In his reverie, he forgot Eric. He forgot Bianca. He even forgot the helicopters. He knew in his heart that fatherhood couldn’t be taken lightly. It was serious business, and he broke out in a cold sweat just thinking about it. He wasn’t ready to be a father. He might never be ready to be a father.
Suddenly he understood what his own father must have felt when he was a baby, and in that moment the mists of confusion peeled away and one of the great mysteries was finally revealed to him.
He finally understood that happiness actually was the central problem, and that the way you found it and the way you kept it was by forming meaningful relationships with the other people in your life. With his heart in his mouth, he mutely sought Bianca’s eyes, wanting to tell her, wanting her to know.
But she wasn’t looking his way. She was looking up at the helicopters, and so was everyone else.
BIANCA STRAINED to hear Saffron’s words. Saffron had reached the part of the ceremony where she asked if anyone knew of any reason why this couple shouldn’t be joined in holy matrimony. There was a definite pause. Saffron looked at Lizzie, and Lizzie looked at Saffron. Saffron looked at Bianca, and Bianca stared back. Finally Saffron looked at Eric and Caroline.
Saffron had to shout to be heard over the noise of the helicopters. “Do you, Caroline, take Eric to be your lawful wedded husband?”
Caroline said nothing. Bianca shifted uncomfortably in her dyed-to-match shoes of pink peau de soie. They hurt; she’d have a blister before the day was over.
Caroline still wasn’t saying anything. Saffron tilted her head quizzically, and Bianca frowned. Something struck her as not being quite right.
“Caroline?” Saffron said, but because of the noise, they only saw her lips move.
Genevieve, in the front row, leaned forward and hissed, “Say it, Caroline!”
Caroline blinked, looked at Eric, and shouted “No!”
“OH, HELL,” said Hainsworth. The wedding had erupted into a melee. After her startling pronouncement and the ensuing shock when everyone was saying something, half of which was accusatory and none of which Bianca could remember, Caroline had hightailed it into the hotel followed by Petsy. While everyone was gawking at the spectacle of the bride defecting from the ceremony, a skydiving photographer had parachuted right into the middle of the gathering and landed on top of Lizzie. Joe, fireman that he was, carried her away, presumably to revive her. Neill punched the obstreperous sky diver in the stomach, after which the sky diver had jumped in the pond and was attacked by a furious Godzilla. Nana was still running around and asking, “What did Caroline say? Can anyone tell me what’s the matter?”
“Plenty,” Neill growled under his breath. He nursed his sore hand, then stuck it in his pocket. He wondered where the helicopters had gone; they’d disappeared in the direction of the swimming pool.
Bianca glanced at him, not sure whether she should be exasperated with him for hitting the sky diver or not. She decided not, considering. Over to the left of the Folly, Genevieve was sobbing loudly and interspersing her wails with dire predictions of kidnappers. Bianca couldn’t see Eric anywhere, and there was something else to worry about. Someone had knocked over a huge vase of pink and white roses at the end of one of the rows of seats, and the resulting flow of water threatened to swamp her hated pink shoes.
Delicately she lifted her voluminous skirts and tiptoed clear of the stream of water before sinking down on one of the chairs and watching the confused guests as they tried to figure out what had happened.
“Do you know what’s going on?” asked Lambie, who as ring bearer was all decked out in formal wear. He hitched himself onto a chair beside Bianca.
“I don’t think Caroline and Eric are getting married,” supplied Neill helpfully.
Lambie thought about this. “Well, Mr. Frog says that’s okay,” he said.
“Mr. Frog?” Bianca had in mind a cute stuffed animal, something green and soft and cuddly.
“Year, he didn’t want to come to the wedding anyway.” With some effort, Lambie pulled an ugly brown toad out of his pants pocket and held it aloft. It immediately escaped his grasp and hopped directly onto the front of a round matronly lady who jumped and screamed and ran. Lambie howled with laughter.
