To Have And To Hold: The Wedding Belles Book 1

by Lauren Layne

  Seth glanced out of the corner of his eye at Brooke’s profile. Noted the way her cheeks were a touch pinker than before, her breath a bit shallow.

  Brooke cleared her throat and glanced down at the minimal space between them. “You’re on my coat.”

  Seth glanced down, and sure enough he was sitting on her coat, which in turn was holding her captive against his side. “Right,” he said gruffly. “Sorry.”

  Even as he said it, they both stayed perfectly still. Seth had to order his body to cooperate, shifting slightly so she could pull away, and the second she did, he felt the urge to yank her back again. To pull her to him, to kiss that full bottom lip, maybe pull her up and over him so she was straddling him, and just—

  The privacy screen separating them from Dex, his longtime driver, came down slightly. “Pardon the interruption, Mr. Tyler. I didn’t get the address of where we were heading.”

  “Oh!” Brooke said, fumbling with her book. “Let me get that for you.”

  “The Miller Museum,” Seth interrupted.

  Dex nodded. “Very good, sir. Traffic’s especially bad today. A concert at Times Square, some rally in the park, plus construction on Third. Might take us a while.”

  “Wonderful,” Brooke muttered as she typed something on her phone.

  Dex slid the privacy screen back into place, and Seth almost wished he’d asked the chauffeur to leave it as is so he wouldn’t be tempted by the blonde beside him.

  His grand plan of getting close to her with the hope of talking her into doing some digging on Neil and Maya may not have been one of his best. He could barely think around the woman, much less speak coherently.

  Hardly like him.

  Seth tapped his fingers slowly on the leather seat beside him, forcing himself to look out the window instead of at her.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her slide her phone into her bag, and was surprised when she shifted her body around to face him. She didn’t even try to hide the fact that she was studying him. He half expected her to start jotting notes about him in her little book.

  Uptight.

  Control freak.

  Unlikable.

  He clenched his jaw, staring out at the slowly passing city before he gave in and looked over at her. “You’re staring.”

  She shrugged, unapologetic. “You’ve been to the Miller Museum before?”

  He lifted a shoulder. “Once or twice.”

  “Your sister said she’d never been.”

  He gave her a look. “Do you do everything with your siblings?”

  “I don’t have any siblings.”

  “Ah.”

  She rolled her eyes at that. “Ah, what?”

  “Ah, the only-child thing. Explains the pampered-princess bit you have going on.”

  “Just like you being a big brother explains the overbearing thing you’ve got going on?”

  He shrugged, unperturbed by the accusation. “I’m not going to apologize for wanting what’s best for Maya.”

  “Uh-huh. So the only reason you’re tagging along with wedding-planning tasks that you clearly despise is because she asked you to?”

  Seth narrowed his eyes at the sweetness in her tone. “It’s like I told you before: Maya doesn’t have a mom or sister or father to do this with her.”

  “But she has Neil.”

  Seth couldn’t stop his grimace, and now it was Brooke’s turn to narrow her eyes. “That’s why you’re really getting all up in this business, isn’t it? You don’t trust Neil.”

  Seth drummed his fingers more rapidly against the seat in irritation, suddenly far more annoyed with the traffic than he had been a few moments earlier.

  This was his chance to convince Brooke to help him, to explain that he just had a feeling Neil was bad news and wanted her help in confirming that before his sister committed herself to a totally untrustworthy jerk—or worse.

  He chose his words carefully. “What do you think of him?”

  Brooke scrunched her nose. “Of Neil?”

  He nodded.

  “He seems to make Maya very happy.”

  The words rolled right off her tongue, sweet and cheerful, and Seth recognized it immediately for what it was.

  A line.

  “Tell me something,” he said, turning more fully toward her. “Do you care even a little bit about whether the people you’re marrying off are right for each other? Or is it all about the check at the end of the day?”

