Peaceful Pilgrims Series is set in Karen Wiesner’s fictional town of Peaceful, Wisconsin, a small community with old-fashioned values and friendly people you’ll want to get to know and visit often.

(ebooks are available from all sites, and print is available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and some on Angus & Robertson)

Continue the Series:

 

 

Chapter 1

 

“They say that your first love never dies. You can put out the flames, but not the fire.” ~”First Love” by Bonnie Tyler

 

 

“Mom, while you’re not exactly Chatty Cathy at the best of times, you’ve been positively mute this whole flight. Actually, since we picked you up this morning. What’s going on? … Mom!”

Nickira Cassidy-Montenegro started when her daughter waved a hand in front of the art magazine she was supposedly reading. She’d heard Gemma’s words but only now allowed them to be absorbed. Taking a deep breath, she had the sensation she’d been in some kind of fugue, completely unaware of her surroundings. In a rush, the sounds of the airplane cabin flooded back, reminding her how she’d fought against flying “Second Class Citizen”, as her parents had jokingly called it. As if their snobbery was amusing in anyone’s estimation save their own.

I don’t find it funny, and I’ve always stood in judgment of it when they said it, yet I don’t like flying anything but First Class myself. So how much different are we?

The question wasn’t a pleasant one. For as long as she could remember, Nickira had been viscerally fighting against the high-class world she’d been born into. Nevertheless, when the bullet hit the bone, she forever capitulated and became as meek and obedient as a clichéd church mouse.

What will I do this time? I know exactly what my parents would say. What my daughter would say. Oh, the gulf between their responses could be a universe for the extreme gap.

“Mom, will you talk to me? You’re worrying me. You’re worrying Maddy.”

Nickira glanced at her granddaughter in the seat next to the window and nearly laughed out loud at her daughter’s assessment. Normally, Maddy was about the coolest, calmest person on the planet. Only when her fiery temper was roused in the face of injustice did she become a Tasmanian devil–a lot like Gemma and even Nickira when she was much younger. At the moment, the 15-year-old had her earbuds in, isolating herself from the rest of the passengers, while she read a three-generations-dog-eared, leather-bound edition of Jane Eyre.

Setting the magazine on the tray in front of her, Nickira found herself dreading…everything. First and foremost, trying to act to her mind-reading daughter as if nothing was up. If only she could detach herself from the memory that put her in a state of shock yesterday afternoon.

The flurry of activity following her knock behind the door of her husband Spencer’s office had been her first clue something was off. Spencer was one of a stable of lawyers retained for the luxury hotel chain owned by her tycoon father. She hadn’t called ahead, anticipating her husband saying he was too busy to see her if she did. Frowning, she’d waited, listening to the strange sounds emanating from behind the office door along with voices–one of them feminine and vaguely familiar; the other’s Spencer’s. The wait had stretched into a minute and counting. She hadn’t been sure what to do and glanced back to reaffirm that his assistant was away from his desk. Once she’d faced forward again, she lifted her hand to the knob just as Spencer said without opening the door, “Who is it?”

Nickira had been taken aback at the strangeness of his voice. Spencer was never flustered. What in the world was going on?

“It’s Nickira… I…” The reason she’d come here–to remind him she was leaving in the morning to attend her son’s wedding in Wisconsin–froze inside her mind as she’d helplessly listened. She’d heard anxious whispering and something fell from inside his office. She’d felt her mouth dropping open.

“Nickira, what are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” he called, sounding angry and distracted.

Her frown had increased, turning into expanding suspicion.

Out of the blue, he’d yanked open the door. He wasn’t wearing his suit jacket, his tie was loosened, and he’d looked nothing like her usual every-hair-in-place fastidious husband. His smile had been about as natural as an enema. Surprising her even further, he’d taken her arm anything but tentatively and pulled her into his office almost as far as his desk on the other side of the room.

Something had told Nickira to look behind her, even as his actions had thrown her off-guard, and she’d caught a very flitting glimpse of the curvy back of a woman fleeing as well as the suffocating cloud of fruity floral perfume left in her wake.

