Kitabı oxu: «The Wedding Planner's Big Day»

To all those readers who have made the past thirty years such an incredible journey.

Contents

Cover

Introduction

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

EPILOGUE

Extract

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

“NO.”

A paper fluttered down on her temporary desk, slowly floating past Becky English’s sunburned nose. She looked up, and tried not to let her reaction to what she saw—or rather, whom she saw—show on her face.

The rich and utterly sexy timbre of the voice should have prepared her, but it hadn’t. The man was gorgeous. Bristling with bad humor, but gorgeous, nonetheless.

He stood at least six feet tall, and his casual dress, a dark green sports shirt and pressed sand-colored shorts, showed off a beautifully made male body. He had the rugged look of a man who spent a great deal of time out of doors. There was no sunburn on his perfectly shaped nose!

He had a deep chest, a flat stomach and the narrow hips of a gunslinger. His limbs, relaxed, were sleekly muscled and hinted at easy strength.

The stranger’s face was mesmerizing. His hair, dark brown and curling, touched the collar of his shirt. His eyes were as blue as the Caribbean Sea that Becky could just glimpse out the open patio door over the incredible broadness of his shoulder.

Unlike that sea, his eyes did not look warm and inviting. In fact, there was that hint of a gunslinger, again, something cool and formidable in his uncompromising gaze. The look in his eyes did not detract, not in the least, from the fact that his features were astoundingly perfect.

“And no,” he said.

Another piece of paper drifted down onto her desk, this one landing on the keyboard of her laptop.

“And to this one?” he said. “Especially no.”

And then a final sheet glided down, hit the lip of the desk, forcing her to grab it before it slid to the floor.

Becky stared at him, rather than the paper in her hand. A bead of sweat trickled down from his temple and followed the line of his face, slowly, slowly, slowly down to the slope of a perfect jaw, where he swiped at it impatiently.

It was hot here on the small, privately owned Caribbean island of Sainte Simone. Becky resisted a temptation to swipe at her own sweaty brow with the back of her arm.

She found her voice. “Excuse me? And you are?”

He raised an arrogant eyebrow at her, which made her rush to answer for him.

“You must be one of Allie’s Hollywood friends,” Becky decided.

It seemed to her that only people in Allie’s field of work, acting on the big screen, achieved the physical beauty and perfection of the man in front of her. Only they seemed to be able to carry off that rather unsettling I-own-the-earth confidence that mere mortals had no hope of achieving. Besides, it was more than evident how the camera would love the gorgeous planes of his face, the line of his nose, the fullness of his lips...

“Are you?” she asked.

This was exactly why she had needed a guest list, but no, Allie had been adamant about that. She was looking after the guest list herself, and she did not want a single soul—up to and including her event planner, apparently—knowing the names of all the famous people who would be attending her wedding.

The man before Becky actually snorted in disgust, which was no kind of answer. Snorted. How could that possibly sound sexy?

“Of course, you are very early,” Becky told him, trying for a stern note. Why was her heart beating like that, as if she had just run a sprint? “The wedding isn’t for two weeks.”

It was probably exactly what she should be expecting. People with too much money and too much time on their hands were just going to start showing up on Sainte Simone whenever they pleased.

“I’m Drew Jordan.”

She must have looked as blank as she felt.

“The head carpenter for this circus.”

Drew. Jordan. Of course! How could she not have registered that? She was actually expecting him. He was the brother of Joe, the groom.

Well, he might be the head carpenter, but she was the ringmaster, and she was going to have to establish that fact, and fast.

“Please do not refer to Allie Ambrosia’s wedding as a circus,” the ringmaster said sternly. Becky was under strict orders word of the wedding was not to get out. She was not even sure that was possible, with two hundred guests, but if it did get out, she did not want it being referred to as a circus by the hired help. The paparazzi would pounce on that little morsel of insider information just a little too gleefully.

There was that utterly sexy snort again.

“It is,” she continued, just as sternly, “going to be the event of the century.”

She was quoting the bride-to-be, Hollywood’s latest “it” girl, Allie Ambrosia. She tried not to show that she, Becky English, small-town nobody, was just a little intimidated that she had been chosen to pull off that event of the century.

She now remembered Allie warning her about this very man who stood in front of her.

