by Amanda Brown
Bunny zipped through the details with approval. “Well, do it fast. And you don’t need a florist. My mother-in-law has volunteered hers.”
He frowned, leaning over the table until his feathers almost brushed her chest.
“Nobody tells Adrian how to do his weddings.”
Bunny nodded. “I’m in for over a million,” she said, “and I’ll kick your fee from twenty to twenty-five percent.”
“Thirty,” he proposed, “and your florist can dress me in an orchid.”
“Thirty,” Bunny agreed, smiling coolly. “But you don’t say the word no to me again. Got it?”
Adrian cringed under her vicious glare. He was glad to go to the altar quickly with this client. He couldn’t imagine a year of singing her tune. But poor Edward Kirkland, he thought, would get this booby prize for life. All the press he had managed to gather on Edward suggested he was a pretty nice guy: Joe Varsity with white-glove manners. He remembered the other family detail he wanted to get out of the way.
“We’ll have to get Emily in for a quick fitting, then,” he said. “She’ll be a charming flower girl, though I should tell you that multiple flower girls are in, so if you have any nieces, or she has any classmates—”
Bunny’s hand slapping the table in sudden fury set Adrian aquiver.
“The child will not be seen on my wedding day.”
He raised his eyebrows and said nothing.
Mistaking his shock for understanding, she lowered her voice. “Listen, Adrian, you’ve seen it happen, I’m sure. Some wide-eyed Shirley Temple stealing the show from a perfectly beautiful bride.”
He nodded, acquiescing. “Okay,” he said, making a note in his book. “No kids, no puppies.”
She smiled with satisfaction. “Exactly.”
He raised his eyebrows with concern. “Where will she be?”
Bunny’s face froze into a smile, and for a minute its painted stillness appeared before Adrian like a horrible mask. “Leave her to me,” she said, glancing around quickly. “Emily won’t be a problem at the wedding,” she assured him.
Adrian gulped, nodded, and said no more until the little girl’s absence raised a technical question in his mind.
“What do you want to do about flower girls?”
He scooped the floating raspberry from his flute of champagne on a silver teaspoon and savored the little treat as he waited for Bunny’s answer.
When she had finished her sip, she told him. “I’ll have plenty of flowers. I’ll have plenty of girls. That covers it, as far as I’m concerned.”
He nodded. One less detail.
“How big are you thinking?” Adrian asked, wondering if now was an appropriate time to announce an increase in the per-person fee.
“About four hundred and fifty people.” Bunny said.
“No, no, no,” Adrian said, covering his face.
“Don’t say no to me, Adrian,” Bunny snapped at him.
He nodded, giving a weary sigh as he tipped his head back for a long drink of champagne.
“Non, non, non, Bunny dear,” he said, trying it in French. “It must be smaller.”
She looked at him with scorn. “I’m not trying to elope, Adrian.”
He rubbed his forehead with his hand. She needed a tutorial.
“Bunny, look at it this way,” he told her, leaning back to make room for the arrival of his shrimp salad, which was presented in a delightful silver bowl, the watercress salad arranged neatly beside it on the signature silver-rimmed china. He forgot for a moment this miserable client as he delighted in the neat exquisiteness of his little lunch.
She smiled too, curious to know why Adrian of all people would argue that less is more.
“Weddings are many different things,” he began. “They are graceful, formal, memorable, sometimes meaningful, always exasperating…no doubt your wedding will be all of these. But if you don’t limit the guest list, baby, the only time you’ll read the word ‘romance’ in your wedding coverage is in Liz Smith’s column—when she tells the world what it lacked.”
Bunny gasped. It was inconceivable that she would hear the word “lack” in connection with herself.
She was stubborn, though. She had thought hard about the guest list.
“I have messengers ready to hand-deliver everything.”
“Bunny,” he said, appealing to her vanity. “Think of where you and Edward are going—as a name, in your shared public image. People…the masses…” he glanced at her, taking a soft tone, “your public, Bunny.”
Bunny’s smile glowed with the thought of having a public.
