Four Weddings and a Swamp Boat Tour - Erin Nicholas Page 0,3

meowed.

“Okay, I won’t turn around and get right back on the road,” she promised. “But I’m warning you now, the second he pulls out a ring, we’re out of here.”

She put Fred on the seat next to Bernie, rolled the windows down partway, shut the car off, took a deep breath, and got out.

She was here. In spite of the five very convincing reasons, this was a bad idea. Not to mention Fred’s general opinion about the whole thing.

She ran a hand through her hair and looked down at the t-shirt and capris she had on. It was January. It had been twelve degrees when she’d left Iowa. Twelve. She was now standing here in a short-sleeve baby blue t-shirt and denim capris. It wasn’t hot. Not at all the steamy weather she associated with Louisiana. But it was in the mid-fifties, and for a girl who’d grown up in Iowa, this felt downright balmy right now.

So, good weather in January. There was a good reason for this trip.

It was nice to know there was one.

She started up the front walk.

Please be home. Please be happy to see me. Please don’t let this be worse than the time I almost died choking on the chocolate cake when Stephen proposed at Vincenzo’s.

It couldn’t be worse than that. Right?

She never reacted well to being proposed to. Always because it was a shock and always because no way, thank you very much, no matter what.

But yeah, that time she’d almost inhaled cake into her lungs in a fancy restaurant in front of fifty people, and the resulting hacking and coughing and watering eyes and smeared mascara had not been pretty.

She coughed lightly now, her lungs giving her a little hey-don’t-freak-out-and-suck-anything-into-us reminder.

Yeah, well, she wasn’t the one who was going to be shocked that she was standing on Mitch’s front porch today.

Okay, okay, she was a little surprised that she was here. That she’d done this. That she’d thought about running away from home, and he was the person she ran to. But he’d be shocked to see her too. She was going to just focus on that and not all of the what is it about this guy? that kept swirling through her mind.

She took in the details of the house. It was nice. Simple. Small. White. Well kept. There was a huge tree in the front yard that she thought was likely a magnolia tree. She didn’t have a lot of experience with magnolia trees, of course, but she’d seen a lot of them as she’d scrolled through the results of her What You Need To Know About Louisiana search last night on her laptop in the roadside motel.

She eyed the front of the house. Did she knock on the porch door, or did she go onto the porch and knock on the front door? The front door, surely, right?

But when she opened the light screened door to the porch, she felt almost as if she was stepping into a living room.

The porch was adorable. Sure, it belonged to a hot, sexy, alpha male who gave her eye-crossing-toe-curling orgasms. But he had a freaking adorable porch. There was no way around it.

There were potted plants everywhere, hanging from baskets overhead, sitting on shelves, and even on the floor. On one end of the porch, that stretched the entire length of the front of the house, was a porch swing long enough to fit two or three adults. It faced the street and would be the perfect place to sit and rock and watch the neighborhood go by.

She glanced around. Of course, not much was going on in this neighborhood. It was very quiet. The houses were set back from the street several yards, and there were wide expanses between them. This was the far end of town, furthest from the highway and closest to the bayou. The houses were older. The front walks cracked and uneven, the plants and trees very established. There was also an overgrown field that stretched out behind this house and the two to the west. It spread out all the way to the line of trees in the distance.

She couldn’t see or hear it from here, but she knew the bayou was on the other side of those trees. Less than a mile from the houses. She hadn’t known which house was Mitch’s, but she’d checked out the town of Autre online.

That wasn’t super creepy. Was it? It wasn’t weird that she’d looked the town up since