Allie had said, My future brother-in-law is going to head up construction. He’s a bit of a stick-in-the-mud. He’s a few years older than Joe, but he acts, like, seventy-five. I find him quite cranky. He’s the bear-with-the-sore-bottom type. Which explains why he isn’t married.

So, this was the future brother-in-law, standing in front of Becky, looking nothing at all like a stick-in-the-mud, or like a seventy-five-year-old. The bear-with-the-sore-bottom part was debatable.

With all those facts in hand, why was the one that stood out the fact that Drew Jordan was not married? And why would Becky care about that, at all?

Becky had learned there was an unexpected perk of being a wedding planner. She had named her company, with a touch of whimsy and a whole lot of wistfulness, Happily-Ever-After. However, her career choice had quickly killed what shreds of her romantic illusions had remained after the bitter end to her long engagement. She would be the first to admit she’d had far too many fairy-tale fantasies way back when she had been very young and hopelessly naive.

Flustered—here was a man who made a woman want to believe, all over again, in happy endings—but certainly not wanting to show it, Becky picked up the last paper Drew Jordan had cast down in front of her, the especially no one.

It was her own handiwork that had been cast so dismissively in front of her. Her careful, if somewhat rudimentary, drawing had a big black X right through the whole thing.

“But this is the pavilion!” she said. “Where are we supposed to seat two hundred guests for dinner?”

“The location is fine.”

Was she supposed to thank him for that? Somehow words, even sarcastic ones, were lost to her. She sputtered ineffectually.

“You can still have dinner at the same place, on the front lawn in front of this monstrosity. Just no pavilion.”

“This monstrosity is a castle,” Becky said firmly. Okay, she, too, had thought when she had first stepped off the private plane that had whisked her here that the medieval stone structure looked strangely out of place amidst the palms and tropical flowers. But over the past few days, it had been growing on her. The thick walls kept it deliciously cool inside and every room she had peeked in had the luxurious feel of a five-star hotel.

Besides, the monstrosity was big enough to host two hundred guests for the weeklong extravaganza that Allie wanted for her wedding, and monstrosities like that were very hard, indeed, to find.

With the exception of an on-site carpenter, the island getaway came completely staffed with people who were accustomed to hosting remarkable events. The owner was record mogul Bart Lung, and many a musical extravaganza had been held here. The very famous fund-raising documentary We Are the Globe, with its huge cast of musical royalty, had been completely filmed and recorded here.

But apparently all those people had eaten in the very expansive castle dining room, which Allie had said with a sniff would not do. She had her heart set on alfresco for her wedding feast.

“Are you saying you can’t build me a pavilion?” Becky tried for an intimidating, you-can-be-replaced tone of voice.

“Not can’t. Won’t. You have two weeks to get ready for the circus, not two years.”

He was not the least intimidated by her, and she suspected it was not just because he was the groom’s brother. She suspected it would take a great deal to intimidate Drew Jordan. He had that don’t-mess-with-me look about his eyes, a set to his admittedly sexy mouth that said he was far more accustomed to giving orders than to taking them.

She debated asking him, again, not to call it a circus, but that went right along with not being able to intimidate him. Becky could tell by the stubborn set of his jaw that she might as well save her breath. She decided levelheaded reason would win the day.

“It’s a temporary structure,” she explained, the epitome of calm, “and it’s imperative. What if we get inclement weather that day?”

Drew tilted his head at her and studied her for long enough that it was disconcerting.

“What?” she demanded.

“I’m trying to figure out if you’re part of her Cinderella group or not.”

Becky lifted her chin. Okay, so she wasn’t Hollywood gorgeous like Allie was, and today—sweaty, casual and sporting a sunburned nose—might not be her best day ever, but why would it be debatable whether she was part of Allie’s Cinderella group or not?

She didn’t even know what that was. Why did she want to belong to it, or at least seem as if she could?

“What’s a Cinderella group?” she asked.

“Total disconnect from reality,” he said, nodding at the plan in her hand. “You can’t build a pavilion that seats two hundred on an island where supplies have to be barged in. Not in two weeks, probably not even in two years.”

“It’s temporary,” she protested. “It’s creating an illusion, like a movie set.”

“You’re not one of her group,” he decided firmly, even though Becky had just clearly demonstrated her expertise about movie sets.

