And so it went. We argued about everything. Every venue, every arrangement. Everything from catering to clothing to wedding-day events to photographers to whether or not we would be throwing a joint engagement shower (I put my foot down with an emphatic no). There was absolutely nothing we could agree on, which was insane because none of it even mattered. I swore half the time it felt like she was arguing just for the sake of arguing. I knew I certainly was.
There was one thing I did feel strongly about, though. “I don’t want my parents involved,” I said.
“Do they...do they know about me?” Elizabeth asked, and I realized I hadn’t informed her yet that I wasn’t planning to tell them anything other than that I was getting married.
“Of course, sweetheart,” I said, careful of my audience. “They’re excited to meet you. I haven’t told them everything about us. Don’t worry about that.” I winked and met her eyes to make sure she understood what I was saying.
She nodded once, but her brow furrowed. “And you don’t want them involved.”
“That’s correct.”
She continued staring at me, her mouth open in that cute little annoying way that said she wanted to say something, and so help me if she did, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do.
“No parents. Got it.” LeeAnn entered the information in her tablet.
“No, my mom will be involved,” Elizabeth clarified. She opened her mouth to say more, then shut it. Then opened it again. Then shut it.
Good girl, I thought. Leave it alone.
But then she turned abruptly to me. “You really need to include your parents, Weston,” she said, her lips set in a smug line that made me want to draw her across my lap and spank it off of her.
“No, actually, I don’t.”
“Why?” She stared at me, her blue eyes looking inside me as though she could see through my walls. As though she thought I would divulge my reasons to her here, of all places.
“It’s none of—” your business, I started to say, but Donovan cleared his throat and I caught myself in time. “Our life is none of their business,” I said, instead.
“It’s their son’s wedding. And what about your sister?”
Shit. I hadn’t thought about Noelle. “We can involve my sister somehow. What can an eighteen-year-old girl do as part of the wedding?” I directed this last part to LeeAnn.
“She could greet people as they arrive, and since you’ve decided against a receiving line, you’ll want to have a guest book. She could manage that.”
“Great. Have her do that,” I said.
“Awesome. Stick a teenager behind a table all night when she’d rather be mingling and dancing,” Elizabeth muttered.
I glared, but otherwise ignored her. “As for my parents, they don’t need to be seated at any special time, they don’t need to have any special recognition, and they certainly don’t need to pay for anything. And that’s final.” I looked over at Donovan, because he was the one person in the room who would understand.
But he didn’t say anything to either back me or refute me.
“Okay, then. You heard him. He doesn’t want his parents,” Elizabeth said in obvious disagreement. She leaned toward our planner. “Make sure that if anyone asks, it’s clear that was Weston’s decision, and not mine.”
God. Sometimes she was a real bitch.
A gorgeous bitch that made my pants feel too tight every time I looked at her too long, or thought about her just right, but a bitch all the same.
“At the wedding itself,” the gorgeous bitch continued, “We should probably have a large family picture taken, with all the extended family. I have a cousin that would really like to be in that portrait.” She looked at Donovan and me to see if we understood, and we did. She wanted to make sure that her cousin Darrell was invited to be in that photograph. That he was part of one piece of the wedding, so he would feel like the whole thing was real.
“Good idea, Elizabeth,” Donovan said, and she beamed.
“We’ll send him an invitation to the engagement party too, though I’m sure he won’t tear himself away from work to attend.” Again she sounded bitter, and this time, when the bitterness wasn’t directed at me, I felt a tinge of sympathy for her. That she had to play this charade in the first place, for a piece-of-shit asshole who didn’t give a damn about her personally.
Not that I was about to let her know.
“And your bridal parties? Do you have ideas of who you’d like to have in your line?” LeeAnn went on, marking each of our requests in her tablet.
“There are several people I could choose. I have some good friends from college…” Eliza-bitch chewed on her lip as she considered.
Donovan shook his head. “Make it simple. One attendant each. Don’t you think?”
“Yeah, one attendant is good,” I agreed. The simpler the better. Having fittings and rehearsals for something that wasn’t going to last was a waste of time, not only for us, but for these friends of ours as well.
“You’re right,” Elizabeth said. “I’ll pick my friend Melissa from college.”
“If we’re going with old friends, I guess that’s you, Donovan,” I said.
LeeAnn looked confused. “I thought you said he was your life coach?”
“Donovan is my life coach. He’s Weston’s best friend. He’s a lot of things to a lot of different people,” Elizabeth explained.
“I see,” LeeAnn said, though it didn’t really look like she did see.
Donovan side-eyed me. “Do you really think that I would be the best choice for planning your bachelor party? And writing the speech about true love to toast you with at your reception?”
I rubbed two fingers along my forehead. A bachelor party from Donovan actually might be fun. It would be all cigars and Scotch, but I would probably regret everything that happened afterwards. And weren’t those the best kinds of nights? But any speech he wrote on true love would be so depressing half the audience would grow suicidal.
“Brett Larrabee,” Donovan and I said in unison. Brett was a roommate from college, a guy I still kept up with pretty well. He was extroverted, charismatic, a good speaker, the life of most parties, and a decent friend. Most of all, he wouldn’t mind being the best man for a night, even if he found out later on that the whole thing was a farce.