Nickira’s brain had fired off an answer to the strangeness of Spencer’s actions even before her head had twisted back to him in time to see him wiping his mouth vigorously and looking more uncomfortable than she’d ever seen him before. Her gaze had been fixated on the shimmery copper lipstick on his fingers.

He was cheating on me. A second before I knocked. That thought had been paramount. She’d pivoted, not halting until she was back outside the building, waiting for her car to be brought to her by the parking valet. She’d vaguely heard her cell phone ring, knew it was Spencer, and ignored it.

The present came back in a rush as Nickira forced herself to take another deep breath and found that, while it cleared the intangible memory of that expensive perfume, it brought with it the nose-wrinkling odor of too many bodies crammed for an extended length of time into the airplane cabin. She glanced into the aisle to the opposite side of the middle row they were sitting in. Gemma’s husband Charley, in an aisle seat, seemed lost in thought as well, though he offered her a friendly smile she hesitated a moment too long in returning. While Charley hadn’t honed his mind-reading skills the way his wife had, she saw a mild expression of worry settle over his handsome features.

“Mom, I fully intend to pitch a fit right here right now if you don’t talk to me,” Gemma warned her.

If anyone would do that, it was her older child, who was a creature of emotion the likes of which few others were. It was part of what made her so attractive. Gemma was nothing if not passionate. Even her rose gold hair attested to her fiery disposition.

“I’m fine, sweetie. Don’t upset yourself.” By the time Nickira turned back, the words sounded as normal as she could make them.

“Do you think I don’t know you at all, Mom? Come on. What did Granddad do now?”

“What makes you think your grandfather did anything?” He, at least, hasn’t done anything. But he will. As soon as Daddy hears about Spencer’s “indiscretion”, he’ll be furious, but he’ll quickly assess the situation and realize what needs to be done. What I need to do. That I’m married to a man worthy of my status is the only concern he’ll have. The rumor mill will run its course, and then I’ll be expected to suck it up, chin up, take it in the stride befitting an heiress.

To hell with that…

“Okay, so what did your mom do?” Gemma leap-frogged to the next most likely culprit.

Nickira snorted in a highly unladylike fashion. “When does my mother ever do anything to strain herself?”

“If she doesn’t like your behavior– Okay, so it’s not her that has you upset. Spencer?”

My daughter got lucky guessing what’s going on with me on the third try. But, before Nickira could formulate a response, Gemma rushed ahead in her feverish assumptions. “I know. It’s Dad.”

Flames suffused Nickira’s cheeks at the mention of her ex-husband Landon Robinson, the father of both of her children. Since their son Dante announced he was hanging up his bachelorhood to marry the woman of his dreams, Nickira had gone out of her way in the last few weeks not to think about the close contact she’d be having with her own first love.

Her reaction immediately confirmed to Gemma that Landon was the source of her silence this day. While the thought of her daughter believing she could be upset by anything Landon did was troubling, somehow the excuse felt convenient now, if not a little fortuitous when Gemma just continued assuming she knew what was going on without Nickira speaking a word.

“Well, I guess that makes sense. The most you and Dad have ever had to see each other since the divorce is a couple times a year while we were growing up, meeting halfway to shuttle me and Dante between the two of you.”

Following the official divorce, Gemma had spent an uncomfortable month every summer with her father and brother in Peaceful, Wisconsin while, in his turn, Dante spent a month with Nickira in Malibu, California. Dante and Gemma had always been close. Gemma’s relationship with Landon, however, was anything but. Gemma turned into a raging inferno concerning her dad since she’d become inappropriately aware how young and plentiful his short-term girlfriends were.