“How do you know?”

“Imperative,” he said. “Inclement.” His lips twitched, and she was aware it was her use of the language that both amused him and told him she was not part of Allie’s regular set. Really? She should not be relieved that it was vocabulary and not her looks that had set her apart from Allie’s gang.

“Anyway, inclement weather—”

Was he making fun of her?

“—is highly unlikely. I Googled it.”

She glanced at her laptop screen, which was already open on Google.

“This side of this island gets three days of rain per year,” he told her. “In the last forty-two years of record-keeping, would you care to guess how often it has rained on the Big Day, June the third?”

The way he said Big Day was in no way preferable to circus.

Becky glared at him to make it look as if she was annoyed that he had beat her to the facts. She drew her computer to her, as if she had no intention of taking his word for it, as if she needed to check the details of the June third weather report herself.

Her fingers, acting entirely on their own volition, without any kind of approval from her mind, typed in D-r-e-w J-o-r-d-a-n.

CHAPTER TWO

DREW REGARDED BECKY ENGLISH thoughtfully. He had expected a high-powered and sophisticated West Coast event specialist. Instead, the woman before him, with her sunburned nose and pulled-back hair, barely looked as if she was legal age.

In fact, she looked like an athletic teenager getting ready to go to practice with the high school cheer squad. Since she so obviously was not the image of the professional woman he’d expected, his first impression had been that she must be a young Hollywood hanger-on, being rewarded for loyalty to Allie Ambrosia with a job she was probably not qualified to do.

But no, the woman in front of him had nothing of slick Hollywood about her. The vocabulary threw his initial assessment. The way she talked—with the earnestness of a student preparing for the Scripps National Spelling Bee—made him think that the bookworm geeky girl had been crossed with the high school cheerleader. Who would have expected that to be such an intriguing combination?

Becky’s hair was a sandy shade of brown that looked virgin, as if it had never been touched by dye or blond highlights. It looked as if she had spent about thirty seconds on it this morning, scraping it back from her face and capturing it in an elastic band. It was a rather nondescript shade of brown, yet so glossy with good health, Drew felt a startling desire to touch it.

Her eyes were plain old brown, without a drop of makeup around them to make them appear larger, or wider, or darker, or greener. Her skin was pale, which would have been considered unfashionable in the land of endless summer that he came from. Even after only a few days in the tropics, most of which he suspected had been spent inside, the tip of her nose and her cheeks were glowing pink, and she was showing signs of freckling. There was a bit of a sunburn on her slender shoulders.

Her teeth were a touch crooked, one of the front ones ever so slightly overlapping the other one. It was oddly endearing. He couldn’t help but notice, as men do, that she was as flat as a board.

Drew Jordan’s developments were mostly in Los Angeles. People there—especially people who could afford to buy in his subdivisions—were about the furthest thing from real that he could think of.

The women he dealt with had the tiny noses and fat lips, the fake tans and the unwrinkled foreheads. They had every shade of blond hair and the astonishingly inflated breast lines. Their eyes were widened into a look of surgically induced perpetual surprise and their teeth were so white you needed sunglasses on to protect you from smiles.

Drew was not sure when he had become used to it all, but suddenly it seemed very evident to him why he had. There was something about all that fakeness that was safe to a dyed-in-the-wool bachelor such as himself.

The cheerleader bookworm girl behind the desk radiated something that was oddly threatening. In a world that seemed to celebrate phony everything, she seemed as if she was 100 percent real.

She was wearing a plain white tank top, and if he leaned forward just a little bit he could see cutoff shorts. Peeking out from under the desk was a pair of sneakers with startling pink laces in them.

“How did you get mixed up with Allie?” he asked. “You do not look the way I would expect a high-profile Hollywood event planner to look.”

“How would you expect one to look?” she countered, insulted.

“Not, um, wholesome.”

She frowned.

“Take it as a compliment,” he suggested.

She looked uncertain about that, but marshaled herself.

“I’ve run a very successful event planning company for several years,” she said with a proud toss of her head.

“In Los Angeles,” he said with flat disbelief.

“Well, no, not exactly.”

He waited.

She looked flustered, which he enjoyed way more than he should have. She glared at him. “My company serves Moose Run and the surrounding areas.”

