“So, you wanted that dress,” he said. “Who’s the groom?”
“Who’s your bride?” she flung back.
He chortled. “You’re not getting married. You don’t even have an engagement ring on.”
“Whether I’m getting married or not, I certainly have no intention of sharing my personal life with you.”
“What happened? Your momma and daddy said you should be married by now? And you’re feeling blue? Gotta daydream instead?”
“Oh, shut up,” she said, and strode away. She willed her eyes not to flood with tears. Pierre was perceptive, sadly. And he was also a … a punk. She’d never called a grown man a punk before, but he was, and he wasn’t worth her tears.
He came running after her. “I bought this dress as a business investment. You wanted it so you could pine over it in your closet. Believe me, Greer, the whole audience could tell.”
“I don’t know how you stay in business with your mean attitude.”
“My business is thriving.” He was like a bulldog. “Don’t you think it’s odd that the co-owner of a matchmaking agency can’t even find someone to marry, especially when she says she believes in love all over your marketing materials? What does that say about Two Love Lane’s algorithms? And your hypocrisy?”
His words stung, but she wouldn’t let him win. “I’m sorry the algorithms didn’t work for you. It doesn’t mean they haven’t worked time and time again for other people. And I do believe in love. I’m not going to marry someone just to get married, though.”
She’d learned the best way to deal with small people like Pierre was to treat them like recalcitrant children, with pity and patience.
His little face turned red. “Your algorithms didn’t work for me because y’all messed up. Don’t blame me.”
“I’m not,” she said. “We told you they’re really good but not a hundred-percent perfect, and sometimes we can’t make matches, whether we use those or old-fashioned hunches. It doesn’t mean something is wrong with you, although if you want the truth, which I’ve told you before, you refused to listen to any of our coaching advice. I think that stubbornness figured into the outcome. Now please leave me alone.” She kept walking.
“I lied, Greer,” he called after her in his tiny voice.
She turned around. “About what?”
“About why I bought Royal Bliss.”
She had to strain to hear his Pekingese-sized voice.
“It’s not an investment,” he said, his forehead shiny with sweat. “I bought it so you couldn’t have it. I could tell how much you wanted it.”
She stood still and took in what he was saying. “You must hate me a lot.”
“I don’t give a hoot about you.” The outrageous L.A. chick came up and put her arm around his waist. She gloated Greer’s way. “I’m going to make sure some bride in Charleston gets it,” he said.
Greer intentionally loosened her grip on her purse strap. She took time to inhale slowly. “It’s been eighteen months since we last tried to help you. You’ve been stewing on this ever since?”
“Revenge is a dish—”
“Best served cold,” she finished saying with him. “Do you watch a lot of bad TV?”
“No.” He was so damned literal.
“I’m trying to say I get it,” she said. “You have the dress. Your revenge is done.”
But he didn’t hear that last part. When she looked back at him, he was strutting away with his lady friend.
“Whatever, Pierre.” Greer’s day so far had not gone well. She needed to get home. On Liberty Street, she called the girls in California and told them about her old boyfriend tying the knot.
“Wesley?” Miss Thing said into the phone’s speaker.
“Yes,” she said back.
There was a long silence.
“Hello? You don’t think I should have married him, too, do you? He was the wrong guy for me. Hello?”
“We’re still here, and no, we don’t think that!” said Macy, the only native Charlestonian among them. She was also a major player on the local social scene. “I’m taking you off speaker, if you don’t mind. It’s hard to hear. We’re in line to get into the studio, and the crowd is stirred up.”
“How exciting,” Greer said, but she really only felt a pang of guilt for not going.
“Look on the bright side,” Macy said, her Lowcountry drawl a little clearer and louder off speaker, “maybe with Wesley finally off the market, they’ll be nice to you back home again.”
“No, my mom is really upset.” Greer was passing college dorms on both sides of Calhoun Street. “But maybe eventually people back home will stop asking me why I dumped the finest man ever to walk the streets of Waterloo.”
