by Linda Seed
Megan had told Breanna about her encounter with Drew, but Breanna was her closest friend. Julia was a friend, certainly, and a good one, but she wasn’t certain they were at the level of closeness it would require for Megan to confess about her illicit relationship. Plus, she was Drew’s sister, which meant Megan would be telling Julia not only about her own scandalous behavior, but about his, as well.
And there was the fact that the fewer people who knew about her and Drew, the less chance there would be of Liam finding out and being more hurt than he already was.
“There’s no story. There’s nothing to tell,” Megan said.
“Sure. If that’s what you want to go with. I’ll just get it out of him,” Julia said cheerfully. “But you are still going to be in the wedding, right?”
“Yes. Of course.”
Julia sounded relieved. “Great. That’s great. Really awesome. And if you’re going to be in the wedding, that means you have to come to the rehearsal, of course. And if you’re coming to the rehearsal, you might as well come to the dinner, too. Liam won’t even be there. He’s not getting released until tomorrow.”
No matter how she tried to spin it, Megan couldn’t think of a valid excuse to skip the rehearsal and the dinner, especially since she wouldn’t have to face Liam.
“All right.”
Megan started to hang up, but then she heard Julia’s voice.
“Megan? Don’t worry. Liam will be okay. And you will, too. It might not seem like it right now, but you will.”
Later that day, as Drew dressed for the rehearsal, he mused over the intense discomfort that was facing him that evening. One, he’d have to be in the same room with the woman he was in love with, without admitting to anyone or showing in any way that he was in love with her. Two, he would have to face the family of the man whose girlfriend he’d slept with. And three, he would have to face his mother.
He’d managed to avoid his mother since he’d seen Redmond’s letters, which hadn’t been easy, since she seemed to be everywhere. He knew he couldn't avoid her forever, but he just didn’t know what to say to her. He’d come to terms—mostly—with the fact that she’d cheated on Drew’s dad, and that she’d hidden Drew’s true parentage from him for so long. But this new information, that Redmond had wanted to be a part of Drew’s life but had been shut out by Isabelle, had been a devastating body blow. How could she have let Drew think his father hadn’t wanted him? And how could she have kept a man from knowing his only child?
He feared that if he really took the time to talk to his mother about it, he’d end up saying things that would cause an irreparable rift between them. And while he was more or less willing to do it and let the consequences be whatever they were, he didn’t want to do it right now and cause problems for Julia’s big day.
He planned to avoid his mother as much as possible over the next couple of days, which shouldn’t be hard, given how much would be going on.
Drew was wearing a suit and tie, which he almost never did, and which he wouldn’t be doing now if his mother hadn’t had very specific ideas about what it should look like for her daughter to marry a billionaire. The Delaneys would have preferred a backyard barbecue, probably, but Isabelle was the driving force behind the planning of this thing, and she wasn’t about to let the opportunity go to waste.
Anyone could have a backyard barbecue, but when you were marrying into one of California’s most important families, by God, the least people could do was dress up a little, in Isabelle’s mind.
So Drew straightened the tie and combed his hair, checked the closeness of his shave, and made sure his shoes were gleaming. He fed Eddie and refilled his water dish. Then he cursed his luck for having a soft-hearted sister who cared about pleasing their mother, and got into his rental car to head for the rehearsal.
The wedding was being held at the Santa Rosa Chapel, a small, white wood building that dated back to 1870, shortly after the Delaneys settled the land where the family still lived.
The way Julia told it, that was the one wedding detail about which Colin had put his foot down. Isabelle had protested that the chapel wasn’t big enough to hold all of the couple’s 200-plus guests—and she was right, it wasn’t. But Colin had argued that the chapel had been a part of his life since his infancy. Though the Delaneys were only casual Catholics, he’d been christened there, he’d attended Christmas concerts there, he’d said goodbye to Redmond there, and he’d witnessed the weddings of his friends there. It was where he wanted to get married, and he’d been unwilling to budge on the point even in the face of Isabelle’s pleas.
