Pleating for Mercy Read Online Free PDF Page B

eggplant, more or less. I didn’t have a bit of talent when it came to gardening.
    “How’d your day go?” she asked as she arranged the flowers, fixing the few that had torqued during transit.
    I beamed, determined to do whatever it took to make the dresses. “I talked to Josie Sandoval today. Do you remember her?”
    “Does a ladybug have wings? Of course I remember her. I saw her a few days ago when I was leaving—” She suddenly stopped, regrouped, and finished with “—when I was, er, visiting a friend.”
    “Well, she’s getting married and can you believe that the place she bought her dress from went out of business?”
    Mama tsk ed. “That’s awful.”
    “That’s not the worst of it. Her gown and the bridesmaids’ dresses are MIA.”
    My mother sucked in a breath. “Very bad luck.”
    Tessa Cassidy was a firm believer in superstition. She was forever tossing salt over her left shoulder and crossing herself, even though she wasn’t Catholic. I didn’t know if a missing wedding dress was universally bad luck, but sometimes it was better just to nod than to argue a superstition point.
    “Their wedding’s in a few weeks,” she said. Her eyebrows pulled together as she eyed me. “What’s she going to do?”
    “Twelve days, actually. Her misfortune is my good luck.” I felt a smidgeon of guilt over being happy about the Bridal Outlet going belly-up, and although Josie was out the deposit on the dresses she’d ordered from the store, I firmly believed it was her absolutely good fortune that I was on the job. “She hired me to make them. Her gown and all the bridesmaid dresses.”
    Mama placed her palms flat on the table, interlaced her fingers, and stared me down. “Oh, no, Harlow Jane, you can’t do that.”
    “Of course I can. It’s an unbelievable opportunity!” I slid into the ladder-back chair opposite her, pushing the vase of flowers out of the way so I could look her in the eye. “So far, everything I’ve designed and made has been for myself, an assignment, or based on someone else’s vision. If I lay eyes on another Maximilian dress with the artsy collar and the structured shoulders, I’ll scream. Bridal gowns. It’s such a niche market. They may be just the thing to put me on the map.”
    But my mother was shaking her head. “Making someone else’s wedding dress means bad luck for your own romance.”
    I sat back, folding my arms over my chest. “Mama, I’m not going to turn away this contract because you think it’s bad luck.”
    “I don’t want the Harlow and Cassidy names to die out,” she said with a frown.
    “So that’s what this is about? Grandchildren?”
    “I’m not getting any younger, and your grandmother would sure love some great-grandbabies from you.”
    Nana spent every waking moment in the company of her goats. I didn’t think she was holding her breath over me producing great-grandbabies for her. “You both have Red’s kids.”
    “You know I love those boys to pieces,” she said, a smile ticking up one side of her mouth. My brother’s kids were the apples of the Cassidy family’s collective eye. Cullen was four and Clay was two. “But,” Mama continued, “they don’t have the Cassidy gift.”
    “ I don’t have the Cassidy gift!” I exclaimed. I’d held out hope throughout my childhood, into my teenage years, and even into my twenties that my charm would make itself known. It hadn’t happened, and I was resigned to the fact that it never would. “Even if I have a daughter someday, she probably won’t be charmed, either,” I added wistfully. “Time to let it go, Mama. If there’s romance out there for me, great, but I’m not going to stop living in the meantime.”
    “Your charm will materialize one of these days. It’s in you,” she countered, as if she knew it for a fact. “And your daughters will have it, too.”
    I was firmly into my thirties and hadn’t had a serious boyfriend in more years than I cared to remember. And