“Okay, sport, no more of that,” Neill said, looking as if he was holding back laughter.
“Aren’t we going to have the party?” Lambie asked after a few seconds.
“I don’t know anything,” sighed Bianca, gazing dispiritedly down into her wilting bouquet and sliding the offending shoes off her feet.
“Of course we’re having the party,”Hainsworth barked somewhere behind them. Bianca turned around so she could see him. Looking grim but determined, the beleaguered father of the bride jumped up on a chair and clapped his hands. It took a while, but everyone finally stopped milling and began to pay attention.
“Thanks to all of you for coming today,” he said. “Now I don’t know what the problem is exactly, but one thing I do know. The Swan’s Inn hotel chain is famed for its hospitality, and we won’t turn any guest away unhappy. I have decided that the reception will go on as planned! No matter what!” This announcement was greeted by an uncertain round of applause and a collective sign of relief.
Nana, poor thing, finally heard something. She shimmied in delight and yelled, “Let’s party!”
Suddenly a band started playing in one of the tents, and as if on cue a long line of waiters marched from the hotel bearing enormous trays of hors d’oeuvres. Guests straightened their clothes and fluffed their hair, and Genevieve blotted at her running mascara gingerly with her hanky in one hand while reaching for a Rob Roy on the rocks with the other.
“Well, Bianca,” Neill said, looking down at her with an air of resigned amusement. “Shall we go to the reception?”
Bianca slid her feet back into her shoes. Her heels were halfway to a blister, and her longline bra was biting into her rib cage, but, with a sense of perverse fascination, she couldn’t wait to see what happened next at this Bellamy wedding. Or non-wedding. As it were.
THE SILVERY STRAINS of Leo Lavin’s Orchestra, the band of choice for society weddings from Lake Forest to Grosse Point, filled the pink-and-white-striped tent on the wide level part of the lawn below the hotel terrace.
Neill, after investigating and learning that Eric was nowhere to be found, wanted nothing so much as to hold Bianca in his arms.
He’d seen her dancing with others, and her grace of movement on the dance floor had caught him off guard. He couldn’t recall that they had ever danced together, and he intended to remedy the situation immediately.
He pushed his way through the crowd of men surrounding Bianca. Every unattached male at the wedding seemed enchanted with her, pink butt bow notwithstanding. Neill hovered at the edge of the crowd, unable to make any progress toward his goal but close enough to hear what was being said.
Bianca was regaling her admirers with news about D’Alessandro. They seemed to be hanging on every word, eager for details about the fall line, about sales last year, about her expansion plans for the company. He didn’t quite catch the context, but he distinctly caught the word Vittorio.
At that, he shouldered into the group, but his position was slightly behind Bianca and he was sure she didn’t see him. Her hair hung down her back, shimmering whenever she tilted her head. It was all he could do not to reach out and touch it.
She paused in what she was saying, and he cleared his throat.
“Bianca, let’s dance,” he said into the air somewhere in the vicinity of her left ear, and she whirled around. A few strands of her hair brushed his cheek.
She lifted a hand and tucked the renegade strands behind her ear. “Neill,” she said. “I didn’t know you were there.” Her eyes were wide, and he could tell nothing about what she was thinking from their expression.
But for him, everyone else in the room disappeared and it was only Bianca. He wanted to drown in those blue eyes, to dive deep into their depths and never
surface. He took Bianca’s hand and led her to the dance floor where the band was winding up a slow ballad. He had just taken her in his arms, when, without warning, the music segued into a mind-walloping beat that seemed to combine rap, rock and roll and disco into one tune.
He looked down at Bianca and she looked up at him, and suddenly they both broke into laughter. Several much younger couples as well as Fawn, who was dragging a protesting Lambie onto the floor, began to gyrate in time to the music, arms and legs flailing wildly.
“I hate dancing when the people don’t touch,” he said.
“So do I. You might as well be dancing by yourself.”
