CHAPTER ONE
Spotting her ex-boyfriend in a dress was the very last thing Shaelyn Lawrence expected to see when she stopped at Rite-Aid for tampons.
But there she was, dropping a box of Tampax Pearls into her blue basket when Brady Taylor stepped past the hygiene aisle. Red fabric clung to his masculine frame, and the scalloped, mid-thigh hem offset the black Nike tennis shoes on his feet and the black Saints baseball cap on his head.
After twelve years away, there’d been no doubt in her mind that she’d run into Brady after returning home to New Orleans. The city was small, their social circle even smaller. But even knowing that their meet-up was inevitable hadn’t prepared her for this.
Shaelyn stood on her tiptoes to absorb the sight of him over a display of female hygiene products. His dress was made of lace. Brady Taylor, I-was-born-with-a-voice-as-deep-as-sin, was brazenly wearing lace in public, and he wasn’t alone. He stood with a group of four men who also wore red dresses.
It would have been ridiculous if not for the fact that no less than two women doubled back around to ogle the men in the same time frame that Shaelyn stood there clutching boxes of overnight pads to hold herself steady on her toes.
Pull it together, girl.
Turning to one of his buddies, Brady clapped him on the back and then reached up to adjust his hat over his short, dark hair. Despite the twelve years and the heartbreak, Shaelyn could still recall the silky texture of his hair. How his eyes used to flutter shut with pleasure as she combed her fingers through the thick layers.
Shaelyn barely refrained a snort as she spared Brady one last glance and backed around the opposite end of the aisle.
She’d been way too naïve at eighteen, naïve enough to believe Brady when he talked love, marriage, the whole nine yards. At thirty, Shaelyn no longer mistook lust for love.
And no matter what excuses he might scrounge up whenever they officially crossed paths—because they would, eventually—Shaelyn knew one last thing: for as long as she was stuck in New Orleans, she wanted nothing to do with the man who’d sent her running from Louisiana with a shattered heart.
***
“I saw Brady Taylor wearing a red dress today.”
Shaelyn’s grandmother craned her head, blue eyes blinking slowly from behind black, cat-eye bifocals. “Did you tell the boy hello?” Meme Elaine asked.
“I think he’s a few years beyond being a boy.” Shaelyn popped a red cherry tomato into her mouth. “Is he gay?”
“Did he seem gay to you?”
It was hard to forget how the cheap fabric had molded to his frame. He was taller than she remembered. Broader. Because of his hat, she hadn’t gotten a good glimpse of his face, but that was probably a good thing. He’d been sinfully handsome at eighteen, and she wasn’t above hoping that he’d lost some of his looks in the last decade.
No one ought to be that attractive.
“He was wearing a dress.”
“Cher, have you been gone so long you’ve forgotten your roots? Today was the Red Dress Run.”
Ah, right. The day in which New Orleanians embarked on a half-marathon while wearing red dresses, all in the name of charity. Only in New Orleans did no one bat an eye at the sight of hundreds of people running down the street in dresses—or in nothing at all.
She’d been gone too long. It was official.
During the past twelve years, she’d called Jacksonville, Washington D.C., and New York City home. The sense that something new, something better, was always around the corner, had kept her moving. New York had been home for the longest, and she could acknowledge, at least to herself, that the city that never sleeps had reaped its toll on her.
Returning to New Orleans had never entered her radar until last month.
Not until her grandmother had delivered the news.
Shaelyn hid her worry behind a casual tone. “What did the doctor say this morning?”
Meme Elaine blinked once, her eyes appearing cartoon-like behind the bifocals, and glanced down at her plate. “Oh, nothing. The nice doctor told me that I need to watch out for my sugars.”
“You said your prognosis was bad.” It was the only reason Shaelyn had bought a plane ticket and moved back to the one place she’d sworn never to return. Growing up in New Orleans had been good, until it’d turned bad. But her grandmother had been there for Shaelyn every step of the way, even when her own parents hadn’t, and there wasn’t much she wouldn’t do for the Lawrence matriarch. Meme Elaine was everything to her—a package of mother, grandmother, and friend all wrapped up into one. “Let me go with you to your next appointment.”
“I won’t be done in by a packet of Splenda, cher.”
It was more than just the sweeteners and they both knew it. Deciding to let the matter drop, Shaelyn reached for her glass of sweet tea and shifted her full attention to her grandmother. Although Elaine Lawrence didn’t look sick, it was clear she had long slipped past caring about her genteel Southern heritage. Neon-green rollers were tucked into thinning white hair, shimmery-blue eyeshadow dusted her eyelids, and on her feet were a pair of pink leopard-print slippers. The slippers were fuzzy and Shaelyn’s cat, Freckles, had a bad habit of swatting at them as though offended by their very existence.