Was she kidding? It sounded like a name Hollywood would invent to conjure visions of a quaintly rural and charming America that hardly existed anymore. But, no, she had that cute and geeky earnestness about her.

Still, he had to ask. “Moose Run? Seriously?”

“Look it up on Google,” she snapped.

“Where is it? The mountains of Appalachia?”

“I said look it up on Google.”

But when he crossed his arms over his chest and raised an eyebrow at her, she caved.

“Michigan,” she said tersely. “It’s a farm community in Michigan. It has a population of about fourteen thousand. Of course, my company serves the surrounding areas, as well.”

“Ah. Of course.”

“Don’t say ah like that!”

“Like what?” he said, genuinely baffled.

“Like that explains everything.”

“It does. It explains everything about you.”

“It does not explain everything about me!” she said. “In fact, it says very little about me.”

There were little pink spots appearing on her cheeks, above the sunburned spots.

“Okay,” he said, and put up his hands in mock surrender. Really, he should have left it there. He should keep it all business, let her know what she could and couldn’t do construction wise with severe time restraints, and that was it. His job done.

But Drew was enjoying flustering her, and the little pink spots on her cheeks.

“How old are you?” he asked.

She folded her arms over her own chest—battle stations—and squinted at him. “That is an inappropriate question. How old are you?” she snapped back.

“I’m thirty-one,” he said easily. “I only asked because you look sixteen, but not even Allie would be ridiculous enough to hire a sixteen-year-old to put together this cir—event—would she?”

“I’m twenty-three and Allie is not ridiculous!”

“She isn’t?”

His brother’s future wife had managed to arrange her very busy schedule—she was shooting a movie in Spain—to grant Drew an audience, once, on a brief return to LA, shortly after Joe had phoned and told him with shy and breathless excitement he was getting married.

Drew had not been happy about the announcement. His brother was twenty-one. To date, Joe hadn’t made many major decisions without consulting Drew, though Drew had been opposed to the movie-set building and Joe had gone ahead anyway.

And look where that had led. Because, in a hushed tone of complete reverence, Joe had told Drew who he was marrying.

Drew’s unhappiness had deepened. He had shared it with Joe. His normally easygoing, amenable brother had yelled at him.

Quit trying to control me. Can’t you just be happy for me?

And then Joe, who was usually happy-go-lucky and sunny in nature, had hung up on him. Their conversations since then had been brief and clipped.

Drew had agreed to meet Joe here and help with a few construction projects for the wedding, but he had a secret agenda. He needed to spend time with his brother. Face-to-face time. If he managed to talk some sense into him, all the better.

“I don’t suppose Joe is here yet?” he asked Becky with elaborate casualness.

“No.” She consulted a thick agenda book. “I have him arriving tomorrow morning, first thing. And Allie arriving the day of the wedding.”

Perfect. If he could get Joe away from Allie’s influence, his mission—to stop the wedding, or at least reschedule it until cooler heads prevailed—seemed to have a better chance of succeeding.

Drew liked to think he could read people—the woman in front of him being a case in point. But he had come away from his meeting with Allie Ambrosia feeling a disconcerting sense of not being able to read her at all.

Where’s my brother? Drew had demanded.

Allie Ambrosia had blinked at him. No need to make it sound like a kidnapping.

Which, of course, was exactly what Drew had been feeling it was, and that Allie Ambrosia was solely responsible for the new Joe, who could hang up on his brother and then ignore all his attempts to get in touch with him.

“Allie Ambrosia is sensitive and brilliant and sweet.”

Drew watched Becky with interest as the blaze of color deepened over her sunburn. She was going to rise to defend someone she perceived as the underdog, and that told him almost as much about her as the fact that she hailed from Moose Run, Michigan.

Drew was just not sure who would think of Allie Ambrosia as the underdog. He may have been frustrated about his inability to read his future sister-in-law, but neither sensitive nor sweet would have made his short list of descriptive adjectives. Though they probably would have for Becky, even after such a short acquaintance.

Allie? Brilliant, maybe. Though if she was it had not shown in her vocabulary. Still, he’d been aware of the possibility of great cunning. She had seemed to Drew to be able to play whatever role she wanted, the real person, whoever and whatever that was, hidden behind eyes so astonishingly emerald he’d wondered if she enhanced the color with contact lenses.

