“Meant to be!” Madame Za, who was eighty now and sat in the corner of the couch, still dressed in her scarves and rings, telling weird fortunes to anyone who wanted one.
“Anyway, I just wanted to say I would not be who I am,” I lifted my glass. “Without all of you and a little help from fate.”
And I never would have met Nick.
Our eyes met and he made a big show of rolling his. He didn’t believe my fate theory. The most he would concede was good luck. He’d been adopted by a family in Calico Cove – Antony and Birdie Renard. But he’d been older. A teenager, who’d been beaten, abandoned, sent to juvie and left to fend for himself for too long before he’d found family.
Me.
Love.
“Here, here!” Dad shouted and everyone raised their glasses towards me. I sucked down the glass of champagne (not Sprite, sneaky Nick), accepted a ton of birthday hugs and felt more love than I thought possible.
The low chucklenext to my ear made all the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Goose bumps raced down my arms and I had to cross them to hide the way my nipples reacted to the sound of his voice so close to me.
“Hey kiddo, good toast. What did you wish for?”
You. Only you.
“I can’t tell you,” I said, turning towards him. “Or it won’t come true.”And you’re going to find out soon enough.
“You’re eighteen now,” he said. “Too old for fairy tales.”
“That’s the difference between us,” I said. “I’ll never be too old to believe in fairy tales and you’ve always been too old to believe in them.”
He jerked back, like I’d punched him in the gut. “Swear to God, Nora, sometimes you say shit that makes me feel like you should be Madame Za.”
“I can see your future,” I pretended to wave a hand over a crystal ball. “You will have to learn how to invoice your customers and schedule appointments-”
He punched me in the arm.
“Ouch.”
He rubbed the spot he’d punched and I felt like a puppy who wanted to roll over onto her back for the handsome man.
Nick was turning thirty in a couple of months, something I teased him about mercilessly. But he was only getting hotter. There wasn’t a single woman in Calico Cove, ten years his junior or ten years his senior, who wasn’t interested in dating Nick Renard.
And he’d dated plenty of them over the years – the older ones. Not the younger ones. And that didn’t bother me…much.
Because I didn’t want to date Nick. I had my eye on a much bigger prize.
“Okay, I wished for you to stop calling me, kiddo, old man.” I lied.
He laughed. “Fair enough. You’re an official adult now. I’ll call you Nora, if you drop this old man business. You’re giving me a complex.”
He made like he was going to ruffle my hair, but I avoided his heavy palm, which probably had engine grease caked under his fingertips.
“Stoooop! You’ll get me dirty.”
I was wearing a white sundress with spaghetti straps that was so tight to my waist I’d kept the dress hidden from Dad until itwas too late for me to change. It was loose and twirly around my knees and it made the most of my summer tan and dark hair.
I looked like a beautiful adult woman.
There was not a single part of me that wanted to be something or someone else. My hair was wavy, but I didn’t straighten it or make it curlier. I had freckles, but I didn’t hide them. My clothes were basic because while my mom came from a family with money, my dad was a fisherman who believed nothing should ever be wasted.
I had one dress that my mom tailored for all my dances, making a new dress out of magic and good material. That prom dress was now my sister, Charlie’s, prom dress and would probably be Bethany’s one day. That’s just how the Barnes family rolled.
But for my eighteenth birthday, I’d wanted something special. Something grown up.