  It was an insulting question, and as expected, her placid smile disappeared altogether, before reappearing, this time with an edge. “Oh, come now, Mr. Tyler. It’s never only about the check. It’s also about the write-up in all the biggest bridal magazines.”

  She batted her eyelashes as she said it, and though her tone was thick with disdain and sarcasm, Seth couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t a bit of truth there. He’d seen the Wedding Belles’ office. Knew enough of their reputation to know that Brooke and the women she worked with weren’t in this as a hobby. It was their career.

  They might like what they did, but there was ambition there, too. A pride in what they did, and did well, from the looks of it.

  Normally he’d have admired it.

  But since Brooke’s ambition would very likely see his sister marrying the wrong man, he wasn’t about to applaud her for having lofty career goals.

  “There’s something you should know before we go any further,” he said, his eyes locked on hers.

  “I can hardly wait to hear it. You sure you don’t want to wait until we’re out of the car? Maybe you can crowd me against a kitchen counter again and invade my personal space?”

  Seth’s fist clenched at the memory her jab evoked—remembered just how good it had felt to lean into her, how satisfying it had been to watch her bright blue eyes go dark and stormy with want. And she did want him. She may be fighting it just as readily as he was, but there was heat between them.

  A heat that was once again threatening to burn him. To burn both of them.

  “I can crowd you in here, too, if you want,” he said, flicking his eyes meaningfully at the privacy screen that prevented Dex from having the slightest clue as to what was happening back here.

  Brooke made a slight sniffing noise. “Do these moves usually work for you? Does threatening to manhandle women turn them on?”

  His eyes locked on her lips. “Sometimes. Only when they like to be handled.”

  Brooke’s expression remained unchanged, but he could have sworn he saw a slight twitch of her hand, as though she was itching to pull him toward her just as much as he wanted to haul her across his lap and lose himself in that perfect pink pout, to slip his hands under that fussy sweater to where he just knew she’d be warm and soft.

  A tense moment stretched between them before she cleared her throat and lifted an eyebrow. “You were saying there’s something I should know?”

  Right. Right.

  “I don’t think Neil Garrett is the right man for my sister,” he said quietly.

  “Well that comes as a huge surprise. It wasn’t at all obvious from the way you glower at him every chance you get.”

  “I just don’t want to see her get taken advantage of and make a mistake.”

  Brooke’s eyes softened slightly. “Of course you don’t. But Maya’s, what, twenty-six? Twenty-seven? Plenty old enough to be making her own decisions.”

  “I realize that. I just want her to make her decisions with all of the facts.”

  She shook her head in confusion. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I think the Neil that Maya thinks she’s in love with isn’t the real man. Or at least not all of the man. He’s hiding something, and I need to figure out what it is before he traps her into a marriage.”

  For a moment something awful and real flashed across her face—as though his comment struck a raw nerve. But then she merely shook her head and let her eyes go perfectly blank as the car finally came to a stop outside the Miller Museum.


  He held her eyes as he waited for Dex to come around to open the door. “Do we have an understanding, Ms. Baldwin?”

  She blinked. “Seriously? No, we don’t have an understanding. On the one hand, you’re hiring me to plan a wedding—not only that, you’re actively participating in the planning. On the other hand, you’re telling me you don’t intend to let the wedding actually happen. What exactly is it I’m supposed to do with that information?”

  “Stay out of my way,” he said, without hesitation. “Let me do what I do best.”

  “Which is what?” she said as the door opened, the rush of winter air providing a merciful reprieve from the building heat between them. “Controlling everything around you?”

  He lifted a shoulder. “Pretty much.” When I can.

  She rolled her eyes and started to scoot toward the door, but he used his body to block hers, since he was closest to the curb.

  “Brooke.”

  She paused and looked at him, exasperated. “What?”

  “Stay out of my way,” he repeated.

  “Under one condition,” she said with a wide, fake smile.

  He narrowed his eyes and waited.

  “I’ll stay out of your way, big brother”—Brooke reached a hand up to his cheek, patted it with a condescending familiarity—“if you stay out of mine.”

