The Wedding Plan

by Melissa Shirley

  No. This was Nat’s story to tell. And whatever she’d done, whatever sin she’d committed that made her feel such shame, he knew he wouldn’t find the whole story in that envelope. “I don’t want it.”

  His mother sighed—one of her poor-me sighs. “Darling, you know, more than anything in the world, I want you to be happy.”

  “How would I know that?”

  The hand not holding the envelope went to her pearls. “Just take it, Jacob. Do what you will with it, then I can at least know I tried to save you from her.”

  “From someone who loves me?”

  “Does she? Or are you the latest meal ticket in a long line of meal tickets?” When she pushed the envelope at him again and he shook his head, she left it lying on the exam table, gathered her purse and brushed past him. “It’s for your own good, Jacob. And I would be a very bad mother if I didn’t share this with you.”

  Instead of asking her the difference between what she’d always been and what she was doing now, he let her leave then stood staring. For a very long time.

  * * *

  The envelope in his bag weighed more than its actual few ounces. He’d first thought to shred it, and did destroy the actual report without ever reading a single typed word. But when it came to the pictures, he decided no. He would bring them home and burn them. Shove them in the fire pit and watch the flames send her secrets off in a puff of smoke. Yep. That was definitely what he would do. As soon as Nat shuffled off to bed.

  As happy with that plan as he could be, he pasted on a smile and popped open the front door. Just inside the living room, he stopped and set his bag down. She’d finally gotten herself a hat—a bowler hat with the ace of spades tucked in the band—and had a card table set up in front of the sofa. An unsalted pretzel stuck between her teeth—her answer to a cigar he supposed. “Come on, lover boy. You have that card thing this weekend. It’s time to learn to play.”

  “Can’t we just watch a movie tonight?”

  She shook her head. “Maybe later, but right now, I ordered pizza which should be here any minute, and I made Ryhan come over and set all this up.” She puffed out her lower lip and shot him a big dose of the puppy dog eyes.

  Jacob loosened his tie, too weak for her to provide much resistance. “Okay.”

  An hour later, she’d won all his money, his tie and shirt, both shoes, socks, his belt and pants. “Baby, you gotta learn to lie better.” She threw down three aces and two jacks.

  He rolled his eyes and grinned. “Did it occur to you that maybe I wanted to lose?” He lifted the table and moved it across the room then came back to stand in front of her.

  She put a hand over her chest and spoke in a deep south, Scarlett O’Hara accent. “Why, Mr. Henry. I think you might have the wrong idea.”

  “Oh, I have ideas, all right.” He sat beside her and used his body to push her back against the couch. “And not a damned thing wrong with any one of them, Mrs. Henry.”

  Oh, yeah. This was what he’d waited for the whole day—holding her, kissing her, untying those tiny little laces at the top of her shirt. When he kissed a path up her throat, she moaned and tilted her head. When he ran his hand over breast, she gasped and he jerked away, almost fell off the sofa in his desperation not to hurt her.

  She pulled him back. “Sorry. The girls are a little tender.”

  “God, don’t be sorry.” He shook his head and wrapped his arms around her. “I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.”

  Then she went on the attack, lips, hands, more lips. “Nat? Baby…” He couldn’t decide whether to hold her head against his chest, let her know he wanted her to never stop, or push her away and possibly die from an explosion—science be damned—he honestly believed could result from another night of not finishing what they started.

  She stopped swirling her tongue around his nipple and lifted her head. She looked back at Matt. “Go home.” When Matt was safely out the door, she licked her lips and smiled. Jacob almost exploded right there. “Jacob, just because I’m not allowed any sort of stimulation right now, doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed”—she trailed her fingernails down his stomach to his waistband—“any sort of stimulation.” She gripped him in a firm fist and his eyes rolled back. “Right now.”

  What kind of man would say no to that?