Once upon a time she was the princess in his life, and he doted on every sweet smile she bestowed upon him. Now Gemma has nothing kind to say about her lothario father. And, until his fiancée came along, Dante followed in his father’s footsteps as if they were the exact shoe size…

Mutely, she listened to Gemma “reason” about Nickira’s anxiety in spending so much time with Landon during the wedding preparations in the upcoming week. “He’ll probably have one of those simpering airheads with him who’s like two years older than me, her boobs dangling like ripe fruit for everyone to see, whether they care to or not.”

In the process of “prognosticating” about the source of her mother’s withdrawal this whole day, Gemma worked herself into such a foul state that Nickira finally injected the comment, “I can handle Landon. Don’t stress yourself about anything he does, sweetheart. What good will it do you?”

Gemma glanced at her, her light sea green eyes like beautiful jewels, and seemed to be reassessing whether she’d indeed guessed the nature of Nickira’s disengagement today correctly. But the pilot overrode any inclination she might have had to start over on figuring out what was really going on when he announced they would be landing soon.

Nickira could hardly believe she’d spent most of the day–morning and afternoon–traveling. She’d been so withdrawn, she’d simply gone through the motions when Gemma and her family had picked her up early that morning. Gemma wasn’t wrong in saying she’d spoken next to nothing in all that time.

I don’t have to deal with my problems right now. Maybe not at all while we’re here for Dante and Lena. I want to focus on their wedding. Not my marriages, past or present. Not myself and the life I’ve screwed up in so many different ways at so many different times, always making the wrong choices.

What Spencer did bothers me but, in all honesty, it doesn’t bother me as much as it should. The only thing that really annoys me is his brilliantly stupid idea last night about going to my son’s wedding with me. I told him no, that him setting one foot in Wisconsin was forbidden. He thinks I’ll forgive him for cheating if he makes up one of those posh half-truths about why he doesn’t want anything to do with my inelegant children and their mawkishly down-to-earth families. But is this even a matter of forgiveness?

The idea boggled her once they were up, getting their carryon luggage and shuffling along toward the goal of disembarking. She heard Gemma’s nearly hysterical cry of motherly welcome when she spotted her 18-going-on-19 son waiting to pick them up in the terminal. Shea was attending college in La Crosse, about an hour from Peaceful, and living with Dante while he did.

Nickira waited while Gemma, Charley, and Maddy hugged Shea before she moved to embrace her grandson.

“Is Dante waiting in the car?” Gemma asked, though why he would was the real question.

“No. he couldn’t come,” Shea said. “That’s a long story, Mom. We’ll tell you on the way.”

“‘We’ll’?”

“Yeah. Neve is waiting in the car.”

“Lena’s niece?”

Shea nodded.

 

***

 

Peaceful, Wisconsin was a very small town on the western border of a midsection of Wisconsin along the east side of the Mississippi River–cloisteringly small, Nickira had thought when she first moved there and realized nearly every one of the citizens knew each other. She hadn’t grown up with them, the way Landon had, but she remembered hearing about Dante’s bride-to-be Lena Young before, although she hadn’t actually met her yet. Dante’s best friend growing up had been Rick, Lena’s much older brother. Rick and Dante had been involved in football youth leagues from the age of five. Rick’s whole life had been about the sport that dominated the attention of so much of Wisconsin’s population, while Dante’s interest had waned as he got older and discovered the opposite sex.

Nickira had never felt comfortable around Rick, though she’d always encouraged her children to invite their friends over whenever they wanted. Rick’s sister Lena had been born when Rick was eight, so Nickira hadn’t really known her at all before the divorce, and Rick and Dante’s friendship had fractured, she’d heard through Gemma, something that vaguely relieved her when she’d learned of it.

With their luggage in tow, they made their way to the waiting vehicle, a fairly roomy SUV a friend of Dante’s had provided, which allowed all of them to fit with their bags.

The beautiful 16-year-old girl helped them load up the car, hugging each of them warmly. They’d met Neve through video chats with Lena and Dante. Nickira had been relieved to find out Neve’s father Rick’s disturbed personality and thoroughly unpleasant demeanor hadn’t been passed on to her.