“I hope so, sweetie,” said Macy. “That’s so rude and unfair to you.”
“His fiancée is so much more compatible with him, too. They’re both surgeons.”
“Love is crazy,” said Macy. “Look at me and Deacon! Who’d have thought I’d ever marry a Yankee from New York City?”
“True.” Greer knew Macy had fought her attraction to Deacon tooth and nail. He’d been her client at Two Love Lane, after all, and Macy was supposed to set him up with other women, not herself.
“I’m so glad you followed your gut with Wesley,” Macy said. “It freed him up to find his true soul mate. And you, yours. Someday.”
That wasn’t going to happen. Greer had tried to convince herself she was in love once. Who could say she wouldn’t do it again? She couldn’t tell her best friends that she’d wondered if there was something inherently wrong with her, like a chip missing in her heart.
But deep inside, she knew that was silly. Her heart was in fine shape. Wesley had simply been the wrong man for her. “It’s possible I’ll run into them someday, and if I do, I’ll be very happy for them. Very, very happy.”
“Good,” said Macy. “I can tell you’re worried that I don’t believe you, but I do. I can also tell you think you’ll be old and shrunken and alone, but you won’t. I promise.”
“You really think?” Greer loved how Macy always understood her.
“I know,” said Macy, and handed the phone off to Ella.
“Stop worrying about what your mother thinks,” Ella said in her Bronx accent. She also always seemed to know what Greer was thinking.
“I try not to,” she said.
“I know it’s hard. My own mother is very involved with all of us Mancini girls. She treats us like we’re still twelve. But I just let it roll off my back. Some of my sisters can’t.”
“What’s your secret?”
“I don’t know,” said Ella. “Once I figure it out, I’ll tell you. In the meantime, treat yourself like a princess.”
“I’ll try.”
And then Greer got to talk to Miss Thing, who had an obsession with Queen Elizabeth II and tried to dress like her. She’d grown up in the tiny town of Kettle Knob, North Carolina, up in the mountains near Asheville, before arriving in Charleston in her late twenties. They were only babies when she started cooking and cleaning at the Sottile House, a dormitory on the College of Charleston campus where they would all later meet. She bolstered Greer’s spirits with her excitement about being in California and striking their Price Is Right adventure off her bucket list. “We’re having a wunnerful time,” she said. “Just wunnerful.”
Oh, dear. That was Miss Thing’s tequila voice.
“I hope one of you gets onstage and wins something,” Greer said, at the corner of Meeting and Calhoun, one of the busiest intersections in Charleston.
Miss Thing responded with a flurry of talk that Greer didn’t comprehend in the slightest because on the other side of the street she saw Wesley—and his fiancée.
She was supposed to run into them back home in Waterloo, a sixteen-hour drive and a thousand miles away. Not here in Charleston.
And they were with the man in the gray plaid blazer.
CHAPTER TWO
On the bustling corner,
Greer was riveted to the sidewalk. “I have to go,” she said to Miss Thing. “I’m getting another call.” She hung up the phone while Miss Thing was talking about winning an RV. It was her dearest hope, she was saying.
But Greer already knew that—Miss Thing said it every time she watched The Price Is Right, and she had about ten other dearest hopes, too, including owning a quilted pink Chanel bag and visiting the Great Wall of China. Meanwhile, something big and horrible was happening, and, and …
A woman with a camera around her neck glanced over at her. “Are you okay? Your face is really red. Maybe you need some water.”
“I’m fine, but thank you for telling me.”
“Charleston’s almost too much,” the woman said. “Everyone has window boxes. And dogs that look like they get regular baths. You notice that?”
“Yes.” Greer threw her a semblance of a smile. “And sun tea brewed in large mason jars in the garden.”
The camera lady gave her a quick once-over. “You live here?”
“Yep.”
“I’d guess you were from somewhere else.” The woman reached over her camera, into her purse, and pulled out her phone.
“Wait—” Greer said. “You mean my accent?”
Her talkative fellow pedestrian turned her back.
