Read Online The Provence Cure for the Brokenhearted by Bridget Asher - Free Book Online Page A

but somehow I already knew this. He was the right age, alone, a little nervous, and he was handsome, by my mother’s definition, which is to say he was traditionally handsome. He had all the right features—a nice nose, gentle eyes, a tough jawline, closely cut hair. He wasn’t fat or skinny, tall or short.
    “Hi,” I said. “I’m Heidi.” I stuck out my hand, which seemed to make things worse. He smiled and shook my hand, and, in that moment, it hit me that my sister was right—my flirting skills had atrophied. And, to be honest, they never really were that pumped up to begin with. That’sone of the reasons I’d fallen for Henry so immediately—it hadn’t ever felt like flirting.
    “I know that your sister is trying to turn this into a blind date,” he said. “I hate blind dates, and I just want you to know that there’s no pressure on my end.”
    “Oh,” I said, feeling a little disappointed. Was he trying to get out of it? “No pressure on my end either,” I said quickly, maybe too quickly. “I’m just being myself anyway.”
    “Um, okay then,” he said, and he smiled graciously. “We can try to just mingle normally then, telling them that we’ve done our best. We were good sports.”
    “I’m a very good sport,” I said. “I won sportsmanship awards in lieu of actual sports awards when I was younger. I lack basic eye–hand coordination.” I looked down at his shoes. “For example,” I said, “sorry about your shoes.”
    “No,” he said, “it’s okay. I don’t mind being bumped into by a beautiful woman.”
    I wasn’t sure how to respond to this. “A hypothetical beautiful woman,” I said, as if correcting him.
    “A hypothetical beautiful woman or a real one,” he said.
    “Well, then,” I said, taking a deep breath. “We have established that we’re good sports! We’ll just try to mingle normally.”
    “Right,” he said.
    And I walked away. A beautiful woman? I wasn’t sure what to make of that. I hadn’t felt beautiful in a very long time. In fact, I’d barely felt like a woman. I was a widow, a single mother. I decided to not think about it and to insteadlocate Abbot. How long had it been since the last time I spotted him? I stood on my tiptoes and looked through the crowd.
    Finally I saw him in a pack of other kids his age. They were scurrying around a table in the back of the tent. The band started up just then, and this seemed to send them into a frenzy. Something about the drums, I thought, made them tribal. A few of the other kids had started to crawl around under people’s tables. And so Abbot was standing there, hands in his pockets, bouncing on his toes. He wouldn’t have interacted as intimately with the ground as the other kids did. As much as the kids on the ground seemed like unruly beasts, I wished Abbot would join them, or at least feel like he could if he wanted to.
    I walked up to him. “Are you having fun?” I said. “You can let loose, you know.”
    “You let loose,” he said.
    “I’ll try if you try.”
    He asked me to unclip his tie. All the other kids had long since abandoned theirs. I flipped up his collar and unhooked the metal clasp. He shrugged off his jacket and handed it to me. “Okay, I’ll try,” he said, and scuttled off.
    Charlotte and I crisscrossed paths, as if on the same migratory loop. “Keep moving,” she said, “and you can avoid the attack of awkward conversation.”
    “I don’t know how long I can last in these shoes,” I said.
    “If a shark stops swimming, it dies,” she said. “Have you seen the clarinet player?” she asked. “He’s like a hundred andtwenty-eight years old. I figure if he can make it through this wedding, then I can.”
    I looked over at the wizened, bowed old man playing the clarinet, his cheeks taut with trapped air. “Impressive,” I said, and we glided on.
    I looked up and saw Jack Nixon dancing with one of the bridesmaids. He looked over and saw me and gave a small wave. I