One Last Time: A Second Chance Romance Read online

  One Last Time

  A loveless brothers novel

  Roxie Noir

  Copyright © 2020 by Roxie Noir

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  All rights reserved.

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  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  In other words: please don’t pirate this book. Were you raised by wolves?

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  Cover: Coverlüv

  Photographer: Michelle Lancaster

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Epilogue

  Reign

  Chapter One

  About Roxie

  Chapter One

  Delilah

  The seamstress pats my butt again. It’s a very firm, professional pat.

  A moment later, she follows it up with a pin prick.

  “Sorry,” she says, though it sounds more like thowwy because of the pins clenched between her teeth. “Please hold still.”

  That comes out as peesh hole shtiww, but the fact that I can understand her perfectly is a testament to how much time I’ve spent a bridesmaid dress while a well-meaning but stern woman frowns at my backside.

  Usually that woman is a seamstress. On occasion it’s been my stepmom or the bride, because a bridesmaid dress that looks pretty and proper on the rest of the bridal party inevitably makes me look like I’m heading out to work the pole.

  “She was standing on a chair on top of an end table?” asks my stepmother, Vera, from her seat at the massive dining room table. “With a shotgun?”

  “Apparently she’d had it up to here with the squirrels in the attic,” I say, still holding perfectly still.

  “She’s lucky she didn’t break her neck. Or a hip. At her age, that’s nearly as bad.”

  “Does she have something against ladders?” asks my sister Winona, sitting off to my right on a huge leather couch. She’s carefully putting custom snow globes into small, decorative boxes.

  “Her ladder broke last year when she tried to patch the roof during a thunderstorm,” I say. “She hadn’t gotten around to replacing it yet.”

  “Well, bless her for being spry enough to fix a roof in her eighties,” Vera says. “I certainly couldn’t manage that.”

  I’m not sure Vera’s ever been on a ladder in her life. Vera doesn’t go on ladders. Vera hires people to go on ladders.

  Next to her, my sister Ava sighs.

  “Well, what should we do with Beauford’s seat?” she asks.

  “Just leave him out,” I say, shrugging.

  Behind me, the seamstress huffs.

  “Sorry,” I tell her.

  “Then we’d have an odd number of people at the head table, and it’ll look strange,” Ava says, looking slightly worried. “I mean, another table, maybe, but people will be paying attention to that table.”

  “May I see that?” Vera asks Ava, who slides a sheet of paper over.

  Vera contemplates it. Intently. Ava takes another sheet of paper on floral letterhead and consults it. Winona keeps putting snow globes into boxes.

  I keep my doubts about whether anyone will be examining our table to myself. No one looks at bridesmaids. No one cares how many people are at their table. There’s no way this matters.

  On the other hand, my youngest sister didn’t become president of Kappa Gamma Alpha by glossing over details.

  “You know, it would be a shame for that meal to go to waste,” Vera finally says, sitting back in her chair, legs crossed, and looking at me. “It’s already paid for, you know, with the wedding two days away.”

  “I’ll bring Lainey,” I offer. “She’d have a great time.”

  “You can’t bring a girl friend to a wedding,” Vera says, looking back at the seating chart. “Wait, she’s just a girl friend, isn’t she? Not a girlfriend?”

  “If she were my girlfriend could she be my date?”

  “Norman and Wes are coming,” Ava pipes up, still looking at the list. “You wouldn’t be the only gay couple!”

  I wish I were surprised that, of three hundred and sixty-something guests, there’s one gay couple, but I’m not. My family isn’t explicitly regressive, but they do run in some very traditional circles.

  Vera ignores my hypothetical question.

  “This could be a good opportunity for you,” she says. “You need a date, isn’t there someone you’d like to ask?”

  “Not really,” I say, as the seamstress moves around to my front, still frowning. “Can’t I go alone and spend time with my family?”

  Vera doesn’t take the family time bait.

  “What about the man who owns that bakery next to your shop?” she asks. “Everett?”

  “Evan Hill,” I tell her. “He’s married. I think his wife is pregnant. Or maybe they just got a dog.”

  “One or the other,” Winona deadpans, loud enough that only I can hear.

  “I don’t know, he’s been going on a lot about responsibility lately,” I mutter back. “I kind of glossed over the details.”

  “George Thompson,” Vera calls out, running a highlighter over a sheet of paper. “His quarry business is going quite well —”

  “No,” I call back, because George Thompson is both insanely boring and currently trying to legalize mountaintop removal mining so he can make more money, which makes him evil.

