Guns and Roses

by Brennan, Allison; Armstrong, Lori G. ; Tabke, Karin; Causey, Toni McGee; St. Claire, Roxanne; Brown, Josie; Littlefield, Sophie; Griffin, Laura; James, Lorelei; Day, Sylvia

  “We have to talk,” Cam said, holding a straight face as she tried to beat down the hoops. They sprang back and smacked her in the nose and she didn’t know if she should be grateful he didn’t even change expressions or smack him for being so used to her being a klutz. She opted for annoyed, instead, because the cop stare he assumed was his infamous you’re going to listen, whether you like it or not gaze, and she fumed. “And waving guns around inside bridal shops is a distinctive no no, of which, I am pretty damned certain, you are aware.”

  “I have a concealed carry,” she snapped back. As he narrowed his eyes in a challenge, she stared at the silver butterfly pattern of the wallpaper, fascinating stuff, and hedged, “Almost.”

  He cleared his throat and she could feel that stupid cop stare.

  “Fine. It got revoked, but I’m getting it back. Eventually, when they quit being snits about it. It is totally not my fault the Governor keeps putting me on the Homeland Security Terrorist Watch list just because I made him cry.”

  “Three times. In public. And that third time, he wet his pants.”

  She paused for a moment, smiling at the memory. “That one was kinda worth it. Besides, this isn’t your jurisdiction, anyway.”

  “It is when it’s you. I’m on the Governor’s speed dial, now. Fancy that.”

  “Okay, fine.” She threw her hands up. “No more waving guns. I’ll go home peacefully. I’ll pick something out another day.”

  “You’re stalling, Bobbie Faye, and I think I know why.”

  She froze there a moment, the tension hanging between them, fear creeping up her throat, pressing down into her chest. She felt heavier than the world, just then. He was going to say it was because of him—that there were still feelings between them, and she just couldn’t take that right now. She was exhausted and cranky and hormonal and she didn’t want to keep hurting him and feeling like shit about it and she put her hand up to stop him. “No—God, Cam, please. Not now.”

  He chuckled, low, sad. “No, Bobbie Faye, it’s not because of me. I know you’re happy with Trevor.”

  She stopped breathing a second. Stared. He had said it with a perfectly straight face. Without rancor or irony. Without mockage. “Are you dying?” she asked him, and he shook his head, though he wasn’t entirely convincing that she was on the wrong track. “Am I dying?” she asked.

  “Exaggerate much?”

  “Well, you actually said Trevor’s name without, you know, looking as if you’d like to shoot something. Either I’m dying or the world is ending.” She looked down at the hoops. “Or hell just froze over.”

  Cam closed his eyes a moment, opened them again and she could see the earnestness layered over the sorrow. “As much as it pains me to say it—I like the guy. He wasn’t my first choice—” he admitted, shrugging ruefully. “But even I can’t help but see that the two of you are right for each other.”

  If you gathered up all of the shock in the whole world and piled it into that dressing room, it wouldn’t cover an inch of what Bobbie Faye felt. Her head was going to spin clean off her shoulders, and she was wedged into the dressing room, hoops up around her ears, and no place to pass out. She had to look away from him to keep from crying.

  “I’m going to be okay, Ba—” He stopped himself and grimaced. “Bobbie Faye. You’re not my baby, and I’m going to be okay with that.” When she looked back at him, she could see the pain there, but she could also see he was telling the truth. “I didn’t think so, at first. But you said, once, after you’d been able to break up with me—or let me break up with you,” he said, stopping her interruption, “that we were able to stay apart because a life without each other was possible. I didn’t understand that then, but I do now. I’m not ready to date yet, but I can see it, down the line. Someone calm, docile, easily biddable,” he added with a wink, just to make her grin.

  She put her face in her hands to keep the tears at bay. The pain and pressure that had been in her heart, for God knows how long, started easing off, and she hadn’t realized how much she needed this from him. Cam had always been such a huge part of her life.

  “So, you’re stalling,” he said again, “and I know it’s not because of me, and it certainly isn’t because of cold feet in marrying Trevor.” She looked up fast and shook her head to assure him that wasn’t it. “Which made me realize what it was.”

