Page 5 of Slow Hands Cowboy

It was just the Grayson of it all.

“Are you okay?”

She looked at her friend Anna, whose brow was wrinkled with concern.

Anna had been her best friend since high school and was her maid of honor. She also had a couple of friends in town for the bridal shower that she had gotten to know when she went to UC Davis, and they seemed to be enjoying themselves. She was really worried that they weren’t enjoying themselves, and even now, as Anna looked at her like that, she was concerned that she was somehow letting down the group.

“Everything is okay,” she said. “This is beautiful. It’s perfect.”

“I love the peacocks,” Lydia said.

“So do I,” Denisha added.

“They really are good. They’ve done… an excellent job. With all of this.”

“Honestly, I wasn’t really thinking of a destination wedding, but maybe when Carl and I get married we should do it here,” Lydia said.

And this was exactly what she was supposed to be doing. She was supposed to be creating a sense that this ranch was a destination. That Mustang River itself was a destination. Her wedding was half travel log, honestly. And when she thought of it that way, when she thought of how it was going to benefit the community, it was all better.

She had a very popular social media account for the boutique.

And she knew that when she posted wedding things, it was going to bring a lot of eyes onto the venue as well, so it was going to reach beyond just her guests.

It had the makings of a real viral moment.

She didn’t like to call herself an influencer. She didn’t go out of her way to be one, but her social media gained traction because she was a young woman in a small town running for mayor, and who owned a main street boutique. People often left comments about how she was the perfect small town romance heroine, how she belonged in a Hallmark movie and so did her boutique.

She played into that. Because it got views. It got business. It drew people to Mustang River.

Maybe back in the day a brochure, or a listing on a website was enough to get people to travel somewhere, but now a viral video showing food that people wanted to try, a hotel they wanted to stay in, a view they desperately wanted to get a picture of on their phone too, that was the way to do it.

And she had dreams, no, fantasies, of taking over the official account for the town. Of growing it. Of making this a haven for younger tourists looking for an aesthetic, relaxing vacation.

It could be both.

And it would serve the broader community. She was practically a philanthropist.

Everything just had to go perfectly. That was all.

She felt, as ever, a sword dangling over her head with the word disappointment branded into the blade.

If there was one thing she knew she didn’t want to be, it was the hometown letdown. And that had always been very clear.

Her mom was the hometown letdown. The woman that had married the town’s most eligible bachelor, only to leave him and her children when they were small.

Her mom was the one who was whispered about, who was talked about in hushed tones of disapproval, and the idea of having that happen to her made her want to die.

She had spent her life proving to her father that she was not her mother, however much they might look alike.

It wasn’t fair, and she knew that. It was automatically assumed that Jackson would take after their father because he was a boy.

Automatically assumed that she was one to watch, to keep a close eye on, because what if she was her mother’s daughter?

A woman who had run away from her family, and not just that, had run off with the help.

Her stepfather, Thomas, had once been the gardener on the estate, and apparently, he and her mother had had a torrid affair right beneath her father’s nose.

Her mother had been absent from her life for years when she was small, and it wasn’t until college that Addison had reconnected with her at all. She would be coming to the wedding, along with Thomas, but that was… strained.