by L. L. Muir
London waved a kid over who’d been carrying an empty box toward the door. She pulled some stems and garbage from the big pocket in the front of her apron and tossed it in the box. After the kid was out of earshot, she turned back and leaned close.
“Maybe you can’t sleep because you’re, you know,” she whispered, “frustrated.”
Mal straightened. “Shut. Up.”
London laughed and backed away, her hands digging in her pockets for her tools. “I’m headed off the island anyway. The carriages are arriving any minute. But that thing we were just talking about?” She grabbed her coat off a chair, then headed out of the ballroom. Her head poked back inside, like it often did. “I’d jump on it.”
Mal heard London’s laughter halfway down the causeway.
The photographer’s assistant showed up, set up some equipment, then left again. A man delivered a harp and asked three times if Mal thought it would be safe if he left it in the corner. She assured him it would, that she was alone on the island for a while.
She went outside and checked the arrangements at the ends of the staircase.
“What you need,” she said to one giant wreath, “is a little bit of snow.” She turned and looked at the causeway. “If it doesn’t snow hard and fast, no sleighs.” She sighed. Her breath puffed up into a cloud and she resigned herself to the fact that one thing was not going to be perfect for Pemberly. The Hopi Indians would approve.
Mal headed up the steps. A man laughed behind her and she turned with a professional smile on her face. But no one was there. Which was at it should be. Everyone else had left the island with London.
“Hello?” She stared at the tall shrubs at the north side of the building, expecting someone to step out. No one did. “Hello?”
A chill ran up her spine and fractured into a hundred little jolts at the base of her skull. She was imagining things. Talking about her nightmares to London had brought them back to life. She was imagining Bennett St. John laughing at her.
She gave a little hmph and headed inside. At least that was one nightmare that wasn’t about to come true. There wasn’t anything out of place, nothing about Harmony Lodge’s current state that 007 could complain about. Her confidence in that, at least, couldn’t be shaken.
Of course, he might laugh at all her contingency plans, but that didn’t matter. Let him laugh. At least she hadn’t needed to worry about things going wrong—she was prepared. And if it wasn’t for her nightmares about him, she could have rested easy.
Mal slipped into the mindset of a wedding guest and walked through one of the big doors. It was really heavy. Thank goodness they had a doorman scheduled. A doorman in white livery, with an electric green vest, wearing a powdered wig, just like the carriage drivers. Pemberly was going to love it.
There were two openings at the rear of the entrance. One led to the ballroom. The other led to the rest of the lodge. A heavy cream ribbon hung across the second opening, making it clear that guests should use the first. Once inside the ballroom, there was a music stand of cream and gold holding the guest book.
Mal pushed on the stand, to test its stability. Nice tight screws. It wouldn’t flop around while people signed the book. She flipped up her apron and tested the pens on the underside. Three pens. All working. She moved the stand to the left, looked at what it did to the flow of foot traffic. Moved it back.
The path led around the edge of the room, then to the massive scrolled fireplace on the rear wall. Two chairs were dressed in rich cream paisley on richer cream satin, then tied with solid cream. The wedding couple could sit, if they ever got the chance.
The path led back to the buffet on the right. Appetizers and desserts would be offered, since the wedding party, family, and closest friends would have attended a luncheon in the city after the wedding was over and photos were taken.
Turning back to the tables and chairs, which were also elaborately dressed in cream satin and paisley, Mal adjusted one of the ties. Then her eye caught movement outside and she nearly jumped out of her skin. But no one was there—it was snowing!
She pulled out her phone and tapped the app for the weather. Snowing in the mountains. Big storm headed their way. But she’d checked the weather that morning! No storms expected for days! Not that she would have done anything differently if this storm had been predicted. There was nothing to worry about, really. She was ready for anything, after all.
Her phone rang. It was London.
“You seein’ this?”
“Yeah. I am. Glad all those kids are headed off the mountain already. I just hope we can get them all up here tomorrow, to pull it all down again.”
“Don’t worry. We will. Good thing we don’t have to strike it all tonight. But isn’t it perfect? We’re taking video out here, for Pem. Just in case it stops snowing before she sees it. The lodge looks like it’s in a snow globe already.”
“Oh, it’s not going to stop. I just checked. Substantial storm gathering between us and Park City. Better have the carriage drivers put on their sleigh runners. And make sure the Spencers are on their way.”
“Already here.”
“Perfect.”
The words too perfect whispered somewhere in the back of her head, but she pushed the superstition aside. Nothing could be too perfect for a sweet girl like Pemberly Adams. She even had the perfect step-brother, didn’t she?
And the devil was back…
CHAPTER FOUR
That glorious sports car turned onto the drive.
Mal had to give him credit. He was taking the now-slick causeway very slowly, which was pretty smart and fairly rare for an out-of-towner. Most newcomers thought of Utah snow as pretty and powdery. Few gave it the respect it deserved. Even locals, until they’d seen a dozen cars slide off the road during the first big storm of the year, forgot the pretty stuff is dangerous. And sliding off a causeway and into the lake would be deadly.