“Your public,” he repeated, “wants to see exclusive events. I mean the Miller girls…”
She nodded. “I was there.”
“Everyone was there, Bunny. That’s the point. They invited seven hundred and fifty people to their wedding. Nobody was left out—there was nobody left to guess about what happened. Talking about that wedding would be like talking about your day at the post office. Everyone already knows what it was like.”
Bunny paused, frowning. She hadn’t thought of it that way. “All right,” she agreed, wondering which of Edward’s relatives she could cut without getting too much flack from her mother-in-law. “I’ll send you a shorter list.”
“Send it to Michaela,” Adrian said, handing her a business card. “My Feng Shui consultant. I’ve sent him the blueprints of your property so he can find harmony among the terrain, the guests, and the land’s ancient inhabitants.”
“I hate to disturb his harmony,” Bunny said with a sneer, “but the wedding won’t be at my house!”
Adrian gasped. “Bad karma,” he said.
Bunny rolled her eyes. “Tell me about it. But Edward’s old bat of a mother insisted on having it at her house in the Hamptons.”
Adrian looked around nervously. He wouldn’t talk about Catherine Kirkland that way. Twenty people either friendly or beholden to her could be sitting around them right that minute.
Bunny noticed his nervous glance, and quieted her voice a bit. “Don’t worry,” she said, to assure herself as much as Adrian. “If she’s in the city, which I doubt, she’s at Astor Court.”
“In the St. Regis?”
“Right. The only tea she drinks, other than Fortnum & Mason’s Earl Grey, is Astor Court’s house blend.” Bunny realized as she spoke that afternoon tea was not served for a few hours yet, and chided herself on her carelessness. After all, she only had to keep her seat for ten more days.
Her eyes shining with severity, she leaned toward Adrian and whispered to him.
“You’re right, I shouldn’t trash the old bat here. Anyway, I’m letting her have the wedding at her house. Why not? It’s the last time she’ll have any control over what Edward does.”
Adrian was quiet. He’d seen pushy brides galore, but this Bunny was something extreme. He laughed to think of her mother-in-law getting the jump on her. Imagining a lion in full roar against a tiger, Adrian began to daydream. Bunny mistook his quiet moment for interest, and continued, “Do we meet with Michaela?”
Thinking with a smile how Bunny’s presence would spike gentle Joy’s disharmony scale into the red zone, Adrian said, “He’s too busy.”
“Too busy for me?” Bunny was astounded.
“I told you on the phone,” Adrian said, “Rosita Naranja’s destination wedding is the same weekend as yours. He’s booked for all ‘Five Days of Olé.’ In fact, he’s on my flight to Rio.”
“You won’t be at my wedding?” Bunny was surprised, but instantly saw the advantage in that.
“No,” Adrian answered, hanging his head. “But you’ll love my assistant, Jo-Jo. He’ll be able to execute the details we’ve worked out.”
Bunny was thrilled to have Adrian Parish at her steering wheel, and even more excited to have one of his minions there for the actual wedding. Adrian was a genius, everyone knew that, but he had said no to her, and so she regarded him as lacking in deference. She was sure she would be able to
bully his little Jo-Jo around if she wanted any last-minute changes.
As they enjoyed their lunch, making small talk and laughing over the mistakes other people made at their horrendous and unenviable weddings, Adrian asked Bunny again about Emily.
“Do you know my relic of a mother-in-law actually thinks I am going to raise the little brat?” Bunny laughed at the ridiculousness. “She’s not even Edward’s!”
Adrian recalled the details.
“What will you do?” he asked, concealing his shiver of revulsion with a hasty shrug of the shoulders.
“Pack her suitcases,” Bunny answered, laughing. “Actually, not even that—it’s a job for the maid. But you get the picture.”
“She’s moving out?”
Bunny nodded. “Edward doesn’t know it yet, but she will. Thank God for lawyers.”
“You don’t hear that every day,” Adrian observed, looking past Bunny to avoid showing his disgust.