  * * *

  JACOB: I should have thrown them away, shredded them when I shredded the report, but I wanted to watch them burn, to really cement the idea that they didn’t matter. Because they don’t matter. Everybody has a past. What she did in hers, what I did in mine, it just one piece of who we are. And no matter what, we’re strong together. Nothing else matters. Not to me, anyway.

  For the last eight days, every morning while he showered, Nat wrote Jacob a love note on the pad he kept in the monogrammed folio Lucia had given him for his birthday. She poured all her feelings into it, all the love she felt for him into every word. And it made her happy.

  As he belted out a few lines of some old Elvis song during his shower, she tiptoed downstairs. She flipped open the flap to his messenger bag and pulled out the leather folder. And when she opened it, her breath sucked from her body, her heart broke and a thousand reasons to leave overclouded every reason she’d ever had to stay.

  A black and white—several actually—photo of Nat squatting with her hands over her head as she danced topless in front of a pole fell out of the folio. It was like a flip-book of the dance she’d performed Friday through Monday nights at the Kitten Club in Redford, complete with hip thrust into Mr. Deevers’ face. She felt sick. Sicker than her normal sick.

  Maybe broken was a better word.

  Destroyed.

  Devastated. She set the folio down and rifled through the bag. How the hell had he gotten these? There was no card, no letter or envelope that let her know the sender.

  Her breath came in shallow puffs. Oh God. And this wasn’t even the worst of it. When he found her, she hadn’t moved except to tear the pictures into pieces. “Nat?” He crouched beside her, smelling of soap and his own natural scent. “Oh, shit.”

  She picked up a handful of torn photo and fisted it in front of his face. “Where the hell did you get these?”

  He closed his eyes and sat beside her on the floor. “My mom.”

  She nodded. “Just couldn’t resist, huh?” She couldn’t bear to look at him, to see the shame he would have for her.

  “It wasn’t like that, Nat.” He kept his tone soft to match hers. “She came to the office. Pretended to be a patient and gave me the report from her investigator.”

  One tear after another slipped down her cheeks, and she wiped them away with a flat palm. “So, I guess you know now.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t read it.”

  “But you kept these. For what? A souvenier? Evidence? What?” Her mind so fast, so far out of her control that she could barely get words out.

  “I was going to burn them tonight after you went to bed.”

  Unable to hold herself up anymore, she lay back to stare at the ceiling. It was already over. Telling him the rest would just put the last nail in their relationship, but…”I was a stripper for a while because I couldn’t make enough money to keep my mama in alcohol, and I couldn’t pay the bills with what I made at the Rusty Hinge.”

  “Nat, you don’t have to…”

  She shrugged and waved her arms. “Maybe secrets aren’t meant to be kept, huh?” She didn’t have to tell him. She could let him think this was the worst of it, that this was her big secret. But he probably already knew. Probably read that report cover to cover. And she might have been a lot of things, but not a liar. Not about the big stuff anyway. “Sometimes, we would get hired to dance at events. The rules were different for those. More relaxed, I guess you could say.” She shook her head. “One night, me and another girl got a job at a party for some guy who was celebrating his divorce.” God. She would sell her soul to have that night back. To not have gone with Lianna. “It was in a ho
tel. One of those cheap pay by the hour places. But when we got there, after we danced…” She closed her eyes, could still smell the smoke in his room, the scent of his expensive cologne. “He didn’t want us to just dance. He offered us a boatload of money, too. But we said no. Lianna ran to the bathroom, called the club. Got one of the guys to come and get us out of there. But he locked the door. He had Lianna by the throat, her eyes were so big…He kept saying he would kill her.”

  “Nat…”

  “Still, not the worst of it.” She swallowed hard, shook her head. “He paid us and we kept the money.”

  “It wasn’t…you couldn’t let him hurt her.”

