Dirty: The Complete Series (Secret Baby Romance Love Story) (163 page)

“Are you sure you don’t want to do a first
look photo set?”

I couldn’t open my eyes to look at the
photographer; the makeup artist was busy applying shadow to my eyelids,
blending it with brushes. My ass was starting to go numb from how long I had
been sitting in the chair, but I knew better than to complain; I had asked for
a particular hairstyle, and a particular makeup look—it wouldn’t be fair for me
to bitch about how long it took.

“That’s going to take too long,” I said,
keeping my eyes obediently closed. “Just get pictures of him at the altar, and
pictures of me coming down the aisle; that will be good enough.”

I thought that my heart couldn’t possibly
beat faster in my chest; I pictured the beautiful cream-white dress I would be
putting on in a few more minutes in my mind. A little more than a year before,
I would have given long odds for me getting married at all—much less so soon.

“Okay,” the makeup artist said quietly.
“Open your eyes carefully, and take a look in the mirror. Tell me if it looks
as good to you as it does to me.” I slowly lifted my eyelids; they felt heavy
with all the makeup already on them, but when I looked at myself in the mirror
it didn’t look like I was wearing a ton of makeup—it looked like I was only
wearing a little bit, but that my eyes were even bigger, bolder, more vivid
than ever.

“I look gorgeous,” I said, my breath
catching in my throat.

“You look gorgeous even with no makeup
on,” Jessica said from somewhere off to my right. The hair stylist was still
working on my hair, wielding a curling iron and a mouthful of bobby pins.
 
“But I will say that you’re starting to look
like a total princess.”

I laughed as carefully as I could—I didn’t
want to get a burn or mess up my own hair while it was being styled—and carefully
looked over my shoulder without turning my head. “If I’d had my way, we’d all
be at the Justice of the Peace, and I’d be wearing jeans and a sweater.”

My parents had insisted on me having a
“real wedding,” with bridesmaids, a reception—the whole nine yards. I had tried
to get Patrick on my side, but Landon had trumped us; one of his friends at
school had been a ring bearer at a cousin’s wedding, and he had campaigned hard
for us to have a wedding so that he could follow in the trend. Patrick had done
his son one better: he’d made Landon his best man, and my two brothers were
groomsmen. I’d taken Jessica as one of my bridesmaids, Evie as my Matron of
Honor, and Amie as my third bridesmaid. I’d enlisted my niece as my flower
girl, and one of Landon’s cousins was our ring bearer.

I struggled to sit still as the two
stylists finished up their work, getting more and more excited by the moment. I
was tingling all over, hot and cold flashes washing over me. I was nervous
about the ceremony—even though I’d managed to pare down the guest list to the
bare minimum, there were still easily fifty people in the chapel—but I was
happy and excited at the idea of the reception afterwards, and then the
honeymoon that Patrick and I would be going on.

It had taken Patrick no more than six
months after telling me about his bet with Landon to propose. I’d thought that
maybe he would ask me at the end of the year; I didn’t suspect anything even
when Patrick told me about the date: he’d scheduled all of the places we’d gone
to in the first month of dating, including the park where we’d gone
ice-skating, one of the restaurants where we’d had dinner, and the café where
our first date had been. While I waited at the table for him to go and get our
coffees, someone appeared out of nowhere and delivered a bouquet of
peonies—late for the season, but just as beautiful as any I’d ever
seen—directly to my table. I’d been shocked at the fact that the delivery guy
had somehow managed to find me in the middle of a crowded café, much less that
he knew I was the person he was supposed to deliver to.

And then Patrick had appeared with our
coffees, and asked if I liked the flowers. “I have no idea how you managed
this,” I had told him, still staring at the beautiful blooms.

“You’ll be really surprised by this,
then,” he’d said. I looked up and saw that he’d put an open jewelry box on a
little saucer, and inside of the jewelry box was a beautiful diamond ring.
“Will you marry me, Mack?”

I had barely been able to stop crying from
happiness enough to say yes, and we’d immediately agreed to have our wedding on
New Year’s Eve, since that had been the night that we’d finally, truly come
together as a couple. It just made sense to us.

“Okay, time to get you into that dress,”
Jess said, just as the two stylists finished up their work.

“Give me a second to look at myself!” I
protested, smiling. I looked into the mirror and saw myself transformed. I
didn’t look like a completely different person—I wouldn’t have liked that—but I
did look more beautiful than I thought I had ever looked in my entire life
before.

“How long do you think it’s going to take
Patrick to get the dress
off
of her
at the end of the night?” I rolled my eyes at Amie even as she, Jess, and Evie
got to work helping to tighten my bodice and pull the other pieces of the dress
together on my body. I’d tried to pick something out that wouldn’t be too
complicated, but it still required a lot more effort than I would normally put
into a dress I was only ever going to wear once.

“Since she’s not going to wear it again,
it doesn’t matter if he destroys it,” Jess said. I chuckled.

“Are you going to wear that lingerie I got
you for your bridal shower?”

I grinned at Evie, shaking my head
carefully as they worked to get the veil on me.

“I don’t know. Maybe when we get to
Tahiti.” Landon was going to be with us for the honeymoon—but he was staying in
a separate room, with his mother’s parents. I couldn’t have imagined leaving
Landon out of the fun, but the honeymoon was supposed to primarily be about me
and Patrick having a little time to ourselves. We would be in Tahiti for two
weeks, soaking in the sun and getting tanned in the middle of winter. I
couldn’t think of anything I would have wanted more.

“What do you want to bet that she ends up
having a kid with the same birthday as John?” I rolled my eyes.