Like right now.
Shaelyn slipped her hand under his belly to pick him up before he threw another well-aimed right hook. A small paw went to her chin in protest. “No, baby,” she murmured with a playful tap on his nose.
Meme Elaine frowned. “Where are his manners?”
“Brady’s?” Shaelyn asked innocently.
Pointing her fork in Shaelyn’s direction, Meme Elaine clucked her tongue. “You know exactly who I’m talkin’ about.” The fork swiveled down toward Freckles. “If I find him chewing on another one of my Victoria’s Secret bras, I’ll introduce him to Chow.”
“We buried that dog fifteen years ago.”
“Exactly.”
Shaelyn lowered Freckles down to the ground with the order to “save yourself.” His tail shot up in the air like a fluffy middle finger as he pranced into the rarely used parlor.
Truth be told, most of the house now sat unused. The Lawrences were Old New Orleans—the sort of family who continued to live in the same mansion a great-great-great-great-grandparent had constructed in the 1850s. The Italianate-Revival mansion boasted seven bedrooms, five bathrooms, a converted ballroom, a parlor, a kitchen, a media room, and one very, very pretty circular wrought-iron staircase. Six thousand square feet later, Meme Elaine owned it all.
Or she would until her living will was instated and Shaelyn inherited the monstrosity.
She poked at the herb-encrusted chicken on her plate with her fork, her head swirling with dread of the impending responsibilities.
“Are you going to eat that?” Meme Elaine barked over the sound of her knife scraping against the porcelain plate.
“I told you, I’m a pescetarian.”
“What’s that?”
“It means that I don’t eat meat or chicken.”
Her grandmother’s blue eyes narrowed. “What did that godawful place do to you?” Up went the fork again, only this time it pointed unerringly at Shaelyn’s neck. “You’re too skinny. Eat.”
“Meme—”
“What? You used to love chicken. What am I going to tell people?”
“That I have a weird obsession with blackened red fish and crawfish. I don’t know. Does it matter?”
Clucking her tongue again, Meme Elaine punctured Shaelyn’s uneaten chicken breast with her fork and plopped it onto her own plate. “You’d best stop this pesce-whatever business before the Taylors’ BBQ this weekend. I won’t be—”
A red cherry tomato flew out from under Shaelyn’s fork, skidded across the table, and dropped to the floor. A thrilled meow echoed in the room as Freckles initiated a sneak attack, snatched the tomato in his mouth, and beat a hasty exit back to the parlor.
“The Taylors are having a BBQ?” She turned slowly toward her grandmother, even though she really, really wanted to escape with her cat.
“Saturday coming up.” Meme Elaine drained the rest of her glass. “Everyone will be there. At least a hundred people—you know how the Taylors are.”
Yeah, Shaelyn knew all right. She knew that Arthur and Mary Taylor, Brady’s grandparents and guardians, were all about The Image. The Image they presented to their neighbors, to their fellow churchgoers, and to their only grandson. Lovely as they were, Shaelyn also knew that it had been Mary Taylor’s idea to hook up Brady with Shaelyn, her best friend’s granddaughter.
How cute would it be if they got married? Mary Taylor used to say when the two families gathered together. Brady would be the lawyer in the family (after attending Tulane University, of course), and Shaelyn would follow in her daddy’s footsteps and become a doctor (after attending Tulane, of course).
Shaelyn had always known that Mary Taylor had supported her and Brady’s relationship throughout high school, but she hadn’t known then that Mary was the sole reason for the relationship in the first place.
Over the humming in her ears, she heard herself whisper, “I can’t go.”
Meme Elaine reached for her hot-pink cane. Bracing one hand on the table, and gripping the cane with the other, she hoisted herself up. “You’re goin’.”
Given the option between coming face-to-face with Brady or living the rest of her life in the bayou with the gators, she’d choose the gators. Every. Single. Time. “I’m here to help you get better, Meme, not to party.”
Slow, tempered steps brought her grandmother to the fridge, which she opened to withdraw a decanter of homemade sweet tea. “You wouldn’t have agreed to come back at all if it weren’t for your mama and daddy dying.”
Shaelyn felt the words like a blow to her stomach, eliciting age-old guilt that never quit. She screwed her eyes shut and shut those black thoughts away in a box. Ultimately, her parents’ death may have driven her home two years ago for their wake and funeral, but the elderly woman standing at the fridge had brought her back now. For however long that Elaine Lawrence continued to feel unwell, Shaelyn had no plans on leaving New Orleans.