  “I bought a car, Jacob. I used the money to buy a car. I was nineteen and I used that car to drive back to that hotel once a week for a month.” She sat up now, forced steel into her voice and stared at him, waiting for the flinch, for the tell-tale sign she was losing him. “And I called it dating.”

  This was why the network agreed to pay her so well, for the ratings her secret would get them. They’d never said it, but she knew they’d done the same background check, gotten the same photos off the internet. And she’d agreed, because back then when they’d “accidentally” left her alone with the folder of information they’d collected on her, she hadn’t cared what people thought. After her five minutes of fame expired, she planned to live happily ever after by herself in a place where no one knew her. She hadn’t counted on Jacob being so…Jacob, or falling in love with him for it.

  “People do what they have to do, Nat.” He laid back, turned to face her. “He could have hurt your friend. Probably would have hurt you, too.”

  “Well that explains the first time, but did you miss the part where I said I went back?”

  “No.” His voice was less than a whisper but as loud as a scream.

  “I sold myself for a Toyota Corolla with a hundred and fifty thousand miles on it.” Her heart hurt and she needed to make the pain go away. To expel it once and for all no matter what agony took its place. “How many miles you think he put on me?”

  “Don’t, Nat.”

  “What? Is all of this too much for your rich-boy sensibilities? The truth shall set you free, right, Jacob? Go ahead. Tell me the truth about what I did. It’s vile. It’s disgusting. It makes you sick, doesn’t it, to know you just let some whore touch you, that you’ve been screwing a whore.”

  “Stop it, Nat.”

  “No. You wanted to know and now you owe me. I told you what I did, and I want you to look at me and tell me it doesn’t make you sick to know it.” She’d wounded him, could see it in the pain in his eyes, the lines on his face. And she hated him for it. “You think I’m changed? That you didn’t pay for it with the flowers and the candy and…the house? For God damned sake, Jacob, you bought me a house.”

  “I bought us a house. I gave you the flowers because I wanted to see you smile. I bought you the candy because you love caramel and I wanted you to have what you wanted.” Fire danced behind the blue of his eyes. But she’d hit her mark.

  And no matter how much it hurt her, she couldn’t stop it. Tearing her own heart out, whether she deserved it or not, and she knew she did, was the only thing that would make the shame of what she did die. “I screwed you for the contract. Because who’s going to watch a show where the couple isn’t busy humping like bunnies? And then where would our royalties be?” But as soon as she said it, she wanted it back.

  “Stop, Nat. I mean it.”

  They were both breathing as if they’d just finished a marathon sprint. She used her hands to push herself up then stood. “Now you know.”

  “Now I know.” He reached out to grab her wrist. “Feel free now?”

  She ignored the question and went to their room, Matt close behind her, camera at his side. “Nat?”

  Nat closed her eyes. “For tonight, I can’t do this. Okay? Just tonight. The network got what they wanted. Jacob got what he wanted. This is what I want.” He nodded. “Thanks.”

  He wiggled his toes in his socks. “You all right?”

  “I think I lost him, Matt.”

  Matt, who would forever be the camera guy in her eyes, nodded. “Did you do it on purpose?”

  She would have answered, would have told him how Jacob was all she ever wanted and yeah, it scared her death, but Jacob stormed down the hall, wrapped her in a hug and walked her backwards into the bedroom. Matt left for the night.

  * * *

  NAT: If I could do that night over, not the night in the hotel, although I would like that one back, too, but the night I hurt Jacob, I would sell my soul to undo it. I don’t know if this is the sort of thing other married people go through or not. I doubt it. Later on, after we both cooled off a little, we did burn those pictures. He told me it would be okay and I believed him. Because he’s Jacob and I knew he really wanted it to be okay.

  17

  Nat cringed in her seat, not looking at the crowd to see their reaction to hearing her story firsthand. Instead, she stole a glance at Jacob from the corner of her eye. He’d not said anything in the last few minutes. But she had to say something. Anything to get rid of the silence stretching between them.