“I’m not
trying
to get pregnant,” I protested. That wasn’t completely and
entirely true; Patrick and I had been talking a lot about when we wanted to try
for a baby. Landon was six, and he still wanted a younger sibling to play with
and take care of; and even though I loved Landon more and more every day, I did
want a baby of my own to raise. While we weren’t exactly planning to have a
child during our honeymoon, I didn’t think I’d be upset if we did. I didn’t
know whether I’d quit working if and when a baby did come—Patrick and I had
both agreed to worry about that when the time came—but I loved spending time
with Landon, and I knew that I would want to spend even more time with him and
with my new baby if and when I had a child.

“Okay—okay. Everyone is seated and the
groom is in his spot,” Evie said, hurrying back into the room from her quick
check-in at the chapel down the hall. “You’re ready to go, you look beautiful.”

Evie kissed me on the cheek, and then so
did Jess and finally Amie, and I stood up, taking one last look at myself in
the mirror. I tingled all over, and when Jess handed me the bouquet—snowy white
roses and blush peonies—I took as deep a breath as my bodice would allow.
“Let’s get this done before midnight, ladies,” Evie laughed.

“It’s my wedding!” I said, grinning. I
took another quick breath and Evie opened the door. “I’ll take as long as I
want to take.”

I swallowed against the dry, tight feeling
in my throat and followed my bridesmaids out of the prep room and down the hall
to the chapel. The doors were closed; everyone except for my dad and the
wedding party were inside, waiting. I looked at my beautiful friends, my family
members, my proud father, and when I heard the music start up in the chapel to
signal the start of my new life as Patrick’s wife and Landon’s step-mother, I
thought that I could never be more overjoyed in my entire life.
 

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YOU
– THE COMPLETE SERIES

By
Nella Tyler

This
book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are
products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not
to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual
events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Copyright
© 2016 Nella Tyler

PART
1

Chapter
One

  
“Nicole,
you’ve been reading the same chapters in the same book for the last three
hours,” my roommate Ashley said, throwing herself down onto the couch next to
me. “You’re not making any progress and it’s managing to even make
me
anxious.”

  
“So
go somewhere else,” I said, grinning at her in spite of the dread I felt. She
was right; I had been studying the same sections of the same class for hours
and I felt like I was no closer to actually being able to understand what the
point of it was.

  
“It’s
not just me who needs to go somewhere else,” Ashley said. She reached out and
tweaked a loose strand of hair hanging down from my ponytail. “If you don’t get
out of this room and get some oxygen, your brain is going to suffocate.”

  
“Brains
can’t suffocate,” I told her. “At least not like this.” I looked down at my
Introduction to Psychology textbook and frowned. There had been a chapter about
structures in the brain only a couple of weeks before; had I really forgotten
what I’d learned already?

  
“You
know what I mean, and I’m serious,” Ashley said. She put her hands over the
textbook in my lap, keeping me from being able to read it. “Didn’t Dr. Fletcher
get around to telling you that staring at a book for three hours isn’t going to
actually make you learn anything?” Ashley had taken AP Psychology in her junior
year of high school; she had started with almost a full year’s worth of credits
at West Central College.

  
“We
haven’t covered learning yet,” I said. I sighed. “Maybe they should cover that
first so that all of us idiots in the class can keep up.” Ashley laughed.

  
“You’re
not an idiot,” she told me firmly. “This is just not your wheelhouse.” She
grabbed the book and closed it, throwing it onto the coffee table. “Now come
on. Res Life is doing a game night at the Student Union and that is exactly the
kind of thing you need to refresh your tired brains.”

  
“Right,”
I said, laughing and shaking my head. “Because if I can’t wrap my mind around
the stages of childhood development, not even looking at it at all is going to
totally help me.”

  
“Actually,”
Ashley said, sitting up and beginning to look excited, “it might. You’ve read
over the material probably five or six times, right?” I nodded, frowning.
        
“I’m going to give you some spoilers
for the learning and memory chapter. The best thing to do sometimes is to read
through something a few times and then put it down, distract yourself with
something else, sleep on it and then get back on it.”

  
“How
does that work?” I frowned more deeply. Ashley shrugged.

  
“Your
brain never really stops working,” she explained. “So when you’re doing other
stuff, it’s filing away the readings and the classroom discussion and the
lecture, and when you dream, it creates the actual memories. So by going to
Game Night with me, you will actually be making it easier for you to remember
the stuff in the textbook.” I stared at her for a moment before shaking my
head.

  
“That
doesn’t sound right,” I said, taking a deep breath and sighing. I had been
working hard ever since the semester started, but I seemed to barely be able to
keep up with any of my classes, no matter how hard I tried to get ahead. I
rubbed at my eyes; it felt like I had sandpaper on the insides of my eyelids
after staring at the book for so long.

  
“It’s
totally right, and anyway, how are you supposed to learn something if you don’t
even understand it? Let’s go to game night, and then tomorrow morning, if you
still aren’t getting the material, I’ll go over it with you between classes.”

  
“I
guess that could work,” I said, pressing my lips together. Part of me felt
guilty at even the idea of knocking off on my homework before I’d finished it.
All of my classes cost so much money and the thought that I might not even do
well in them—or that I might have to re-take them after all the money I’d spent
and all the work I’d put in already—filled me with dread.

  
“You
definitely need to get out of this room,” Ashley told me, nodding firmly.
“You’re going to drive yourself crazy if you don’t give yourself at least a
little time to relax and unwind every now and then.” I laughed, scrubbing at my
face again and then standing.