The Wedding Bees Read Online Free PDF Page A

chirpy. Did you win the lottery?”
    â€œWould I be sitting here if I had won the lottery?”
    â€œKnowing you,” she said. “Yes.”
    â€œIt’s not true what they say about Scotsmen being cheap,” he said. “And anyway I’m always chirpy and did I mention you look particularly bonnie today, Marlena?”
    â€œGet your own cupcake,” she said. “I queued ten minutes for mine. And it is true about Scotsmen being cheap and you are not always chirpy.”
    Marlena reminded Theo of his mother, Shona, who had passed away ten years before on the opposite side of the Atlantic without Theo even knowing she was sick.
    He never went a day without missing her, without wishing she was there on the other end of the phone, dispensing advice, her thick Glaswegian brogue coarsened by a lifetime of smoking forty Silk Cuts a day. She’d loved him unflinchingly but she’d been tough, like all Barlanark mothers, and relentlessly straight to the point. Marlena was like that too. It was why he had hired her, but he was surprised to find out she didn’t think he was chirpy.
    â€œNot even a wee bit of chirp?”
    â€œNo,” she said. “Not usually. Until today. Did something happen?”
    â€œYes, actually,” he said. “It did. I met someone.”
    Marlena put her cupcake down, midbite. “Well, it’s about time,” she said. “Do you think she is the one?”
    Theo’s mother had also believed in “the one.” “You’ll know her when you find her,” Shona had told him, time and time again. “Without a shadow of a doubt.”
    â€œShe’s definitely something,” Theo told Marlena. “But how do I know if she’s the one?”
    â€œYou just know, I guess.” She shrugged. “Let’s start with her name.”
    â€œSugar.”
    â€œSounds fabulous,” said Marlena. “You should marry her.”
    He was never quite sure when Marlena was joking, another quirk she shared with his mother.
    â€œI’m not even sure I’ll ever see her again,” he said. “I just met her on the street and now I can’t remember her last name so I can’t find her on Facebook or LinkedIn and I didn’t think to get her number.”
    â€œYou’re always telling me what a smart guy you are, Theo. You’ll figure it out. Which street did you meet her on?”
    â€œAvenue B.”
    â€œWell, that’s a start, isn’t it?” said Marlena. “And it’s just around the corner.”

5 TH
    S ugar woke after the first night in her new apartment, looked out at the jagged peaks of downtown Manhattan wavering behind the floating muslin curtains over the French doors, and wondered why she had dreamed of Theo Fitzgerald.
    True, she’d been unnerved by the shock of his touch, by her body’s physical reaction to him, but she’d quickly swept that under the rug of her past where she’d long stashed all romantic notions.
    She had certainly not expected to think of him again, especially not in a way that continued to chase a shiver up her spine.
    Sugar did not want a boyfriend, no matter what Jay thought, no matter what anyone thought. Not all romances were fairy tales; she knew that. She’d long ago decided handsome princes did not always mean happy endings, and she was happy—she made it her business to be.
    She might no longer have a lot of what she started out with—her family for one—but she refused to mourn that. And her clock was not tick-tocking, despite her being thirty-six. Or if it was, she could not hear it.
    Besides, she had her bees. And they were not confused critters at all. What Jay did not know was that Sugar’s whim and fancy had nothing to do with where she ended up each year: it was her queen who chose.
    At the end of every winter, when the sap started rising in the trees and the flowers and plants began to think