When Drew walked into the chapel to take his place as a groomsman, Isabelle was loudly complaining about the fact that she’d been forced to invite some of the guests to the reception only, because of the lack of seating inside the tiny building.
“It’s just so rude,” Isabelle was telling Julia and Colin as Drew walked down the aisle to meet the others, who were loosely gathered in the area around the altar. “Imagine telling people that they’re not welcome at the ceremony.” She shook her head and made a judgmental clucking sound with her teeth.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Colin replied. “I think some of them are grateful they can cut straight to the party.”
“I know I would be,” Drew said.
Colin greeted him with a smile and extended his hand, shaking Drew’s firmly. “Drew. Thanks for putting up with all of this.” He extended his free hand to encompass the church, the intense wedding schedule, the clothing they’d all been forced to wear, and all of the myriad inconveniences a wedding represented.
“Put up with it!” Isabelle said. “Why, he’s honored! Aren’t you, Drew?”
“I am,” he agreed, because how could he do anything else when Julia was fairly beaming with happiness? “You look beautiful,” he told her.
Julia was wearing a pale pink silk wrap dress, and her hair was swept up into a loose updo, with auburn tendrils trailing down around her neck. Drew didn’t think he’d ever seen her looking so lovely, or so content.
“You look pretty good yourself,” she said, and reached out to straighten Drew’s tie, which didn’t really need straightening.
“Is”—he cleared his throat—“Is everyone else here?” By everyone else, he meant Megan, but he couldn’t exactly say that directly.
“Well, Liam’s not going to make it, of course, and we’re still waiting for Megan and Ryan. Everybody else is around here somewhere, I think.”
People were, in fact, milling around both inside the church and outside, in the historic cemetery that surrounded it. Mike came in the front door of the church looking acutely uncomfortable in a suit that he’d probably bought for the occasion.
“You sure you don’t want a girl for this?” Mike asked Julia.
In a break with tradition, Julia had opted for a Man of Honor rather than a maid or matron. The gruff, fifty-something contractor had been her closest friend for years, and she wasn’t about to push him aside on her wedding day just because of gender.
“I want my best friend for this,” she said. She reached out and squeezed his hand, and the man actually blushed.
Megan came in a few minutes later, flanked by Ryan and Sandra. Ryan looked like some kind of GQ model in his navy blue suit, which came as something of a shock to Drew, who had never seen the man in anything but jeans and flannel button-down shirts. Sandra didn’t wear dresses—somehow, it just wasn’t in her nature—but she’d traded in her usual Levi’s and fuzzy slippers for a pair of black slacks, a silk blouse, and some kind of flowy cardigan that Drew would have bet Isabelle had picked out for her.
As shocking as it was to see the two of them dressed up, Megan was the one who grabbed Drew’s attention. She was wearing a sapphire blue dress that hugged her curves in a way that made him instantly lose at least twenty IQ points. The skirt fell to just above her knees, giving him a tantalizing view of her legs, and the top had a kind of keyhole cutout that offered just a peek of smooth cleavage
.
It took an embarrassing amount of time for him to realize that Julia was talking to him.
“ … get started? Drew?”
Julia’s voice was a distant buzz, like the drone of a honeybee.
“ … you think, Drew?”
He was vaguely aware of someone talking to him, but he didn’t know what they were saying, and he had no sense of it being important. At least, not as important as looking at Megan.
“Focus, you jerk!”
Okay, now that was the sister he’d grown up with. He blinked a couple of times and looked at her.
“What? Sorry. I guess I wasn’t paying attention.”
“I guess you weren’t.” Julia looked pointedly at Megan, and then at Drew. “I was asking whether you were ready to get started.”
“Oh … sure. I guess so. Yeah.”
She leaned toward him and whispered into his ear, “If you ruin my wedding …”
“I won’t.”
