Chapter Sixteen: Resisting The Charm

I smiled down at the hard black angles of his handwriting. I’d

thought I hadn’t wanted a dress, that I wanted to keep our wedding as

dull and unromantic as possible. But now...how had he known the small

gesture would mean so much to me?

Then I saw the dress’s tag. Chanel. Holy cow. Maybe the gesture

wasn’t so small. For a moment, I was afraid to touch the fabric. Then I

stroked the lace softly with my fingertips. It felt like a whisper. Like a

dream.

Maybe everything really was going to be all right.

I exhaled, blinking back tears. I'd taken an enormous gamble, using my

last paycheck to come back to Honolulu, trusting Viktor to help me. But it

had paid off. For the first time in my life, I’d done something right.

It was a strangely intoxicating feeling.

I had always been the one who ruined things, not the one who saved

them. I'd learned from a young age that the only way to make up for all

the pain I’d caused everyone was just to take a book and go read quietly

and invisibly in a corn