Page 3 of Forever Finds Us (Wisper Dreams #7)
Chapter Two
Roxanne
It was so super fun when you showed up late to the function, and static sucked your sundress to the backs of your thighs, and then you realized that the seat your BFF saved for you was in the second freaking row of chairs in front of a really pretty wedding altar, but instead of everyone staring at the roses and wildflowers and the beautiful couple about to say their vows, they were all looking at you.
Ughhh.
“Hey.” Leaning forward in the seat I’d just taken at the lakeside wedding she’d invited me to, I whispered to my boss, Deputy Sheriff Lee, or more precisely to the back of her head since she was the sister of the groom and was seated in the front row.
My best friend, Aubrey, couldn’t have known about my connection to the man sitting next to my boss in front of us because I hadn’t said a word about it to her, but she’d saved me the seat directly behind my boss’s older brother, Brand—the guy I’d picked up on the side of the highway last week and drove to his mama’s place not even a mile away from my current location.
“Sorry I’m late,” I said to my bestie and boss both. “Accident out by Mr. B’s tree farm. Everyone’s okay. Light vehicle damage. Both parties insured.”
Thank God Aubrey had saved me an aisle seat so I wouldn’t have to listen to the groans and sighs of the person behind me when they couldn’t see past my shoulders.
My boss threw me a thumbs up over her shoulder.
Aubrey pressed a finger to her lips. “Shh.”
Brand Lee’s head turned slightly, like maybe he wanted to say hello, but then, stiff as a board, he straightened.
I sat back, crossing my legs and smoothing the hem of the dress I’d changed into in the back seat of my truck.
I tried not to turn my head, but I let my eyes wander the small gathering so I could scope out the attendees.
My boss was the youngest of four siblings, and her oldest brother, Bax, and his girlfriend, Bea, were about to be hitched in a simple ceremony on the Lee family’s property.
Lucky fuckers. I envied them.
Just then, Bea tossed her bouquet. It whizzed past my boss’s head as she ducked and hit me in the face.
I squeaked and sputtered and spit flowers from my mouth, then caught the bouquet before it fell to the ground.
That was bad luck, right? I thought I’d heard that before, but maybe I was thinking of some other superstition.
“Everyone’s lookin’ at me,” I whispered to Aubrey. “And isn’t she s’posed to wait till after they say ‘I do’ to toss the flowers?”
Aubrey shrugged.
Seriously. Why was every person in attendance staring at me? Only one head still hadn’t turned in my direction, and that was Brand Lee’s. Like, the guy hadn’t even twitched.
Whatever. I’d never caught a bouquet before. If anybody else wanted it, they could pry it from my cold, dead hands. Everyone laughed at the irregular wedding etiquette. The bride shrugged and grinned, and said to her groom, “You knew I was weird before you asked me to marry you. Deal with it.”
Maybe it was a little sappy of me, but I believed the old wives’ tale, that if you caught a bouquet at a wedding, you’d be next to get married. So yeah, I was envious of Bax and Bea.
But not about the kid part, though. Bax’s teenage daughter, Athena, was a great kid, and she looked so pretty in her purple and white dress, standing up next to Bax at the altar, but Bax and Bea were also raising his brother’s little boy, Stuey.
Dixon Lee, the youngest of the Lee brothers, had disappeared after an unsuccessful stint in rehab a while back, and then a year ago, he reappeared, abandoned his surprise infant son with Bax and Bea, and disappeared again. No one knew where he was now, whether he was dead or alive.
Normally a hoot and a great boss, Abey had been pretty torn up about it.
Her mom even more so. Abey might’ve been the youngest in her family, but she’d told me Dixon was her mama’s baby.
He’d never been responsible or a productive member of society.
Bax, as the eldest Lee, carried the weight of the world on his shoulders, and when his first wife passed, that hadn’t gotten better, but he’d found Bea and had been loosening up lately.
That left Brand Lee. The middle brother.
The well-off owner of Lee Construction up in Sheridan who’d just moved home to be closer to family.
He’d never been married that I knew of and didn’t have kids.
He was kind of mysterious, or at least it seemed that way to me since I knew all about his siblings and nothing about him.
