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

He wasn’t sure what he might do if he saw Ella again. He kept replaying that moment when she dumped him right in the middle of the emergency room.

He kept wondering if maybe he should have fought for her instead of nodding and letting her walk away. He wondered if maybe he should have told her that he’d fallen in love with her.

Or maybe not. The relationship had been doomed from the start. He settled back and ordered a second beer and watched the dinghies sailing in the harbor. They were holding practice races, and the spinnakers provided sparks of color against the horizon. Behind them, the sun sank over the mainland, casting an orange glow over the evening.

He let go of a sigh. He was like some character in a stupid country song, crying into his beer. He drained the last of it and was about to flag the waitress for his check when he noticed the scruffy band member setting up drums on the small stage at the corner of the deck.

The guy was wearing a black shirt with neon writing across the front, like from a spray can. URBAN ARMADILLO, it said.

Holy crap. Dad had told him a few weeks ago that Ella’s old band was going to be coming here. Was her ex trying to win Ella back? Or was it merely a coincidence?

Dylan didn’t believe in coincidences.

Worry and jealousy flowed through him like a toxic brew. He flagged the waitress and ordered a Maker’s Mark on the rocks in an attempt to numb himself.

Which one of those long-haired, tattooed dudes was Cody? He wanted to go tap on the guy’s shoulder and tell him what an a-hole he was, after giving him grief for treating Ella so badly.

The waitress delivered his bourbon, and he took a healthy gulp, just as the band started playing. As expected, they were loud, and the first twinges of a headache beat at his temples. It was debatable whether the pain came from the music or the beer or his long day at work. But he wasn’t going to leave. Not yet, anyway.

He sipped his bourbon for the next five minutes and had decided to pack it in for the evening when Ella arrived on the scene, striding across the deck to a reserved table right in front of the band. As usual, she was wearing one of those floaty dresses and her army boots. She looked good enough to eat.

He polished off the rest of his drink and ordered another one. He was going to need a lot more booze to anesthetize himself from the sudden agony of his shattered heart.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Ella had waited until almost nine o’clock to head out to Rafferty’s because Urban Armadillo wouldn’t start their set until at least nine. She didn’t want to be there while Cody and the guys were setting up. She wanted to arrive once the music had started, so she could have time to settle on what she planned to do.

Was she going to tell Cody to get the hell out of her life forever, or negotiate with him so she could join the band in May and finish out the tour with them? On a strictly platonic basis, of course.

Because she wanted to arrive late, she’d had to pull a few strings. Ashley wasn’t wild about her coming down here tonight after Cody’s behavior at the tea this afternoon, but she accepted that Ella needed to confront the guy.

So Ashley had called Rafferty’s owner, who she knew from the Chamber of Commerce, and ensured that Ella would have a reserved table when she arrived. So she could sit right in front of Cody and mess with his mind.

While deciding whether she wanted to rejoin the band or walk away.

She walked across the deck and slipped into one of the chairs at her table and looked up at Cody as he sang the old Charlie Daniels song “Long Haired Country Boy.”

She remembered the first time she’d heard him sing this song. It had been at a dive bar in Muncie, and she’d been all of seventeen, sneaking in to catch the show with a fake ID. She’d fallen for Cody’s devil-may-care attitude back then. His laid-back philosophy of life had been so refreshing after Mom’s rules and plans for her. Cody offered freedom. From Mom. From responsibility. From the need to play music the way the composer wrote it without making any mistakes.

Yeah, he’d looked like a long-haired country boy then, and he still did, even though thirteen years had passed and he’d put on a good thirty pounds. Someone might mistake him for a country boy, but Ella knew the truth now.

Cody was a phony. He’d grown up in the suburbs of Dallas. He might be a Texan, but he wasn’t a country boy. He’d never gone hunting or fishing. He’d never chopped wood. He’d never ridden a horse. He might be a laid-back ne’er-do-well, but he wasn’t self-sufficient like the character in the song. No, Cody was needy as hell.

The song was in the key of D, about as simple a chord progression as you could get. The band sounded a little thin tonight, but then she wasn’t filling in all the empty spaces with her fiddle. That’s what she’d always done. She’d stood up there onstage, always behind Cody, filling in the holes, adding a little musicianship to a band that was long on volume and short on finesse.

Cody gave her a smirk and a smarmy, shopworn wink. She’d seen him wink at women all across the Southwest. He’d winked at her that night in Muncie when she’d first met him. He’d mistaken her for someone older, and he’d been a little shocked a few weeks later when he discovered she wasn’t yet eighteen.

He’d almost made her go back home.

But he’d needed a fiddler, and she had consigned all of “Bach’s Violin Concerto No. 1” to memory because that was going to be her audition piece for