A Wedding on Lilac Lane by Hope Ramsay (best book clubs .txt) 📕

and made his way up to Nancy’s condo. Brenda answered the doorbell, wearing a go-to-church dress in a bright flowered print and a strand of pearls around her neck.

“Happy Easter,” he said, trying to invest his voice with holiday joy. But his greeting bounced off Brenda like bullets off Superman.

She stood aside and let him enter the long hallway into the main living area. Nancy had settled into her new home. The boxes were gone, pictures were hung on the walls, and family photos of people Dylan didn’t know graced the end tables on either side of her living room sofa.

He tried not to resent the fact that Dad had ditched the office to hang these pictures and put up these shelves. He tried not to stare at the photographs of strangers, but all those smiling faces seemed to be telling him that he didn’t belong here.

“Hey,” Ella said from behind. He turned and froze.

She was standing in the galley kitchen putting deviled eggs onto a cut-glass dish. Like her mother, she wore a dress with a flowered print, but unlike Brenda’s, it came down below her knees in a wide, loose skirt with an opening up the front that exposed her long legs. Like everything she wore, the dress was a little bit big for her slender frame, and the V of the neck drooped down on one side, exposing a hint of lacy bra underneath.

The spit dried up in his mouth. With her beautiful messy hair piled up on top of her head, she looked as if she’d just come out of someone’s bedroom. The memory of her slightly inebriated kiss ran through his mind, and he had a sudden, overpowering urge to taste her again.

What was wrong with him?

He turned his back without speaking to her and headed off toward the living room, where Dad was standing by the fireplace drinking something that might be scotch or bourbon. “Can I have one of those, please?” he asked.

Dad happily poured him a few fingers of Maker’s Mark into a glass of ice and pressed the drink into his hand. It might be called Tennessee sipping whiskey, but Dylan took a bracing swallow of the stuff before sitting down in one of the side chairs and trying without much success to ignore Ella.

That skirt swirled around her legs every time she brought something to the table. Her voice had a musical ring to it that made his brain cells hum along. Her laugh…

Oh boy. He was in trouble. He squared his shoulders and focused like a laser on the small talk.

Dad was giving a blow-by-blow description of the sailboat races that had taken place on Saturday. Brenda and her mother were talking about yarn, in a conversation that was filled with so much jargon it numbed his mind. Ella said almost nothing, and weirdly, she was the only one he wanted to talk to.

Dylan was on his second bourbon by the time they sat down to a traditional Easter dinner, complete with a relish tray and deviled eggs, a glazed ham, scalloped potatoes, asparagus, fresh-baked rolls, and a German chocolate cake that Nancy had made from scratch.

It had been years since he and Dad had celebrated Easter with a home-cooked meal like this. Usually, they headed off for brunch at the yacht club after church and called it a day. Thinking back over his childhood, Dylan couldn’t even remember having a meal like this when Mom had been alive. But then again, his memories of Mom were sketchy even though he’d been ten when she’d passed away.

As dinner progressed, Dylan grew more on edge. Brenda and Ella talked about various classical violin pieces that might be appropriate for Ashley Scott’s Saturday tea service. Dad weighed in because he was a classical music aficionado. Nancy made sure everyone had seconds and then brought out the German chocolate cake.

But no one said one word about the elephant in the room—the planning for the famous engagement party. What were they waiting for? Christmas?

Suddenly the whole thing seemed like such a sham. Or maybe a setup. Had innocent-looking Ella arranged this so he’d be the bad guy?

Maybe she had. But someone had to do the dirty work.

“So,” Dylan said, casting his glance around the table and his soon-to-be family, “Ella and I have been busting our humps searching for a place to have your engagement party. We’ve checked out Cibo Dell’anima and a bunch of smaller places around town, as well as a couple of spots in Georgetown. None of them are going to work. So earlier this week we took a tour of Grace Church, and we’ve booked it for April sixteenth. I think the next item on the agenda is to talk about catering. We were thinking about Annie Robinson. So—”

“You booked Grace Church? For April sixteenth? Oh my goodness, that’s only two weeks away,” Brenda said, pressing her hand to her sternum in a dramatic way, as if this news had given her palpitations. Which, now that he thought about it, it probably had.

“I’m sorry about the date. It was the only day available, and since we’ve jettisoned the yacht club…” Dylan gave a little shrug, then concentrated on the cake in front of him. He popped a piece into his mouth and savored Nancy Jacobs’s cooking while he waited for Dad to admit that he’d booked the church.

But before that happened, Ella blurted, “Dylan, this is not what we agreed to. We were going to run this idea by Mom and Jim before we settled on it. You promised me that you wouldn’t use the engagement party to—”

“Why do you have to be so disagreeable all the time?” Brenda interrupted. “I’m starting to think you really do want to sabotage this party. Of course I can’t have the party at Grace Church.”

“Why not?” Dad finally weighed in. Coward.

“Because she’ll be the subject of gossip all over this town, Jim. Come on, don’t you know that?” Nancy said, then turned