“Which seems pointless, doesn’t it? Bianca, maybe we’d better sit this one out.”
“Maybe.” She looked toward the long table in the front of the tent where the other groomsmen and bridesmaids were sitting. “I don’t think I want to sit at the table for the wedding party, though.”
“I don’t, either.”
To one side of the bandstand was a small round table shielded from the others by a few strategically placed potted palms. It may have been there for the musicians to use on their breaks, but for now it provided a private place.
Neill led Bianca there and held her chair for her as she sat down. “You look lovely, Bianca,” he said.
“Please,” she said dismissively, but he laughed.
He leaned forward. “You make even a putrid-pink bridesmaid dress with a butt bow as big as—what did you say it was as big as?”
“Rhode Island,” she supplied.
“You make a funny-looking pink dress with a butt bow as big as Rhode Island look like a Paris original.”
She groaned. “I know a few Paris designers personally, and they’d all be highly insulted by that comment.”
He became more serious. “You must have an exciting life in Paris and Rome,” he said.
“Not so exciting anymore,” she said. “Not since the baby.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and he was. The baby had created problems in her life, and she’d borne them alone.
“I don’t mind. Once I would have, but once Tia arrived and she was so wonderful, my life changed. And for the better.”
She was so earnest, so direct, and, it seemed to him, so brave, that it brought a lump to his throat.
“I keep thinking of you in Rome, finding out you were going to have my baby. You must have been so angry with me.”
They accepted glasses of champagne from a passing waiter, and Bianca took her time answering.
“I suppose I was, Neill, but only at first. And I wasn’t only angry with you. I thought I had been very foolish.” Her eyes met his, and he realized that she was telling the truth.
“You must know that I didn’t think there was a snowball’s chance in hell that you could become pregnant,” he said.
“I know. I remember when you didn’t come home from Harvard for spring break, and why.”
“We both should have been more careful.”
She ran a finger around the top of her champagne glass. “I wouldn’t change anything, Neill. In a way, I didn’t realize how empty my life was before I had Tia. The only thing is that I—” But she stopped talking and looked away.
He reached across the table and clasped her hand. “Don’t hold back,” he said. “I want to know what you’re thinking.”
She drew a deep breath. “That I wish I could give her what I didn’t have—a stable home life.”
Her words stabbed through him like a knife to the heart. “The kind neither of us had?” he said, his voice low.
“Yeah,” she said, smiling a sad smile. “Like that.”
The band seemed too loud now, too intrusive. Even though he would have liked to leave the tent, taking Bianca with him, and find a quiet place where they could talk without all the extraneous noise and commotion, he didn’t want to suggest it for fear that she’d refuse.
“I plan to consolidate the operations of D’Alessandro in one place on this side of the Atlantic and raise Tia in the U.S.,” Bianca said. “I’ll hire people to supervise the European end of the business. I’ll have my career, but travel will be kept to a minimum. I’ll find a house somewhere, a good school, everything Tia needs.”
“I’ll want to visit,” he said. “She should know her father.”
Bianca looked away. “I suppose so,” she said.
“I want to give you financial support, too.” He waved away her objection. “I know you don’t need it, but I’m her father. She’s no longer only your responsibility.”
“Does that mean you want to help decide where she goes to school, have a say in the people that I hire to care for her, things like that?”
He met her gaze. “Bianca, I haven’t thought these things through. It was only this morning that I realized that I really had a daughter. I don’t know all the things I need to consider, I’m only bringing them up as I think of them, and when you look at me like that I can’t even think at all.”
He thought he detected a slight flush of her cheeks, and he was about to request something of her, something he wasn’t sure she would or could do, when Nana lurched by doing her own version of the ’60s dance, the Watusi.
“So this is the one,” she said conspiratorially to Neill with a wink at Bianca. “Remember what I said—‘impress upon her the strength of your ardor.’ ” She laughed her foghorn laugh and resumed expressing the lightness of her being with some poor schmuck who looked as if he’d been put through a wringer.