Hopefully her grandmother was destined for a speedy recovery.
Meme Elaine poured sweet tea into her glass, then mixed it with the vodka sitting on the countertop. A Southern girl’s secret, she’d always called it.
“You’re gonna go to the Taylors’, cher, and I’m going to tell you why.” Dropping heavily into her chair, Meme Elaine swirled her finger around in the mixed drink. “You’re gonna go because, after twelve years, you ought to show that Brady Taylor just what he missed out on.”
Oh, no. No, no, no.
“Because you’re a young woman with a promising career ahead of you—”
Actually, she wasn’t. Shaelyn didn’t even have a career. She’d bounced from one job to another, so much so that she’d made a career out of not having a career. She opened her mouth to tell her grandmother just that.
“And because you’ve returned home to take care of your old, decaying grandmother—”
“You’re not decaying, Meme,” she interjected weakly.
“And because you’re engaged to be married.”
Hallucinogens, they were the only answer. Shaelyn would have to question the doctors on the prescriptions they’d prescribed to her grandmother. She eyed Meme Elaine’s sweet-tea concoction suspiciously. Cleared her throat. Fixed her attention on the Svedka vodka on the countertop.
Finally, she managed, “I’m not engaged.”
Meme Elaine winked, like Shaelyn ought to be in on the joke. It wasn’t funny. “I know that but he doesn’t.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“Brady.”
Inhaling through her nose, Shaelyn counted to five. Some years ago, her mama had called Shaelyn to say that she thought Meme was losing her marbles. “She tried to take off her shirt right there in church, like the Good Lord would not remember her old wrinkled self on Judgment Day,” Charlotte Lawrence had hissed over the phone. “I’m telling you that senility has struck, but your daddy is convinced nothing could ever be wrong with his mother.”
“Was she wearing one of her Victoria’s Secret bras?” Shaelyn had felt compelled to ask.
“Shaelyn Magnolia Lawrence! What your grandmother was or was not wearing matters little compared to what she did in the House of the Lord.”
So maybe Meme Elaine was losing it. That was all right. The woman was closing in on eighty and slipped more vodka into her drinks than was probably healthy for a woman her age. She played bingo every Tuesday and still made her way downtown to listen to jazz every Friday night with friends. If she was losing a few marbles along the way, well, it was bound to happen. At least Shaelyn was here to help.
And, quite honestly, a crazy scheme like this was just up Elaine Lawrence’s alley.
She gently placed her hand over her grandmother’s. “I’m not engaged. Not that I think Brady would care one way or another.”
“He can’t win, you see? And neither can Mary.”
Shaelyn had done her best over the years to forget about her first love. She’d tried and mostly she’d succeeded. But not once had she ever thought about their breakup in terms of wins or losses. “I don’t understand why it matters. It’s in the past”—or it would be as soon as they moved on from this conversation—“and I’m over it.”
Liar.
She tacked on, “Aren’t you friends with Miss Mary?”
Meme Elaine picked up her cocktail and downed half like it was Aquafina. “Miz Mary stole my fiancé, got herself knocked up, and then married him. I wouldn’t say that ‘friends’ is the proper term for our relationship.”
“You were engaged to Arthur Taylor?” She tried to imagine her crazier-than-life grandmother married to the stoic patriarch of the Taylor family. Like a misplaced puzzle piece, the image just didn’t fit. “How much vodka have you had?”
“Not enough.” Up went the glass again and down the rest of it went. Elaine Lawrence must have been a favorite at parties in her heyday. A keg-stand girl for sure. “Details don’t matter, cher. What matters is that I’ve already told Mary that you’re engaged. It’s high time that she realizes that the sun does not rise and set on her grandson’s behind.”
Having seen Brady’s behind cupped tightly in a red dress just that afternoon, Shaelyn was tempted to argue that actually, yes, the sun did shine on Mary’s grandson. His behind, particularly.
“It’s been twelve years. I doubt either Miss Mary or Brady have spared me a single thought.” Especially Brady. After their fallout, there had only been silence. Not that she’d reached out, but her silence had been justified, considering the circumstances.
“Listen, Meme,” she tried again, “I’m sure you want to show Miss Mary that I’ve pulled my life together, but I don’t think lying about a fake engagement is doing me any favors.”
One overly plucked eyebrow arched high behind the cat-eyed frames. “Oh, but you are.”
“No . . . ” Shaelyn said slowly, “but I’m not.”
“You are.” A sly grin lit her grandmother’s face and Shaelyn experienced an acute sense of dread slither down her spine. “His name is Benjamin Beveau, and I believe I just heard his car pull up outside.”
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