Wish on You (Bliss Brothers Book 6) Read online

  Wish on You

  A Bliss Brothers Novel

  Amelia Wilde

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  Connect with Amelia

  Also by Amelia Wilde

  1

  Asher

  Of all the bars in Montana, I had to walk into hers.

  My hand is still on the worn handle of the door when I see her perched there at the bar, dark hair picking up the pink neon from the margarita light hooked to one corner of the mirror.

  She’s bowed her head gracefully over a half-full highball glass. That specific tilt of her head drives its fist into my heart. She looks like she’s praying.

  What’s she praying about? My newly knocked-out-for-no-reason heart wants to know. I’ve never been a guy who prays much. I’ve thought about it. There are times when I’m on a red-eye heading back across the Atlantic, looking out at that little light blinking on the edge of the wing…

  I have that same feeling now, looking at her.

  She fidgets with the highball glass, spinning it between her fingers. The song Marry Me, which is, bizarrely, a country song I recognize, competes with a replay of a baseball game. The glass goes around, then back the other way.

  Then, down into her drink, so softly that the sound doesn’t register above the background noise, her lips form the word fuck.

  I let go of the door and let it swing shut behind me. It sticks when it shuts, too, but I don’t turn around and force it. This girl, alone at the bar, is too magnetic to turn away from.

  She lifts her head from her drink—what’s she drinking?—and the hairs on the backs of my arms stand up. This mystery woman could be here with someone.

  But her eyes settle on me.

  Big, dark eyes, with a hint of pink just like her hair. One eyebrow arches. It takes an effort to resist turning around and pointing at my chest like an idiot.

  Instead, I take one step, then another, and then another until I can slide onto the barstool next to hers.

  She looks me up and down, totally shameless. “You’re not from here.” Her tone is half-question, like we’ve been in conversation, and the odd familiarity of it strums a string instrument that seems to have taken the place of my ribs.

  “You’ve got that right.” The bartender makes his way over and I order a beer. My brother Beau would be appalled at how plain it is, there in its chilled glass, but Beau is probably drunk in upstate New York, and I’m in Montana. “Do you come here often?”

  She tilts her head back. “Oh, my god. That line is so bad.”

  “I know. I’m fresh out of good ones. I’ve been on a plane.” It sounds stupid, but it’s true.

  “What do you mean? Like, you’ve been on a plane before?” She tips her head back and laughs at her own joke. “I’m sorry. I’ve had one and a half of these.”

  I take in the lime wedge on the edge of the highball glass. “What are you drinking?”

  She makes a face at the drink like it came up to her grandmother at a party and whispered something offensive. “A cosmo.”

  “Out of a highball glass?”

  Those dark eyes narrow. “What are you, the cocktail police? I don’t like martini glasses.” She thrusts her wrists out toward me. “Take me to jail, if that’s what you need to do.”

  “If that’s what I need to do.” A laugh rises in my chest. “You want to be in jail over a martini glass? Sounds desperate.”

  “Do you think so? Because it’s worse than that.” She whispers the last three words in a high-pitched hiss. “It’s way worse than that…stranger.”

  I stick my hand out for her to shake. “Asher Bliss.”

  “Asher Bliss,” she repeats, testing out the words on her tongue. “No, you’re definitely not from here.”

  “I definitely never said I was.”

  “Where are you from, then? Did you fall out of a crop duster?”

  She’s so weird. “A place called Ruby Bay.”

  “Asher Bliss from Ruby Bay. And where’s Ruby Bay?”

  “Upstate New York.”

  “Oooh.” She leans back on the barstool and I start to reach behind her on instinct, then tuck my hand back into my lap. “Very luxurious.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “Idea me.” She hiccups. How many drinks did she say she’d had? “I mean, give me an idea.”

  “Well…the lake is nice.” Saying that my home base is a five-star resort feels like overkill for someone who just whispered fuck into an alcoholic drink, but nice is a lame understatement. This is going well.

  “Wow. I’m wowed.” This is delivered so flatly I can see that she’s not wowed.

  “It’s probably not as exciting, considering the bay you’ve got here.”

  “I’ve only got this bay while I’m at the bar. When I’m at home, you can only see a tiny sliver.” She pinches her thumb and forefinger together and squints. “But that doesn’t matter much now, because I’m not going to have a home much longer.”

  “What do you mean? Is the lease up on your rental?”

  “Oh, that’s—” She giggles, and the giggle cascades into a full-on belly laugh. “That’s the best way I’ve ever heard anyone explain it. Kind of, Asher Bliss. In a way, the lease is up on my rental.”

  “And in another way…?”

  “In another way…” She looks me straight in the eye. “In forty-eight hours, I lose the farm. Literally. No. Not literally. I lose the ranch. My ranch. My…dad’s ranch. Which is now mine. But not for very long.”