  “I’m not stalling,” she said again, but even she didn’t believe her anymore. She had been stalling this too-real wedding in a very real church. Why? It wasn’t about Cam—as much as it might’ve hurt him, she had been completely certain he’d eventually get past it. She knew him well enough to know that, knew what they’d had—special as it was—wasn’t good for either of them, wasn’t what he ultimately wanted or needed, and he hadn’t been fully in love with her. Oh, he loved her. Sure. But he constantly wanted to change nearly everything about her to keep from being upset with her all of the damned time. That wasn’t real, when you got right down to it.

  “You are stalling,” he said gently, because he knew her well enough to know even she could see it now. “Because it breaks your heart to have to walk down that aisle alone, without your father to give you away.”

  Her voice felt knife-edged, and serrated as she sliced out, “I don’t want Old Man Landry within a thousand yards of that church.” He’d ignored her when she and her siblings had lived in abject poverty. He’d only recently recognized her as his daughter and barely tolerated a truce with her, now.

  “I know. And I wouldn’t let him. He isn’t the right person to walk you down the aisle.” He paused a moment as she looked at him. “I am.”

  She had to put a hand against the dressing room wall to hold herself up. Her legs had just sent a memo: quitting now. “Are you crazy?”

  “Probably. But think about it, Bobbie Faye. You should be walked down the aisle by someone who loves you dearly, by someone you mean the world to. You should be given away—symbolically—to the man you love by someone who knows how special you are. I think, if you’d let me, it’d be a great honor to walk you down the aisle. Would you?”

  He meant it. In that expression, she could see it in his eyes and in his heart.

  And she did what any self-respecting, tough-as-nails woman would do. She burst into tears. Not dainty little oh-look-the-bride-is-sniffling tears; no, these were big, honking sobs, the kind that scare small children and animals and turned her nose red. The kind she’d maybe only cried once or twice in her life.

  “Aw, damn,” Cam muttered, gathering her forward into a hug, and the back of the hoop, now having a smidgeon of room, promptly popped up and smacked her in the back of the head. Which only made her cry harder, snotting on his shirt only as a girlfriend or an ex could do—thoroughly—as he said, “I’m sorry. If you don’t like that idea, we don’t have to do it.”

  “Sundance?” Trevor’s voice asked, quietly, from the door to the dressing area.

  She leapt back. Trevor stood in the doorway, his arms folded, his biceps bulging beneath the black t-shirt that strained across his chest. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, and that stubble, paired with the bohemian wavy hair—long, curly, nearly past his collar—and abetted by the cold glare in his startling blue eyes, gave him the look of a man who had killed, and could do so again. The keen intelligence in his eyes said it could just as easily be Cam who was next and that he knew many ways to hide the body.

  Before she could explain, Cam said, “I asked her if I might have the privilege of walking her down the aisle.”

  Something she couldn’t quite describe passed between the two men—there was an entire conversation going on there, and then a slight nod from Trevor to Cam, an understanding.

  Trevor looked at her, and a grin threatened. “As long as it’s not in that monstrosity masquerading as a dress, we’re good.”

  And she laughed, which immediately turned back into hiccupping tears. Before she knew what had happened, Cam had moved away and Trevor held her, his hand sliding
into her hair, pressing her gently to his chest. She wasn’t sure what all he murmured, his lips to her temple, but after a while, everything felt right.

  She didn’t know how he did it, but she didn’t have to know.

  “It’s all going to be okay, isn’t it?” she murmured, and he nodded.

  “No one outside the family knows where we’re getting married; the shuttles are lined up for the few we’ve invited, and we have decoys to confuse any stray reporters.” She grimaced at that. As the Contraband Day’s Queen, she was something of local royalty in Lake Charles, which she hadn’t minded. Much. But once she kept getting entwined in disasters after trying to rescue her brother—back when she first met Trevor—she’d become headline gold for every news outlet in the South, and a few national tabloids, as well. It was hell on Trevor, who was a privacy and safety freak. He’d continued murmuring and she tuned in to the rumble of his voice, as he explained, “and the florist doesn’t know the location—she’ll find out only when she arrives that morning, and I’ve got security who’ll monitor her for any outgoing phone calls.”