“I swear to God …”
“I won’t,” he said again, more firmly this time.
She glared at him in the way only big sisters do, then gathered everyone together to listen to the priest go through the details of the ceremony.
They all went through the processional while the wedding planner—a slender, crisply dressed woman in her forties with a dark, tight bun—told everybody what to do.
The groomsmen—Drew and Stuart Guthrie, a big, burly guy who’d been Colin’s college roommate—lined up at the altar, leaving a space for Liam. Ryan, who was the best man, stood closest to Colin, who waited expectantly for his bride-to-be.
The bridesmaids filed one by one down the aisle: Gen, Breanna, and Megan. Finally, Mike brought up the rear.
When they were all in place, Julia came down the aisle on her mother’s arm.
Tears glimmered in Julia’s eyes, and Drew knew it wasn’t about her happiness to be marrying Colin, though she was happy. She was crying because her father wasn’t there.
Suddenly, Drew felt himself choking up a little, too. Andrew McCray, Julia’s father and the man Drew had thought was his as well, had been dead for five years, but the wound wasn’t any less fresh today than it had been when it happened.
He should be here. It wasn’t right that he wasn’t here.
When Julia came within range, he reached out and squeezed her hand.
As the priest went through a brief summary of what would be included in the ceremony—I’ll say this, and then you say that—Drew couldn’t keep his eyes off Megan. Being here, in the context of a wedding, made him feel nervous butterflies—or maybe they were bees—in his stomach.
The sensation wasn’t unpleasant. There was a lot to be said for knowing exactly where you were going and what you wanted and with whom, and that was how Drew felt now. As though his future had been laid out neatly for him, as though a bounty of riches and rewards was his, and all he had to do was reach out and take it.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The dinner was being held at Neptune, the most upscale restaurant in Cambria, where Ryan’s close friend Jackson Graham was the head chef. They’d rented a private room at the restaurant for the night, an arrangement that had come at not inconsiderable expense. Isabelle and her husband, Matt, were paying. There’d been a delicate series of negotiations regarding who would pay for what, with Colin offering to foot the bill for everything, and Isabelle, not wanting to be entirely outdone, insisting on covering the expense for at least something.
Because the rehearsal dinner was on Isabelle’s dime, and because it was so important to her that she appear neither cheap nor poor in comparison with the Delaneys, a number of people who weren’t in the wedding party were invited to the dinner.
This included Drew’s aunt and uncle and their two kids; a couple of the ranch hands from Montana whom Colin had become especially close to; and a handful of others, including friends of Colin and Julia who were here from out of state and a few Cambria fixtures who were close to Orin and Sandra.
The crowd started gathering at Neptune shortly after the rehearsal wrapped up, and people were milling around with cocktails in their hands by around seven p.m.
Drew was drinking a craft beer and chatting with Stuart in a far corner of the room when Megan walked in.
If Drew was trying to pretend that he wasn’t waiting for her and hadn’t noticed her, he was a complete failure, because Stuart noticed Drew’s interest the moment she walked in.
“She’s a looker, all right,” Stuart commented, as though Drew had said something to which he was merely agreeing. “A damned shame she’s hooked up with Colin’s brother.”
The comment brought him out of his Megan-induced reverie.
“Your news is out of date,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she broke up with him.”
Stuart, who looked like some kind of lawyer-lumberjack hybrid with his beard, his barrel chest, and his crisp suit, seemed taken aback. “What? When did that happen?”
Drew took a long drink of his beer, trying to appear casual. “Today.”
Stuart let out a low whistle. “She did it while he’s laid up in the hospital? Man, that’s cold. Still, if she’s free …” He wiggled his eyebrows to suggest what he might do now that Megan was available.
Drew felt the sudden and almost irrepressible urge to throw the guy to the floor and step on his throat, though it would probably be like trying to wrestle a tree trunk. Instead, he shrugged, feigning a lack of interest.
