Needing Happily Ever After Read online

  Needing Happily Ever After

  Elena Aitken

  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

  Wanting Happily Ever After

  Join Me!

  Also by Elena Aitken

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  There were probably a million ways that Katie Langdon could have told her family about her upcoming nuptials to Damon Banks. Particularly considering as far as anyone knew, she wasn’t even dating Damon, and certainly the news was unexpected, to say the least.

  She’d actually toyed with the idea of telling her mom privately first, but she couldn’t help but feel that there was safety in numbers. Her mom may be slight, but she was tough and even her big brother Logan was smart enough not to piss Mom off.

  Not that news of Katie’s nuptials should piss off her mom, but it was sure to get a reaction. There didn’t seem to be a very good way to share the news at all, so Katie made the split-second decision to just blurt it out in the middle of a family dinner. And not just any family dinner. No way. A going-away dinner for her cousin Levi and his new wife, Hope, who had been like a sister to her growing up. The two of them were scheduled to leave early the next morning on an extended honeymoon around the world—or a lot of it, anyway—so everyone was focused on them. No one would really pay much attention to her announcement.

  At least, that had been her hope.

  She’d been wrong. Very wrong.

  Forks clattered to plates. Someone coughed. There was a sound somewhere between a choke and a laugh. She didn’t want to look, but Katie was a little bit afraid that her mom had made a sobbing noise.

  She sighed, and braced herself as the questions began.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Married? Like, married married?”

  “To Damon? Are you even dating?”

  “Have you ever dated Damon?”

  “He’s your best friend.”

  The questions, really, were valid and all things that she herself would have asked if the roles were reversed. Still, she kept her answers as vague as possible.

  “Marriage.”

  “Yes, married married.”

  “Yes, to Damon. We’ve been close our whole lives.”

  “Dating is such an old-fashioned idea.”

  “I love him very much.”

  It didn’t matter that she’d never loved Damon that way. It was true, they’d been inseparable since grade one. Marriage would just make them even more inseparable. No one knew her better than Damon Banks.

  Even so, her family did not look impressed.

  Yes. She totally should have waited to tell them.

  At least until Damon himself was in town.

  Isn’t that how people announced their engagements? With their betrothed by their side?

  Hell, she didn’t even have a ring.

  Katie looked down at her lasagna, and took a deep breath before looking up with a smile on her face. She focused first at Faith Turner, who had a funny grin on her face. Hope’s twin sister, Faith had also been like a big sister to Katie growing up, although she’d only recently moved back to Glacier Falls to take over her sister’s wedding business at Ever After Ranch, which was the only reason Katie had brought up the whole marriage thing in the first place.

  “You want to have your wedding at Ever After Ranch?” Faith put a bite of pasta in her mouth.

  “No!” It was Logan, her big brother, who objected. “She is not getting married. Never mind at the ranch.”

  Faith rolled her eyes and kept looking at Katie, but Hope spoke next. “Do you want us to change our travel plans? If you’re getting married right away, we’ll—”

  “No!” Levi interrupted. “I love you, Katie, you know that. But we are not changing our plans.” He looked pointedly at his new wife. “We only have a limited time to do this before the baby and your treatment and…no.” He shook his head and Hope nodded.

  “No,” Katie agreed. Hope had been recently diagnosed with uterine cancer, and her doctor had given her only a small window of time in order to attempt to conceive a child before she would need to have surgery to treat her disease. Their trip was too important. “You aren’t changing your plans. But yes, I was hoping that maybe if there was an opening at the ranch…”

  “No,” Logan said again. “You aren’t getting married.”

  “I am.”

  She still hadn’t looked at her mother, but this time there was no mistaking the sound that escaped her mother’s lips. She did not want to see her mom crying.

  “It’s really not a big deal.” Katie knew the moment the words were out of her mouth, they were the wrong choice. She tried to quickly backpedal. “I mean, it is a big deal. Obviously. I mean, it’s marriage. I know that. But I don’t know why everyone is so surprised. It’s Damon. And me and Damon are…well, we’re me and Damon.” She shrugged and took a bite of garlic bread as if to signal the end of the conversation.

  Logan opened his mouth to say something else, but Faith stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Just leave it,” she said. “Let’s just get through dinner, okay?”

  Her big brother looked as though he were going to explode, and Katie wouldn’t have been surprised. Logan’s relationship with Faith was contentious with a distinct undercurrent of sexual tension, but to her surprise, he nodded and turned his attention back to his dinner.

  For a few moments, everyone focused on eating and the only sound to be heard was the scraping of cutlery against the plates. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, Hope started talking again about their upcoming trip and some of the activities they had planned. Soon enough, the tension had almost completely lifted and Katie could almost forget that she’d just dropped a bomb on her entire family.

