Tish promised.

“Mom,” Felicity said. “I really like what Tish has shown us. She’s got a way of drawing out people that makes for great video. She’s the sixth videographer we’ve spoken to and I like her presentation the best.”

“What have I taught you?” Addison chided.

“Never act in haste,” Felicity replied dutifully.

“That’s right. We’ve got four more videographer interviews scheduled.”

Their waiter approached the table. “Dessert, ladies?”