Four
The next day, Bel was restocking the grocery shelves for the final time before her leave for the wedding. She’d taken a week off and her boss, Doreen, had been grumbling ever since she’d put in her request a whole two months earlier.
As far as bosses went, the Dwyers were okay. They’d owned the service station and general store for years and were now both in their early sixties. They’d made Bel the manager six years earlier and were pretty much retired, heading off on long trips in their motorhome and taking up hobbies they’d never had the time to do before. It was a good arrangement and Bel was a great employee, rarely taking time off, so asking for a week leading up to the wedding shouldn’t have been a big deal. Only Doreen wasn’t the warm fuzzy kind, and shehad been getting used to her retirement. She wasn’t overly thrilled to be called in to work.
When Doreen had asked, ‘Do you really need to take this time off?’, it had taken a lot of nerve, and the thought of dealing with a disappointed Larkin, for Bel to hold her ground.
The door opened and the relative peace and quiet of the little store was broken as the bride herself blew in like a category four cyclone.
‘It’s a disaster! The wedding’s ruined!’ Larkin announced, her big blue eyes filling with tears. She walked past Bel to the freezer section and pulled out a one-litre tub of cookie dough ice cream.
Bel bit back a sigh as she removed the container from Larkin’s hands, replacing it with a small bag of pistachios from the nearby healthy snack rack.
‘Your dress,’ Bel reminded her with a wry grimace. Ice cream would also be her own go-to remedy in a crisis, however only last week it had taken Bel the entire drive home from a dress fitting to talk a sobbing Larkin down after the zipper on her wedding dress hadn’t been able to do all the way up. Bel had been under strict instructions not to allow anything fattening to pass her cousin’s lips until after the wedding day.
‘I won’t even need a wedding dress if we can’t find napkins!’ Larkin said, raising her voice as she ripped open the small packet of nuts.
It had been twelve months of crises, each with the potential toruinthe big day, and Bel had become an expert at defusing these situations. Bel now chose her words with all the skill and caution of a seasoned bomb technician.
‘What’s happened to the napkins we already chose?’ After walking around three Sydney suburbs and looking at hundreds of white napkins until they found therightwhite …
‘There aren’t enough and they don’t have any more. We’ll never match them exactly! It’s a disaster,’ Larkin said, shoving more nuts into her mouth as fresh tears began to flow. Only her cousin could cry and still look beautiful, Bel thought absently as she struggled to find enough patience to deal with this crap at the end of a long day.
‘Can we maybe go with a different white?’
‘It’s notwhite,it’ssalt. And it was expertly matched by my interior décor expert. Now nothing matches!’
How hard can it be to match freaking white napkins?‘Can you maybe ask your interior décor person to find another shade we can use?’
‘It’s too late! The entire colour scheme will have to be changed!’
‘That sounds a bit extreme—’ Bel stopped as her cousin glared. She quickly searched for something constructive to say but was saved by the door. This time, when Bel glanced up, she knew she wouldn’t be uttering another sensible word as her tongue seemed to swell inside her mouth and her brain scrambled.
He had returned.
‘Larkin? Is everything okay? What’s happened?’
‘Oh, Tate! No! Nothing’s okay. Everything’s a mess,’ Larkin simpered as she reached out to put her hand on his arm and tell him about the great napkin debacle.
Bel simply stood there and soaked him in. He was so close that she could smell whatever divine manly scent he was wearing, bringing to her mind a big, tough lumberjack cutting down enormous trees in a Canadian forest. Bel’s eyes were glued to his face—that finely chiselled, Greek god-like face that was focused intently on Larkin.A man who listened.
When Larkin finished, Tate smiled and Bel swooned so heavily that she thought one of her ovaries actually exploded.
‘Everything is going to be fine,’ he said gently. ‘Leave it with me. I know a guy. He’s a professional event organiser. He owes me a favour.’
‘Oh, Tate. Really?’ Larkin gasped, looking up at him in complete awe.
‘Absolutely. I’ll go call him right now.’
‘You’re a lifesaver.’
Bel caught her breath at his impossibly ocean-like blue eyes, which crinkled slightly at the corners.
Glancing across to her cousin—who was now smiling brightly at Tate as he turned and walked away to make his call, all traces of her earlier tears gone—Bel’s giddy excitement came crashing down. What was she thinking? That next to her gorgeous, bouncy, blonde-haired, blue-eyedcousin someone like Tate would honestly give her, with her big glasses and muddy brown hair, a second look? She would never have Larkin’s charisma—or the confidence that came with belonging to that class of society Tate so obviously belonged to.
Emma was wrong. There was no way someone like her was going to ever get a guy like him. She’d have to stick to reading about romance in her books. Which suited her fine. Inside books, she could be whoever she wanted to be. When she read a book, she wasn’t plain old Mabel Buckley. She was a runaway bride, or a billionaire’s personal secretary who steals his hardened heart to become the love of his life, or a nanny to some rich oil sheikh’s children in a far-off exotic foreign land, who he falls madly in love with.
She’d stick to books. The ordinary, quiet girls always triumphed in books.