This time, thankfully, the car went around the side of the building, to park in the back. If it were anyone else, she’d ask them, nicely, to take their car back to the parking lot, that the caterers were going to need the limited space in the rear, around four o’clock. But she didn’t want to mar her moment of glory with an argument. And it was going to be her moment of glory. The moment she’d waited two weeks for, the moment Big Brother had to pick his jaw up off the ground and beg her forgiveness for doubting her.
It was going to be…well, perfect.
She wandered back to the kitchens. The doors were probably locked and he’d be forced to knock. Walking all the way around the lodge, in the snow and slush would damage his shoes. She peeked outside. With tinted windows, she couldn’t tell if his car was empty or not, so she waited. She would have liked to peel her eyes away from that driver’s side door, but she just couldn’t do it. She felt like she was in Junior High School again, waiting for the cute basketball players to get off the bus, just so she could drool on herself. She even felt a silly thrill knowing his car was parked next to hers.
Maybe London was right. Maybe some old maid body-clock had struck some significant hour and she was going to explode.
A whistle rang out in the ballroom. Her first impulse was to hurry out to greet him, to be there when he scraped his chin off the floor and folded his tongue back in his mouth like a cartoon character. But she couldn’t seem to move her feet. She was terrified. It didn’t matter that he’d whistled. It didn’t matter that she knew, without a doubt, that he’d be pleased with everything. That moment of glory didn’t matter.
Then it struck her —it wasn’t the flowers she wanted him to like. It was her. What if he didn’t really like her?
In all her years as a florist, starting out as a delivery driver in high school, she had never once cried in the middle of a job. Afterwards, fine. Plenty of times. But never when a client was around, never until after she was back in a van and headed home. But this might be the first.
Tears gathered in her head and started looking for a place to leak.
And it made her mad—mad at herself, but still mad. She took a deep breath and forced it out her nose. Then she did it again.
Better.
He filled the kitchen doorway, then just stood there, speechless, but his mouth wasn’t hanging open, unfortunately. He was obviously waiting for her to speak first, but she wasn’t going to move until he at least paid her a compliment. She’d worked her butt off. She was pretty sure she deserved it.
“Have you a towel?” he said.
“A towel?” Was he setting her up for a punch line? What was he going to do, weep over the beauty of it all?
“I tried to be careful, but I seem to have dripped in your foyer.”
Foy-yay. Heaven help her, if he was going to speak with that British accent again, she was going to be drooling for real.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it. There is a closet, just inside the entrance,” she was not going to call it a foy-yay, “and it’s full of clean towels so I can dry the guests’ shoes as they come inside.”
“You will not.” His jaw showed the first sign of hang-age.
She smiled. “There will be a doorman. And yes, I will be drying shoes. Between putting out fires, of course. Sometimes, the contingency plan is me.” She buried her hands in her apron, out of habit, then she pulled them out and folded them instead. “I won’t be dressed like this, though. I brought a change of clothes.”
He started walking toward her. “Can’t one of your…” he waved a hand around, “lads do it? Or that London woman?”
“All my lads have been sent back down the mountain. And London is manning the parking lot.” She made her eyebrows jump. “My wedding. I get to stay inside.”
As always, her words seemed to make no difference to him. He kept coming toward her, slowly, with no signs of stopping. She was already backed up against the counter with boxes of delicate pastries behind her. But she thought of something that should get his attention.
“Aren’t you going to compliment the flowers?”
He smiled that vague smile of his, but he only stopped when there was no more space between them. He gently took a hold of her arms and uncrossed them. Then he took her hands in his. “I would much rather compliment the hands that arranged them all.” He lifted her right hand and kissed the back of it, looking her in the eye while he did it, thank goodness, so he didn’t notice the green stem slime under her nails. Then he took her left hand, turned it over, and kissed the center of her palm. She felt her own jaw heading for the floor, but stopped it in time.
“Well,” she laughed, with little breath behind it. “You’re going to be kissing a lot of hands, then. Because I didn’t do this all alone. Most of it was done in refrigerated trucks, by five more designers. Over the past three days. I didn’t just whip all these designs out this morning.”
“Then I lied,” he said, still smiling. “I don’t wish to kiss all the hands. Just yours.”
Mal quickly curled her dirty fingernails into her palms and pulled them from his grasp, wondering if she might be able to go the rest of the night without washing her hands, or at least that one palm. Then she buried them back in her front apron pocket. She didn’t care how it made her look. There were tools in there. A knife at least. And at the moment, she felt like she might need it, if only to feel a little prepared. After all, there had to be a catch. There was no way a man like Bennett St. John would be interested in kissing her, let alone her hands. It was just too fairy-tale-esque.
Or maybe he was just distracting her from the fact that he hadn’t paid the balance of his bill. Maybe he didn’t intend to.
He took a step back and held up his hands. “Someone should warn you, Miss Mayhue, that you possess an impressively expressive face. If I were to guess, you were just thinking something terribly unkind about me. So pray, allow me to defend myself, which I can do only if you tell me how I have offended.”
