The Billionaire and the Wedding Planner

by Emily Tilton

  “Well,” the priest said. “Go ahead. I suspect you’ve practiced this already, but I like to be thorough. And nothing that will shock the old ladies, please.”

  Even the bridesmaids and ushers laughed at that, but the bridal couple themselves weren’t smiling. Quint looked down at Emily not with anger but with a sternness that made Maria put her hand out to steady herself with the help of the altar, since it seemed suddenly to have turned her knees to jelly. Emily looked up at him not, to Maria’s surprise, with penitence for derailing Reverend Sweetser’s intentions, but with a strange mixture of defiance and anxiety, as if she had tried to count the cost of asserting her willful desire but now thought she might have counted incorrectly.

  Quint bent down and kissed her lightly on the lips. Emily tilted her head prettily to receive it, but though their heads assumed the posture of a happy couple, the tension in their bodies remained. Maria glanced at Jason again, and saw that he had seen the same thing, though no one else seemed to have—even Priscilla, who was smiling and applauding along with the wedding party.

  The rehearsal dinner took place at one of the best restaurants in Boston, of course. Priscilla footed the bill with the commandeered but amiable help of her estranged West coast husband who had flown in that morning with his much younger San Diego girlfriend and seemed to have no trouble taking credit for everything his wife had done. Money couldn’t buy happiness, Maria supposed, but it could definitely buy the ability to avoid unpleasant scenes; what might have made for a conflict among the less-than-super-rich ended up as a rounding error for the Skip Allertons of the world.

  Maria would have left the dinner after making sure everything at the restaurant was in order, but just as she had finished going through the schedule with the maître d’, Jason came up to her and put his hand on the small of her back. A tremor went through her whole body when she realized that it was he, standing there beside her, touching her in that casual way that nonetheless seemed suddenly so intimate to her. She couldn’t help it: she felt herself get suddenly warm, both above and below.

  “Tanya had to take the boys back to the hotel,” he said, referring to the mother of the ring bearers, “and she doesn’t think she’ll make it back for dinner. We can’t let that plate go to waste, can we?”

  For a moment Maria had no idea what he meant. Then her blush grew hotter. “Oh, thank you, but…”

  “I insist,” Jason said. “Not because we’d waste the food, though. Because you’re the only woman here I want to have dinner with.”

  Maria swallowed. How could this be happening? She wanted to ask him that—directly, immediately. How could he? After…

  After spanking me. How could he make her confront the terrible fact with which she had been living since the middle of April, the night after the shower? All I want is another spanking from Jason Garrons.

  She looked up at him, thinking about the way Emily had looked at Quint in the church. Her eyes went to them, across the room at the head table, laughing with friends to either side about the bridesmaids’ and ushers’ gifts, carefully selected by Emily, and not really engaging with one another. They had walked side by side from the church to the restaurant, but they hadn’t held hands.

  “What if I say no?” she said softly to Jason. “What will you do?”

  He smiled down at her. “That depends.”

  “On what?” Maria asked, trying to keep the desperation out of her voice.

  “On whether you say it like a good girl or a naughty girl.”

  Chapter Twelve

  She let Jason take her hand, then, and lead her to a place at the same table with Reverend and Mrs. Sweetser, Priscilla, and Skip and Skip’s impossibly blonde girlfriend. The girlfriend—could her name really be Freedom? Jason hadn’t quite caught it—seemed grateful for the presence of another outsider; Skip and Priscilla were reminiscing about how Anne had introduced them, along with Reverend Sweetser, who had married them. Priscilla welcomed Maria less warmly, of course, presumably because she suspected Jason’s romantic interest in her.

  Nor did Jason have any desire to disguise that interest tonight. He had watched her handle the rehearsal with amazing tact and efficiency, and then he had scrutinized her reaction to the little scene between Quint and Emily. He had felt even more enchanted than he had been that day at Priscilla’s shower, when Maria had graciously, under great pressure, provided Georgia with the advice about keeping the bride from drinking too much.