  Chapter Eight

  AFTER SPENDING A COUPLE more hours with the happy couple and the not-so-happy brother, Brooke was more certain than ever that Seth was completely off base about his sister’s fiancé.

  Sure, Neil had been just a bit pushy at their first stop about wanting a large wedding, but the second he’d realized that Maya hadn’t wanted that, he’d backed off completely. In fact, from what Brooke had seen so far, Neil Garrett might be perhaps the ideal groom. And she would know, having been in the business for a while and encountering virtually every type of groom out there. Generally speaking, they could be grouped into three main categories:

  The passive-aggressive nightmares who swore up and down that they had zero opinions, that the bride could pick whatever made her happy, only to wait until after the DJ had been selected to announce they wanted a live band, or until after the red velvet cake had been selected to announce they wanted chocolate, and so on.

  The guys who actually had zero opinions and had to be physically dragged to their suit fittings and rehearsal walk-throughs.

  The more forward-thinking dudes who cared as much as—or more than—the brides about the flowers, who had strong feelings on crab cakes versus mini tartlets, and who had their personal tailor working on their wedding tux even before they’d bought the ring. These ones often cried.

  From what Brooke could tell, Neil didn’t fit into any of these. He demonstrated that he cared, in that he provided input when explicitly asked, but he also seemed to be more concerned with what Maya wanted. He was polite and friendly, easygoing, and most important, completely smitten with Maya.

  He seemed . . . decent.

  If Maya did have a guy problem, it wasn’t on the romantic front.

  On the sibling front, however, Maya had a serious issue to contend with. Seth alternated between silent and glaring and pissy and opinionated. If one place was too small, the other was too large. If one was too fussy, the next was deemed pedestrian. The only good news about the man being a complete ass was that he was making it very easy for Brooke to move past whatever this weird thing was between them. But she couldn’t ignore the effect he was having on her bride, whose smile was growing more strained by the minute, or her groom, whose skin had taken on a distinctly pale pallor. By the time they were on their third and final venue of the day, it had become clear that they couldn’t keep going like this.

  Seth, for his part, seemed completely unfazed by the fact that he was the storm cloud on an otherwise sunny occasion, and he walked a few paces behind them, typing distractedly on his phone while Maya quietly conceded that maybe they needed to call it a day.

  Brooke walked Maya and Neil through the lobby of the lavish Biltmore Hotel that had been one of the front-runners for a possible reception site, assuring the distraught bride that it was only the first day and that they would of course find the perfect venue.

  She didn’t add that they’d need to leave the overbearing big brother behind in order to do so, but that wasn’t Maya’s problem to deal with. People like the Tylers paid companies like the Wedding Belles a premium not only to identify problems such as this one but to solve them.

  Although, Brooke had to admit, this particular problem was trickier than most—that the person who was paying her to solve problems was, in fact, the problem.

  But she wasn’t worried. She wasn’t one of the best wedding planners in the country for nothing.

  It was time to prove herself worthy of that title.

  The dejected group filed outside and prepared to separate, Seth staying behind in the lobby to finish up whatever apparently super-important call had his phone attached to him like a third ear. Acting on instinct, Brooke pulled Maya into a quick hug before the other woman could slip into her waiting town car. “I’ll talk to him,” she whispered.

  Maya didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “He means well,” she said to Brooke in a hushed tone. “Seth’s just so used to controlling everything, and now that Daddy’s not here, he thinks he has to be my protector and my brain, and . . . I love him to death, but he’s driving me crazy.”

  Brooke squeezed her tighter before pulling back and giving Maya a reassuring smile. “He loves you to death, too. But maybe I can convince him to show his love in other ways than all this hovering.”

  “Yes, please,” Maya said gratefully, grabbing Brooke’s hands. “Let’s find a way to make him feel involved without having him be so . . .”

  “Involved?” Brooke rejoined with a knowing smile.

