Blissed (Misfit Brides #1) (17 page)

After what she’d done last night at Suckers, this couldn’t be a friendly visit.

She had some crow to eat.

He blinked, and suddenly he was the quirky-smiled, goofball bartender who might’ve been the kind of guy she’d like to get to know better, had they both been someone else.

Her breath caught.

“Missing something?” he asked.

What an ego. And she had a problem if she thought that was endearing. “No.”

“So this isn’t yours?”

“Hey!” Natalie slid Noah aside and sprang to her feet as quickly as her modesty would allow.

CJ had her wallet.

“Somebody turned it in after you left.”

She took it and unzipped it enough to peer inside but not cause any other embarrassing scenes.

Yep, definitely her wallet. “I don’t understand how this happened.”

He stared at her like the
how
should’ve been obvious. She hadn’t dropped it. She’d paid, then she’d handed it over to—

Lindsey. She’d handed it to Lindsey. Lindsey had taken all the purses and coats in her side of the booth.

This
wasn’t an accident.
This
was all Lindsey.

Sneaky little bi—brat.

“Thank you,” Natalie said. She needed to add
I’m sorry
. He’d been nothing but decent to her entire family since he’d come back, and she needed to let go of what had happened between them.

CJ wasn’t the type of guy to intentionally kiss the wrong woman. And Derek hadn’t been the type of guy who was cut out to be an Aisle husband.

Natalie’s problems had never been CJ’s fault.

Lindsey was right about something else too.

Natalie needed to convince CJ to play in the Golden Husband Games. To make a point to the QG. Have some kind of psychological victory.

More, though—it was what Mom would’ve wanted.

“Hey, I remember you.” Noah stepped out from behind her, one hand tucked around her knee. “You saved Cindy.”

Natalie put a protective hand to Noah’s shoulder, which earned her another inscrutable look from CJ. He squatted down to Noah’s level. “And how’s Cindy doing?”

“She’s fair,” Noah said, as if he were forty instead of four. “She’s sad that we couldn’t save her dress, but Mommy’s going to make her a new one.”

“Better give her a few extra hugs until then,” CJ said.

Natalie’s heart might’ve gone a little soft at the edges.

Noah pointed to CJ’s head. “Is that a Cubs hat? I only like to be friends with Cubs fans, but the Cubs are blue, and your hat is gray. Why’s it pointing backward?”

“Noah—” Natalie started, but CJ twitched another eye at her.

He pulled his hat off and handed it to Noah. “You like the Cubs, little dude?”

Noah inspected it, wrinkling his forehead and squinting at the letters. “Yeah, but I wish they won more. They like to fall apart after the all-star game. If they were my team, I’d rename them the Dinosaurs and give them all dresses if they played good.”

CJ smiled easily. “You like dinosaurs?”

“And dresses. And the Cubs.”

“You like planes?”

Noah gave a body-moving shoulder shrug. “They’re okay.”

“Not every boy likes planes,” Natalie said.

CJ ignored her and touched this hat. “Well,
this
is an Air Force hat. They fly planes and have a football team.”

“A dinosaur team?”

“Sorry, little dude. They’re the Falcons.”

Noah’s whole face scrunched up. “What’s a falcon?”

“It’s a big bird.”

Noah rolled his eyes as only a four-year-old could. “Dinosaurs can eat birds.”

CJ chuckled. He brushed a few errant snowflakes out of Noah’s hair, then abruptly stood. “Good kid.” His gaze focused somewhere beyond her, and there was an unfamiliar note in his voice that almost made him sound simply human, rather than Celebrity Poster Boy for Knot Fest.

The idea of considering CJ
normal
among mere mortals caused a pinging sensation beneath her rib cage, and the pinging made her stop for an extra breath, which gave him time to look back at her.

Into
her.

“You’re lucky to have him.” The raw sincerity in his words impacted her chest stronger than the pinging and deeper than her core.

She squeezed Noah’s shoulder, as much to ground herself as to acknowledge CJ’s sentiment. “I am.”

He held her gaze a moment longer, then turned away with a ruffle to Noah’s hair. “Have fun in the snow, little dude.”