  His palm had tingled with the memory of spanking her in that incredibly sexy lingerie. Something in the way Maria had put out her hand to steady herself on the altar, as Quint asserted his authority at Emily’s evident bratting, called out to him and told him he’d been a fool not to phone her the very next day, after the shower, and simply ask her out.

  As Maria and Freedom discussed the beauties of Boston architecture and the humorous excesses of the Boston elite as to pomp and circumstance, Jason looked over at the ‘happy’ couple. He couldn’t figure out how much of the little tiff in front of the priest had represented nerves on Emily’s part and how much true brattiness. He suspected Quint would find out; since the night of the shower the soon-to-be spouses had seemed to find a new harmony. Not a single conflict that Jason knew of had arisen between them, or between Emily and Priscilla. Certainly Emily’s conduct toward Jason himself had proven exemplary.

  Skip stood up as the entrees were cleared and tapped his knife against his water goblet in a disorganized fashion whose irregular rhythm betrayed the volume of bourbon that had helped him get through the night so far. To each his own solution, Jason thought. Skip had justifiable regrets, he knew, for having left his family.

  Jason had not called Maria because of the memories of Anne that kept crowding in. But Anne had made him promise he would remarry. She had even said that he must use Emily’s wedding, when Emily married Quint, to find his own new bride. Jason and Anne had always had the best sex of their marriage after weddings, something she recalled to his mind with a wan smile from her hospital bed.

  “Just makes sure she likes to be spanked,” she had said, laughing though Jason knew it hurt her heart and her body to laugh at the idea.

  Skip cleared his throat theatrically as the conversations around him died down.

  “Thank you so much for joining us tonight,” the father of the groom said, barely slurring his words at all and demonstrating how well blue-bloods could hold their liquor. “To honor an amazing couple.”

  The requisite applause rose and fell. Quint and Emily, all eyes upon them, looked into each other’s faces, and to Jason’s joy he watched the tension evaporate. He could well be imagining it because of his own proclivities, but he thought he saw in his stepdaughter’s eye a look of apology, and also of acquiescence, or even submission. He knew Emily—and Quint—far too well to think she would end up as any more submissive a wife than her mother had been, but he thought he could also see that just as Anne had loved to let him take care of her, to let him make decisions for her when she couldn’t figure out which path to take and couldn’t stop agonizing over the crossroads, Emily had begun to learn the pleasure and the benefits of yielding.

  Jason looked at Maria, beside him. Her eyes, too, had turned to Emily and Quint. He could see in her lovely, olive-skinned face and her dark eyes something of the professional planner and attender of such events, applauding dutifully, gazing dutifully upon young love. Could he see something else, too, though, perhaps in the lift of her chin? Or, even in the candlelight and beneath her dark complexion, could he see a blush to match the bride’s?

  Skip went on, speaking unconvincingly of early memories of his son, and then with real emotion of Quint’s trip out to San Diego the previous year to crew on his father’s ocean-going schooner. Jason kept watching Maria, and Maria kept watching Emily. The bride smiled dutifully as she looked at Skip, whose slightly drunken gaze shifted between her and Quint, but when she looked at her fiancé, as his father sang his praises as a sailor, her face seemed l
it with the kind of desire that can illuminate the dimmest room.

  “I said to myself…” Skip teared up at this point, and Priscilla dabbed daintily at her eyes. “I said, as I gave him the helm, that kid isn’t a kid anymore. He’s crewing for me this year, but I’d be proud to crew for him, and I know he’s going to make a fantastic husband…” The thought began to run on, now, but Jason could tell the audience would tolerate just about anything from the father of the groom at this point in the evening. “…as long as you let him steer, while you trim the sails.”