“I’ll give him a call,” I said.
“Great,” LeeAnn said, relieved that at least one item had been ticked off without a fight. She had to be wondering why on Earth we were marrying at all. “We have that settled.”
We managed to continue without any brawling through the next few items, but then we got to the details of the actual ceremony and hit a doozy of a bump.
“I hate traditional vows,” Elizabeth said, her jaw tight. “I do not want to read traditional vows at our wedding.”
“LeeAnn just gave us seventeen different options. We don’t have to use any of the ones that say ‘obey and honor.’ We can use one of the more modern ones. But we definitely don’t need to write our own!”
Because of course she wanted us to write our own vows. For our not-real wedding. For our not-real relationship. Was the girl insane?
“It’s not just that they are old-fashioned and outdated. Yes, some of them are more modern,” Elizabeth flipped through the booklet of vows LeeAnn had given us to look through, “but they’re just so standard. So conformist. So trite and overdone.”
Fake wedding. I said it really loudly in my head, zooming it toward her, hoping that she would hear me. Fake wedding, Elizabeth. Overdone is okay for a fake wedding.
But apparently she didn’t hear my thoughts, because she continued to speak her side. “I really think we should write our own.”
I was going to murder her. I’d actually tried to get along with her for the most part. It had been hard, especially with how close she was sitting next to me. Every time she moved, her scent would drift toward me—a combination of tropical body wash and expensive perfume, a smell so purely her that i
t made me want to bury my head in her neck and breathe her in until I was high. And every time her skin brushed against mine, my dick perked up. And every time she argued, I wanted to choke her or fuck her or both.
God, I was so fucking horny and blue balled.
And I was not going to sit there and listen to her try to twist me around her pretty little finger one more goddamned minute.
“Excuse me, LeeAnn. Donovan, may I please speak to my lovely fiancée alone for just a moment?” So that I can wring her lovely neck.
“Of course. Donovan, why don’t you come in the other room. I can show you those examples I have of invitation vellum.” She stood and he followed, giving us a warning glance before he disappeared behind the closed doors.
As soon as we were alone, Elizabeth turned to me. “It’s my wedding.”
“It’s a fake wedding.”
“Nobody else knows that. I’m going to be judged on this. Everyone will look at me and say, ‘Elizabeth Dyson, boring, unoriginal.’ I need to have original vows.”
“Then we will pick the most original pre-written vows there are. But we are not writing our own. I refuse.”
She drew her lips into a tight line and folded her arms across her chest, the action showcasing her tits, not that I noticed. “Why don’t you want your parents involved?”
“Maybe I don’t think it’s fair to bring them out just so you can play fantasy wedding.” Ouch. I went there.
But she didn’t flinch. “That’s not why. You have another reason.”
“And I’m not telling you what it is.”
She took a deep breath in, her breasts heaving and expanding. “Fine. I’ll drop it.”
“We’re still not writing our own vows.”
I swear she growled. My dick jumped at the sound. “This is stupid. You can’t write your own vows because you can’t think of something nice and genuine to say about me?”
Honestly, I could think of a lot of nice and genuine things to say about her. Things a man who had no real interest in a woman probably shouldn’t say to that woman. Things that a woman like her might be scandalized by hearing. “No. I can’t.”
“You’re an asshole.” But she’d taken a step closer to me.
“You’re a bitch.” I noticed our bodies were only inches apart now, her mouth was tilted up towards mine, her eyes pinned on my lips.
And suddenly all I could think about was kissing her. I couldn’t give a fuck about vows or parents or secrets or anything but finding out what her lips tasted like, what they felt like against mine. If they stayed pressed shut until I worked them open or if they eagerly parted for my tongue.
I bent closer, leaned toward her—
And suddenly the doors burst open again.
“We found your invitation material,” LeeAnn said with a boastful grin. “You’ll be quite pleased, it matches everything else you selected. Have you sorted out the vows?”
Elizabeth jumped back the minute we were interrupted, putting as much space between me and her as she could in as little time as she had.
“It’s settled,” she said, before I could even remember what the disagreement had been. “We’ll do pre-written vows. A version of the traditional. Minus the honor and obey.”
LeeAnn raised a brow. “Oh. So the groom won this round.”
“Yeah.” I glanced over at Elizabeth but she wasn’t looking at me. “I guess I did.”
Why then, did it feel like I’d lost?
Chapter Eight
“Oh no, oh no! What did you do?” Weston’s anguished voice came from behind me.
It was the night of our engagement party, and we’d been bickering for weeks. Since the meeting with our wedding planner, to be precise, and bickering was maybe too light a word. Outright arguing might have been more like it. The only time we hadn’t been arguing was that strange moment when I thought he was going to kiss me, when everything calmed down except the beat of my pulse and the flutter in my tummy, and the noise between us finally hushed.
But the moment had passed, our lips never met, and the calm turned out to be only the eye in a hurricane of constant tension.
I expected tonight to be more of the same. Luckily, I’d arrived at The Sky Launch first, having only managed to do that by telling him our meeting time was a full hour later than it was. I turned from the florist, prepared for another battle but when I caught sight of him, I nearly lost all the air in my lungs.
