The Billionaire and the Wedding Planner

by Emily Tilton

  “Of course,” Maria had said. She had realized at that moment that she had somehow found a very good business for her essential character: she had an iron will without the need to force it upon anyone else—a personal and moral backbone utterly devoid of vanity. She hadn’t even considered that the bride’s tantrum truly had anything to do with her. In Maria, the Sicilian temper, which could in fact sometimes surface in really personal situations, would never come out professionally.

  Heather had used the same technique with that bride that Maria had employed with Emily Easton: taking a moment. In the interim, the MOB had apologetically suggested to Heather that Maria should take the day off, at their expense, to defuse the situation. Heather had told Maria later that she thought it the wrong thing to do, and would not have acquiesced again, but she had sent Maria home and called in her second-string assistant.

  Emily Easton’s problem with the colors was serious, and Maria could tell that something about the way she had put the suggestion of taking a few minutes in her room had worsened at least one part of the problem. But Maria had not the slightest doubt at this point that they would all come through it with enough predominantly happy memories to turn the color crisis into something to laugh about in future years.

  She only wished that she could concentrate with her characteristic focus. She didn’t feel off her game by much, but the experience of not being able to look at the FOB without blushing didn’t have a parallel in her career so far, and Maria felt like it had begun to throw her subtly off-kilter. When the weepy moment had occurred outside the church, for example, she had been gazing at his face as he watched his stepdaughter, and thinking about what his bed would be like—whether he had really meant it, and what precisely he had meant by the old-fashioned phrase that sent a shiver down her spine every time she remembered it: you will come to my bed.

  Those few seconds of panty-warming daydreams meant that she had nearly missed the look on Emily’s face as she suddenly remembered her mother. If Maria hadn’t called the hold in to Gerard in the church, the processional music would have started, and things might have gotten terribly awkward. No disaster, certainly—in Maria’s experience half of bridal processions ended up mistimed in one way or another—but after the scene in the living room she wanted to make sure she demonstrated her skill especially to Jason. Every wedding, Heather had liked to say, has countless little moments at which a professional planner can make a subtle but memorable difference—times when without the planner things wouldn’t have run as smoothly or sparkled with the wedding magic that every bride wants. Maria wouldn’t receive any specific thanks, she knew, for creating a few minutes there on the church steps for the Easton girls to have a hug and a cry with their stepfather. The whole wedding, though, would shine a little brighter in the memory of the guests and, more important, of the families, with the bride and groom at the center of that warm glow.

  Grant that all married persons who have witnessed these vows may find their lives strengthened and their loyalties confirmed, Reverend Sweetser would say, in a few minutes. Maria had grown up Catholic, but she had a preference for the Episcopal prayer book’s marriage ritual, she had to admit. When the right priest spoke those words, a lovely murmur always went through the congregation, and Maria always saw most of the couples present clasp hands. She sometimes thought there should be another prayer in there, for the single, but she supposed that the whole wedding ceremony could serve in that capacity, holding up inside its shining, magical light the ideal without which Maria, at least, didn’t think a human life could be complete. The whole service seemed to say, Grant that all single persons who are watching these brave, foolish souls pledge themselves to one another may find in themselves like courage and like folly.

  She stood now along the side aisle. Gerard was on the other side. Both of them scanned the congregation with a relaxed eye: things could go wrong at this point—fainting ushers and sobbing aunts, for example—but in general the ceremony itself represented needed downtime for the planners. Reverend Sweetser stood in the grand pulpit, high above the happy couple, and all seemed right with the tiny, microcosmic world of the Easton/Allerton nuptials. Devin and Susan moved unobtrusively around, silently snapping candid photos that Maria knew would end up being some of Emily’s favorites; Devin had a special knack for photography in old churches.

  Maria risked a glance at Jason. He looked up at the priest with a slightly bemused expression on his face, as if not quite sure he believed that a minister of the gospel—even one married for fifty years, as this one had been—really represented the person from whom either a twenty-year-old girl or a forty-year-old man should take marital advice.

