The Wedding Pearls Read online

  ALSO BY CAROLYN BROWN

  CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE

  Love Is

  A Falling Star

  All the Way from Texas

  The Yard Rose

  The Ivy Tree

  Lily’s White Lace

  That Way Again

  The Wager

  Trouble in Paradise

  The PMS Club

  The Ladies’ Room

  Long, Hot Texas Summer

  Daisies in the Canyon

  The Yellow Rose Beauty Shop

  HISTORICAL ROMANCE

  THE OKLAHOMA LAND RUSH SERIES

  Emma’s Folly

  Violet’s Wish

  Maggie’s Mistake

  Just Grace

  DRIFTERS AND DREAMERS SERIES

  Morning Glory

  Sweet Tilly

  The LOVE’S VALLEY SERIES

  Choices

  Absolution

  Chances

  Redemption

  Promises

  BROKEN ROADS SERIES

  To Trust

  To Commit

  To Believe

  To Dream

  To Hope

  THE PROMISED LAND SERIES

  Willow

  Velvet

  Gypsy

  Garnet

  Augusta

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 Carolyn Brown

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake Romance are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503954441 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1503954447 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781503949539 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1503949532 (paperback)

  Cover design by Laura Klynstra

  To my awesome agent,

  Erin Niumata:

  Thank you for taking a chance on me all those years ago, for sticking with me through these many years, and for everything you do to make me successful. It’s been said that some people cross your path and change your whole direction.

  I’m sure glad that our paths crossed!

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  Being adopted never bothered Tessa as much as being clumsy. Her biological parents, whoever they were, could have given her an ounce or two of grace. But oh, no! She had inherited the gene to fall over nothing more than air, and she gave a whole new meaning to the term butterfingers.

  Her adoptive mother, Sophie, was a different story. Tall, thin, and graceful as a runway model, she taught dance to students from age four through high school. When Tessa was four years old, Sophie put her in ballet classes, but after the first year, when both of them cried at every lesson, she admitted defeat.

  By the time Tessa was twenty-five she’d stopped praying for a miracle called grace to fall into her lap. At nearly thirty, she’d accepted the fact that the clumsiness, like her blonde hair and blue eyes, could not be given back to the DNA gods.

  If it could go wrong that last Friday in August, it did; if it couldn’t possibly go wrong, it found a way to do it anyway.

  Tessa’d spilled two cups of coffee and had to change her shirt both times. Thank goodness she’d learned long ago to keep extra clothes at work. She’d dropped two fat files and mixed them up, which resulted in an hour of hard work getting them separated. Thirty minutes before closing time, she sat down behind her desk and picked up a thick romance book. Just another half an hour, and surely to God if she sat right there until it was time to leave she could avoid another disaster.

  On Monday her partner and cousin, Clint, would be back at work. Sorry sucker had taken all four weeks of his vacation time in the same block so he and his wife could tour Europe for their fifth wedding anniversary. As mad as she had been at him for leaving her in the middle of the summer to run the travel agency alone, she sure looked forward to him being back in the office.

  She’d read only a few words when the door pushed open, bringing in a blast of hot, muggy air and a tall, good-looking cowboy. Tessa was glad she was sitting down or she would have tripped over her own thoughts and fallen right into his arms. He looked like one of those old Marlboro ads and a CD cover of Blake Shelton all tossed in together. Her pulse kicked in a little extra giddyup, and her heart did one of those thumps that came along these days only on special occasions.

  “Hello, is Tessa Wilson here?” he drawled.

  She closed her book without using the bookmark. “I’m Tessa. What can I do for you?”

  He nodded toward a chair and asked, “Mind if I sit?”

  “Honeymoon?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am.” He removed his hat, laid it on her desk, and raked his fingers through thick, dark hair that feathered back perfectly. She could read people, and this man was damn sure nervous. Maybe he was married and planning a trip with his mistress. It didn’t matter—her job was to put him at ease and work a little magic to get him a good deal. Where he went—or with whom—wasn’t a bit of her business.

  He inhaled and let his breath out slowly. “I guess I am planning a trip, but not one that you can help me with. I’m here on official business.” He slid a business card across the meticulously clean desk toward her.

  She picked it up, glanced at the name, and looked up into the sexiest green eyes she’d ever seen. He looked far more like a rancher than a lawyer. The hair, the eyes, a square face with the perfect amount of chiseling and a perfect-size cleft in his chin. She held her hands in her lap with her fingers laced tightly together so she wouldn’t reach out and touch that little chin dent.

  Holy crap! She didn’t let clients affect her like this. It had to be that the steamy sex scene in the romance book she’d been reading had set her mind and hormones into overdrive. She glanced down at the cover image of a cowboy with a bare chest, hip-slung jeans, and a cowboy hat in his hands. It was exactly like the black felt hat sitting there between herself and the new client. She undressed him with her eyes and decided that he wouldn’t look so very different from the model on the novel. She quickly closed her eyes and willed the wicked thoughts away, then opened them again and glanced down at the card one more time.

