Free The Wedding Garden by Linda Goodnight

twirled. “This was my Easter dress but I still like it. Purple is my favorite color.”
    No surprise there. Half the drawings she’d done for him featured some shade of purple.
    “You’re a beauty.” He looked above her head to where Annie was standing. Their gazes connected and held.
    Everything in him wanted to say “Gorgeous like your mother,” but he was treading on thin ice today emotionally. No point in getting himself kicked in the teeth.
    Seeing Annie dressed up for a wedding was doing weird things to him.
    “We’d better get Lydia in the car and go,” he said, more gruffly than he’d intended.
    Annie moistened her lips and nodded. “I parked by the ramp you installed.”
    “Thanks for taking your car.”
    The comment seemed to break the tension. “I doubt she would ride on your Harley.”
    “Sure she would,” he said, joking.
    But would Annie?
    Sloan hissed at the unwanted question. He and Annie were over long ago. Why were his head and his heart going crazy today?
     
    Redemption Fellowship was humming with quiet conversation as Annie guided her two children and her patient down the aisle. Sloan pushed Lydia’s wheelchair, the fingers of his hands tense against the handles. She knew he was anxious about attending church, but he hid it well behind the confident swagger that had driven her father mad and fueled her teenage crush.
    Heads turned as they passed and people nodded or called out a greeting. Sloan’s return greeting was almost grim. He had been defensive for so long, expecting everyone to reject him, that she wondered if he could see the admiration on the faces around them. She had always thought him the handsomest man she’d ever known, but in a dress shirt that matched his blue eyes and a red tie that accented his dark hair, he was the stuff dreams were made of. Her dreams, anyway.
    But she’d learned the hard way not to be fooled by dreams.
    “Is this seat okay?” the usher asked, indicating a vacant pew with access to a side exit. “You’ll have the end and the door in case Miss Lydia needs to leave.”
    “Wild horses couldn’t drag me away,” Lydia answered, but her voice was frightfully weak and raspy today. The preparations alone had taken too much out of her, but though she’d argued, Annie had not been able to change her mind about attending.
    With a smile, Annie said, “This is perfect.”
    Sloan positioned himself next to Lydia, and Delaney plopped down on his other side, whispering excitedly about the pretty lavender flowers and bows decorating the church. Needing to be near her patient, Annie sat beside her daughter with Justin at her elbow. This close she could smell Sloan’s cologne—a subtle, expensively masculine mix of spice and sandalwood that had driven her to distraction in the car. She’d be salivating by the time the wedding ended if she didn’t find something to take her mind off Sloan Hawkins.
    Fortunately, the wedding music commenced. Traditional notes of “Amazing Grace” played on a violin accompanied the groom, the minister and the best man as they made their way to the front of the church. Annie had known Doctor Trace Bowman both personally and professionally since he’d moved to Redemption, and she had never seen him happier than in the last year since he and the darkly intense woman from Colorado had fallen in love. Today he radiated happiness as his daughter, the effervescent Zoey, made her way carefully down the aisle, strewing rose petals along the way. For a blind child, Zoey was remarkably confident, but her grandmother, Trace’s mother, walked behind, one hand resting lightly on the child’s shoulder.
    Then the music changed and the congregation stood as a unit. A little thrill raced along Annie’s arms. She loved weddings, especially this moment when the bride appeared in all her glory and the groom got that thunderstruck expression on his face.
    Cheyenne, a former police officer who had overcome a terrible violent attack to become