  Maya nodded. “Exactly.”

  Neil came up beside them, sliding an arm around Maya’s waist and kissing the side of her head tenderly. “Let me take you to an early dinner?”

  Maya smiled up at him gratefully and nodded, and Brooke’s heart twisted just a little in jealousy. Yes, she was a very self-assured woman. Yes, she could take care of herself, support herself, the whole enchilada, but sometimes after a long day when you were aching, it was nice to know that someone else was there. To share a cocktail with and let the day’s tensions fade away.

  She missed that.

  “Maya!”

  Brooke glanced over to see an unfamiliar man headed their way, but from the way Maya’s face lit up, it was obvious she knew him.

  “Grant!” She rushed toward the man and wrapped both arms around his waist in a friendly hug. Brooke appraised the man with interest—he was handsome, in an easy, likable sort of way. He was unusually tall, but carried his height well, his movements smooth and easy as though he was accustomed to maneuvering all six-plus feet in whichever way he pleased. He had medium-brown hair that Brooke imagined would glint a bit red in the sunlight, warm whisky-colored eyes with thick lashes, and a good smile.

  A great smile, Brooke amended as he grinned down at Maya.

  Maya returned the happy smile. “What are you doing here? I haven’t seen you in weeks, and I see you outside a hotel of all places.”

  “I was just on my way home from the office,” he said. “What’s your excuse?”

  “Oh my gosh,” she said, laying a hand on his chest as though it was second nature. “I haven’t seen you in so long, you might not have heard.” Maya reached for Neil’s hand, tugging him forward. “I’m getting married!”

  It was hard to say which man disliked the other more. Neil, for his part, clearly hadn’t missed the easy familiarity with which Grant and Maya greeted one another, and it didn’t seem to be sitting well. And there was no mistaking the flash of agony on Grant’s face at Maya’s pronouncement.

  “Seth told me the good news. Congratulations,” Grant said, his flat tone indicating he was feeling anything but celebratory about Maya’s an
nouncement.

  The men silently shook hands, and the unspoken challenge there was like déjà vu from when Seth and Neil had first met.

  Maya looked at Neil lovingly. “Neil, babe, this is Grant Miller. He’s my brother’s best friend. Well, and one of mine, too. We grew up together, so he’s practically like a second brother.”

  Neil nodded in acknowledgment of this. Grant said nothing.

  Maya finally seemed to realize that something was amiss but was clearly clueless as to how to fix it as she looked helplessly between the two men. Brooke stepped forward and extended a hand to Grant. “Hi there. I’m Brooke Baldwin. The wedding planner.”

  Grant’s smile returned, not quite as bright as it was when he’d seen Maya but friendly nonetheless. “Ah yes. The damned wedding planner. I’ve heard all about you,” he said with a little wink. “Speaking of, where is the magnanimous Seth?”

  Now it was Brooke’s turn to be confused. Seth had talked to his friend about her?

  “He’s on the phone,” Maya said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “As always. Neil and I were just about to grab an early dinner. You should come!”

  “Thanks, but I have plans later,” Grant said, in what Brooke would have bet money was a smooth lie.

  “Ah,” Maya said. “Who’s your latest lady?”

  He clucked her playfully under the chin. “Nobody you know, Miss Nosy.”

  Maya giggled, Neil frowned, and Brooke was suddenly feeling a little bit parched for a drink herself, preferably of the alcoholic variety. There was always drama in the wedding-planning world, but so far the world of Manhattan’s rich and famous had a whole other layer of subtext. She’d always thought the East Coast was made up of a bunch of straight shooters, but so far she’d only seen a whole lot of what people weren’t saying.

  “Shall we get going, sweetie?” Neil said, rudely interrupting Maya’s animated description to Grant of the various venues they’d looked at today.

  She glanced at him, her smile dimming. “Right. You must be starving. You sure you don’t want to tag along, Grant? Or Brooke?” she added politely.

  “Definitely not,” Grant said.