“Is it my accent?” Greer had to know.
The woman whipped around, the phone to her ear. “Just your vibe.” And she turned back to her phone call.
No, no, no. Not that being from Wisconsin wasn’t wonderful, and near and dear to Greer’s heart, but she had to be different since she saw Wesley last. Since she’d broken up with him, she’d tried her best to change in exciting, good ways just to prove she could to everyone back home. She hadn’t spiraled downhill after dumping the greatest guy in Waterloo. She’d blossomed!
Unless she’d been fooling herself.…
She decided to look down at her phone. She’d also keep an eye on the other pedestrians’ feet and follow them when the stop-n-go light turned green (she hadn’t called it that since she’d left Waterloo). She would walk right past her ex and his new woman, and the man in the plaid blazer.
It was time. Feet moved. Instinct made her look up—she was entering a busy intersection, after all. But as soon as she got her bearings—and saw that apparently the trio had not seen her—she looked down again. Charleston was one of the most romantic destinations in the world, but it was small enough that a chance meeting with an old love interest was not out of the question. Wesley had to have known that.
Why was he here anyway?
And why was he talking to the man in the plaid blazer? Had that guy known who she was at the auction? Had he followed her there?
Nothing made any sense.
“Hello,” the man in plaid said.
Greer thought of pub crawls, soccer matches, the Beatles, and a Downton Abbey–style chaise lounge upon which they both were entangled, his fingers pulling slowly at her laced-up bodice. She looked up from the asphalt and white painted crosswalk line.
The Englishman wore a pleasant, curious expression. “Fancy meeting you again,” he said, stopping. “So soon.”
She paused, too. “In the middle of a busy intersection this time.” She widened her eyes in an effort at a comic touch. Wesley and his fiancée were still crossing the street and talking to each other. Cars and trucks hovered mere feet away, engines growling.
“Bye,” she said, and took off.
There. She’d been nice enough. On to the rest of her life—which suddenly loomed like a barren desert with a lone tumbleweed skirting across the dunes.
But “Greer!” she heard next. It was Wesley’s voice. She had just stepped up onto the sidewalk, too. For a brief second, she shut her eyes. The desert was gone, but nothing came to replace it. Nothing. That was what she felt around Wesley.
She opened her eyes again. Turned slowly. Made eye contact with the lover and friend she’d ultimately rejected as a life partner. He was now walking toward her, his fiancée’s hand held firmly in his own. She was all silken black hair, cheekbones, and chic street style.
Greer felt instantly plain and uninteresting, which she never had before. In high school she’d been in a math class with a future Miss Jefferson County, who told Greer she should enter pageants because brainy beauty queens were trending, even if she was flat-chested and not great with makeup. And then in college, she’d won an award in Web site design for a Charleston-based fashionista who’d told her she looked just like Scarlett Johansson if Scarlett Johannson had glasses, a slightly different nose, and that squiggle perpetually on Greer’s forehead from thinking so much.
No. She’d never felt drab. But now she did.
The man in plaid came with the smiling couple.
“I can’t believe it!” Wesley said.
The sea breeze wafting down Calhoun Street from the harbor dwindled to nothing. Greer could feel the heat and humidity curl her hair on her neck. The last thing she wanted was for Wesley to see her sweat.
“Wesley,” she said. “Wow. What are you doing here?” She backed up a few steps so they could all get away from the corner. Across the street, some hotel dwellers peered down at the crowded sidewalk filled with tourists and locals getting where they had to go. Greer’s come-to-Jesus meeting with Wesley wasn’t going to be private in the least.
The man in the plaid blazer stuck his hands in his jeans pockets. “You know each other?” he asked, in a perfectly innocent voice.
Wesley smiled the same way he had when he was sixteen and they’d go to the skating rink and skate holding hands. “Serena, Ford, I’d like you to meet an old friend, Greer Jones. Greer, this is my fiancée, Serena. And Ford’s a friend.”
Greer’s hands and feet buzzed with mortification. “Hello,” she said, looking back and forth between Serena and the man she could now give a name.