“You can try, but I don’t think she’s your type.”
“She’s a woman and she’s hot. That makes her my type.”
Because Stuart was paying such close attention to Megan, it didn’t escape his notice that she was paying close attention to Drew.
“Man, I think I know who is her type. She’s looking at you.”
“No,” Drew said casually, waving a hand to dismiss the idea.
“Uh … yeah. She’s looked over here about a dozen times since she walked in, and I can tell you she’s not checking out my ass.”
Drew wanted nothing more than to cross the room, sweep Megan into his arms, carry her out of here, and make hot, unrelenting love to her until all thoughts of social propriety and sensitivity were drowned out by their moans of pleasure. Knowing that she was watching him and thinking about him made him want it even more. But since that wasn’t an option, he drained his beer, ditched the bottle on a tray positioned nearby for that purpose, flagged down a passing waiter, and ordered another.
It was going to be a long night.
The seating arrangement was merciful—to a point. Drew sat at one end of a long, rectangular table and Megan way down at the other, so that was good. But he was seated with his mother to his left, which was a problem, and Stuart to his right, which was even more of a problem, since the guy wouldn’t stop making comments about Megan.
“God, look at that cutout thing on her dress,” Stuart said in a stage whisper, referring to the keyhole that exposed a small but tantalizing glimpse of Megan’s breasts. “It’s like a little portal to an enchanted kingdom with unicorns and fairies and shit. Like Lord of the Rings, but with sex.”
This guy was a Harvard-educated lawyer? How in the world had that come to pass? And more puzzling, how could it be that he was Colin’s friend? Colin was one of the most refined and tasteful guys in Drew’s acquaintance, but his college roommate seemed like he ought to be holding a club and dragging a woman around by the hair.
“Could you maybe not talk about her like that?” Drew said.
“Like what?”
“Like she’s … I don’t know. A sex object for you to ogle at.”
“Dude, all I’m saying is, it’s a nice dress.”
The dinner conversation with his mother didn’t go much better, mainly because she was trying to pry into his life the way mothers do, at a time when he was in no mood to let her into his innermost thoughts. Either she didn’t realize that he was pissed at her,
or she knew, and was trying to defuse the situation by burying his anger in an avalanche of questions, observations, and minutia.
Drew’s stepfather, Matt, who’d finally made it to Cambria after wrapping things up at work, tried valiantly to provide a buffer, but it wasn’t very effective.
“I just thought, now that you’re well off”—she pronounced the two words as though they made her tongue tingle—“you might consider putting aside that business with the boats and do something else. Something meaningful.”
“Building boats is meaningful to him, Iz,” Matt said. “He’s building something with his hands. Creating something. I wish I could do what he does.”
Drew shot his stepfather a smile of gratitude, but he knew Matt’s words wouldn’t sink in with Isabelle. He was right; they didn’t.
“Oh, it’s all fine, I guess,” she went on. “For a hobby. But now Drew’s got a chance to really do something! The Delaneys are all over the financial magazines with their philanthropy, and their land deals.… You could be like that, Drew! You could really be somebody!”
In just a few short sentences, Isabelle had managed to imply that Drew’s work was meaningless and that he was a nobody. An impressive feat, even by her standards.
“Dad taught me boat-building,” Drew said mildly.
“Well, yes, but I don’t think he meant for it to take the place of a career,” she said.
“Isabelle, it is a career for Drew,” Matt said. “One that makes him feel close to his father. You shouldn’t—”
“It’s okay, Matt,” Drew said, leaning across Isabelle to address him. He appreciated what Matt was trying to do, but it was hopeless; besides, he’d prefer not to engage with Isabelle at all if he could help it. Not now, when Redmond’s letters were still fresh in his mind.
Across the table, Mike was leaning toward Julia to mutter something to her—apparently, it was something about the food. He was holding a piece of asparagus between his thick fingers and using it to poke at his fingerling potatoes.