After Rick and Lena’s parents had been killed in an explosion at the factory where they were both employed when Lena was only eight, Rick had given up the coveted football scholarship he’d earned in order to take care of his sister. Eventually, he’d become a truck driver and a violent alcoholic. He’d never been gracious about his sacrifice and, from what Dante had told them, he’d made Lena’s life hell. After Rick had gotten custody of the daughter he barely believed was his own, the hell had spilled over onto Neve while Lena tried to protect the girl as much as possible from it. Rick hadn’t allowed Neve’s mother Destiny to so much as talk to her. Just before Christmas of last year, his ex-wife had tried to befriend Neve, even going so far as to call Rick and foolishly try to secure his permission for visiting her. When Destiny went missing and her parents started asking questions, they found out with the spring thaw that Rick had murdered his ex- in a drunken rampage and hid her body on his property.

Before Rick’s arrest, Destiny’s diagnoses of Hepatitis C had been discovered. Rick had contracted it, along with Hep B, and he was also in end stage liver failure from cirrhosis.

“They moved him into an isolation ward at the hospital today,” Shea told them once he got the vehicle on the freeway, heading toward Peaceful about an hour away. “If he doesn’t get a liver transplant, his doctor doesn’t think he’ll live longer than a few weeks. The SOB had the nerve to ask if Lena or Neve can give him part of their livers.”

Nickira put a hand over her mouth in horror.

Gemma proceeded to infuriate Maddy by unsuccessfully attempting to put her hands over the 15-year-old’s ears while she went on to say, “Forgive me for being rude, Neve–since he’s your father–but I have to ask, why should anyone care if he does die?”

Charley looked at his wife in shock, and Neve said quietly, “I agree with you. But Aunt Lena…”

Silence filled the car for a long moment, broken only when Charley offered, “We’re so sorry, Neve.”

“I’m only sorry my aunt is actually considering giving him part of her liver,” the teenager said forcefully, adding to everyone’s shock.

Nickira wordlessly cheered her for her strength.

“I’m guessed this situation somehow affects the wedding, considering Dante’s not here,” Gemma said.

Shea nodded from the driver’s seat. “Lena was contacted this morning about being a donor. She and Rick have the same blood type. Neve’s under 18, so she’s not allowed. Uncle Dante said he’d do it for Lena but he’s not a blood match.”

“Do the doctors want to do this now?” Gemma asked.

“Yeah. Considering how advanced his condition in, they have to start the pre-donation evaluations as soon as possible. But they first have to decide if Rick’s even healthy enough to go through the surgery. As soon as they decide that, they want Lena to come in immediately to start their tests.”

“So she’s on call this weekend instead of getting married,” Gemma stated in disgusted shock.

Neve looked back at them from the passenger’s seat. “At the very least, Dante’s convinced her not to cancel the wedding or even officially postpone it.”

Nickira couldn’t help thinking of the money she and Landon had put up equally for the wedding. Spencer had cast a disapproving eye about using “their” money, despite his own son’s two failed marriages paid for by it, and he and her parents’ snide comments about Nickira having to pay any bit of Gemma’s wedding with the Cassidy fortune had always grated on her. Nickira had taken her father’s money to get her degree, but her salary at the fine arts gallery where she worked as an assistant director was what she’d used for Dante’s wedding to avoid their miserable scowls a second time.

Tension spasmed in her middle at the thought of losing the considerable money she’d chipped in, but the discomfort passed in the space of a heartbeat. All that mattered was Dante and Lena’s future happiness. Even if they’d all come here for a wedding that might not happen now, Nickira accepted they needed to be here for Dante and Lena at a difficult time. In comparison to what they were going through, her life didn’t seem quite so tragic anymore.

 

***

 

Nickira intended to treat her son’s bride-to-be Lena as if she was and always would be family, even if she turned out to be another bimbo like those Dante had previously ended up with. Gemma had been thoroughly convinced Lena was radically different and so she’d appeared during their video chats. Her original descriptions of Lena painted a fairly vivid picture: “Sweet, intelligent, warm, and moral. The kind of girl a son should bring home to meet his mother.” In other words, the exact opposite of Dante’s usual sex-pots.