He’d come away from Allie frustrated. He had agreed to build some things for the damn wedding, hoping, he supposed, that this seeming capitulation to his brother’s plans would open the door to communication between them and he could talk some sense into Joe.

He’d have his chance tomorrow. Today, he could unabashedly probe the secrets of the woman his brother had decided to marry.

“And you would know Allie is sensitive and brilliant and sweet, why?” he asked Becky, trying not to let on just how pleased he was to have found someone who actually seemed to know Allie.

“We went to school together.”

Better still. Someone who knew Allie before she’d caught her big break playing Peggy in a sleeper of a movie called Apple Mountain.

“Allie Ambrosia grew up in Moose Run, Michigan?” He prodded her along. “That is not in the official biography.”

He thought Becky was going to clam up, careful about saying anything about her boss and old school chum, but her need to defend won out.

“Her Moose Run memories may not be her fondest ones,” Becky offered, a bit reluctantly.

“I must say Allie has come a long way from Moose Run,” he said.

“How do you know? How well do you know Allie?”

“I admit I’m assuming, since I hardly know her at all,” Drew said. “This is what I know. She’s had a whirlwind relationship with my little brother, who is building a set on one of her movies. They’ve known each other weeks, not months. And suddenly they are getting married. It can’t last, and this is an awful lot of money and time and trouble to go to for something that can’t last.”

“You’re cynical,” she said, as if that was a bad thing.

“We can’t all come from Moose Run, Michigan.”

She squinted at him, not rising to defend herself, but staying focused on him, which made him very uncomfortable. “You are really upset that they are getting married.”

He wasn’t sure he liked that amount of perception. He didn’t say anything.

“Actually, I think you don’t like weddings, period.”

“What is this, a party trick? You can read my mind?” He intended it to sound funny, but he could hear a certain amount of defensiveness in his tone.

“So, it’s true then.”

“Big deal. Lots of men don’t like weddings.”

“Why is that?”

He frowned at her. He wanted to ferret out some facts about Allie, or talk about construction. He was comfortable talking about construction, even on an ill-conceived project like this. He was a problem solver. He was not comfortable discussing feelings, which an aversion to weddings came dangerously close to.

“They just don’t like them,” he said stubbornly. “Okay, I don’t like them.”

“I’m curious about who made you your brother’s keeper,” she said. “Shouldn’t your parents be talking to him about this?”

“Our parents are dead.”

When something softened in her face, he deliberately hardened himself against it.

“Oh,” Becky said quietly, “I’m so sorry. So you, as older brother, are concerned, and at the same time have volunteered to help out. That’s very sweet.”

“Let’s get something straight right now. There is nothing sweet about me.”

“So why did you agree to help at all?”

He shrugged. “Brothers help each other.”

Joe’s really upset by your reaction to our wedding, Allie had told him. If you agreed to head up the construction, he would see it was just an initial reaction of surprise and that of course you want what is best for your own brother.

Oh, he wanted what was best for Joe, all right. Something must have flashed across Drew’s face, because Becky’s brow lowered.

“Are you going to try to stop the wedding?” she asked suspiciously.

Had he telegraphed his intention to Allie, as well? “Joe’s all grown up, and capable of making up his own mind. But so am I. And it seems like a crazy, impulsive decision he’s made.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“You’d think he would have asked me what I thought,” Drew offered grimly.

A certain measure of pain escaped in that statement, and so he frowned at Becky, daring her to give him sympathy.

Thankfully, she did not even try. “Is this why I can’t have the pavilion? Are you trying to sabotage the whole thing?”

“No,” he said curtly. “I’ll do what I can to give my brother and his beloved a perfect day. If he comes to his senses before then—” He lifted a shoulder.

“If he changes his mind, that would be a great deal of time and money down the tubes,” Becky said.

Drew lifted his shoulder again. “I’m sure you would still get paid.”

“That’s hardly the point!”

“It’s the whole point of running a business.” He glanced at her and sighed. “Please don’t tell me you do it for love.”

Love.

Except for what he felt for his brother, his world was comfortably devoid of that pesky emotion. He was sorry he’d even mentioned the word in front of Becky English.