Now, Brand watched his nephew Stuey wiggling in his grandma’s arms next to Abey, and a little smile curved the edge of his lip. Brand was clean-shaven, but I could see the hint of stubble filling back in.
Stuey was cute and all, with his waving brown hair and chubby, dimpled cheeks, but I could do without the sticky hands and wailing cries of babes in my life.
Little Stuey stood on his granny’s legs and peered over her shoulder.
His baby blues landed on me, and he smiled and waved.
Lifting my hand and scrunching my fingers discreetly, I wondered why I’d never really wanted kids.
Did that mean there was something wrong with me?
I mean, not that I could do much about it now, single and in my forties. My five sisters all had kids. You’d think that’d make my mama and daddy happy, but they were back in Oklahoma, still praying for me to jump on the domestic-bliss chain gang.
Hope they brought kneepads to church.
Stuey flopped down onto his granny’s lap, finally facing forward, and Aubrey bumped my elbow when she noticed me fidgeting and chewing on the cuticle around my thumbnail.
I crossed my arms tightly across my chest to stop myself, and a memory of the old SNL skit filled my head, the one with the nerdy high school girl who was always sticking her hands in her armpits and then she sniffed them.
The preacher droned on, “Do you, Beatrice Baker, take Baxton Lee to be your….”
Hm. Brand has a really nice neck. Like, the guy’s built. It’s clear he works out, or maybe he stays fit because he runs a construction company. I thought he was just the suit in charge, but it looks like he gets pretty physical. His neck is smooth. The short, golden-brown hair there is sexy.
Biting my bottom lip hard enough to draw blood, I stared at the back of some guy’s neck and found myself wanting to lick it. My leg started jumping, my finger tapped out a one-two-three against the side of my thigh, and my usual affirmation sounded in my mind: You are enough. You are not too much.
Aubrey elbowed me in the ribs this time.
Right. Pay attention, Roxi. It’s not like every wedding isn’t the same . I rolled my eyes. You’ve been to 567 of them. By now you’re practically ordained. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride? Five times had to be some kind of record. Isn’t there a movie about that, a professional bridesmaid?
The preacher wrapped things up. “By the authority vested in me by the state of Wyoming, I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may now seal your promise with a kiss.”
Bax swept Bea up into his arms. She threw hers around his neck, balancing on the tips of her bare toes to press her lips to his.
But then she reached down and hiked her long, lavender skirt up her legs, Bax lifted her, and she wrapped them around his waist. The flowing fabric bunched and draped itself over Bax’s crisp Wranglers, and they attacked each other’s mouths.
Cheers and whoops erupted from the crowd. Everybody stood, so I followed suit, trying to wiggle the underwear out of my butt crack without anyone noticing. Finally, the flexing and releasing of my ass cheeks did the trick, and I clapped in relief.
Leaning down closer to Aubrey, I whispered, “These pantyhose are makin’ my butt itch.” If I wasn’t wrong, a little tear had escaped her eye. My comment made her laugh, which had been the point of me making it.
Aubrey and her boyfriend, Rye, had talked about marriage, but Aubs had been married before.
It hadn’t been a great experience to begin with, and then her husband went and got himself killed overseas when he was in the Army and left her with two teenagers to raise alone at the time.
But Rye was nothing like Aubrey’s former husband.
Rye was kind and patient and all in for a life with Aubrey, even if she never said yes to his repeated proposals.
She would though. If I knew my best friend, and I did, she’d say yes soon. She just had to get over herself first.
Their love was the kind I’d longed for my whole life.
I hated to complain—actually, I kind of loved it—but growing taller than nearly every person I’d ever met by the time I hit seventh grade hadn’t set me up for social success in high school.
The only thing my height had been good for was guaranteeing me a healthy dose of insecurity and a place on the girls’ basketball team.
Boys? Dating? Yeah, being six-feet tall wasn’t the way to any boy’s heart.
Most teenage boys were insecure, too, and if they had to look up at their date, it kind of ruined the romantic vibes.
I’d brought out the little-man syndrome in every guy I’d liked since I was thirteen.