“Here’s your hat.” Noah held it out to him.

CJ’s grinned a grin that had probably given his mother a thousand heart attacks. “You keep it, so your dinosaurs have something to practice stomping.”

“Cool!”

Natalie nudged him.

“I mean, thank you,” Noah said. He shot a sly glance up at her. “
And
cool.”

Natalie took a long, slow, deep breath, and willed her pulse to slow. Noah might’ve had a point.

It wouldn’t change anything, but he still had a point.

Chapter Nine

CJ
HAD PROMISED Bob and Fiona he’d stop by today to investigate a noise in Fiona’s car. Instead of driving to Willow Glen, though, he was crouched in the breeze on top of the wedding cake monument.

Felt nice to release some pent-up energy, but working out the physics of racing from the ground to the top tier with nothing more than rope and the columns between the layers hadn’t worn him out. Muscles, maybe. Brain, no.

He couldn’t shake Noah out of his head. Kid had his mother’s eyes, but without the wariness and weariness. Noah offered the nonjudgmental, no-history, innocent kind of acceptance that made CJ ache for what he’d lost and for what he’d never have.

A family. Kids.

Friends.

Huck and Jeremy and the regulars at Suckers were great, and much as CJ complained about Basil, hanging with his brother again was nice, but none of them
got
it. Neither would Noah, which didn’t explain why the kid made him want a friend.

Climbing up here, breaking the rules, taking in the view, it was all supposed to clear CJ’s head. Remind him he was here temporarily, just a stop on his grand tour of life. Instead, he was leaning against a mutant statue of a bride on top of a concrete wedding cake, his thoughts ricocheting from one unfortunate memory to another, with the occasional thought of a dark-haired pain in the ass.

He dropped his head back against the bride’s dress and stared at the perfectly manicured courthouse lawn way down at the opposite end of The Aisle. At the white gazebo peeking through the bare trees to the left of the classic Federal-style building.

Seemed a hundred lifetimes ago that he’d stood there and said his vows.

Reality was, it was only Serena’s lifetime ago.

She’d died for her country, and what had he done since? Basil liked to rib him about needing to grow up, but aside from the lessons he’d learned traveling the world, CJ had grown up, once upon a time. He’d put himself through college and then he’d had a steady accounting job in a small government contract firm near Scott Air Force Base in southern Illinois.

Then Serena had come to town, an Air Force lieutenant on official military business. They met over dinner with a mutual friend.

CJ’s world had stopped the minute she walked in the door. She’d had dark crescent eyes over round, dimpled cheeks, and the bounce in her step only added to the self-confident way she carried herself. She’d given him a disarming smile and offered to arm-wrestle him for his menu. He’d let her win. She’d called him on it. But one touch of her soft skin, and he was a goner. He’d asked her out before their drinks arrived.

She’d said yes.

They had gone into St. Louis for a Cubs-Cardinals game after work the next night. Night after, he took her up in the Arch, then accepted her invitation to join her in her hotel room. He proposed over stale biscuits and chewy bacon in the hotel lobby the next morning. After her meetings were over, she called her boss to get leave approved. He told his boss he needed the rest of the week off to get married, and they drove up to Bliss that night.

Let’s start our adventure with a bang,
she’d said.

Knot Fest had been the best days of his life. He’d thought it would only get better.

But two months later, he was unemployed, living hundreds of miles from his family at Gellings Air Force Base in southwest Georgia, and being invited to work at the base thrift shop and join the Officers’ Wives Club for their monthly bunco-babes-gone-wild get-togethers.

Not his thing.

Any of it.

At first, when Serena was home, when it was just the two of them making dinner or playing board games or going out to the movies, life was good. The rest of the time he was either holed up in a silent house or handing out résumés to companies that all suggested he come back for temp work during tax season.

He started looking for jobs Serena could do when her commitment from her ROTC scholarship was up. Jobs in Chicago, so she could be near her hometown and he could be close enough to his own. Where he could find a job without employers asking when his wife would get orders to move somewhere else.