“No, no,” she sang, “but who else can reorganize your family to rid it of some of the deadweight?” Sipping her champagne, Bunny paused to enjoy the cherished dream that was so nearly her reality. “I just came from Weil, Gotshal & Manges,” she told him. “You did a wedding for the managing partner over there, didn’t you?”
Adrian nodded. “Both of his wives used me; the second so that I would pull the file and double everything I did for the first.”
She smiled indulgently. “To each his own!”
After toasting something to do with this sentiment, she explained, “My lawyer drew up a little paper that terminates Edward’s parental rights. Bing bang boom! We’ll let her zip over to the other guardian, but just for child care. The papers keep me as trustee: Did you know she sits on a little eight-hundred-million-dollar nest egg?”
Adrian finished his champagne hastily.
“So we won’t abandon her, exactly. I’ll make the decisions regarding her assets, and we snuck into the fine print that the trustee will be the sole decision-maker regarding the child’s school.”
Adrian was confused. “So what, exactly, does the guardian get?”
“Legal responsibility,” Bunny said, laughing with delight at her cleverness. “Liability, of course, if the child breaks anything. And very little else. I’ve enrolled her to begin right away at a boarding school in Zurich. Thank God they have full-day preschool in Switzerland! I had to call in a favor to get her in the midsemester, but, you know, for the children!” She toasted again, raising her champagne flute high in the air. “Between school and riding camp in the Alps next summer, little Emily will enjoy quite a bit of mountain air! And her French will be delightful.”
“Does your fiancé know?”
“Of course not.”
“And he doesn’t need to sign the papers?”
“Oh—he will—once he’s my husband, he will.”
Adrian was quiet, sitting in stunned silence.
“Well, enough about that,” Bunny said, unsure of his devotion to her.
“I’ll need you to gather your bridesmaids for lunch tomorrow,” he said. “We have a million details to discuss. And I’ll need blueprints of the Kirkland property.”
Bunny smiled smugly. “Lunch tomorrow at the Four Seasons,” she said. “Twelve sharp, so we get a good table,” she added.
Adrian left quickly. He needed to take a shower.
CHAPTER 27
Blame It on Rio
Becca could not fall asleep in her own apartment. Her mail had piled up, as had her phone messages, but she left the letters lying in a pile and erased her voice mail with the touch of a button. Nobody she wanted to hear from would call her here. The doorman had already forgotten who she was: he never knew her well, with all her travel. Her apartment was hollow; she tossed restlessly in bed with thoughts of another place, uncertain where in the world she could really call home.
She and Edward had begun, first when it was convenient, and then as a matter of practice, to sleep at the Stearns’ apartment at the same time. He got home late, usually after she had gone to sleep, and Becca rarely heard Edward let himself in. The bedroom he had chosen was well removed from the rest of the living quarters. But she knew he would be there in the morning, and that helped her sleep.
Edward slept in a small room, formerly the residence of Emily’s nanny, a comfortable little nook with an oak floor and a west-facing window. Down a half-flight of stairs from the music room and the library, his bedroom adjoined a full bath and some overflow cedar closets where Amy had stored her furs in cloth bags. He had claimed to find the room easy and welcoming, with its pale-yellow chintz curtains and battered suede reading chair. But it was no more than a changing room for him. As often as not a tuxedo and shirt were thrown across the seat of his reading chair, pant legs draped across the ottoman, as if a man had fallen and evaporated in place. When he was in the apartment, he sought the life of the rooms they used in common.
Becca knew he had chosen the nanny’s room for his own to give her privacy in the master bedroom. Edward was flawlessly considerate. She wondered if Emily knew to head down the hall in the morning, to wake Edward instead of her. She found herself hoping that Emily would be careful on the stairs. She felt like calling, suddenly, but knew it was too late. Anyway, she had nothing to say. She wondered if Edward were awake too.