“What on earth is Nana talking about?” Bianca demanded.
“I think she wants us to dance together,” he said smoothly. “And if you don’t, you’re going to have to endure dancing with my father.” Budge, displaying his trademark cocky grin, was descending upon them from the other side of the dance floor.
“Not on your life,” Bianca said, rising quickly and preceding Neill to the dance floor as the band abandoned its foray into the ridiculous and settled back into the sublime.
When Neill took Bianca in his arms, it was as though she fit exactly. He’d been schooled at Miss Anita’s Junior Assembly in Lake Forest and knew he was a good dancer, but Bianca was naturally light on her feet and followed him as if it were second nature.
“Have you always been such a good dancer?” he asked.
She smiled up at him. “Maybe you should have asked me to dance in the old days. You would have found out,” she said.
Neill wrinkled his forehead. “We were never at a dance together.”
“Wrong, Neill. When our parents got married—”
“At our parents’ wedding, I was nursing a grudge because I’d been called home from a perfectly wonderful vacation sailing in Maine for what I considered another of Budge’s peccadilloes.”
She leaned back and stared at him. “You thought my mother was a ‘peccadillo?’”
“I didn’t think it would last. I was right, wasn’t I?”
She sighed and relaxed. Yes, I suppose so. But back to where we could have danced together before this. I distinctly remember the Stein bar mitzvah when we were holding hands dancing the hora, and the music changed to something for couples and I was devastated because you turned to Jennifer Belknap instead of me.”
“Ah, Jennifer Belknap. She had red hair—”
“And a red face.”
“And green eyes that lit up when I suggested we take a ride in my new Corvette, which we did. We ended up at her house, where her parents weren’t.” He laughed.
“I was crushed because you disappeared with an older woman.”
“Jennifer was all of eighteen at the time.”
“I was sixteen and no competition at all, now that I think about it. I still had braces on my teeth.”
“You turned out all right, though,” he said, pulling her closer.
“It took you long enough to admit it.”
“Too long. And now it’s all complicated by other things. ”
She rested her cheek against his shoulder.
She wished he hadn’t said that. The things that complicated her life—her work, her child—meant a great deal to her.
She said against his jacket, “For a while, a short space in time, let’s not think about any of that. Please?” Her voice trembled.
His arms moved tighter around her. “Okay,” was all he said, and she let herself be buoyed up by the music and the solid firm bulk of Neill Bellamy as he guided her around the dance floor. Dancing with him was another part of her dream fulfilled. She’d sat on the sidelines at their parents’ wedding, fourteen years old and yearning after a suave nineteen-year-old male who was so full of himself that he didn’t even realize she existed, or if he did, he regarded her as a nuisance on the periphery of his splendor. And she’d watched him walk out the door with Jennifer Belknap at the Stein bar mitzvah; Jennifer, who had a voice like fingernails screeching on a chalkboard.
But now she was the one in his arms, she was the one with her hand resting lightly in his, and she was the one he’d been with all last night and even in the morning, and though there probably was no future for them as a couple, he was the father of her child. And he’d made it clear that he wanted to maintain a place in Tia’s life. What that meant for the two of them as a couple, she couldn’t know yet. Maybe she didn’t want to know. Maybe it was enough to enjoy this moment, this closeness. Maybe.
Chapter Twelve
“Let’s go,” Neill murmured in Bianca’s ear.
“Go?” she leaned back and gazed up at him, thinking that never had he been more desirable.
“Yes, go. So I can ‘impress upon you the strength of my ardor.’ We can go to your room, my cottage, the gazebo—”
“Not the gazebo,” Bianca said.
“Then come to my cottage and I’ll order champagne and a tray of edibles,” he said. “We’ll have our own celebration.”
“Of what?”
“Of having a daughter,” he said.
She looked down at the pink embroidered fabric of the hated bridesmaid dress. “I’d like to go to my room first and change clothes,” she said.
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