  “I believe,” Reverend Sweetser was saying, “you will hear many ministers in my position say things like, Never go to bed angry. I’m not going to say whether a good many of them are Catholic…”

  This got a laugh—and even Maria found herself giggling. That initial mirth proved only the precursor to the priest’s true punchline, though.

  “But it’s arrant nonsense! Every happily married—and, I believe, though without personal experience, unhappily married—couple knows that this only makes you even grumpier, because you’re always tired!”

  The congregation roared, and Reverend Sweetser looked pleased. Jason looked a little less bemused, even. Maria suddenly felt her eyes mist over; Jason knew, it seemed, that the priest spoke the truth, because Jason had been married. Maria had planned or helped plan two hundred twenty-three weddings, but she didn’t know what it was like to fight with your spouse, or to make up, or to go to bed angry.

  Maria had inherited from Heather, as a sort of badge of honor worn on the inside by wedding planners, a jaundiced view of monogamy as a long-term arrangement. You didn’t do so many celebrations of second, third, and even fourth marriages without beginning to understand even as a single person that inherited cultural expectations of fidelity were rather out of sync with basic biological urges. Heather had chosen not to get married for that reason, more or less, something that an endless succession of matrons had declared ‘such a shame,’ barely concealing their envy at Heather’s freedom to enjoy herself as she liked, above all in the bedroom.

  If Maria ever did get married, it would be with the expectation that sex, especially, was too powerful and complex a thing to let it get in the way of an enduring love. As far as she had been able to discern, most of the sorrow caused by infidelity resulted from a failure to communicate painful truths about the bedroom. As Reverend Sweetser moved to lead Quint and Emily in their vows, she took one more look at Jason. She didn’t think she had ever had a lover or a prospective lover to whom she could more easily speak the truth—and perhaps do it so thoroughly that it wouldn’t even prove painful.

  Tonight I shall come to his bed, she thought, not even sure whether it was only a dream on one or both of their parts. Dream or not, it made her smile.

  “I, Quint,” Reverend Sweetser said.

  The vows were given out in the short phrases the priest had recommended. Maria wondered if she could see a slight twinkle in Emily’s eyes that might indicate the couple had come to some rather deep understanding on the matter, perhaps even with a promise of a sequel when they found themselves alone in the honeymoon suite.

  It went by so fast, as it always did. Maria knew, even without having been there with the stole wrapped around her till-death-joined hand, how much faster it must go for the wedded pair. Quint kissed Emily chastely but swooningly, Emily’s head bent gracefully back with her long veil flowing in the most sophisticated manner down to her train. The applause broke out, lightly, and then more forcefully after Reverend Sweetser had turned them to face their congregation and presented them as man and wife.

  The brass suite from Purcell’s King Arthur broke out from the chancel, for which Maria had to give Emily credit. She had indeed shown a good deal more sophistication in her taste than practically any bride of a similar age with whom Maria had worked. She and Gerard applauded
from the side aisles as Quint led Emily at exactly the right pace, not too hasty but not lingering either, down away from the altar and toward the big doors that would take them out into their married life.

  Quint’s smile looked relieved, confident. Emily looked radiant, the brightness imparted by her earlier tears seeming to speak of the knowledge Georgia had imparted, that their mother had seen the wedding from a most privileged seat in heaven.

  Maria remembered yet another of Heather’s sayings. As long as they make it out of the church in one piece and smiling, we’ve done our job. It wasn’t actually true, of course, because for a wedding planner the main event always still lay in the future at that point, but Heather liked to say it as a way of refocusing on what was important. If the reception proved disastrous, it never changed the fact that the couple had in fact gotten married. It might not make up for any damage done to the planner’s reputation, but in the cosmic scheme of things, wedding planners didn’t go into such an aggravating business unless they took a fundamental joy in helping people get together for their mutual happiness.