“We’ve met,” Ford said slowly, “in a way.”
“Oh?” said Wesley.
“At an auction,” Greer said. “A few minutes ago, actually.”
“We almost won a dress together,” Ford said.
“We didn’t stand a chance,” said Greer. “Someone else was determined to get it.” She wouldn’t bother explaining more than that.
“Oh my gosh, what an adventure!” Serena sounded genuinely excited.
Greer hadn’t expected her to be so friendly. Or to sound like a Valley Girl from Clueless. It wasn’t a bad thing. Just took her off guard. She never imagined serious Wesley being with someone like that.
“It’s nice to meet you, Serena,” she said, and felt a little more herself. “In fact, congratulations. I saw on Facebook—” And then realized she might look like a stalker. She wasn’t friends with Wesley. But friends had posted pictures of an engagement party.
“Of course, you’d have seen,” Wesley finished for her. “Helen gave us a party.” Helen was a mutual friend in Waterloo. They’d all graduated high school together. “Serena and I are getting married this summer.”
Serena held out her left hand. A sparkling diamond surrounded by sapphires sat there.
No freaking way.
It was the engagement ring Wesley had picked out for Greer. She would never forget the day he’d offered it to her in its pretty little velvet box. She instantly felt sorry for Serena. And it was the first time she could justifiably criticize Wesley—how selfish of him. How utterly insensitive. She shot him a look. She couldn’t help herself.
His pupils widened.
“I know it was originally meant for you, Greer,” Serena said, her voice full of concern. “I hope you won’t mind.”
She knew?
“I loved it so much,” Serena continued over the sound of cars and trucks streaming by, “I told Wesley not to get a different one. Believe me, he tried. He’s not the type of guy to pawn a used ring off on the woman he’s going to marry.”
“She’s into re-purposing.” Wesley shrugged. His ears were slightly pink. But he exchanged a loving look with Seren
a. She was obviously the Girl Who Made Everything Easy. “I just had to get it resized down a notch.”
Of course. Serena was model slender.
“Are you okay about it?” Serena asked. “I just love it so much.” She got little tears in her eyes.
Wesley hugged her shoulder.
“No, no—please, don’t cry—it’s fine!” Greer said. And though this encounter was getting weirder by the second, she wasn’t lying. “I-I hope you enjoy it.” She smiled and nodded a few times. Adjusted her purse.
“Oh, I will,” Serena said, and beamed.
Wesley beamed, too.
Let them beam. The truth was, that ring had never been Greer’s style.
“It was great to see you, Wesley,” said Greer. “And to meet you, Serena.” She looked at Ford. “Nice to run into you again.”
“Likewise,” he said, a gleam in his eye.
She could tell he was reading her BS meter, and yes, it was off the charts. She was doing her best to be civilized, and sometimes you simply had to play a part.
“Ford’s an artist,” Serena said in her charmingly persuasive manner, which made it impossible for Greer to take off. “We met when he painted my portrait.”
“Oh.” She should have known Ford was an artist. He was very much alive, humming with awareness. Sensual. She didn’t know how she knew that last part. She was mad she hadn’t guessed he was a creative type when she’d done her Two Love Lane scope-out at the auction.
“I’d just graduated from a boarding school in London,” Serena continued, “and my mother insisted on the portrait. I told her I’d do it if I could choose the painter.”
She loved to talk, it seemed. But she was so warm and friendly, who wouldn’t listen?
“I honestly thought the whole experience of posing for a portrait would be awful,” Serena went on, “but Ford kept me entertained.”
“She’d never met a true English curmudgeon,” Ford said, “or stood still that long.”
“You’re not a curmudgeon,” Serena insisted. “Look how well you’ve handled yourself lately.”
Lately?
“That’s her way of saying she’s shocked I’m out of bed, dressed, and sober.” Ford’s dry delivery made Wesley laugh. Greer, too. She couldn’t help it.
A Wedding At Two Love Lane Page 3