  I take the first sip of my beer. It’s still cold, and the taste on my tongue reminds me of sitting poolside at Bliss, which reminds me that I am not in Montana—Paulson, Montana, of all places—to meet women at the bar.

  I’m here because my father sent me here ten days before he died.

  He didn’t tell me to go, not right then. He didn’t know he was going to have a heart attack. But he did give me the instructions to come out here. To Montana. To a town I’ve never heard of in my life.

  I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not at first. I was too busy with all the other things that had to be done in the event of his death. None of my brothers had any idea of the extent of that to-do list. He’d been giving it to me in bits and pieces for years—pretty much every time I went overseas, or to California, or anywhere else he had me go.

  “Roman’s got enough on his plate,” he’d say with a wave of his hand. “You handle this, and he’ll run the resort. Everybody’s happy.”

  Roman’s been happy, as far as I know. From what I’ve heard, and what I’ve seen on their social media posts when I bother to check, Roman’s found the love of his life. All of my brothers have, except me, and I don’t know if that’s because the love of my life is waiting for me at Bliss or because she’s somewhere else on this planet.

  A rush of cool like the crisp fall breeze outside brushes against the back of my neck.

  “Why are you going to lose your ranch?”

  She sighs, her head bowing over her cosmo-in-a-highball again. “Would you believe me if I told you my father had the most screwed-up will on the planet?”

  “No. Because my father had the most scr
ewed-up will on the planet. It’s only added to my already bizarre job.”

  “What’s your bizarre job?”

  I take another sip of beer. “Don’t you think we should be on equal footing before I tell you all my secrets?”

  “Oh my god. Do you work for the CIA or something?” She looks over her shoulder at the mostly empty booths. “Did you come here because of the will?”

  “I came here because of a bunch of papers in a folder. That sounds like I work for the CIA, but I work for the family business.”

  “The mob.” Her voice lowers to a definitive whisper.

  “The Bliss Brothers Resort & Club,” I whisper back.

  Her eyes go wide. “You own a resort?”

  “Along with my brothers, yes.”

  “Asher Bliss.” She tests the name one more time, and then something flickers through her eyes. Recognition? It’s gone in a blink. “Bliss.”

  “See? You know my name.”

  She snaps her fingers and points at me, a flush of color coming to her cheeks, and I’d bet all the money in my wallet that this is cosmo number three. “I do know it. But you don’t know mine.”

  “I’d like to.” I’d love to.

  “That’s the thing. If I tell you, I feel like I’ll also have to tell you why I’m really here tonight.”

  Heat sprints down the length of my spine. “You could tell me the secret first and leave it anonymous.”

  She pins me to my seat with her gaze. “But I’m feeling—” The sentence is interrupted by a hiccup. “I’m feeling brave.” She takes a deep breath, like she’s a second away from jumping off the high dive. “I’m Everly Carson. And I’m here to find a husband.”

  2

  Everly

  Asher’s eyebrows shoot up at the word husband and an alarm bell goes off in my mind. It sound suspiciously like a muffled version of the one on top of the fire station over on First. It’s the cosmos making that alarm seem far away—more of a dreamy suggestion to put the words back into my own mouth than an urgent warning.

  I wasn’t a hundred percent truthful when I said I’d had one and a half drinks. I’ve had one and a half, plus an additional one and a half. And this current one makes three and a quarter.

  It’s not like I expect a cosmo in a highball glass to solve my problems, which are patently unsolvable by alcohol. If only I could legally marry citrus vodka.

  But all it can do for me now is make this entire situation—Asher, the bar, the fact that I just admitted I need a hasty husband—slightly less mortifying.

  It still makes my cheeks burn that I couldn’t find a way around my father’s will, which is apparently ironclad. And not only is it ironclad, the details are incredibly specific. You would not be surprised to find out that those details are making my life…difficult. To say the least.

  Asher sits up straight on his barstool and takes a deep breath. Moisture flees the inside of my mouth, leaving a dry, sandy sandy wasteland. I pick up cosmo number four to wet my lips and gulp another quarter of it down in the process.

  His gaze travels over the rest of the bar. “You came here to find a husband?”

  I crane my neck and take it all in, trying to see it through his eyes. This turns out to be completely unnecessary because even through my eyes it’s clear that the Riverbend is a bust. One couple nestles in the back booth, four bros huddle around a deck of cards and basket of peanuts at the table by the narrow front window, and Lindsey Barnett, one of my sister’s friends from school, stretches her legs out on a bench seat by a round table somewhere in the middle.

  That’s it.

  If Asher hadn’t walked in…

  “The Riverbend has a view of the bay.” I take another swig of my drink. “It seemed like as good a place as any.”

  The door of the bar opens, letting in a breeze that smells like fallen leaves with a hint of bonfire. For a second a strange quiet settles over the bar. Heads turn toward the open door, one after the other. I hold my breath.

  Greg Owens, the owners and winner of the award for Bartender Who Works The Most Shifts, looks up from where he’s drying glasses with a pristine white cloth. “Can somebody shut that?”

