She also couldn’t imagine what the consequences would be if she’d said no. Her bottom was still tingling from the spanking she’d received just before they had left on this little getaway.
The rest of the patrons had erupted in cheers when it was obvious that she had said yes, and they were gifted by the owners of the restaurant with a second bottle of champagne, with which to toast their long and happy life together.
Sean – ever the gentleman – helped her back into her chair, his hungry eyes never leaving her face as he then poured them each a glass, saying, as he raised his own. “To the woman I love.”
To which she replied without hesitation, “To the man I love,” clinking her glass with his, then taking a healthy swallow of the bubbly, thinking all the while that it certainly hadn’t started out this way...
Tessa Renee Martin had moved back to Thompson Bend, New Hampshire four years ago, because it was one of the few places she could remember having been happy as an Air Force brat. The relationship that she had been sure was going to be her happily-ever-after had just ended. After she had drowned the pain of his betrayal in whiskey and – her true Achilles heel – gold vanilla cupcakes with four inches of frosting on top, she pulled herself back into the real world and knew she had to leave the comfortable life she’d found in Florida.
The New Hampshire she found was much the same as she had remembered, with very few additions. There was the ubiquitous Walmart on the outskirts of town, and – as was apparently requisite in every New England town – a Rite Aid or a Walgreens seemingly on every corner.
She felt immediately as if she’d come home, and with a renewed sense of purpose, determined to follow her dream and open a flower shop. She had been the assistant manager of a very large one in Florida, but noticed that the distinctly, deliberately quaint downtown area of this tiny burg was lacking that service, and she thought that a florist might do well here.
Like almost all other small towns in the area, Thompson Bend had experienced a wave of gentrification that had produced expensive housing developments springing up out of what had previously been cow pastures. It was just close enough to Portsmouth to make that town’s more citified accoutrements readily available, if one was willing to drive a bit, but not close enough, she thought, that her potential clientele would decide to go there for their floral needs.
Three years later, bearing the name that she’d always eschewed because it sounded so pompous, Contessa’s Flowers was, she had to admit, a modest success. While she hadn’t been greeted with open arms – no small New England town was going to do that, she already knew – she had become a fixture in Thompson Bend. Tess opened earlier and closed later than one might have expected of a one-woman shop. She always went that extra mile for her customers – whether that meant hand-delivering funeral sprays or doing a cross promotion event with the candy shop across the street. Tess did her best to remember every customer by name, and their spouses’ and kids’ names, too, as well as the dates of their anniversaries and birthdays and she quickly built a loyal customer base because of it. She became involved in the town’s celebrations, often donating her own time and floral displays which garnered great word-of-mouth advertising.
But even three years after settling here, Tess was still adjusting to some of the more annoying aspects of living in a small town, and this morning was no different.
She was renting a small house that she truly loved near the coast, because – although it wasn’t the dream house on the beach she intended to own one day – it did have a nice view of a tributary where she could walk and collect shells and sea glass when she was of a mood. It wasn’t the prettiest of views, but it and the house itself suited her just fine except for the trip to and from the shop. Tess felt certain that it was going to drive her over the edge. In the spring, summer, and most of autumn, it was the tourists dawdling their way into town. In the off-season, it was the natives who collectively decided they had to drive five miles below the posted fifty mile-per-hour speed limit.
That was exactly the situation she found herself in – yet again – this morning. She was going to be late to open the store if this damned hillbilly in the ginormous blue truck didn’t wake up and find the accelerator with both friggin’ feet.
There was one – count it, one – two-lane road into Portsmouth that didn’t take you out and around and through the wilderness. She’d spent months in vain searching for a more efficient route to work. Route 4 was the most direct way, and, since this was late fall/early winter, it was rife with natives slow-poking their way into Thompson Bend.
The idiot in front of her was the worst. Not only was he going so slow Tess was surprised they weren’t rolling backwards, but his truck was so damned wide she couldn’t see around him to pass. They did this exact dance almost every morning; he seemed to have the same schedule as she did.
Well, no guts, no glory. Tess decided she wasn’t going to dawdle along behind this idiot any longer than she had to. So, after peeping out around him as best she could and determining that there wasn’t anyone barreling at her from the other lane, she downshifted into fourth and floored it, making the engine of her geriatric little Miata strain
