Page 1 of Impulsive Saint
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Ashtyn Echols was making a mistake.
She wasn’t ready to get married. She was only twenty-three years old. She had her whole life ahead of her. She had dreams. She had plans. She had a bucket list for crying out loud!
She wanted to travel, and see the world. She wanted to ride a motorcycle, and go on a road trip. She wanted to get drunk and dance on a bar and sing bad karaoke. She wanted to experience fun, danger, adventure and a hundred other things that she’d never had the chance to do.
She wanted to live!
She was twenty-three years old and she’d never really lived.
She wasn’t ready to get married, settle down and start popping out babies.
Settle. That was the twenty-pound word that felt like it was sitting on her chest. She didn’t want to settle! She had been settled her entire life. She had always been steady, mature, thoughtful and reasonable. But she was so damn tired of always doing the right thing and never stepping out of line.
For once in her life she wanted to stir things up and if she didn’t do it now, she knew she’d never get the chance to find out if she had it in her. But the only possible conclusion, the only way to get what she wanted, was to hurt the people she loved most in the world. She knew it would devastate them all, but she also knew that she couldn’t marry Aaron today.
Marrying Aaron would kill what was left of her spirit. It would kill her and she wasn’t even being dramatic about that. She could see exactly what her life would be like if she went through with this wedding and she knew, without a doubt, how it would end.
If she married Aaron today, she’d spend the rest of her life playing a well-defined role. She’d go from being Senator Echols’ daughter to Mayor Laughlin’s wife. He’d probably knock her up on their honeymoon and she’d spend the next six years popping out babies.
Her days would consist of tending to their children and sipping white wine spritzers with the other bored Stepford moms at the country club. She’d smile on command and appear to be the perfect wife as Aaron worked his way up the political ladder as her father’s protégé. Behind closed doors, she’d start drinking the hard stuff to drown her unhappiness and then she’d start swallowing antidepressants to numb the empty, hollow feeling inside of her. Eventually, it would all be too much and she’d find a way out, no matter the cost.
It wasn’t that Ashtyn had a wild creative streak. She didn’t have to imagine the worst-case scenario. She’d watched it play out before, with her own two eyes.
She’d had a front row seat for the destruction of her family when the gilded cage of political life got to be too much for her mother.
Ashtyn had been the one who came home from school to find her mother passed out on the bathroom floor. At eight years old, she hadn’t understood what was happening. It was only years later that she’d learned the truth.
Her mother had downed a bottle of pills, chased them with a fifth of vodka and waited for death to come, only to have it outrun by the ambulance Ashtyn had called.
That had been the beginning of the end. Not just of her parents’ marriage, but also of Ashtyn’s childhood. It was an end that had spanned five more years. Five years full of hospital trips, psychiatry visits, family therapy sessions and, eventually, divorce proceedings.
By then, Ashtyn had been a teenager and she’d known that divorce was the best possible outcome for her parents. They weren’t happy together, if they ever had been at all. Her mother wouldn’t have tried to kill herself if she was happy. Her father wouldn’t have spent so many hours at his office or out of town, avoiding them, if he’d been happy. Her parents had made each other miserable and parting ways was the only healthy solution to their misery.
And, separately, Ashtyn had watched her parents come back to life.
Her mother had flourished on her own. Delisa Echols had become a world traveler, flitting from one destination to another on a whim, never settling anywhere for long before the urge to go somewhere new struck her again. She wore what she wanted, said what she wanted, and had even let her hair go naturally silver without giving a care to what anyone had to say about it. She even smoked weed, a fact that had horrified her ex-husband and made her teenage daughter laugh when the newspaper found out and splashed it all over the front page of the society pages. She had become, Ashtyn now realized, the woman she never could have been as a Senator’s wife.
While her mother had been halfway around the world, finding herself, her father had taken over raising Ashtyn. Andrew Echols had recovered from the controversy of his wife’s suicide attempt and subsequent divorce, increased his political power and then, after the appropriate amount of time, remarried. On the second attempt, he’d found someone more suited for him and for life in the political arena. Rebecca Morningstar, Delisa’s former best friend, had stepped in to play the role of the politician’s new wife and step-mother to the daughter who already saw her as family.
They had all moved on with their lives, as happy and normal as any family.
At least, Ashtyn had always thought of her life as normal.
She had forgiven her mother for the suicide attempt. She’d forgiven her for leaving when Ashtyn had been in her most formative years and needed her mother the most. She’d even forgiven her for abandoning her husband and daughter with nothing more than an excuse that it was best for everyone that she go. But Ashtyn had never understoodwhyher mother felt so trapped in her picture-perfect life that she’d thought the only way to escape was death... until now.
Ashtyn had spent her entire life living under the strict regime laid out by her Senator father. She went to all the right schools, got the best grades, and she always earned the highest honors. And more importantly, she had never, not once, challenged the rules that she was meant to live by.
She had grown up privileged and she’d known it, so she’d accepted that a life like hers came with certain pressures and demands.
Of course there had been times she’d felt suffocated by her father and stepmother’s love, which they showed in their need to be part of her daily life and every decision she made. Of course there had been times when she had wished that they would accept she was an adult and could make her own choices. Of course there had been days, and months and sometimes even years, when she’d felt lost inside the picture-perfect persona of the woman they wanted her to be, desperately trying to live up to their impossible standards, certain she was losing another piece of her soul every day that she didn’t stand up for herself.
But it was today, here and now, standing in the back room of a historic chapel in downtown Nashville, in a couture white dress that made her feel claustrophobic, that she truly understood what it must have felt like for her mother
She’d thought she was different. She’d thought she was stronger. Better even. But she wasn’t.
Ashtyn’s throat felt tight. She couldn’t breathe. It felt like the dress was cutting off her air supply. She was sweating, panting, and her vison was starting to blur around the edges.