  Almost.

  Because when she finally dared to look at her mother, Debbie Langdon was staring directly at Katie, a look of concern and question in her eyes. As much as Katie would like to believe that the hard part was over when it came to this whole thing, she wasn’t foolish enough to believe her own bullshit. It was only just beginning.

  At least she’d have Damon at her side to help field some of these questions. She shook her head and stuffed another bite of food in her mouth.

  She really should have waited until he arrived to say anything at all. He’d been her best friend for almost twenty years and apparently nothing much had changed—he was still getting her into hot water.

  Only this time, it seemed a little more serious than getting called to the principal’s office.

  Despite the stress and worry flooding through her, Katie worked hard to keep the smile on her face as she got through the rest of dinner. After all, she was a blushing bride-to-be.

  Wasn’t she?

  Damon Banks couldn’t remember exactly how long it had been since he’d been to his hometown of Glacier Falls.

  Three years? Four?

  No. It had been three.

  They’d buried his mom four years ago. But he’d come back for a quick trip for Katie’s twenty-first birthday the year after. And that had been three years ago already.

  It was hard to believe it had been so long. Especially considering not much had changed in the small mountain town
. Of course, nothing ever seemed to change in Glacier Falls. That’s why he liked it so much.

  He drove his newly purchased pickup truck down the highway that led to Main Street. There were one or two new houses and acreages set back in the trees, but so far, it all looked mostly the same.

  Damon took the turn that led him off the main road right before heading into town onto Forester’s Road. It wound its way up and away from the townsite below to a magnificent hilltop estate that looked over the windy river that wound its way through the valley and held a spectacular view of Jumbo Glacier tucked into the mountains in the distance. It also happened to be the site of his childhood home and the entire reason he was back in Glacier Falls.

  Well, half the reason he was back.

  There was Katie, too.

  His fiancée.

  It still felt strange to think that of his oldest and best friend that way, but he was going to have to get used to it. And quickly.

  He pulled his truck off the road beside the main gates and killed the engine, but he didn’t get out of the truck right away. Instead, he took a deep breath and ran his hands through his thick hair, almost as if to steel himself for what was outside. Which was ridiculous. There was nothing out there but pine trees, fresh air, and…beyond those gates somewhere, his father.

  Damon was being childish and he knew it. He wasn’t a teenager anymore, for God’s sake. With a shake of his head, he opened the door and stretched his legs as he stepped onto the road. It was heavily treed, and from where he stood, there wasn’t much of a view into the valley below. But he knew very well that just beyond the gates, down the lane, was an amazing view. His favorite view, really. It didn’t matter where he went in the world, or what exotic locations his travels took him; nothing compared to the view from ElkView Ridge. Maybe it was a sense of home, or the good memories he held of the place, or even just the fact that it was familiar to him. But whenever he looked out over the mountaintops, something changed inside him. Almost as if a switch were flipped that allowed him to breathe again.

  And that sense of breath and peace was just beyond the gates.

  No doubt the code was the same as it always had been, too. But he didn’t press the buttons on the keypad to enter the familiar numbers. Instead, he dropped his head and sighed.

  Part of him wanted more than anything to walk into his childhood home the way he did for so many years, knock on his father’s office door and say hello as casually as if he hadn’t been gone for years and there wasn’t a cavernous divide between them. And hadn’t always been.

  Damon couldn’t actually remember a time when there hadn’t been a strange distance between them. When his mother had been alive, the gap hadn’t seemed quite so insurmountable. But after her death, it was as if the little bit of glue they did have holding them together died right along with her. Those days and weeks after her funeral had been so tense and uncomfortable in the house. If it weren’t for his father expressing how disappointing Damon was to both of his parents, and how he’d broken his mother’s heart, there wouldn’t have been any conversation between them at all.

  When he closed his eyes, he could still hear his father’s voice in his ears.

  “She died from a broken heart, Damon.” His father’s words had come out of nowhere over a dinner of leftover casserole some caring neighbor had brought over. “You left home and she didn’t know what to do with herself.”

  “That’s not my fault.” Ever since the funeral, he’d tried his best to avoid a conversation like this one with his father, knowing exactly how it would go. “She had a heart attack, Dad. That’s very different.”

  “She dedicated her whole life to loving you, and you just left,” he continued, as if Damon hadn’t spoken.

  “I went to school, Dad. I’m in college.”

  Anthony Banks shook his head, not willing to hear any excuses from his son. “All she ever wanted was to see you settled down with a family, Damon.”