It was my curse in life and probably the root of all my self-doubt.
How the hell was I supposed to be swept off my feet when no man I’d ever dated had been able to lift me?
The party moved around the lake to where more chairs and tables had been set up. Big speakers surrounded a small beach and sandy area, and everyone was taking off their shoes and stowing them underneath their chairs.
Great. I hated my feet. They were big. Kind of cute though, but bigger than most men’s.
Just another reason to set me apart, to tell every guy in a five-mile radius that I was no petite, dainty lady, which was what it seemed every cowboy around here wanted, but whatever.
It wasn’t like I could dig my big feet into the sand and hide them, like a dang flamingo.
Aubrey claimed a table for us, we dumped our purses on it, stuck our shoes beneath, and she hung Rye’s jacket over a chair to save his seat since he’d been part of the ceremony and was currently having his picture taken.
If anyone wanted to go through our bags, the only important item in my purse was Honey Bee lip balm.
I’d left my gun and wallet locked in my truck.
I felt naked as a jay bird without the old Smith & Wesson 469 my uncle Al had given me when I enrolled in the police academy back home.
But there were kids here, and people were about to get drunk.
The bar table and keg had more bodies surrounding it than the buffet table did.
I sat while Aubs went to find her man, and I watched the guests all making their way up to congratulate Bax and Bea.
There were many people in attendance I didn’t know but most smiled or greeted me.
I’d seen them around town on the job or at the local watering hole, Manny’s Bar, but hadn’t had occasion to get to know them.
Aubrey and I had become best friends pretty much the minute I stepped foot in Wisper on my first day with the sheriff’s department.
I’d made friends through Aubrey and Abey, even joined a book club which had become like a family to me.
I missed my own family, but only one of my sisters still lived in Oklahoma near my parents.
The rest had scattered farther around the US with their husbands and kids.
The six of us kept a text thread going, and we sent memes and checked in with each other most days, but I hadn’t seen any of my sisters in person in almost two years.
Aubrey returned with a beer from the keg for me, which I’d decided to pretend was an expensive Aperol spritz, and just as I brought the red, plastic cup to my mouth and took a deep whiff of the hoppy bitterness, my cell rang in my crossbody purse on the table.
The dreaded X-Files theme-song ringtone told me it was my partner, Dan.
I ignored it. I was off duty, and he was probably calling to suggest again, like he had the one and only time I’d encountered him drunk, that since we were both single and lonely, we should hook up.
Yeah, never gonna happen.
He wasn’t creepy about it. Just resigned to the inevitability, like a pact you make with your best friend in eighth grade that if you’re not married by thirty-five, you’ll marry each other .
But I set down the beer, just in case Dan was calling to inform me of a bad accident in town, a reported crime, or maybe aliens had landed and were setting up shop at the top of Mount Bannon. X-Files indeed .
Abey approached with a petite redhead following at her side. The woman was all smiles and polished teeth.
“Hey, Roxi,” Abey said. “This is Tabitha. She just moved here to work with Brand.”
“Oh.” Huh . Why did that grate my nerves? One-two-three . “Nice to meet you.”
I extended my hand and Tabitha shook it, but the fact that she worked with Brand Lee rankled. She was perky and perfect. And short, or at least normal-woman-sized, which probably suited someone like Brand better than my telephone-pole height.
“Roxi works with me at the station,” Abey said, but her attention drifted as we heard Stuey throwing a tantrum by the buffet table.
The gargantuan, plastic bowl of grandma-style potato salad in the middle of the spread was calling my name, but I ignored the craving ’cause I didn’t want to pig out and embarrass myself.
Abey’s mama, affectionately known to her children as Merv, looked like she was at her wit’s end as the kid stomped the ground, tugging on Merv’s puce-colored skirt and pointing at the wedding cake. Stuey held his breath, and his little face turned the color of a beet.
“S’cuse me for a minute,” Abey said, and she dashed over to assist and left me standing there, stranded and trying to make conversation with Miss Perky Everything.
If somebody started a conga line and I had to hold onto her hips while we hopped around the reception in a procession of stupidity, I was going straight back to my truck for my gun.