  Laughter rippled through the guests. Jason felt sure that Skip had just been looking for a metaphor to use for his finish, a slightly poetic turn of phrase upon which to raise his glass. But he also saw on Emily’s face that the meaning of the metaphor, with all its traditional force, had hit home, and that she liked it almost despite herself. She took hold of Quint’s arm, and turned her face up for a kiss, which was graciously bestowed—just as chaste as the one in church, but much more convincing.

  When Jason turned his attention back toward Maria, to his astonishment her eyes had filled with tears. Not wanting to call any attention to it, and not sure whether it meant anything other than her being so good at her job that she could manufacture the necessary emotion when called upon, he turned his attention elsewhere. When he looked back at Maria, the tears were gone, and the sad expression replaced by a mild half-smile.

  “Very nice,” she complimented Skip when he sat down. “One of the best I’ve ever heard.”

  Jason felt certain Maria said the same thing about every toast to which she was subjected, but she managed to make it sound entirely convincing, and Skip actually looked shy for a moment. Quint rose, his own glass in one hand, the fingers of the other intertwined with Emily’s as he looked down at her. Dessert had started to arrive, but the quiet bustle of the wait-staff made for a piquant contrast to the stillness of the moment otherwise, in the big private dining room.

  Jason turned his eyes to Maria once again, and felt an almost electric thrill go through him when he saw that she was looking straight back at him.

  “Thanks so much, Dad,” Quint began. “And thanks, Mom, too, for this wonderful night. Thank you, everybody else who’s here—our very closest friends and dearest family—for coming.”

  In Maria’s eyes, though the tears had gone, Jason saw the sadness lingering. Instinctually, hardly even thinking about it, he reached out his left hand, under the table, and took her right into his grasp. She gave a little start, and squeezed his fingers, her fixed little smile widening slightly. Jason withdrew his hand, hoping he had eased whatever distress lay upon her heart, and at Quint’s next words was very glad he had broken the contact, electric as it was.

  “There’s a very big absence here tonight,” the groom was saying. “And Emily’s told me she’d like me to be the one to mention it, and to talk about her mom.”

  Jason felt his own eyes fill with tears now, as he saw his stepdaughter’s face crumple. Emily had great public-speaking skills, but she clearly had known she couldn’t get through a toast to Anne without breaking down.

  “All I really want to say is that she’s here, and she knows how much we all love her,” Quint said. “And that she’s looking down on you, Em, and you, Georgia, and you, Jason.” He sought out each of them with his eyes. Jason smiled back, so conflicted he could hardly have named his emotions. “And I want to say thank you to her for the most wonderful girl I’ve ever met.”

  Tears and applause and kisses followed the toast, and Jason went to hug Quint and Emily, and then Georgia. When he returned to the table, Maria had risen, clearly intending to depart.

  “May I call you a cab?” Jason asked.

  “Thanks,” Maria said rather brusquely. “I’m going to walk. It’s a nice night.”

  Feeling that to lose this opportunity at least to talk would be the kind of mistake that could haunt him forever, he said with his heart in his throat like an adolescent, “May I walk you home?”

  For a moment Maria’s eyes seemed very troubled: some of it seemed the sadness Jason had seen before, but he thought he could also detect a sort of anxiety about her personal safety with him. He supposed he had earned that by spanking her, and he prepared himself for rejection.

  But finally she said, “Yes, alright.”

  “I’ll just say goodnight to Priscilla, okay?”

  “Okay,” Maria responded steadily, as if she had made up her mind and had resigned herself to whatever would come of their walking home together.

  Truly, Jason realized as he kissed Priscilla on the cheek, waved to his stepdaughters, and walked back to the restaurant door to rejoin Maria, he didn’t even know what he wanted to come of it, with the exception of trying to get the answer to one question.

  He asked the question after they had walked half a block in the bright near-summer moonlight, very softly and not looking at her. “Why were you crying, at the end of Skip’s toast?”

  He thought he saw a shudder go through her even as she walked. “You saw me,” she said quietly.

  Something in her tone, perhaps a very slight emphasis on the word you, suddenly gave Jason a hint, and he pursued it.