  “William Obach.”

  “Married.”

  “Jonathan Haynes.”

  “Married. With four or five kids, I think.”

  “Or dogs,” Winona says, too quietly for Vera to hear.

  “Brian Sutton. Jethro Long. Timothy Newhall?”

  “Married, no, and married,” I call back.

  Vera sighs. She caps the highlighter, then looks over at me, the look on her face mostly thoughtful but slightly annoyed. The seamstress pats my butt softly.

  “It’s the small-town south,” I point out to my stepmother. “Everyone my age has been married for seven years, and they’ve already got three kids and a minivan.”

  “And you’re sure Beauf
ord can’t just pop back by for a few hours?” she asks.

  “Mom,” Ava admonishes. “His grandmother’s in the hospital. In Tennessee.”

  Vera sighs.

  “I know, I know, I’m sorry,” she says. “What about Tucker Yates? I heard his divorce from Cathy was finalized at last.”

  “Tucker’s divorced because he’s a lunatic who thinks the earth is flat and the president of the United States is a lizard in disguise,” I say.

  “And because he cheated on Cathy with an eighteen-year-old,” says a new voice as Olivia, my middle sister, walks through the door. “Have y’all seen — oh, there they are. Why are we talking about that sorry excuse for a man?”

  “Delilah’s date canceled last minute and she’s refusing to go with anyone else,” Vera sighs.

  “Beau’s grandmother is in the hospital,” I explain.

  “Because of squirrels,” Ava adds.

  Olivia just raises her eyebrows.

  “Aren’t you still doing your nun thing?” she asks me.

  I shoot her a good, hard glare.

  “What?” she says, blinking her wide blue eyes, oblivious.

  “Delilah hates it when you mention the detox in front of Mom,” Winona explains.

  “You can’t still be doing that,” Vera says, politely astonished. “It’s been nearly two years.”

  “Two years Tuesday, actually,” I say. “Some families would give me a certificate in recognition of my accomplishment.”

  “Then this is the perfect time to re-start dating,” she says, ignoring my certificate comment. “You’ve had plenty of time to sow your wild oats —” she waves one genteel hand in the air, “—take your stripper class, do your meditation, all those things you’ve been up to.”

  “Two years is the goal,” I say, as patiently as I can. “I won’t make it if I go on a date Saturday night, will I?”

  “Isn’t it close enough?” Vera asks, in a tone of voice that means I think you’re being ridiculous.

  I take a deep breath. Vera and I have had this argument before. We know one another’s positions on my single-and-celibate-by-choice state, and I know I’m not going to change her mind this time, either.

  Vera thinks that being thirty and choosing not to date is crazy as a shithouse rat, though she’d never use that phrase. She’s excruciatingly old-fashioned in some ways, from a time and place where a woman’s worth stemmed from the man she was with.

  For Vera, it’s unimaginable that I actually like being single, so I think she assumes I’m lying about it and must be longing for a man to come in and sweep me off my feet.

  I am not.

  “I’d like to go alone,” I say.

  Simple, direct, firm, yet polite. My therapist would break into applause if she heard. I hold my breath, hoping that it was polite enough and not too direct.

  I’ve heard rumors of families where people can just tell others what they want and their wishes are respected instead of debated. Sounds nice, but I believe it about as much as I believe in unicorns.

  Vera and Ava look at each other.

  They frown, both brows gently wrinkling in an almost-identical pattern.

  Then Ava sighs and grabs her iPad, and I wonder what those other families are like.

  “Okay,” she says after a moment, flicking her finger along the screen to scroll. “Donald Craw. Jeffrey Preen.”

  “Ava,” I say, closing my eyes and willing myself patience.

  “Andrew Haulier — oh no, wait, apparently it’s complicated with him.”

  My eyes snap back open.

  “Are you going through my high school graduating class on Facebook?” I ask, staring at my little sister.

  “Cory McGarvey,” she says, ignoring me and tilting her head, still looking at the screen. “He’s kinda cute?”

  I take a deep breath and glance around the room, trying to give myself a moment. Off to one side of me, in front of a plush leather armchair, is a triple mirror featuring a tall pink column topped with curly orange hair.

  Of course Ava’s bridal seamstress makes house calls. For the amount Vera and my dad are paying for this wedding, you can’t expect the bridal party to go somewhere and slightly inconvenience themselves, for goodness’ sake.

  I glare at the hottie in the mirror. She glares back.