Inside the house, Neve told them Lena and Dante were in the bedroom and would be out soon.

“Will the wedding be canceled?” Gemma guessed the reason the nuptials-impending couple weren’t there to greet them.

Neve glanced at Shea, who shook his head. “Not necessarily. We’re hoping everyone can try talking Lena out of giving her SOB brother anything but a kick in the head.”

“I imagine you have very compelling reasons,” Gemma said, looking a little surprised.

“The likes of which could stand up in any court of law. But against a gentle heart like the one inside Lena…” He shook his head. “…not at all. But let’s get everything in from the car.”

Nickira joined Shea and Charley. Charley protested, being an old-fashioned gentleman, but Nickira brushed him off and he allowed her to help bring all the luggage into the foyer, where it could be sorted by the owners later.

While in the past, Nickira was accustomed to taking one of the two guest bedrooms in the house, Neve had officially moved into Dante’s house with her aunt Lena. Maddy was bunking with her. That only left one guest room. Nickira had insisted Gemma and Charley should have it, since they needed more privacy and there were two of them, while she sacked out on the living room couch. Both had protested, but not overly long. Somehow that had felt like a victory. Nickira’s own mother would have pitched a snobbishly restrained fit about her daughter or herself not sleeping on 50 feather-down mattresses befitting a royal princess so delicate she could feel a pea nestled at the bottom of them.

I was raised to be spoiled rotten. Even when I resist, somehow I always find myself draped in satin, choking on that damn silver spoon. But not this time.

When they settled with drinks in the living room to wait for Dante and Lena to make an appearance, Nickira resisted turning her cell phone back on to its normal mode until the silence became too uncomfortable not to be doing something with her hands. As expected, Spencer had texted a few times, suggesting he join her in Peaceful for the week. He also encouraged her to talk to her father and “get some perspective”. Which means he already told Daddy he “made a boo-boo” and, even if my father initially showed disapproval about what my husband got caught in, I know his philosophy. I was raised on it like a religion. Appearances were more important than anything else.

Just like in the Victorian Era, men and women in the world Nickira had come from lived under the strict regime of the “doctrine of separate spheres”. Men were the main breadwinners as they built on the fortunes they’d become heirs to from the previous generation and, as such, could be forgiven a few transitory indiscretions. Women were either quiet affairs or wives who were properly educated (but useless) eye candy all others envied for beauty and social standing as well as breeders if not actual nurturers. Those wives were in charge of raising the next generation to their society’s very high standards, but weren’t usually involved much in the mothering, which was relegated instead to live-in nannies (the older and more grandmotherly, the better).

Feeling detached, Nickira fired off a text that simply said, “Don’t bother coming. I don’t want you here. The rest of my family doesn’t either.”

The wayward thought that Landon would become positively twitchy if Spencer was anywhere in the vicinity almost made her laugh out loud in a very solemn room full of people who didn’t seem to know what to do or say.

Nickira would probably never forget the icy look her father gave Landon the day she brought him home and told him she was pregnant and marrying the father of her child. For some reason, Landon had thought he could win her Daddy over with his small-town charm and good intentions. Randolph Cassidy saw only Landon’s cheap, threadbare clothing and old, beat-up car, and listened to him speak for a few seconds before assuming (correctly) he didn’t have two dimes to rub together. Her father had left the room without shaking Landon’s proffered hand, ordered her to come with him, and, in the privacy of his home office, he’d informed her that if she went through with her flighty plans, he would disown her. She would never get a penny of the inheritance she and the fiancé he’d chosen for her to marry would gain after he was gone.

I didn’t know Landon well, but I’d never seen him in a mansion full of rich people before. He couldn’t have stood out more if he was wearing rhinestones, spurs, and a twenty-gallon cowboy hat.