  She watched Jason and Priscilla follow the bridal party, arm-in-arm, with a tiny pang of silly jealousy. My time will come, or it won’t, she told herself. But either way I have a job to do. She darted out the side door near which she had positioned herself. Crunch time had begun, and she had to be by Devin’s side to make sure the posed photos got taken as efficiently as possible.

  She met Gerard at the corner of the steps, in the fading light of a pinkening Boston sky.

  “Congratulations, girl,” said the wonderfully flamboyant red-haired man in the blue suit that he somehow made look like it were as colorful as his language could sometimes be. She could afford him part time, for events, but they both fervently hoped that the word-of-mouth from this wedding would bring enough business to change that. “Stunning.”

  Maria appreciated the compliment, but they had a long night ahead. “Any questions about drinks and appetizers?” she asked.

  Gerard snorted and shook his head. “I’m gone,” he said, and turned to begin his walk to the Park Plaza, well ahead of the first guests out of the church, who had stopped to mill about and admire the newly wedded pair.

  Time to go to work.

  Maria threaded her way through the crowd around Emily and Quint. She waited to catch Emily’s eye, but didn’t succeed until Quint said, “Em, Maria’s trying to get our attention.”

  “Picture time,” Maria said, as sweetly as she could, sensing in the irritated glance the bride returned that despite all her good will, and Emily’s joy, an unavoidable struggle lay ahead.

  She’ll thank me. They always thank me.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Jason had thought whatever tension had arisen between Emily and Maria during the color crisis had dissipated, but as they went through the endless series of posed photos he could tell that a lingering resentment remained. Whenever Maria announced the next group of relatives who should appear with the bride and groom for arrangement by the photographer’s assistant and then fussy readjustment and finally admonishment to keep smiling for an eternity, Emily rolled her eyes, or snorted, and looked at Quint as if begging him to call an end to the proceedings.

  Quint for his part seemed imperturbable, if a little hot. His ushers had started to grumble, some of them wanting to join their girlfriends at the reception and start the drinking. The bridesmaids, with the exception of Georgia, had also begun to misbehave, making the whole thing take longer by their failure to pay attention to what Maria had told them.

  Jason could tell that Maria’s patience had frayed a little from the increasingly strained way the words “Just a few more” came from her beautiful lips. When she added, fifteen minutes in, “Remember that you signed off on the list of pictures, Emily,” though, he knew that tensions were about to soar.

  “I didn’t,” Emily retorted. “Priscilla did that.”

  “You saw it, Emily,” said Priscilla, clearly trying hard to keep any sign of frustration from her own tone. “You initialed it. You said that you’d shown it to Quint, too.”

  “That’s not true,” Emily said. Her radiance seemed in danger of fading away entirely.

  “It’s only a few more,” Maria said. Jason could tell that she meant to pour oil on the waters; her tone had returned to its professional pitch. “Let’s get them done, and go have some champagne.”

  “Just two more,” Devin called from the bottom of the steps. “The bridal party can go, actually. I just need the parents and Georgia and Dave and Quint and Emily.”

  A little cheer went up from the ushers and bridesmaids.

  But Emily, for reasons Jason couldn’t quite grasp, though he supposed they must have to do with the color crisis, didn’t want to let it go. “I didn’t sign off on any list of pictures.” She glared defiantly first at Priscilla and then at Maria. “Don’t say I did.”

  Maria, to Jason’s surprise, suddenly seemed to undergo a complete change in manner that he would never have expected from her. Her face turned icy cold, and her eyes narrowed. “I have the list in my hand, Emily. Do you want to see your initials?”

  Emily looked down and saw that Maria did indeed, of course, have the list. She clearly recognized it, now, for her face went red and she turned to look at Quint.