She sighed, lying in her bed, thinking of Edward. What an experience they had shared. She supposed she had learned a little something, for at first she had regarded his lazy, frivolous life with disdain, as she might consider a feather that had drifted into her office: an annoying distraction floating through a humming, productive world. But she met him now with a smile of joy, unable to resist the pleasure of greeting Edward Kirkland. She had grown fond of his ruddy complexion, his cheerful smile, his healthy diversions: squash, yachting, tramping around in the woods behind dogs. She had learned to appreciate the benefits gained by these activities she once dismissed as useless.
Before she met him, she never would have respected a life like Edward’s. He seemed content with knocking the dirt off his boots and getting some fresh air in the countryside without achieving a thing from sun to sun. She still didn’t know where he lived, in a sense: She knew all his numbers and addresses and she could always find him, but she didn’t know where his spirit lived.
But as she tossed in bed under her crisp starched sheets, twirling herself like a pastry, she saw Edward’s life in a different light. Whatever it was, whatever it was good for, he had decided to share it with someone. Or he had consented, she corrected herself, still a bit baffled by his awkward explanation of being engaged by ambush. And there it was. Emily would have a new mother.
She made herself smile, trying to imagine Emily as a teenager, asking the private steward for a deck chair on board a yacht to Europe, sailing to help her mother open a new house there, in St. Tropez, her golden curls long, then, streaming in the wind. A charmed life, she would have, under the wing of Bunny Stirrup.
Bunny Stirrup. Becca had only a single image to connect with the awful name, but as she replayed the brief encounter she, Emily, and Edward had with Bunny over and over in her head, her midnight imagination produced horrible possibilities all turning their selfish pampered backs on her beloved Emily.
Forget about it, she told herself, forget about it, Becca. You can’t do a thing to stop what is happening. Your life will be as it was.
Her mind swam with thoughts without fixing on any in particular. Finally she began to calculate exchange rates, to calm herself. And in time she slept.
Becca met Edward at public places for the next few days when they changed the guard over Emily, finding anything preferable to being confined in the apartment with him there. Only when Edward had made it clear that he would be out for the night did she stay overnight with Emily, and at the morning’s first light Becca tugged Emily out of the building with the nervous energy of an animal captured and released. She had found things for them to do early in the morning. New York in October was perfect�
��they walked, along with what seemed like everybody in the city, on Central Park’s runner’s path. They collected leaves. Sometimes they stopped at one of the twenty-four-hour greengrocers and bought carob-covered peanut clusters—Becca kept them in their little plastic bag until lunchtime. By eight o’clock, they were planning their day. Edward no longer hung out in the apartment when he had “down” time. He had asked her if he should take MacDuff and the other two dogs back to the Carlyle but this sounded like just another blow to Emily’s sense of permanence, and Becca said no. So now when they went back home, or to the Stearns’ apartment, or whatever that physical space should be called, they had the dogs to play with. Carmelita, the Bichon Frise, invariably found her way to Becca’s lap. MacDuff kept one eye on them, to make sure he was part of the action—with the other eye shut in that funny way dogs have of leaving eyes open while they sleep. The lab did what everybody else did because that was his nature—so they rested a lot these days. And it seemed like a death watch. The wedding was a week away and Becca was counting days—was Edward, she wondered? Or was he caught up in all the prewedding festivities? She didn’t want to know.
Edward was shocked to hear her rush into the apartment in the middle of the following week, while he and Emily were playing “duck the boom” in the sailboat in her room. He was “on duty” with Emily until the evening. Their paths had not crossed there for better than a week.
She is here to pack, he thought sadly, noticing that Becca flew past Emily’s room down the hall to her bedroom with a hanging bag on her arm.
Edward had mentioned to Becca, or rather to her voice mail, that Emily had been invited to his parents’ house for the weekend. She knew without asking that she would not be invited. She was too proud to mention it.
He was still reeling with disbelief at the speed with which his change in course had taken place. One minute he was picking up Emily from Little Ladies Lacrosse, and the next minute, his mother was on the phone telling him to pack his morning coat and vest, his tuxedo, and a dinner suit, and come out to Sternwood with some pretty clothes for Emily to wear to the wedding. Pack for Bermuda too, if you want to honeymoon there, she added. We sent people over to open the house. No point in putting things off any longer.