Page 186 of A Love Letter to Whiskey
“Nah, you’re a leaf peeper now.”
Morgan said his name in a chastising tone, but it earned a chuckle from his father.
I just narrowed my eyes, doing everything in my power not to notice how tall he’d grown, how his toned and tanned arms crossed over his built chest, how his russet brown hair was still a bit long and boyish, making him look so much like the boy I left behind that I nearly doubled over at the sight.
“It’s summer,” I pointed out. “If I was a leaf peeper, I’d be here in October.”
“I’m just saying, you can’t call yourself a New England girl when you talk and look like that,” he said, eyeing me. “And when you haven’t set foot in New Hampshire in almost a decade.”
“I can call myself whatever I damn well please.”
He surged forward with a challenge in his eyes, leaning over the kitchen island until his stupid grin was right in my face. I leaned back in the same instant.
“Hmm… let’s test it. How do you pronounce the scenic highway all the leaf peepers like yourself drive through every fall?”
I crossed my arms. “Kancamagus,” I answered, putting emphasis on the mog. “But most of us don’t pronounce it at all, since we just refer to it as The Kanc.”
Tyler smirked, leaning in a little closer, his dark eyes fixed on mine like he saw every single thing I was trying to hide. “Now, say, ‘wicked.’”
I flipped him off, and the entire family laughed, Robert pointing the wooden spoon covered in lobster salad at me. “I always loved that you had moxie, kid.”
Tyler licked his bottom lip, eyes roaming over me for longer than necessary before he shoved back from the island again, dipping into the fridge and grabbing a Sam Adams Summer Ale and popping the top off on the edge of the kitchen counter. That earned him a slap on the wrist from his mother, but he just winked at me before putting the bottle to his lips and taking a long, slow pull.
I flushed, tearing my eyes from his just as Robert said it was time to eat.
I managed to calm down during dinner, mostly thanks to Amanda and Morgan filling any empty space in the conversation. Every now and then, one of them would ask me something, like how California was (beautiful as always), how work was (wonderful, the podcast is growing more and more every day), or, my favorite, how Jacob and I met (at a networking event for local influencers, he was the most charming man I’d ever met — and I made sure to say that last part loud and proud).
But, for the most part, the conversation hinged on the upcoming wedding.
The wedding that would take place on the Cape two weeks from today.
It should have surprised all of us when Morgan said she was marrying a guy she’d dated less than a year, and in two weeks, nonetheless. But, the fact that no one in this family batted an eye is a testament to how well we knew our girl. She had always been impulsive, and not in the way that she’d buy a pair of three-hundred-dollar shoes on a whim. No, for Morgan, it was always the big things — huge changes that she’d make up her mind about overnight and no one could ever talk her out of it.
She cut off all her hair without ever looking back. She changed majors her senior year of college, just because she felt in her gut that it was the right thing to do. She got her first tattoo at a basement party in Boston and bought a horse she kept at a stable outside of town without ever having ridden one in her life.
It was as if she mulled on what her next move would be constantly, and once she decided, that was it. There was no other option.
So, when she met Oliver Bradford during her girls’ trip to the Cape last summer and told me with the utmost confidence that she’d be marrying him before her twenty-sixth birthday, I didn’t doubt it for a second. And when she called me last week to tell me he’d proposed, it didn’t surprise me at all that she wanted to get married on June twentieth.
Four days before her birthday.
I didn’t fight her on it, didn’t try to talk her into waiting or taking her time to plan. I knew my best friend well enough to know there was no use in even trying.
So, instead, I hopped a flight.
And I came back to the town I swore I never would.
After dinner, we all gathered in the backyard around their stone fire pit, and Morgan handed out binders about an inch thick with Wagner/Bradford Wedding Itinerary printed in perfect script on the cover.