  Jason’s astonishment grew as Maria spoke again, and he understood that for the very first time he was seeing her lose her temper, as controlled a rage as it was that she now turned on the bride. If she hadn’t lost a bit of her self-control, she would never have added, at that point, “Can we get past this little episode of bridal amnesia and finish up the photos now?”

  Emily, to Jason’s relief, hardly heard what Maria had said, because her eyes remained locked on Quint’s. Before Jason turned to look the wedding planner in the face, he saw in Quint’s expression precisely the intention he himself meant to convey to Maria. Despite the tension and general unpleasantness of the moment, part of Jason smiled inwardly.

  Quint had on his face what Anne Easton (like, Jason knew, many women who had consented to traditional discipline) had always called the look. Emily responded to it with wide eyes and even more color in her cheeks, which actually went some way toward restoring her radiance. The look, which Jason now proceeded to give Maria, when she turned to look at him as he had felt certain she would, meant one thing, and one thing only: you will be over my knee at the next opportunity, and you will feel the consequences of your unhelpful attitude on your bare backside until you can’t sit down for a good long while.

  Georgia, it seemed, had witnessed the whole thing. “Oooh,” she said, and then she stopped herself because the look had also appeared on Dave’s face as soon as she turned to him with the clear intention of sharing the joke at Emily and Maria’s expense. Startled by Georgia’s interrupted teasing, both the bride and the wedding planner looked at her, then caught the expressions on the faces of groom, stepfather, and boyfriend.

  A moment of silence followed, which must have mystified Priscilla, Skip, and the blonde girlfriend whose name Jason couldn’t remember for the life of him, as the three to-be-spanked girls’ eyes went wide. Then they all burst into helpless giggles.

  Jason looked at Dave, then Quint, crooking a smile.

  Skip said, “I have no idea what’s going on, but the champagne sounds nice.”

  “To me too,” Jason said.

  Maria recovered her composure first. “All the parents and all the kids,” she said.

  The photographer’s assistant said, “Two lines, please: kids in front and parents in back.”

  Just like that, it seemed, the wedding had returned at last to its smooth course.

  * * *

  The reception went just as marvelously as Maria could have hoped, Jason thought he could tell even with his layman’s eye. Certainly everyone at the two head tables, older generation and younger one, seemed to be having a wonderful time. Jason’s problem was that as he tried to concentrate on catching up with Anne and his
old friends, he couldn’t keep his eyes from straying once a minute to find Maria as she made her way in and out of the ballroom, conferring with Gerard, conferring with the caterer, conferring with the baker, doing her job with an efficiency and a grace that somehow made Jason unbearably horny.

  So strongly did his very skin seem to yearn for her touch that he knew he had to do something naughty—if he didn’t, he wouldn’t make it to the end of the night without having to excuse himself so that he could go jerk off in the men’s room, thinking of what he would do with his hot-tempered, hyper-professional Sicilian charmer when he finally got her into his bed. At the end of dinner, with the gorgeous cake to be cut in mere minutes, he excused himself from the table and went to where Maria had huddled with Gerard in the corner opposite the loud, if quite classy, swing band.

  Jason came up behind Maria, and saw Gerard take in his approach until Maria turned around to see what her assistant was looking at. When she caught sight of Jason, her eyes went wide, and for a moment a look of alarm crossed her face that Jason found very gratifying. She composed herself almost instantly, though.

  “Jason? How can I help?”

  Jason looked at Gerard, feeling like a very naughty boy but unable to help himself. “Could you excuse us for just a moment, Gerard?”

  Gerard looked at Maria, who gave a very quick, highly ambiguous nod. “I’ll go give Emily and Quint the five minute warning,” Gerard said, and headed off.

  Jason, looking at Maria and feeling his lust for her nearly overflow its bounds, threw caution to the winds. He reached out and took her hand and led her out of the ballroom.

  “Jason!” she said. “I… I have to…”

  But he had already drawn her into the men’s room, which thankfully had fully enclosed stalls.

  “What are…”

  He got her into a stall, and pulled the door closed.