  “I’ve got it.”

  The voice comes from directly behind me and I startle, my body jerking several inches off the barstool. How did he get back there? Now I can hear every creak of the floor underneath the rubber soles of his boots on the way to the door, but before I must have been so caught up in Asher Bliss’s eyes that I didn’t notice his approach. He must have been tucked in one of the back booths near the dart board. Just outside he threshold he pauses to lift his cattleman hat back onto his head. For a moment, his broad shoulders fill the doorframe, the light from the bar casting him into a shadowy silhouette against the backdrop of the street. Then he turns, the moonlight catching on his face, and pulls the door closed behind him.

  Noise rushes back into the Riverbend again, filling the space. Asher turns back around to face me. “Who was that?” He shakes his shoulders and settles back in. “I thought a tumbleweed was going to blow by. That song played in my head.”

  “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.” The flute

  “Right.” He considers me. “You don’t know who it is? He has serious lonesome cowboy vibes. And I don’t even know what I’m talking about when it comes to cowboys.”

  A pair of fingers walks a chilly path down my spine. The lonesome cowboy walking out of the bar isn’t exactly a stranger, but he’s not exactly relevant to the issue at hand. The cosmos whisper that I should tell him, just give Asher Bliss enough to get his focus back on me, but I don’t want to.

  The fact is that Asher looks like a solution to my problem.

  Maybe it’s insane, given the thump I felt at the center of my chest when I heard his last name. Curiosity runs its fingernails down my skin, leaving goose bumps in a trail down my arms. It comes in a steady rhythm like waves lapping against the shore of Paulson Bay.

  One Bliss, two Bliss…

  I don’t know where my brain was going with that.

  But Asher came in on a gust of wind that held a hint of summer. I’ve never seen him here before. I’ve never seen him anywhere before. The only thing familiar about him is the depthless blue of his eyes. And if Lonesome Cowboy hadn’t been headed for the door…

  No. He has nothing to do with my situation, even if he has something to do with Asher Bliss walking into this bar tonight. He doesn’t matter.

  “Are you single?”

  Bless you, cosmopolitan martini, for making my mouth work without my permission.

  Asher cocks his head to the side. “Are you avoiding my question?”

  “My question is more important. My question has a timeline.”

  Those blue eyes narrow. “Were you serious before? About losing your house.”

  “I was. Yes. I was completely serious, and I was also serious about needing a husband.” I look him up and down. Every feature of his sends a miniature earthquake through the center of my core from the windblown yet somehow perfect fall of his dark hair to the ocean shock of his blue eyes to his cut chin and oh, god, don’t get me started on the way that his shirt stretches almost erotically over his body.

  And who shows up at the Riverbend in Paulson if they already lead a rich and full life with a wife and several children? Who comes to Montana from a bayside resort in New York if everything is peachy? If my assessment is correct, then Asher Bliss has some space to fill in his life. I don’t even need much of it. I only need some temporary vows and a license on file at the county building.

  Nobody has to know. And even if he has something to with the Lonesome Cowboy Who Shall Not Be Named, what’s that to anyone in Paulson? Nothing. Never the twain shall meet. And even if they shall meet, nobody needs to know about any potential arrangements I might make with a handsome stranger at the Riverbend just in time to avert a family crisis.

  “You okay?”

  I’ve been lost in thought, is where I’ve been, and
I drag my gaze up from the general vicinity of Asher’s abs and back to his eyes. “I’m…” I lift my highball glass to my lips one more time only to discover that I’ve been drinking it without realizing and now it’s empty. “I’m fine. I’m good. But I seriously need to know if you’re single.”

  “I am single,” he says solemnly. I believe him.

  “Here’s the deal, Asher Bliss.” A nervous numbness wraps itself around my jaw and settles in on my tongue. When I came to the Riverbend two hours ago, I didn’t actually expect to proposition someone in quite this way. I did have a moment where I pictured myself out on the sidewalk at closing time, frantic, asking people to marry me like Donna in the West Wing trying to trade her vote for President. “I like the looks of you.”

  The sexiest half-smile I’ve ever witnessed curves the corner of his mouth in a delicious arc. “I like the looks of you, too. That’s why I sat down here.”

  “And you could’ve sat pretty much anywhere, so that means something.” I snap my fingers and point at him again, because of course I do. It’s like my brain thinks I can snap away some of the fierce attraction humming at the base of my spine. It does not work. “The bottom line is that I’m in a real…situation.” I clear my throat. “My late father’s will has a wedding clause with a deadline that’s up in two days. If I’m not married, the ranch goes up for auction.”

  “A wedding clause,” he echoes, as if saying it more times will make it make sense. “Do you get the proceeds from the auction?”

  “Does it sound like I get the proceeds from the auction?” I drop my head into my hands, then pick it back up. Face this head on. “No. The local police department does. And my sister and I are out a place to live.”