  “Oh God. I know what’s next.” Of course, it was almost as shameful as what she did to Jacob.

  “Oh, I have been dying to see this part. I begged Matt to just roll back the film and let me watch it again, but he’s a tough sell. Wouldn’t budge. Damned professional ethics.” Jacob’s smile. That was something she’d never quite been able to talk herself into living without. She had about a thousand pictures on her phone of him in all stages of it—the slow, sweet one, the come-get-me, the teasing, playful one right before they doused each other with water balloons at the county fair, even the one when he dreamed at night. At least, if they didn’t make it through this, she’d always have those pictures to remind her of the days when she was really happy. He was still talking.

  “What?”

  “I said, you’re kind of my hero. But why did you invite her?”

  Nat shrugged. It was another of those things she wished she could do over. “I have no impulse control.”

  He grinned. “That’s one of the things I love best about you.”

  “I destroyed your family, Jacob.” Nat blew out a breath, a loud exasperated breath.

  He shook his head, angled his body toward hers, and brought the hand he’d been holding to his lips. “We have our own family. And we have Lucia. I’m not so worried about anything else.”

  God. He always said the exact right thing to wash away her doubts, to make her life easier.

  * * *

  LANIE: By far, the best baby shower I have ever been to. It made Nat a local legend. And even though there was no cake, everyone in town except maybe one person, had the best time.

  * * *

  100 Days earlier

  * * *

  “Come one, come all to the Bowties and Barbie Dolls co-ed baby shower celebrating the upcoming arrival of Lucah Michael Henry.” The invitations, sent out by Lucia, went to every resident in Rangers End. And Jacob’s mother, at Nat’s insistence, although Jacob and Lucia, Ryhan and Lanie, and even John had tried to talk her out of it. “She is this baby’s grandmother. And I can’t change that, no matter how much I want to. So, I will not exclude her from his life.” Even though the last thing she wanted was for that woman to be anywhere around her child. So, the invitation had been mailed, and the RSVP accepted.

  It took fifteen minutes of Constance Blah-blah-blah Graeme whispering to the women folk in town before Nat regretted that decision. Five more for her to fume about it. And another seven before she stood and walked to the cake table where Ryhan, Lanie, and Constance were heads together over a cup of punch. Before she had the thought to ask what they found so amusing, she picked up the three-layer chocolate and caramel cake then proceeded to dump it on her mother-in-law’s eight hundred dollar platinum highlights.

  Jacob blew out a breath, and his the corner of his mouth tw
itched as he took Nat’s hand in his. “You are not supposed to be standing up.”

  She’d just dumped an entire cake—a really heavy one—on his mother’s head, and all he could do was remind her of her promise to stay seated. But it had been too much to endure while the entire town—the people she’d considered friends—found out she’d been a hooker. There had to be a joke in there somewhere, but she couldn’t find it.

  Constance’s fists balled at her side. “You are a trailer trash whore, and I hope my son takes this baby away from you, and you never see either of them again!” Barely controlled fury edged her voice from its normal nasal sound to a more irate shriek.

  A dollop of buttercream icing dripped from Constance’s head to land on her nose. She didn’t bother wiping it off, just straightened her jacket, lifted her chin, and stalked from the room leaving a trail of cake and icing in her wake.

  Nat didn’t laugh. She didn’t smile. She didn’t blink. “Okay, you know what?” She turned to the crowd. “I am what she says, so we don’t have to stand in corners whispering about it anymore or look at our feet because it’s easier than looking at the girl who hoodwinked your beloved Doctor Jacob into marriage and a baby. We can put it out there. Anybody has questions, I’ll answer them. Right over there.” She pointed to her chair, the one decorated like it belonged in Malibu Barbie’s dream house. “Tips and pointers cost extra though.”

  Lanie leaned in. “What are you doing?”

  “Not letting anybody talk about me.” She glared from Lanie to Ryhan. “Not even my friends.”