Mal took a second to absorb what he’d said, then tried to keep her face blank so he didn’t read anything else on her face. Maybe he knew, from their first meeting, how he made her heart race. Maybe that’s why he came into the kitchen, to see if he could do it again.
She pasted on her professional smile. “I’m sorry. I just realized we haven’t received payment for the balance of your bill, so I wondered…” If you were a slime ball who planned to leave sweet Pemberly with the debt.
His nostrils flared and his eyebrows lowered like two dark axes. She would have stepped back if she could have.
“Miss Mayhue,” he said icily. “I apologize for the misunderstanding. I assumed you would be charging the entire balance to the charge card number you were given. If my sister received a bill for the balance, she forgot to mention it to me. If you give me your information, I can have the funds transferred directly to your account in a matter of moments.”
Mal refused to be embarrassed, even though it was her own fault for not bringing it up before the wedding day. She’d just been too busy to worry about it, assuming Pem or one of her family would be dropping by with the balance. And even then, that balance might have changed depending on what happened with the weather, if they ended up using the Snow Cats, or not using something else.
“Give me just a minute,” she said, then pulled out her phone.
He dipped his chin, spun on his heels, and left the kitchen.
She called to see if anyone had returned to the shop yet. The donut chick had taken a load of worker bees down over an hour before.
“Ivy and Stone, how may I help you?”
One of the girls had picked up. Mal had her try to run the balance due on the card number on file. It went through. She almost wished it hadn’t, that she’d be vindicated. But she would have been screwed too. That payment meant that Ivy and Stone could go on.
She made her way down the side hall, under the cream ribbon banner, and into the entrance. Better to clean up the drips before they dried and made a mark, she rationalized. She pulled a basket from the closet. It was full of small dark towels that had been nicely rolled and placed in the basket weeks ago—contingency plan 14.
There was one small drip still visible, but she rubbed the hell out of it.
She left the basket next to the rug, at the ready but not in anyone’s way, then she went into the ballroom to apologize. 007 stood at the far window, looking out over the lake, or at least, where the lake should be. Huge snowflakes, the size of golf balls, fell so fast it looked like white rain. The lake was just a grey shadow beyond. Since Mal could do nothing more than she was already doing, with clearing the roads and making damned sure guests could get to the Lodge, she wasn’t going to worry until she had to.
He didn’t turn as she approached.
“I apologize,” she said. “I just had one of my girls put the balance on your credit card. It went through just fine.”
He stood there, like he hadn’t heard a word, so she turned to walk away.
“I was just thinking,” he said, still facing the window. “I suspect this had nothing at all to do with the money.” He turned then and watched her face.
She was dying to know what he saw there, since he was dead wrong. It was about the money.
She shrugged. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. I could be wrong, of course.” He grinned to one side of his mouth. “I have been wrong before, though I can’t really remember…”
“I get it.” She rolled her eyes. “You’re brilliant, never wrong. And gorgeous. And rich—”
“And you can’t believe I would kiss you, or your profoundly talented-but-green hands, unless I had an ulterior motive.”
She laughed. “So, you are familiar with the real world. Imagine that.”
He stormed toward her and she stopped laughing. He took her hand and pulled her forward, then wrapped his other hand around her waist, and pulled her closer. Her dirty apron pressed up against Armani, but the damage was done. Nothing could be saved by her pushing away from him now.
“Why do you Americans think it such a virtue to be self-deprecating? Do you think humility is attractive? I liked you much better when you were so sure of your abilities, so quick to call me out.”
She shook her head and sighed. He couldn’t really mean it, that she’d impressed him. But she knew one way to test it.
“Ass hat,” she hissed.
He leaned forward and kissed her hard, as if she’d said kiss me, instead of ass hat. And she would have laughed if she weren’t otherwise occupied. This was no tender kiss of magnet meeting magnet with no power to pull away. This was the kind of kiss she’d dreamt of for two weeks. The kind of kiss that, thanks to her insecurities, was always followed by something horrible happening. It was so close to her nightmares, in fact, she started worrying and pulled back.
They stood there, staring at each other. Both of them breathing hard like they'd been racing around the room. And that's when it happened. The world moved under her feet.
She might have even wondered, for a split second, if that's what it felt like to fall in love. The look on his face —the touch of wonder, surprise, then curiosity —might have meant he'd thought the same thing...if it hadn't been for the boom.
A second later, the lights went out. There was still plenty of daylight coming in the windows, but the difference was clear. And the snowflake lights were gone from the ceiling.
“What the devil was that? An avalanche?” He took her arm like he thought she might need a little support or something while they hurried to the windowed doors in the entry.
“If it was an avalanche,” she said as she thought it through, “there would have been a rumble first, not just a boom. Must have been a power pole. But don't worry. I've got that covered. I have a generator out there for the tent and another for the lodge. The ballroom was going to have primarily candlelight anyway.”
The snowfall made it impossible to see the end of the causeway, but something was definitely going on down there.