  “So all I have to do is pick out a dress and it’s a go.”

  “Think you can do it without terrorizing the owner this time?”

  “As long as she keeps that stupid crying assistant away from me, we have a shot at it.”

  “Which reminds me, I’m confiscating your gun ’til you get it picked out.”

  “Spoilsport.”

  ~*~

  A scant five blocks away, at the Hotel Montelone…

  Robert Garrard, or RG as his people knew him, stood at the expanse of windows of the Faulkner suite overlooking the Mississippi and a goodly portion of the Quarter and saw none of it, save his own handsome reflection. He’d paid a lot for that face and had worked hard to maintain the build of a well-to-do, though athletic, businessman. He looked, if one just glanced, like a polished upper-class Ivy League type who played tennis every weekend, or kept fit with rounds of serious golf. He did not look like the kind of guy who’d once gutted people in alleys, who fought with his hands and feet, who had once had the scars to prove you didn’t think twice about messing with him.

  Now, he looked… charming. Perfect slacks, expensive shoes, pressed shirt, all costing more than his first car, not to mention the understated-but-exorbitant watch. RG knew how to look the part.

  Behind him, in the reflection in the glass, he could see the team he’d assembled.

  “I don’t see how the job site is a problem,” Catalina sighed, having said so at least six times since Evan came in an hour earlier. She was a fine specimen of womanhood with particular uses—not in the brains department, which suited RG just fine. She stretched out her lithe little body, mostly to shake Evan off his point rather cruelly, since she knew he had the hots for her and no chance in hell. “It is just one little wedding,” she continued. “A tiny one. In. Married. Out. Bang. Gone.”

  “It’s not just one little wedding. It’s the who.” Evan gestured frantically toward the computer where there were several images of some local yahoo—a woman—whom everyone blamed for various clusterfucks and yet, she kept getting off scot-free. Josh had fallen asleep. Bored. He’d wake up if RG gave him someone to shoot.

  “So, she is klutzy and has caused a ruckus or two,” Catalina argued, “so what? She is just one little woman. What could she possibly do to mess with the job?”

  Evan stopped pacing, nearly toppling himself over in the process as he assessed Cat’s baffled expression. He wasn’t about to admit he was afraid of a woman. RG turned his smile into the window as he watched Evan blush three shades of red as the man realized how cowardly he had sounded. “Well,” Evan regrouped, “she’s more than a klutz—she’s a menace. Something always blows up around her.”

  “Come now, Evan, look at her,” RG said, nodding toward the last photo enlarged on the screen. “She’s a local beauty queen, and you know how all those women are: vain, shallow, grasping—craving attention. I’d be willing to bet you that she’s some wannabe actress or singer, trying to insert herself into whatever media event she can, to try to gain entrée into any gig that’ll have her. She’s harmless. If she weren’t, with this much attention, I’m certain the feds would have arrested her by now.”

  “She’s the Dread Pirate Roberts,” Josh supplied, eyes still closed.

  “She’s a pirate?” Catalina asked, rubbing her temple as if trying to massage the brain cells into action.

  “Someone who pretends to be something badass, and because people believe that reputation, they’re afraid of her and so treat her as if she’s badass. But it’s all a trick.”

  “So she’s not really a pirate?” Catalina asked.

  “No, honey,” RG said, “she’s simply one of those media seekers. Nothing for us to worry about.”

  Evan seemed to ponder that and finally nodded. “Okay, that may be true,” he said, breathing out a sigh. “But I’m still worried about the fiancé.” Evan paced again, looking like a little terrier who’d lost most of its hair and hadn’t the good grace to be embarrassed. “Ex-FBI, ex-spec-ops, God knows who he’s working for now. My intel says that the man terrified the priest into having the wedding there, and Father Patrick isn’t that easily scared. But this Cormier—”

  “Cormier?” RG asked, turning now to face the room. He knew that name.

