“Yep.” Viv nodded proudly as she made her hands in the shape of a heart. “Project Valentine.”
Beside Audrey, Grace choked on her soda.
Audrey patted Grace’s back. “Are you okay?”
Grace nodded. “Yep, just went down the wrong pipe.”
Audrey noted that while Grace explained her choking, she was giving Viv a strange look. She figured her oldest sister must be thinking the same thing that Audrey had been. There was no way that their sister could take on such a huge project. Especially with Ava’s wedding scheduled the same week.
Which reminded Audrey why they were there.
“So, the wedding. Where are we at with plans?” Audrey asked as she pulled out her notebook to take notes. She and Grace were definitely the two type-A personalities in the family, but Grace’s tended to come out more in needing control, whereas Audrey just needed to be organized.
“Right, so far we know it’s going to be at the church,” Ava explained happily.
Audrey smiled. Ava had always wanted to get married at the church in Hope Falls. The wedding she’d planned last year was going to be outside, because her fiancé hadn’t wanted a church wedding. Audrey was happy that her sister was marrying the right man and she was going to get her dream wedding.
“What about the reception?” Grace asked.
Her sister’s eyes squinched. “I don’t know yet. It’s Valentine’s Day so a lot of the venues are taken. When Blake suggested the day, I didn’t really think about finding a venue for the reception.”
Ava’s fourteen-year-old soon-to-be stepdaughter Blake had thrown out getting married on Valentine’s Day when Ava and Asher were discussing possible dates on Thanksgiving and the couple had decided it was as good a day as any.
“We could have it at Brewed,” Audrey suggested.
“Yeah.” Ava nodded and Audrey could see that she had probably already thought of that as a possible solution but wasn’t really sold on the idea. “It’s just…I mean, I know I’ve only lived here for less than a year, but I have really fallen in love with the whole town, and I sort of didn’t want to put a limit on the guest list for the reception. Not that everyone will want to come, but I just don’t want to leave anyone out. I sort of wanted the reception to be a big party that everyone was invited to.”
“I get it.” If Audrey ever got married, she wouldn’t want anyone to feel excluded in her celebration and Brewed would max out at seventy-five people or so, and even that would be pushing capacity to the limit.
“What about the ballroom at Mountain Ridge?” Viv asked. “I’m sure Amanda and Justin would figure out how to make it work.”
Ava cringed slightly. “Yeah, I thought about that, too, but that was where mine and Ian’s reception was supposed to be. I just want this to be totally separate.”
All the sisters were silent for a moment before Viv’s face lit up. “What about the Riverside Recreation Area? The Valentine’s Day Festival will be down there. We could put up a tent. That way even if people were working the festival they could stop by and celebrate.”
Ava smiled widely. “That’s actually a really good idea.”
Audrey wrote down that she needed to speak to someone about what permits they would need and also get pricing on tents.
“Okay, enough about me.” Ava said. “What about you, Grace? Have you and Easton set a date yet?”
Grace shook her head. “Let’s just get through your wedding first.”
Audrey could see that Grace was still a little shell-shocked from all the changes in her life. Just a few months ago she’d been living in Los Angeles as a lawyer. Then she’d decided to move to Hope Falls and she’d ended up falling in love with Easton, who she met when she was stranded on the side of the road during a snowstorm. And now she was getting married, something she’d always said she had no plans on doing.
The conversation turned back to the plans Viv had for singles week when Kelly King, a server at Sue Ann’s and Viv’s friend came over and took everyone’s orders. Before she left, she shook her head. “Damn, two Wells sisters with rings on their fingers. If it weren’t you two, I’d be pissed that you took such prime male real estate off the market.”
“There’s still plenty of good men out there,” Grace reasoned.
Kelly picked up Grace’s hand. “Easy to say when you’ve got a rock the size of Gibraltar on your left hand, and it was given to you by the hot one.”
Grace grinned. “He is hot.”
Grace’s fiancé Easton was one of four brothers who were all extremely good looking and two of which were firefighters in Hope Falls. But out of the bunch of Men’s Health cover models, Easton had been deemed “the hot one.”
Kelly sighed as she released Grace’s hand when another table called her over.
As the sisters’ conversation turned to Ava’s new practice and the real estate market in Hope Falls, Audrey’s mind wandered back to Josh and what he might be doing tonight. She also wondered if she’d ever get over the crush she’d had on him since she was four years old. Or if she was ever going to get the nerve to do something about it.
4
Josh pulled up to his grandma’s house and parked his truck out front. He looked out the windshield and saw Matt and Amy Kellan with their twins Peyton and Paige building a snowman in their front yard while their Great Dane Scooby Doo, ran around in circles barking and trying to bite the snowman’s head.
It was like watching a scene right out of a movie. One that he’d never have.
His half-sister Claire, who he shared a father with, had twins as well. Bridgette and Bethany were turning five this summer. She also had a one-year-old son named Braydon. Being a kickass uncle was the closest he’d come to having kids of his own. Fatherhood was not in his future. Even if he hadn’t got in a dirt bike accident at fifteen that caused him to be sterile, he didn’t think it was responsible of him to reproduce considering the shitty genes he had.
His mom Lori had serious mental health issues. She’d been in and out of his life since he was a baby. He hadn’t seen her in a few years, but that was nothing new. His entire life it had been the same pattern. She’d show up on their doorstep out of the blue after being gone for months, sometimes years, promising that she had changed, and things would be different this time around. His dad would always welcome her back into their home and their lives. She would stick around for a while, and then disappear without any warning. No note. No explanation. No promise of when or if she was going to return.
It used to stress him out when he was a kid and even a teenager. But now that he was in his mid-thirties, he no longer allowed himself to give a shit about it.
So as far as his maternal gene pool, it was safe to say he was swimming in murky water. And his dad was not that much better. Angelo Bianchi was a drunk that cared a hell of a lot more for the bottle than he ever had about having a kid. His dad ended up dying from liver failure due to his alcoholism. Not exactly prime genetic material.
Growing up wasn’t all bad, though. The one constant in his life had been the woman he was going to see now. Nonna. She’d raised him. She’d been the one who was home after school. She’d been the one who showed up to his parent teacher conferences. She’d been to every baseball and football game. Every dirt bike race. She was always in the bleachers cheering him on.