Once Upon a Wedding by Joann Ross

Author:Joann Ross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HQN Books
Published: 2018-09-04T17:33:43+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

“WOW,” BASTIEN SAID NOW, as they entered the apartment that took up the entire floor. “I wasn’t expecting this.”

“What were you expecting?” she asked as she put her purse on a small curved table painted in a pastoral scene by the front door. A gilded bronze mirror in one of the Louis styles—she forgot which one—hung on the buttery-yellow wall above the table.

Desiree was well aware that her apartment didn’t fit in with the typical Northwest design style. Or the heavy, and to her mind cluttered, historical Victorian homes throughout town that always showed up on the annual home tour circuit. Fortunately, Seth, who’d remodeled both what had once been Fran’s Bakery and this upstairs apartment, which had only been used for storage and, it had turned out, a home for mice and spiders the size of her hand, had caught on to her vision right away.

“I don’t know because I hadn’t given it a lot of thought,” Bastien said, taking in the buttery-yellow walls that brightened up the long, dark days of winter and the rains of spring. “But it wasn’t this.”

Tall blue draperies hung from the tops of fifteen-foot-high walls boasting wide white crown molding to puddle on the floor. Desiree never would’ve been able to afford that luxury if Sarah Mannion hadn’t sewn those drapes herself. There were prints and paintings in a variety of frames and eclectic styles—scenes of Paris, of New Orleans, bright and colorful modern art and more classic art prints, like the mother bathing her child in a porcelain bowl—all of which she’d unearthed at various garage sales and flea markets Sarah had taken her to visit.

“I knew wherever you lived would be pretty, like you. And feminine. Again like you.” He swept a long, slow look over her that once would’ve had her panties melting on the spot. But not tonight, she sternly told the rebellious, reckless body of her youth. “But I didn’t expect to find myself back home. Though this is more like the Garden District than my grand-mère’s double shotgun house.”

There were times, whenever she’d have people over for the first time, when she’d watch their eyes open wide and she’d wonder if she’d perhaps overdone the formality. But that feeling would only last a moment as her guests would immediately settle in and she’d watch the cares of their day fall away, just as hers did whenever she came upstairs from the bakery.

“Brianna’s mother, Sarah, designed it for me. She’s principal of the high school, but is taking design classes at the community college so she can have a new career in retirement. She used this apartment as a class project that entailed adding residential space to a commercial building. Usually people go industrial loft style in these old places. But I don’t feel at home in that type of space.

“Some of the things, like the Mardi Gras masks on the bookshelves, we ordered online, and the art on the walls were all my choices, but it was as if she somehow was inside my head, reading the thoughts I couldn’t quite put into words.

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