  “Right,” Evan answered, pacing back to the computer. “Trevor Cormier.”

  RG wanted to kick Evan for focusing on the woman instead of giving him this critical bit of information. “Cormier… as in major ownership of Cormi-Co?”

  Evan paused his pacing mid-step, Cat managed to look mildly appreciative, and even Josh woke up, sensing blood in the water. Evan jumped to his computer, researching…

  “Yes. Son. Famously estranged from his mother, who has the controlling interest in the company. He stays completely out of the business—prefers to keep all ties, except to one of his sisters, Isabelle, completely severed.”

  RG smiled. Evan flinched and backed away. Josh sat forward, interested.

  “This,” Josh said, “just got very very lucrative.”

  “More than the icon?” Catalina asked, studying the five-carat ring RG had given her a few weeks ago. It was paste, but Catalina would never realize, and why waste money if she didn’t know the difference?

  “Oh, much, much more,” RG told her, and she smiled.

  “But… we’re still going for the icon, right?” Evan asked him.

  “Of course. But the rest of this is… as they say here… lagniappe.”

  “What about the woman?” Evan asked, a one-track mind. As if such a creature mattered. “We planned this on the one weekend that the icon was here and the church wasn’t being used! We’ve got everything organized, escape routes, back-up plans. And now… she’s going to be there, mucking it up!”

  “Dear boy, she’s going to be caught up in her frippery and finery and won’t know what happened until we have the icon, her groom, and are gone.” He held up his hand to stop Evan’s interrupting protests. “Look, this can work for us. I know something about that family and what her future mother-in-law would do to get rid of her.”

  Josh laughed. “She already tried to give someone fifty million to take her.” And when Evan gave him a you’re full of bullshit look, Josh shrugged, saying, “Anyone who saw the LSU/Bama game saw that. If you caught that part of the live feed before they squashed it… the mom was actively negotiating to give her to the guy who’d planted the bombs.”

  “Fifty million?” Evan asked, and RG could tell the potential for danger that the woman and her fiancé might present was starting to matter less and less to the team’s worrywart.

  “And that’s a drop in the bucket,” RG said. “Now that it’s definite and given how much the mother hates this Bobbie Faye fluff? She may pay much more. Which reimburses us all of our expenses, plus hefty bonuses and allows us to take our time fencing the icon. This will work in our favor—especially since it’s a
last-minute event.”

  “How’s that help?” Evan asked.

  “They won’t have had time to put in any security details,” Josh answered, and RG nodded.

  “But,” RG said, “if you’re so worried about her, Josh will make her his priority while his men handle the fiancé.”

  “I don’t know,” Evan muttered, staring at the woman’s photo on the computer screen. “I think we need to hire back-up.”

  ~*~

  Andrea Cormier perched on the edge of her desk, her arms crossed in her impeccable gray silk suit jacket, her beautifully manicured nails digging into her arms to keep from raising her voice. Andrea didn’t raise her voice; it wasn’t necessary. When you owned the largest number of shares—albeit by a smidgeon—of Cormi-Co, a multi-billion dollar communications conglomerate, people hung on your every word. They waited, if you wanted them to; hovered, expecting to be at your beck and call. It was her due for having built this empire, diode by diode.

  She glanced around her penthouse office space, the vast clearstory windows spanning the sixty-foot views on two walls, overlooking all of New York. Standing at her periphery, three of her assistants. Two would remain mute, unless she addressed them, but Deronda James, her executive assistant, would not. Deronda was, perhaps, one of the best assistants Andrea had ever had—sharper than most attorneys, more detail-oriented than a bomb expert, ruthless as a samurai, and as loyal. Tall, mixed-race olive complexion, glossy black curls pulled back into a bun, she was formidable.

  But right then, hated.

  “I thought we nipped that possibility completely in the bud,” Andrea said, finally having gotten past her fury enough to form a calm, coherent sentence.

  “As I mentioned when we called the Vatican, this was never a guaranteed maneuver; at best, preventing them from being married in a Catholic Church would only delay the ceremony until they found another venue. They could have selected any venue and had a Catholic priest preside.”