  “I saw you in the church, too. When you put your hand on the altar to steady yourself.”

  “Oh, God,” Maria said, not to him, but actually looking up as if addressing heaven.

  Jason felt nearly desperate to hear the answer to his question, now, but his gentlemanly impulse came first. “There’s no need to answer, Maria. I know it must be a very personal matter. I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  They walked on down Columbus Avenue, little Statler Park now on their left, its trees looming beautifully in the silvery light. Then she surprised him. “You must miss your wife very much.”

  For a moment he felt at a complete loss as to how to take her words, in this context. Did she mean that she had lost someone, too? But the moment in the church, and the moment at the end of the toast… they both had to do with Quint and Emily, didn’t they? And specifically with Emily coming to terms with her desire to submit to her husband.

  “I do,” he said slowly. “But she was ill for two years. We got the chance to say goodbye properly, as awful and sad as it was, and still is for the girls.”

  “Ah,” Maria said, and seemed not to have any intention to say more.

  The silence felt companionable, though, as they continued on Columbus Avenue, over the turnpike and into the midst of the brownstones.

  Suddenly Maria stopped and turned to Jason, looking up at him not with the sympathetic eyes he had expected but with a kind of desperation. Her words came out in a rush. “What if I told you I’ve been a very naughty girl?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Not far away, on the other side of the Massachusetts Turnpike but equally in the moonlight, Emily didn’t know if she was in trouble or not. She couldn’t figure out whether she wanted to be in trouble, even.

  She and Quint stood outside her house on Arlington Street with Georgia and Dave. Part of Emily felt very grateful for the dissipation of the tension she had created at the church, however it ended up. She had felt so foolish, immediately afterward, to have insisted on the longer phrases, and to have tried to provoke Quint by calling him ‘Albright.’ But she hadn’t been able to let it go until his father had made that toast—and she had nearly spoiled the rehearsal dinner by refusing to look at her groom.

  The best she could do, toward understanding her out-of-the-blue brattiness, was to suppose that when she had heard Reverend Sweetser say Albright, some unaccountable jealousy had surged in her heart. If a priest could call Quint by the name that still seemed to Emily a much more distinguished one than the name of the guy in the shark movie, than Emily should be allowed to call him that, too.

  Shouldn’t that just have been a reason to laugh, though? Why had she decided to use it as the occasion to reach even further into her store of willfulness, and felt an even greater need to put her sophistica
ted stamp on her special day?

  Above all, shouldn’t it have been the occasion of additional closeness between her and her intended because of the role it had played in that incredible night six weeks before—the night that still made her face, and other places, hot when she thought about it? The night when she had proven, as Heather Davidson had so crudely declared, that she was indeed a freak and that her future husband loved it?

  But… was that it, maybe? She and Quint hadn’t done that again in the intervening weeks. They had only had sex once. Yes, it had been a super-fun little quickie, doggy-style in her kitchen while Georgia watched the game only a few feet away in the TV room, skirt pulled up and panties pulled down without any warning, and his cock feeling enormous and commanding inside her in that position. But though she knew she had managed to behave herself much better since the spanking and its mind-blowingly erotic sequel of sexual discipline, Emily could see now that perhaps something had begun to build during all that time, too—something that couldn’t find full satisfaction merely in being bent over the counter with Quint’s hardness in her pussy.

  At least Skip’s toast had cleared one thing up for her: as trite as the idea of Quint being the helmsman of their little boat might be, it sent a thrill of recognition, of joy, and even—though she might refuse to say as much in words—of submission through her when she looked into his steady blue eyes. Now she desperately wanted her helmsman to tack one way or the other, away from the squall on the horizon or even right into it, rather than calmly sailing the broad reach he seemed to have chosen for the moment as the rehearsal dinner had broken up and they had walked home with Georgia and Dave, both couples holding hands but not saying much at all, except Georgia’s kind, “It was so lovely, Em. Tomorrow is going to be amazing.”