She suggested he enjoy being a man of leisure. That her next assignment would be longer, and he’d have a better shot at getting work then.

In another year or two.

They started fighting. Over her hours at work. How many video games he played while dishes sat dirty in the sink. The honeymoon she wanted to take when he couldn’t see where they’d find the money to afford it. Her refusal to understand why their smartest financial decision was for her to get out of the service.

Because Serena didn’t want to get out. She lived and breathed being an officer in the Air Force. She didn’t have a job with a paycheck, she had a mission. And she was good at it.

He thought she could serve her country some other way. Some way where his life, his training,
his
career didn’t have to suffer.

She disagreed.

Then he’d gotten the phone call.

His old company had a job opening in their Atlanta office.

CJ had suggested he and Serena try long-distance for a while. It was just a few hours up the road, and they could still see each other on the weekends. He’d have meaningful work, she’d keep her job—for now. Even with him renting a little place in Atlanta, they could afford to put money in his retirement account again
and
save enough for that honeymoon she wanted.

She said if they were going to be physically separated, she was going to war.

They fought. More.

Eight months into their marriage, he took the job in Atlanta, and she shipped out for a voluntary deployment.

Three months after that, the military gave her full honors at her funeral.

CJ had given the flag to her parents, sold or gave away most everything they’d owned, stored a few essentials—like his old car—quit his job, and took off to get a grip on his life. He told his family he was going to do something he and Serena had talked about doing after her deployment. Lounge on a beach in Hawaii, or walk along the Great Wall, or parasail off the coast of France.

The Air Force sent him a big check, Serena’s life insurance money, and selfish grieving bastard that he’d been, he did all three.

Those three months he’d been in Atlanta, he’d realized something.

He’d screwed up.

He missed her. Work didn’t make him laugh. Work didn’t challenge him. Work didn’t make him special.

He’d been an idiot to not appreciate what he’d had, and before he could tell her, she was gone.

So he got gone too.

Cori—short for Coriander, which he didn’t tell people lest she share
his
real name—joined him for a camelback adventure across the Moroccan Desert about a year later. She’d been sent to talk him into coming home, dangling word that Bob and Fiona’s house had flooded in storms that had submerged half of northern Illinois.

She’d shown him pictures on the Internet, including one of the wedding cake monument floating in water. He’d nearly been sick. Too many memories still.

Instead of going home, he’d sent Serena’s parents her life insurance money to help with their cleanup. He still had most of it, partly because growing up with twelve siblings had taught him a thing or two about being frugal, more because it was blood money to him. He stayed in Marrakech, working at a club until he scraped up enough cash to move on to a new part of the world.

It was how he’d lived since. Without steady income, without a steady home, without any of the things he’d demanded Serena let him have. His grief had faded, but he’d still gone down a path of testing his own mortality. Seen how close he could get to what Serena must’ve felt in her final minutes. If he could feel her there again. Tell her he was sorry. Ask her to forgive him.

Didn’t work.

Gave his family a few heart attacks though. He learned to hold back what he told them when he e-mailed or called for his monthly check-ins, shared less with Bob and Fiona in their e-mail exchanges—he was, after all, the only thing they had left of their daughter now—and no one bugged him about coming home and getting a real job.

Until now.

Because every day in Bliss was one more day to face his mistakes in his own marriage.

Something about being close to home made this feel more permanent than it should’ve. He still had rocks to climb and reefs to dive.

Voices below distracted him. He tensed, not eager to talk his way out of trouble if he’d been spotted by the wrong person, but when he listened closer, he decided he was safe.

Relatively speaking. 

“No, really, I’ll do it,” Kimmie said to someone. “One of the port-a-potty guys got married last year. We did his cake. He’ll give me a good deal.”

“Honey,” an overly patronizing male voice replied, “that’s not necessary.”

CJ peeked over the edge of the cake. Kimmie was trailing a sedately dressed middle-aged couple who looked as if they sampled wedding cakes every weekend.

“You keep giving Nat all the dirty jobs. That’s not nice.”

“Kimmie, this is the janitorial committee. Everything we do is dirty.”