Unbelievably, he’d left the house with her, devastated and unreachable once they got to their cheap motel room. When she’d woken the next morning, Landon was gone. After he returned, he was even more sullen, and she found out through excessive needling that he’d gone back to try to talk sense into her father. He’d actually believed this was something they could reason out together and he could prove his worth to the man. He claimed he’d walked up the call box at the locked gate barricading the property, but he hadn’t been allowed inside. As her father had intended when he’d had it installed with a camera, the undeserving weren’t allowed to breach his fortress.

If possible, Landon came to hate the world of the rich and famous even more than I always did…although I never hated it enough to leave it behind for good.

Everyone tensed a little when they heard a door open near the back of the house. Dante and Lena appeared, and Nickira was instantly awash with relief and sympathy. Lena was pretty without being stunning, attractive in an angelic way that was endearing. In part, seeing her son so smitten and protective of the woman he was obviously in love with (something she’d seen only during video chats) was on the same level as being knocked over by a mild breeze. Even as Nickira wondered if Gemma was right that Dante had changed radically from the womanizer he’d been for as long as he’d been interested in girls, she understood that even Casanovas could be seduced by novelty. His own father was once upon a time…and that fairy tale didn’t end with a happily ever after.

“I’m so sorry about all this,” Lena said after Nickira hugged her lovingly.

“I don’t see you have anything to be sorry for, dear.”

“I don’t want to cancel the wedding or even postpone it–“

“Even if you don’t have great love for your brother, you couldn’t live with yourself if you didn’t do this. Lena, I do understand. You have to do what’s best for your peace of mind.”

“But the non-refundable deposits that could be lost if the wedding has to be delayed–” Lena began protesting.

Nickira raised a silencing hand. “I’m not thinking about the money at all,” she assured her.

She’s doing what I wish I had more often in my life: Sacrificing her own happiness and comfort for the greater good.

Lena looked so taken aback and overwhelmed by someone actually understanding why she was considering giving her homicidal brother part of her liver instead of listing any one of the million reasons she shouldn’t that Nickira hugged her again. “You can’t imagine how happy I am to meet you in person, Lena, and call you my daughter. That’s why I’m here. To be with my family. Whatever happens with the wedding doesn’t change what ultimately matters.”

Dante surrounded both of them with his arms, murmuring, “Thanks, Mom” with such feeling, Nickira got tears in her own eyes.

“Is the wedding canceled then?” she asked gently.

Dante spoke. “No. Right now we plan to continue with it. We’ll only cancel if it becomes clear there’s no other way to continue.”

 

 ***

 

With the wedding still on, that means I’ll have to see Landon tomorrow at the wedding rehearsal and the dinner to follow. As Gemma had pointed out on the plane, in the many years since the official divorce, the only time Nickira had been forced to see her ex-husband was the handful of times a year when they met up to swap the kids. They’d spoken as few words as possible, barely looked at each other, never lingering long. Since Dante moved out after high school graduation, Landon had avoided coming around whenever Nickira visited her son with Gemma. We’re like strangers. But maybe we never really knew each other beyond the wildfire attraction between us anyway.

Considering her current marriage was little more than a business transaction she’d undertaken, she couldn’t have been any more uncomfortable with her thoughts. I sold my soul to find my way back into the lifestyle I believed I forfeited when I married Landon.

Dante’s best friend Avery, a gentle, sweet giant, arrived only moments later and accompanied by a buxom blond who was adorable in her dimwittedness. Gemma tended to dismiss all women of this type–in other words, the kind her father and brother gravitated toward unfailingly. Nickira had compassion on the woman surely no older than her mid-20s, hugging her just as she did Avery, who’d always struck her as a boy who needed a lot of mothering.

Stella smiled warmly, her beauty even more striking at Nickira’s ease in treating her like family.

Just like at the fancy dinner parties she’d been forced to endure so often during the years she’d been growing up, all the men converged in one place while the women gathered in another. Not surprisingly in her current rustic setting, the four men went out to the semi-enclosed deck to get the fire going for the meat they’d be grilling for dinner. The females divvied the chores of making salad and side dishes in the kitchen.