I’d seen pictures of him in a tux before. My Internet search had turned up quite a few of him in various versions of Armani and Tom Ford. I couldn’t say that I hadn’t lingered over one or two of them. The man did photograph so well.
Turned out pictures didn’t tell half the story.
His jacket was custom-fit, tightening in at his hips, making the broad stretch of his shoulders accentuate his muscles. He spun, surveying the nightclub, and I caught sight of his backside, which was equally stunning. His jacket was tailored in just the right spots and hit perfectly below his ass, hinting at the treasure underneath. He was breathtaking. When most men wore tuxedos, they blended in. Weston King wore one, and all heads turned.
Fortunately he didn’t see me gawking, because he was too busy gaping at the dance floor.
I strode over to him. “Exactly what is it that I did?” Because there was no doubt in my mind it was me he was yelling at.
“The music. The jazz? The flowers. This isn’t a nightclub anymore. It’s like a banquet before a symphony.” He turned to face me at the end of his sentence, and I didn’t miss the slight look of shock when he saw me.
I stood up taller. I’d chosen a rather conservative gown for the evening—a white halter top dress that went all the way to my feet. But it was a mermaid shape that hugged every curve of my breasts and my hips. I’d watched every last gram of carbohydrates I’d put in my mouth for a week to make sure it fit me like a glove.
I knew I looked good, with my hair off my neck and my shoulders bare, but I hadn’t gone extravagant. I’d left that for my mother, who would most likely be wearing glitter, decked out from head to toe. LeeAnn Gregori would be her only competition for bling queen.
But Weston looked at me like I was wearing the most beautiful gown at Bergman’s—or like I was wearing nothing at all—and it made my stomach do a slow roll.
Then he shook it off. “What did you do to my Sky Launch?” he demanded again, even more enraged than he was a second before.
“It’s an engagement party! We’re not here for dancing. We’re here for mingling and meeting our guests. And you said I could be in charge of the music.”
“I wasn’t expecting it to sound like Muzak. Plus I see we’re only serving champagne? At this rate, everybody’s going to be asleep.”
I crossed my arms over my chest, shifting my weight to one hip. “Well then, good. Then maybe they won’t realize the set for all those video files of you fucking random girls was up in those bubble rooms.”
“Darlings, darlings,” LeeAnn said, showing up out of what felt like nowhere. “I know that all this wedding stuff can be so tense, but you lovebirds really should kiss and make up before your guests get here, which will be any moment now. Smile. Enjoy yourselves! This is your night!”
Before either of us could react to her, she was off to attend to some other aspect of the party.
Weston opened his mouth, probably to say something else smart, when Gwen strolled up to us.
“Hello, you two,” she said, a gift bag tucked under her arm. She hugged first Weston, then me, then stepped back to admire us both. “You look beautiful tonight, Elizabeth. That dress is absolutely gorgeous! You’ve really found yourself quite a catch, Weston.”
His cheek muscle twitched, but then he gave his dazzling dimpled grin. “Didn’t I?” He said it so smoothly that even I almost believed him. “I already know she’s going to be the most beautiful woman in the room, and I haven’t even seen any of the other guests yet.”
Goddamn, he was a charmer. And if he kept look
ing at me the way he was now? At least people would believe he was smitten with me. I’d just have to ignore the dampness in my panties.
“He’s good,” Gwen said to me.
I bit back a laugh. “You have no idea.”
“I hope you aren’t nervous about anything,” Gwen said, now in business mode. “We have everything under control. The food, of course the alcohol, the music. And I have a gift here. It’s from all of us. Our manager, Alayna, wanted to wish you well in person, but she’s still at home on maternity leave with the twins. I’ll just set this on the gift table. Have a great night!”
She took off in the direction of the bar, which was where the gifts were being collected, and I swiveled to thank Weston for his believable performance, but when I met his gaze again his smile had disappeared, and he was back to the frown that I’d seen going on four weeks straight.
“Congratulations on one person fooled,” he said, beating me to the punch. “Now, just four hundred more to go.”
Yes. Four hundred more to go.
I took a deep breath, rubbed my lips together to make sure that I still had gloss on them, and turned in time to see that our first guests had been led into the club.
Fortunately it was just my mother, dressed in a bright purple gown with a slit up to her thigh and rhinestones embroidered over the net mesh that—barely—covered the skin between her breasts.
I tried not to roll my eyes. “Where’s Marie?” I asked, searching over her shoulder as I hugged her.
“Parking the car. You look beautiful, baby. Everything going okay?”
Thank God. Someone I could bitch to.
I started to answer her, but just as I opened my mouth she noticed my groom-to-be.
“Weston! You’re adorable.” Her voice was sticky sweet, her pose suggestive with her hips sticking out.
I recognized that tone of voice. I recognized that pose.
“Mother! You’re hitting on him?”
She shrugged. “You didn’t tell me how good-looking he was. I’m Angela.” Weston took her hand but somehow she turned the handshake into a hug—classic move of my mother’s.
“He’s my fiancé,” I snarled.
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