  I whisper a serenity prayer to myself, though admittedly I start it with for fuck’s sake, please.

  This is exactly why I asked Beau to attend my little sister’s wedding with me. We’re friends, so I’m happy to spend several hours at an open bar with him. He’s single, so no one would going to get mad. And he’s gay, so it wouldn’t get awkward.

  It was perfect.

  Damn those squirrels.

  “Norward Yapp,” Ava goes on. “You went to school with someone named Norward?”

  “I think he went by his middle —”

  “Oh!”

  Vera and I look over at her in unison. I don’t like that Oh!.

  “Did you know Seth Loveless is single?” Ava asks us.

  My heart thumps clumsily in my chest. My stomach tap dances. I think all the blood in my body rushes to my head, and I’m pretty sure time has slowed down and I can now hear oxygen molecules bonking together.

  Yes, I know Seth Loveless is single.

  Seth Loveless is always single, because he’d much rather sleep with every girl in a fifty-mile radius than be tied to just one. Nice of him not to cheat, I guess.

  “Is he?” I say, forcing myself to sound more casual than flip flops at a Jimmy Buffet concert.

  “That’s perfect,” Vera says.

  Does she… know? That Seth is the town bicycle and everyone’s taken a ride?

  “No,” I say without thinking.

  Vera stands up and walks toward me. Even though I think she got up at five this morning, she’s immaculate in well-fitted khaki pants, a white button-down shirt, and a black cardigan, not to mention that her hair is done and her face is on.

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea,” I say, like my heart rate didn’t just double. “We dated in high school, you know.”

  Ava shoots me a withering no duh look as Vera lifts an elbow-length faux-fur cape from a hanger on a clothes rack, inspects it, then walks toward me.

  “You know, I ran into him at the market a few weeks ago and we chatted a bit,” she says, holding it out to me. “He’s a very nice young man. Handsome, too. He asked me to say hello to you for him.”

  She doesn’t know. There’s no way that Vera’s aware of Seth’s reputation.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  Sometimes, despite a lifetime of etiquette training, I still don’t know what response a situation requires of me. For example, going to a wedding with Seth is literally the worst idea either of you have ever had in your lives isn’t on the table.

  “If you see him again, tell him I also say hi?” I hazard.

  “Do you mind trying this on again? I know you already did, but it’ll give me peace of mind,” she says, holding out the half-cape.

  “Have you even seen Seth since you broke up?” Ava asks, still looking at her iPad.

  Then her eyebrows go up.

  “Oh, wow, Mom. You weren’t kidding. Does he look like this in real life?” she goes on.

  Somehow, more blood rushes to my head. My face in the mirrors goes pink. Redhead problem #4501: blushing way too easily.

  “He’s very good looking,” Vera says.

  “I haven’t really seen him, no,” I lie, swooping the cape around my shoulders and hoping we can stop talking about how hot Seth is. “Just around town and stuff. Here and there. Nothing major.”

  I’m over-explaining, but only because I think telling Vera the truth might cause me to spontaneously combust, so I’m lying my face off.

  I also blush more. How? How is that even possible?

  “You two could catch up,” Vera says, closing the clasp at my neck for me, then smoothing her hands down my arms. “I always thought you were a sweet
couple.”

  “We were teenagers,” I object.

  “So? Plenty of people marry their high school sweethearts,” Vera points out.

  “I did,” says the seamstress, gently straightening the cape behind me. “When Mack and I started dating, I was fourteen and he was sixteen.”

  “See?” Vera says, stepping back.

  “Michael and I were high school sweethearts,” Olivia says from somewhere behind me.

  “Delilah, go with Seth!” Ava gushes. “It would be so sweet.”

  There’s a feeling in my chest like my heart’s in a tin can and someone just dropped it. Clonkthump. Squish. I take a deep breath.

  “I’d rather celebrate your special day with friends and family instead of awkwardly catching up with some guy I haven’t seen in, what, eight years?” I say.

  That’s right, I pulled out the big guns: special day.

  Ava makes a face and keeps scrolling the iPad.

  “Please?” I ask.

  “I wish you’d give this some consideration,” Vera says. “I’d hate for you to be the only one there with no date and no one to dance with all night.”

  “I’ll dance with Wyatt,” I say, naming my favorite cousin, who is attending this wedding with his sister and therefore cannot be my date. “I’m sure there will be single men there. I’ll dance with one of them. I’ll dance with all of them if you want.”