Between the two teenage girls and Gemma, the conversation at the stove seemed loud and animated. Gemma had a knack for getting people out of their own heads and into the immediate situation. Nickira was grateful her daughter’s focus was getting to know Lena and Neve at the moment so she could detach momentarily from her own life.

She and Stella worked on a salad at the kitchen table, chopping a variety of veggies to go with shredded purple cabbage, and Nickira encouraged the other woman to talk about herself. She helplessly smiled at Stella’s excitement about being in love with Avery. The relationship was clearly her sole concentration.

I wonder if Avery would say the same thing?

“What do you do, dear?” Nickira asked, half thinking that if anyone would fit into the lifestyle she herself had grown up in, it was Stella. The young woman reminded her vividly of her four life-long friends–girls and now women she’d had everything in common with and yet never truly felt close to any of them. The only one she still talked to often was Jacelyn, another heiress who currently had a crown prince in some foreign country doing back flips over her. He’d find out sooner or later how selfish and conceited she was.

Stella frowned, in the process of halving seedless grapes. “What do you mean?”

“Your career? Your job?”

“Oh. I’m a makeup artist at Macy’s.”

“In New York?”

Stella shook her head, giggling. “No. In La Crosse–“

A musical sound pealed through the living room, but, when Nickira looked around, she saw she was the only one who’d heard it. “Was that the doorbell?” she interrupted the other women to ask when a moment went by and the music came again.

Lena wiped her hands, saying as she rushed from the room, “That must be Landon.”

Nickira tensed at the words she hadn’t expected to hear today. Hadn’t Gemma told her Landon wasn’t expected to join their company until the wedding rehearsal tomorrow?

Glancing at her daughter, she saw her demeanor had changed radically as well. The only conclusion was that Landon wasn’t supposed to be coming today. That meant either Shea or Maddy had talked him into arriving early.

Sometimes it was hard for Nickira to remember that Gemma had lived for every moment of attention she got from her daddy when she was a little girl, his precious “bijou”. Even before the divorce though, Gemma had sensed the change in her father, in part because she’d been so vocal about his transitory girlfriends. Gemma’s lectures and disapproval had become brutal since Nickira made the separation between her and Landon official by moving out on her own and getting a job. Once divorce proceedings finally took place, Gemma had resoundingly stayed in her mother’s custody.

Our daughter even made it clear she didn’t want her father at her wedding when she said, “I can’t imagine you’d want to attend, so don’t feel obligated.” Charley’s dad walked her down the aisle. She was crying so hard during that promenade to the front of the church to marry the man of her dreams, a man so different from her own father…

Not for the first time, Nickira wondered whether Landon would have come to his daughter’s wedding, walked her down the aisle, if she hadn’t dismissed him like that. As usual, Gemma had wanted him to fight her and say, “You’re damn right I wanna be there, bijou”. But he’d felt unwelcome–Nickira had understood that even if her daughter didn’t, and he refused to attend without a direct invitation from her. Trying to reason with Gemma had proved useless, so Nickira had tried to talk Landon into coming anyway. But he’d proved her suspicions correct in seeing right through her attempt. “If my daughter doesn’t want me at her wedding, then my gift to her’ll be staying away. ‘Sides, it’s in a church.”

“She’s being stubborn, just like she always is. She wants you there, Landon. More than anything. Please just come.”

Her attempt did nothing to sway him. Just before he hung up, he’d mumbled something about not being a good father anyway, that he understood why she wouldn’t want him there. The night before the wedding, Gemma had been nearly inconsolable, refusing to admit why she was so upset. Nickira had known the reason, even if few others could guess.

What did Landon do that day? Get drunk? Drown his sorrows in a vixen or two?

All of Nickira’s focus went into ignoring the sexy rumbling sound of a voice that still haunted her dreams sometimes. I fell in love with his voice within the first few moments of meeting him when he was little more than a boy, but way too old for me nevertheless.

