Chapter 23Ellis
The wedding…I wanted Jose to have the wedding she’d always dreamed of having, but time wasn’t on our side. It was important to me that she and Liv both had my last name by the time the baby came, though, and I wanted to focus on Liv after the adoption was finalized without the wedding take up any of our time together. It was a bizarre way of looking at it all, but it was important to me.
So, I rushed through the wedding, risking testicles and limbs every time Jose looked like she wanted to kill me. One thing I didn’t do, though, was sacrifice anything to make it happen this quickly – it was a full wedding, with all the beauty and extras, just put together in three weeks. And now I was happy as fuck because she had my name, but I wouldn’t recommend anyone does it that way, because it was also exhausting and stressful as hell.
Thankfully, I had friends and family who were there to help out, and who’d helped make sure everything was organized, with nothing forgotten from the list. Every time Tabby found out another detail from her sister, she’d text it through to me and I’d add it onto the shared document we all had access to – thank you technology. The wedding had been held out in the field that didn’t have a rabid bull running around in it at the Townsend Ranch, surrounded by grass, beauty, and with the sun shining down on us.
After the hell and heartache that life had thrown at us, I was relieved that today hadn’t been hit by any mayhem. Tabby had raised the issue of Evette turning up and spoiling the day, but she hadn’t been heard of since that night in the diner. In fact, the last we’d heard, she’d moved to Florida with a rich sugar daddy, so it was unlikely she would do anything.
Jose had been given away by both Burt and Hurst, who had become good friends, with Rose, Tabby, and Liv leading the way as her bridesmaids. The second I’d seen her walking toward me in a long white dress with a lace thing over it and a long veil trailing behind her, I’d had to bite my fist and recite in my head, ‘I won’t cry like a pussy, I won’t cry like a pussy. ’
Spoiler alert: I choked up, but I didn’t cry. Well, not enough that everyone noticed, aside from my two best men – DB and Mace – who both made a show of passing me a Kleenex ‘just in case’. Seeing as how DB had done the same thing when Tabby had walked toward him on his wedding day, and I sincerely doubted that Mace would be able to hold it in when he finally made an honest woman out of Ava, I just shot them the bird behind my back, something which was caught by the photographer. After it was all over, and I went back to work after taking two weeks off to be with my girls, it would become the huge canvas that greeted people when they came into the tattoo shop, and one of my favorite photos from the wedding. You could see Jose being walked toward me in all her bridal beauty, and there I was with my finger pointed at the camera with DB and Mace laughing their asses off holding white Kleenex in their hands. It was awesome and looked even better blown up on a huge canvas in black and white.
And now, we were at our reception, still at the ranch and in a huge tent that had been set up for the occasion. In front of it was a dance floor with a stage where the band would play, and where my surprise for my wife would happen any minute now.
“Now, the bride and groom will have their first dance, folks. Could Mr. and Mrs. Beauregard please take their places on the dance floor,” DB said into the microphone, loving every second of his job as MC. Well, apart from when he’d had to leave his cake behind to do it, meaning that his pregnant and hangry wife ate it for him.
Holding onto Jose’s hand, I led her to where we were meant to be, and pulled her into my chest. Our lawyer had told us yesterday that the final stages of the adoption would be completed in around a month, so I had even more to smile about today.
Before I could say anything, a deep voice started singing Bed Of Roses by Bon Jovi. Roses meant a huge deal to both Jose and her sister, and they both had tattoos of them because of that. Not knowing how special they were, the first flowers I’d ever brought her were pink roses to celebrate Olivia’s birth. After that, I tattooed them on the two ladies and gave them their identical tattoos, with a rose for Tabby’s mom in them. Every month, I bought Jose a bunch of roses in different colors, and last week I’d had rose bushes planted in our garden so that my girls had something beautiful to look at while they were out there. They were rare breeds that had special names, too. We had Olivia, Tabitha, Josephine, Southern Charm, Alabama, and Texas roses growing now, and I couldn’t wait for next summer when they all flowered at the same time.