“Drunk on loving you. Do you still want three?” His tone is serious. He angles his head in Dara’s direction. Three kids, just like his sister. Exactly the number Judy wanted.
Joy’s smile falters. She looks at Mark’s chest, and the sterling bracelet with the heart-shaped sapphire on her right wrist catches her eye. Her something blue. Judy’s bracelet. Judy had been wearing it when she died and her mom wanted Joy to have it.
“Do me this honor,” her mom had asked of Joy before the ceremony. “It’ll feel like Judy is here with us.” Joy’s face had crumpled, but she let her mom put on the bracelet.
Mark watches her closely. “What is it?”
“I . . . It’s just—” She fumbles for words, then shakes her head. “We can’t start tonight.”
“You still want to wait?”
“Yes, of course.”
He looked around the event tent, then back at her. “Do you plan to push off everything?” he asked, his voice strained.
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You pushed out our wedding date. For a while there . . .” He lets his voice drift off to nothingness.
“For a while what? You can’t say something like that and not finish it.” Her eyes dart back and forth between his.
“I didn’t think you wanted to get married.”
“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want to marry you.” She’s wanted to marry him since he first swung the idea past her during her junior year. He’s dependable, kind, and loves her parents as much as she does. He listens when she wants to talk and doesn’t pry in areas she finds difficult to discuss. He trusts her judgment, even when she doesn’t. And he’s passionate, about her, family, his career, and life. What more could a woman ask for in a husband?
“People change. You changed.”
“When?”
“When you moved here. You seemed different.”
“Because I moved to a new state and started a new job. It was a bit overwhelming. Why are we even talking about this?” she asks with a tight smile to soften her challenging tone. Mark had proposed the day after graduation, and she moved to New York shortly after to be with him. New city, new job, new home. Overwhelmed was an understatement. Lonely, confused, and disheartened were more like it. She needed time to adjust.
She’d pleaded for Mark to be patient with her. Every engaged woman experienced the wedding jitters. Joy reasoned that she was no different. But in truth, she needed time to sort through the ten days she’d spent with Dylan. Would the life she’d chosen to pursue in New York as a cosmetic chemist banish years of guilt? Would marrying Mark truly make her happy?
“I want a family with you, Mark. I want everything you do. All I was trying to say is that I still have my IUD in. That’s why we can’t start tonight,” she explains. “And we just got married. Can’t we enjoy some time alone first? Once we have kids we won’t have any time together, not for a long while.”
Mark’s eyes briefly round to saucer-size. He leans his forehead against Joy’s. “I’m such a jerk.”
“True, but a lovable one.”
“I’m sorry. I just assumed—”
She presses a finger to his mouth, halting his words, relieved to put this conversation off for another day. She then runs her fingers in his hair. “You know what I want more than kids right now? You, naked, in our bed, loving me.”
He groans low in his throat, then kisses her deeply. “Want to get outta here?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
CHAPTER 6
BEFORE
Joy
Flagstaff, Arizona
Joy admitted it. She was bummed that she’d never see Dylan again. Not in person, anyway. She might see his name on the back of a CD jacket under lyrics written by, but that would be it. Unless she stalked him through Google, which she’d never do. Okay, she’d allow herself one browser search tonight and that would be it.
Joy squealed, wiggling her fists. She drove Jack Westfield’s son to Flagstaff. How sick was that? What a story she’d have to tell her kids one day.
If only. Her little adventure would have to be one more secret she kept to herself. It wouldn’t matter that Dylan was the son of a rock star. Mark wouldn’t be thrilled that she’d picked up a stranger at a roadside café. She wouldn’t be if their situations were reversed. Mark alone with a beautiful woman for five hours? A woman he’d flirt with the entire drive? Not that she’d flirted with Dylan. They just had the same interest: music. And there was plenty to talk about in that arena. Their conversation was just lively, that was all. Okay, so she might have been a tad starry-eyed once she realized who he was.
Joy’s stomach growled. Across the street a diner beckoned. Better to grab dinner now than spend the next hour driving around looking for a place to eat. She wasn’t familiar with the area.
Joy locked and armed her car and entered the diner. The hostess sat her at a window seat. Directly across the street, the neon blue martini glass above the door Dylan had gone through flickered against the darkening sky. A waitress brought her a water and took her order: German potato pancakes with a side salad, the diner’s special.
While she waited for her meal, Joy called Mark. Nervous about giving a stranger a lift, she’d texted her fiancé before she’d left Rob’s to let him know her expected arrival time in Flagstaff. That way if she hadn’t arrived because Dylan had kidnapped her, chopped up her body, and buried the pieces somewhere in the desert between Ludlow and Flagstaff, Mark would know something was up when she hadn’t checked in.
Mark answered after the second ring and she smiled at the sound of his voice. They hadn’t seen each other since he returned to New York a week after he’d proposed. That was almost two months ago.
Mark asked about the drive.
“It was all right. Nothing special. Lots of dry landscape,” she said with a twinge of guilt from omitting mention of her passenger.
“Did you stop at that gas station museum—what was it called, the one in Williams?”
“Pete’s Route 66 Gas Station and Museum, and yes. I bought a magnet.” Though Dylan had purchased a sticker and stuck it on the face of a spiral-bound blue notebook stashed in his duffel.
“I miss you. Next week can’t come fast enough,” he said. “Mom wants to take you bridal shopping.”
Joy thought of her own mom. Jenny should be the one to help her find a gown. If she weren’t moving to New York, they probably already would have made appointments at the bridal shops. “Let me know if she’s picked a date to go. My mom will want to join us. Taryn, too.” Joy was Jenny’s only daughter now. Her mom wouldn’t want to miss watching Joy try on bridal gowns. Joy couldn’t take that moment away from her. She and Taryn could fly out together.
Mark said he would and Joy promised to text him before she left in the morning. Joy then called her parents, Jenny and Joel. Her dad used to joke that if their family ever formed a band, they could call themselves the 4-Js. Then Judy died, and so did her dad’s jokes.
“Joy!” her mom exclaimed when she answered the phone. “How are you, dear?”