Heat flooded her cheeks as she threw the orange pepper strips into the oversized salad bowl. Intending to disregard his presence altogether didn’t keep her straining to hear every word. She heard Maddy’s enthusiasm in seeing her grandfather, Neve’s response to him almost as warm as his niece’s. Gemma’s unfriendly greeting was nevertheless accompanied with a hug, Nickira knew from past encounters.

Even before his approach, Nickira smelled his cologne–what her mother and childhood friends would have passed off as cheap even if they’d been told what brand it was. Nickira recognized the coffee, spice, and citrus scent as Ralph Lauren’s Red Polo that went for about a hundred bucks a bottle.

“Good to see you, Nic,” he said in a soft drawl that sizzled through her nerve endings, turning them into live wires.

She damned that his voice had the same effect on her now as it had the very first time she’d heard it. Taking hard hold of herself, she forced her gaze up–way up–to look him in the face. He was wearing a Stetson Diamante cowboy hat. Today he wore a black one. At 64, he still looked like the lean, rugged cowboy she’d always thought he resembled. His good looks were indisputable, and most people were charmed into loving him within moments. The hat covered thick hair that had natural wave. As usual, he wasn’t clean-shaven, but she knew best that the seemingly careless beard and moustache were anything but. He kept both carefully trimmed, and he spent unfathomable periods of time making sure both were just right.

With everything inside her, she avoided his hooded, soulful eyes, but that meant she had to look at his deeply tanned, muscular body in newer jeans that hugged his low, narrow hips, and a V-neck cashmere sweater with the sleeves rolled up.

He certainly dressed better than he had before the divorce, she noticed. Not that she’d ever cared…at least until her father met him the first time. Then she’d noticed how shabbily he dressed and it’d made her uncomfortably aware of her own snobbishness. She’d hated that she felt that way instead of proud and happy to be with this boy she’d fallen in love with all but overnight–enough to throw away any chance at a bright future. More than anything, she hadn’t wanted to care about something so superficial. The only thing that should have mattered was their love for each other and the children they conceived together.

“So, where’s the new knight in shining armor?” Landon asked when she couldn’t get her dry mouth to cooperate with speaking.

“He couldn’t make it.”

“Shame.”

The way he said the word incited her to face him and she regretted it instantly when his naughty grin sent her heart in a fluttering panic. “Where’s the queen for a day? Or should I say princess?” she returned the jab almost before she was aware she had something to impart concerning the ages of his girlfriends.

“Couldn’t make it,” he offered with the same breeziness she had to his comment about Spencer.

While Dante had never seemed aware of the fact, her current husband had been the very one she’d been unofficially engaged to since she was 18 and her father decided they would make a good match. Spencer had been the oldest son of her father’s closest friend. In their circle, he’d been considered a real catch. Nickira had never seen the appeal. Without all the posh pampering, would he have looked like anyone special? His effect on her had been the opposite of Landon’s. She was revolted each time she and Spencer went on a date and invariably he tried to kiss or touch her. She’d had no trouble remaining a virgin–not something any of her friends had achieved at that age.

Was it any wonder Landon had been a hundred proof to her senses? In the fairy tale world she’d come from where the rich were on the same level as monarchy, Landon had stood out. He had no social standing whatsoever–qualified as little more than a hick from the boondocks of Wisconsin, a place no one had even heard of let alone visited. Spencer was an up and comer, someone all the girls her age in Malibu wanted for themselves. Landon was hard and untamed while Spencer was soft and cultured.

Landon directed a greeting to Stella that held unusual restraint before Lena asked him to bring the platter of meat out to the men.

Only when she heard the patio door slide open and then close again did Nickira breathe normally, but she reminded herself she had a long night ahead of her. She would need to find a way to isolate herself from her ex- without disengaging from the rest of the group.

For all of a few minutes, she let herself believe that was even possible. Strangely, she laughed inside, forgoing reprimand, at the evidence of her obvious weakness.