  “Branch Thomas, what can I do for you?” Her throat was dry, but she was afraid to uncap the water bottle on her desk for fear she’d drop the thing and make another mess.

  His eyebrows k
nit together into a frown. “I’m not sure how to put this in words, and it might come as a shock. I guess the only way to say it is to blurt it out. You’d think this would be easier, since I’m a lawyer.”

  “Spit it out,” she said.

  “Okay, then.” He nodded seriously. “I’m here on behalf of your biological mother and grandmother. They would like to meet you. And that trip I was talking about, they’re leaving on Tuesday for a monthlong road trip around the perimeter of Texas, and they would like for you to go with them so y’all can get to know each other.”

  Tessa was so intrigued with his eyes that his words, which tumbled out so fast, didn’t sink in for several seconds. “I’m sorry, we don’t usually plan trips like that, but if you’d tell me how far they want to travel each day I could maybe work up some tourist sites and hotels.” And that’s when she clamped a hand over her mouth. “What did you say?”

  He picked up his hat and laid it in his lap. “You did know you were adopted?”

  She nodded.

  Any minute he was going to bolt and run. She could see it in his eyes. “And you did know that you had a biological mother somewhere?”

  Another slight tip of the head without losing eye contact with him. “I’ve always known I was adopted. It didn’t matter, and I’m comfortable with it.”

  “The rest is pretty self-explanatory. Your birth mother and grandmother would like to meet you this weekend. They live in Boomtown, Texas, a few miles east of Beaumont.” He looked at a travel poster on the wall behind her left shoulder as he talked. “It’s about a three-hour drive from here. They are willing to come over here, or if you wouldn’t mind the drive, they would like for you to come to Sunday dinner to discuss this trip.”

  “Is this a joke?” she asked bluntly.

  His eyes shifted to her forehead. “I realize it’s a lot to take in, Miss Wilson, but please don’t shoot the messenger. Your mother is Lola Laveau. Her number is on the back of the card, along with Frankie Laveau’s. That would be your grandmother.”

  He pushed up out of the chair and settled his hat back on his head. “I’ve written my cell phone number on the front there so you can contact me over the weekend if you want to decline any or all of this. I’ll be glad to deliver the message for you. Or if you have any more questions, you can call them or me. Sorry to drop this in your lap, but like I said, I’m just the messenger.”

  Then he was gone, leaving her in stunned silence with his card in her hand. She was still sitting in the same spot, her mind going over every word, every name, and looping back to repeat them a dozen times, when the door opened again and her mother pointed at the clock.

  “It’s five thirty. Did you fall asleep and forget that you close at five?” Sophie asked.

  Dressed in a pair of khaki shorts and a bright-orange shirt, she was as cool as a snow cone from that stand down near the park. Her blonde ponytail didn’t have a speck of gray in it, and even after a day of dancing with her students, her makeup was still perfect.

  Tessa handed the card to her mother and held her breath. Sophie looked at the front first and frowned, then flipped it over. “Well, well, well.” She smiled. “I haven’t seen Lola Laveau in almost thirty years, but I have thought of her often.”

  Tessa pinched her leg, and it hurt like hell so she knew she wasn’t dreaming. But she still felt as if she were in a vacuum and all the air had disappeared. Her chest hurt even worse than her leg. Maybe if she shut her eyes and then opened them again, she would wake up to find it was a dream. She blinked slowly and sucked in a lungful of air. When she opened her eyes, she saw nothing had changed, so it was definitely not a dream.

  Emotions flooded over her—mostly shock because this was not a surprise to her mother. And then fear, denial, excitement, anger—each emotion lasting only a few seconds before another pushed it out of the way to take center stage.

  “You knew my birth mother?” Her voice was raspy, and the words came out one at a time with seconds between them.

  Sophie sat down in the same chair that Branch had been sitting in and nodded. “I did. We were good friends back then.”

  Was she hearing her mother right? Had her clumsiness affected her hearing? “You never told me.”

  Sophie shrugged. “You never asked. I was prepared to tell you all about this years and years ago, but you never seemed interested in knowing about your birth parents. I’m starving, my child. Let’s go down to that Cajun place you like and get some shrimp gumbo and I’ll answer any questions you have.”

  Tessa turned out the lights, locked up the business, set the security alarm, followed her mother out of the store, and settled into the passenger’s seat of Sophie’s van. Questions were a jumbled mess in her brain, one leading to another and none of them making a bit of sense. Thank God it was Friday and she had the whole weekend to process this mess before she called that sexier-than-hell cowboy Branch and told him no, thank you, to Sunday dinner, visits, or a cockamamie trip. She needed a drink—hell, she needed a whole bottle of Jack.

