The Wedding Date Disaster (Harbor City 4)

…

Maybe Will should have been more worried when he heard the chain saw, but he was so damn glad to be out of the car that not even the fact that he was walking through an aisle of cinnamon-scented car air fresheners located right next to porcelain figurines of semis being driven by reindeer while Santa’s sleigh was on the roof made him think twice. Plus, there was the fact that he couldn’t stop sneaking looks at Hadley’s perfect round ass as he followed her through the gift shop part of the building that also contained a small diner complete with bright-yellow Formica tables. It wasn’t until they were past the novelty T-shirts that said things like Country Built and Farm Tough that the unmistakable revving he’d only heard in horror movies sounded. And when Hadley walked through a glass door hidden behind the sign labeled Trucker Shower Only, the noise hit him in the face loud enough to make his teeth rattle.

A rangy woman with a military-grade short haircut was wielding the chain saw, going at a large log that looked like a half-carved bear. She wore a band T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and the kind of safety goggles he hadn’t seen since he’d done chemistry experiments in boarding school. As soon as they cleared the doorway into what seemed to be a courtyard with a huge steel building on one end, he and Hadley walked around so she was in the other woman’s line of sight.

A slow smile curled the woman’s mouth upward and she turned off the chain saw, laid it down, and raised her safety goggles onto her forehead. “Trigger?”

“Stacey!” Hadley crossed over and gave the other woman a hug. “It’s been forever.”

“Too long for sure. Hey, Kristine,” the woman yelled in the general direction of the big outbuilding. “Come look what the cat dragged in.”

A second woman, hair pulled into a tight ponytail, came out of the building and took one look at Hadley before breaking into a quick jog and joining in on the hug. After that, it was the kind of rush of talking only old friends had, a sort of coded language like he had with Web—except with these three, it was punctuated by giggles, hugs, and something about getting caught breaking curfew. Hadley showed off a few pictures on her phone of Harbor City while the other women held hands and oohed and ahhed at the appropriate intervals.

Once the three of them finally took a breath, Kristine turned around and gave him an assessing look. “So are you going to introduce us?”

Hadley stepped closer to him, pulling him into the trio’s gravitational pull. “This is my friend Will Holt. He came with me for Adalyn’s wedding. Will, these are two of my oldest friends, Stacey and Kristine Van Camp.”

He shook the other women’s hands, and then they all went over to a porch outside the huge building, where there was a pitcher of tea and a cooler filled with ice and sodas.

“You reliving old high school memories coming all the way out here?” Stacey asked after they’d all caught up.

“Actually, we were on our way to get PawPaw, and I was hoping to buy the perfect wedding present for Adalyn. She’s been searching for just the right hope chest for a while, and I figured you two might have something in stock.”

Kristine nodded. “We picked up a few in an estate auction out in Central Kansas. They’d be over in the furniture section. Go on and look your fill. You know we’ll give you the family discount.”

Will followed Hadley past the huge dragons, wolves, and deer carved out of wood and into a building roughly the size of the big barn on her parents’ ranch. It took him a second for his eyes to adjust after coming in from the bright sunshine. Once he did, though, his jaw fell open. The place was huge and filled with what had to be half a million dollars’ worth of oddities and antiques, all in various states of refinishing.

“What is this place?” he asked. “Is that an iron lung?”

r /> Hadley followed his gaze to the big metal tube. “I think it is.”

Of all the things he’d expected to see in flyover country, he never pictured a collection like this. There were wagons, Victorian-era furniture, what looked like an actual buckskin suit, and family photographs that had to date back from the pioneer days.

“Who are these people?”

Hadley started off toward the far corner of the building to the area that had furniture. “Stacey and Kristine ended up at an estate auction by accident on their honeymoon and they got hooked on finding unique pieces. They got so much good stuff that they opened up an online shop and ship their finds out to places around the world. It’s the perfect place to get something unique for Adalyn. Help me look through the hope chests and see if you can find one that doesn’t top a hundred dollars.”

Less than a hundred dollars? Ouch. Everyone knew the more expensive the gift, the more love there was behind it. That’s why every holiday from boarding school, he and Web came home to extravagant gifts from their grandmother, even if she had to spend the holiday elsewhere. She said what she needed to say with cash, not hugs. “I thought you liked your sister.”

Hadley shot him a no-duh look. “I love her.”

“So shouldn’t you be spending more on her wedding gift than a piece of old random stuff from a high school friend’s garage?” How else was she going to know?

“Number one, who in the world bases how much people love you on how much they spend on gifts?” She must have seen the truth on his face because she wrinkled her nose in disbelief and then shook her head with a pitying sigh. “And that works for you? Does expensive stuff make you feel loved?”

What the hell? Why was she making him feel so weird about how the world worked? “It’s just the way things are.”

She scoffed. “Not everyone judges things by the price tag.”

“You’re saying you’d work for free?” Not likely. Who in the hell would take that kind of sucker’s bet?

“If I could, yes. I love what I do. I get to help great causes that really do make a difference for people. If I hit the lottery, I’d start my own foundation so I could fund those things. Well, that and I’d make sure my family was taken care of. Ranching has been good to them, but you never know when an early ice storm or a hundred-year flood is going to change everything.”

Yeah, that was a likely story. If it were true, she was the one in a million who’d actually go through with it. He’d spent too much time in his life rubbing elbows at fundraisers to believe that for the vast majority of people, their donations were anything but a tax write-off. It all came down to the bottom line. Everything had a price tag. Even the dark-brown wooden hope chest she was trying to pick up.

“Can I help?” He waited for her to agree and then lifted the dark wood box the size of an office moving box. That’s when he saw it. It had horns, was plugged into the wall, and stood surrounded by old gym mats. “What is that?”

Hadley followed his gaze and then let out an evil chuckle that would have done the Grinch proud. “The perfect way for you to earn some of the cowboy cred you bet me you’d earn by the end of this trip.”