  “I’m barely twenty years old!” He finally raised his voice, and even as he did, Damon knew it was futile. “It’s not my fault that she never got a chance to see that and you know it. I’m only sorry that she was stuck here alone with you.” His father’s face had gone sheet-white, and Damon knew he should stop himself, that saying hurtful things wouldn’t bring his mother back. But he couldn’t stop the next words as they flew from his mouth. “Did you ever think that maybe she died to get away from you?”

  He regretted the hateful words the moment he spoke them, but it was too late. They’d never been close, but Damon had never purposefully been hurtful. Shame flooded through him as his dad quietly got up from the table and left the room.

  That was the last time they’d spoken properly. Not that there was anything proper about that conversation.

  Besides a few terse conversations that Damon could count on one hand, he hadn’t heard from his dad in years.

  Until last week.

  He’d memorized the email he’d received barely seven days ago.

  * * *

  Damon,

  The time has come to sell ElkView Ridge. It will be formally listed in two weeks’ time.

  I thought you should know.

  Dad

  * * *

  There was no way he was going to let his dad sell his home out from under him.

  No. Way.

  ElkView Ridge was the only place that had ever felt like home to him. The only place where he felt like him. And more importantly than that, it was his mother’s home. If it was gone…

  No. He wouldn’t even let himself think about it.

  Almost as soon as he’d received the email, Damon had called his lawyer to put in an offer on the property. Money wasn’t an object. It hadn’t been since he’d sold his microchip design in a bidding war with the top computing companies. No, whatever his dad wanted for ElkView Ridge, he’d pay it.

  Only the lawyers didn’t even get as far as putting in the offer because there was one major stipulation in the listing. One requirement that any potential buyer had to fulfill before an offer, no matter the size, would be considered.

  Bastard.

  And that was the real reason Damon had come back to town. To fulfill the criteria necessary to buy back his childhood home.

  He turned his back on the heavy timber gate, and got back in his truck.

  It was time to find Katie. And he was already late.

  Chapter Two

  The town of Glacier Falls was in full bloom at the end of June. It was Katie’s favorite time of year to be in town. The townspeople had really upped their game in recent years when it came to the planters along Main Street and in front of individual businesses. There’d been a push for tourism as more and more people in the city that was only three hours away started to look for a place for a quick weekend getaway and some fun in the mountains. Her once small town was starting to become a destination, and although some of the older residents were against the change and the ballooning weekend population, Katie welcomed it. She’d been taking business courses online and was only a semester away from her degree. But more importantly than the piece of paper was the knowledge that she’d gained and the excitement it had generated within her.

  It hadn’t taken her long to see the potential in a town like Glacier Falls. And she, for one, had no problem with people coming from the city to spend their hard-earned dollars at the businesses in town. Especially considering she had a burning idea for her very own business. All she needed was…well, money. Starting something new would cost a lot. And it was a risk. And, as it turned out, there weren’t a lot of investors excited about backing a twenty-four-year-old small-town girl who hadn’t even completed her online degree yet.

  She couldn’t help but gaze at the vacant storefront that used to be a furniture store that had moved to a larger location a few streets back. The space would be perfect for what she had in mind. The Hub. An adventure center. With all the tourists coming to town looking for fun and adventure, it was the perfect oppo
rtunity to both sell and rent all of the equipment that they could need. Katie visualized mountain bikes, kayaks, and hiking gear for the summer and cross-country skis and snowshoes for the winter months. She’d offer a selection of outdoor wear, shoes, and accessories as well. In the evenings and on weekends, she could offer courses and tours that people could join if they were beginners, or even if they were looking to go out in a group. It would be more than a store, but a gathering place. A home base for adventure.

  One day.

  Reluctantly, she turned away and kept walking toward the falls down the street. With two coffees in a tray, and a paper bag with a special treat that was making her mouth water with the sweet scent coming from it, Katie made the short walk to the park. The town of Glacier Falls was named after just that, a waterfall that was fed directly by a glacier high in the mountains. And as a homage to the namesake, the town had turned the area surrounding it into a pretty little gathering spot, complete with a few benches and picnic tables, and a pile of boulders that had been strategically placed for children to play on instead of the dangerous rocks around the waterfalls. It was one of Katie’s favorite places in town.

  Her eyes went directly to a shiny black pickup truck parked nearby and she laughed.

  Damon.

  Only her best friend, with more money than he knew what to do with, would buy an extravagant truck like that. It looked as if it had every single upgrade imaginable and had clearly never been off-road or seen any actual work that it had been designed for.

  Well, she’d change that. As soon as Katie got Damon out on the ranch, she’d put him and his truck to work.