  Wanette, a familiar hostess at the restaurant on Main Street, took them to a table in a back corner and asked, “How’s that granddaughter of mine doing in ballet? I was afraid she’d have two left feet.”

  “Don’t you worry about Yvette. She’s a natural,” Sophie said. “I think we’d both like a good, strong, top-shelf margarita, and I do mean strong.”

  Wanette winked. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll make it myself so it’ll be exactly right. Need a few minutes to look at the menu?”

  Sophie shook her head. “We’ll both have the shrimp gumbo, but the drinks first and maybe a basket of bread with some butter and honey.”

  “Got it.” Wanette smiled.

  Sophie reached across the table and covered Tessa’s hand with hers. “Okay, for the next hour, I’m all yours. What do you want to know?”

  “I don’t know where to start or what to ask. It never mattered to me, Mama, and I’m not sure it does now. Adopted was just a word. Remember when you gave me my first journal and you wrote on the first page?” Tessa asked.

  Sophie smiled and squeezed Tessa’s hand gently. “I told you that you didn’t grow in my tummy but in my heart. I remember well. You wrote in your journals until last Christmas, when Matt broke your heart. I think it would do you a world of good to start writing again, chère.”

  “I haven’t got anything to write about.” She paused. “I was comfortable with being adopted, Mama. You and Daddy are the best parents a kid could ever have, and even now that I’m an adult, I don’t want to think about life without either of you. God, I’d like to go back to this morning and start all over again. I don’t like this can of worms that cowboy opened.”

  “Cowboy?” Sophie asked.

  “Sexy cowboy, but that’s not important,” Tessa said. “Just tell me what I need to know, because my brain isn’t working well enough to ask questions.”

  “We were in the same commune together up in central Kentucky. Way back in one of those hollers that nobody can find unless they have a map, and even then it’s iffy,” Sophie started.

  “Commune as in . . .” Tessa stammered over the words.

  Wanette brought their drinks, a basket filled with bread, and a bowl with packets of butter and honey. “Y’all enjoy. Your food will be out soon.”

  Sophie broke a hot roll in half and buttered it. “As in free love, all for one and one for all? Yes, that kind of commune. We were all hippies born about twenty years too late, but we hated the establishment and decided we could live off the grid. It wasn’t bad, and most of us stayed with the partner we brought to the party in the beginning.”

  “But you’re from Louisiana and so is Daddy, and Lola”—the name sounded strange on Tessa’s tongue—“is from Texas. Does Daddy know that you lived in a commune?”

  Sophie slathered butter on the other half of the roll and handed it to Tessa. “He went with me. Our best friends had gone up there and we followed them. We’d been there three years when Lola and he
r boyfriend showed up. He survived only a couple of weeks before he packed his bags and left, but Lola stayed. We had a two-bedroom trailer, so she stayed with us when she wasn’t out with the sheep.”

  Tessa bit off a piece of the bread and chewed slowly. “Sheep? As in furry animals?”

  Sophie sipped her drink. “Of course. Her job was to take them out to the pasture to feed each morning and bring them back in the evening. There were about twenty ewes and a couple of rams, and she named every one.”

  Tessa picked up the oversize margarita and gulped three times before she set it back down. “Was her boyfriend my biological father?”

  “No, he was not. She got pretty wild after he left, so she never knew who your father was. Told me it could have been one of four of the fellows who weren’t attached to a particular woman at that time. Don’t be quick to judge her. She was right out of high school and thought the boyfriend loved her. And then he left her more than a thousand miles from home and she didn’t want to go back and face the music. Matter of fact, chère, she didn’t know if she could go home.”

  Tessa took a deep breath and spit out the words before she lost her courage. “Did you and Daddy . . . I can’t even say the words, but did you?”

  Sophie shook her head. “We were committed to each other, and we didn’t cheat on each other. That part was totally optional. We were a couple and everyone knew it. We grew our own food and ate a lot of mutton, barbecued goat, chickens, and vegetables. We canned and froze food for the winter and lived very simply. We moved back to Louisiana right after you were born.”

  “Drugs?” Tessa held her breath and waited.

  Sophie shook her head. “Our bodies were our temples. We didn’t do drugs, but one of the guys, Skip Morton, did make a mean batch of moonshine up in the hills, and I can’t say we didn’t partake of it. Eat some more bread. The way you are downing that drink, you’re going to need it.”

  Tessa popped another bite into her mouth. “This is a lot to take in all at once.”

  Wanette set two piping-hot bowls of gumbo in front of them. “Tessa, I swear you’re pale as if you saw a ghost walkin’ across the Bayou Teche. What you need after that gumbo is a plate of beignets and some good black coffee. That’ll cure you up fast, chère.”