Summer Embarrass him, huh? If he hadn’t goaded me, I wouldn’t have fallen in with Karma's plan.
I survey myself in the mirror.
What had I been thinking when I'd agreed to wear the dress that she had created? I'd gone along with the idea,
because... yeah, I did want to shock him. Show him that he shouldn't underestimate me. I toss my head.
This entire pretend wedding is a car crash waiting to happen. It's inevitable that everything is going to go wrong.
I am nudging it along.
It is his fault, for treating me like... like worse than dirt.
Like I don’t exist.
Hell, he treats that damn old school Casio watch of his with more affection. At least he massages it, touches it,
tinkers with it. He gives it attention.
Me? He dismisses as if I am an errant child, or a dimwit who has no idea what I am doing. Which I don’t, I admit.
Else why would I have landed in this situation? Faking a wedding that I very much want to be real.
I tighten my fingers around the bouquet of flowers.
There, I’ve acknowledged it to myself, huh? Although logic dictates that I abhor him, my body cannot deny the
effect he has on me.
It isn’t that he’s good-looking. Not only.
It's that complete confidence that clings to his every move, the way he seems to walk into a space and own it, how
everyone else in the vicinity acknowledges he is the most lethal of them, how he wears his arrogance with absolute
single-mindedness. A cockiness that the world owes him—a mindset that is so alien, so different from everything
that I am used to—a sureness I wish I possessed.
Is that what this is? Am I envious of everything he r epresents? What I lost out on, thanks to the error of my
parents? Exc ept, that isn’t me. I’ve always been proud of being my own person and making my way through this
world on my own steam. I don’t need anyone to rescue me.
I don’t.
So, what am I doing here? I glance down at my posy.
Wildflowers. White, pink, and violet blooms mixed with green. Thankfully, it isn’t the expensive bouquet that
Amelie had wanted me to order.
It isn’t that I was averse to spending his money... More that every single option that Amelie had shown me in the
catering, the decorations, the entire idea of how I’d wanted a wedding to be, well, it had all felt strange.
I’ll be honest. I’ve never spent time imagining my dream wedding.
When you grow up trying to figure out how to survive and where your next meal is going to come from—
especially after you had all of it one day and it had been taken from you the next—well, you learn not to think too
far out in the future. You really do try and focus on the now and what you have. Maybe it also had to do with my
mother’s slight obsession with seizing the moment.
Perhaps she had an intuition for things to come, that her life would be brutally cut short one day when she’d
contracted blood poisoning. I mean, for hell’s sake, what were the odds, huh? The dye from the hand painted
fabrics she’d loved wearing had bled into her skin and prolonged exposure to it had killed her. Hell. The mind
boggles.
It had wrecked my father enough for him to throw himself into his work.
He’d neglected me and Karma, progressively, and one day had not returned home. Apparently, he hadn’t been the
above-board businessman he’d made himself out to be.
He’d made a series of bad business decisions, then borrowed from the Mafia—bad idea, Dad—and when he hadn’t
been able to pay them back, he’d abandoned us to the system and left the country. The coward.
We’d been lucky to be able to es cape with our lives. At least our foster homes hadn’t been too bad—I’d heard
some of the horror stories of the other kids. I’d thanked our stars that we’d ended up with people who, while they
weren’t too loving, hadn’t been monsters either. And they hadn’t s eparated me and Karma. We'd stayed together
until I'd turned sixteen and found myself at a homeless hostel. I had tried to protect her, but my sister’s illness had
made her far older than her years, too soon.
I raise the blooms to my nose and inhale. The scent of the open countryside envelops me. Whoever had plucked
this had known exactly which blooms to fold into the mix.
There’s a knock on the door.
"Come in." I face the mirror and survey myself.
Footst eps sound, then Karma’s face appears next to mine. "Wow," she breathes.
"Is that good or bad?"
"Umm." She tilts her head. "You look..." "Go on." I grip my bouquet until my knuckles whiten.
"Nice flowers. Your favorites?"
I glance down at the burst of colors. "Aren’t they beautiful? Wonder who got them for me?"
"Maybe Amelie or Isla?" She leans forward, brushes a piece of lint from one of the panels of my dress.
"Maybe." I shift my weight between my feet. "And you haven't answered the question."
Her lips quirk, "Which one?"
"You know," I huff out a breath. "How do I look, Karma?"
She puts distance between us, looks me up and down.
Her eyebrows knit. "You look..." She bites her cheek.
"That bad, huh?" I swallow.
"You look... Not as I expected." Her face breaks into a grin. "You’re going to make such an impression."
Oh. The breath rushes out of me. "Not too much?"
"Yes, much." She brushes away a strand of hair from my temple. "Isn’t that what you were going for? To shock
him?"
"Kind of." My heart begins to hammer. "Maybe I should forget about—" "No."
She grips my hand. "You are strong, gorgeous, one hell of a woman. No one can show you up. No one. You are the
queen of all you survey, who can have anything you want.
You were born to live an epic life, on your terms. You are going to fulfill your destiny and no alphahole can take
that away from you, for you own your power. You are you."
I blink, "Wow."
Her eyebrows furrow, then she straightens herself, pulls away. I swoop down and grab her arm. "Did you mean
everything you said?"
She hesitates, then glances away.
"Do you believe in me, Karma?"
She draws in a breath, then tilts her head up. "I do."
Something in my chest lightens. Tears prick the backs of my eyes, and I blink them away. "Thank you."
She nods, shuffles her feet, then peers up at me from under her eyelids, "I also believe in this dress that I created
for you."
"Ha." I toss my head. "I can't believe you turned it around so quickly." I grip her shoulder. "Thank you, Sis."
Her chin wobbles.
For a second, I am sure she’s going to hug me. I move forward, but she ducks, drops down, straightens the skirt of
my dress.
"Your little speech earlier," I wrinkle my brow. "It wasn’t from a movie, was it?"
"No."
"Then?"
"Something I read in a self-help book."
"You read self-help books?"
"Naah." She hesitates, "Happened to find it on the tube.
I read a few pages, and the sentiment of it stuck with me."
"Hmm."
She rises to her feet, "I really do love the dress. It’s audacious, outrageous. It’s so not you, that it is you."
I straighten, survey myself, one last time. It made sense in a funny Karma-esque way. "You're right. This time."
She meets my gaze in the mirror. Her eyes are too bright.
"Do you have something in your eyes, Karma?"
"Of course not." She turns her head aside to wipe her cheek. "Come on, you want to be on time."
"On the contrary." I grin. "Let’s not."