Abby, Get Your Groom!

by Victoria Pade

  She wanted to ask from what but didn’t feel free to. So instead she made a guess. “A three month paid vacation?”

  “No, I worked the whole time. I wasn’t really in the mood for anything else.”

  He also wasn’t offering any details.

  It felt as if she’d be overstepping her bounds to ask for those details so she decided to change the subject. “Wednesday will be pretty boring for you. And long—your sister’s email said there will be her and her maid of honor and seven bridesmaids and maybe a couple of other family members not in the wedding party who might want to be done up for the occasion, so we’ll be doing trials for them all?”

  “That sounds about right. We’re a big family. How would you like to meet them all tomorrow?”

  That shocked her. “Meet them all?”

  “We have Sunday dinner every week at GiGi’s house. It’s more than just family, though, everybody is free to bring friends or dates or whoever. We thought you might like to have a chance to get acquainted a little, see what you’ll be dealing with in the way of hair and what-not so you can be thinking about it before Wednesday.”

  “Oh, no, it’ll be fine,” Abby said, because that sounded very daunting. “We do this all the time with all kinds of hair and skin types. We don’t worry about what we’re getting into because we’ve pretty much seen everything there is to see and can handle whatever we need to. And just because I said I like to look in on things from the sidelines doesn’t mean I wish I was invited or anything...”

  He shook his head. “My grandmother told me to invite you before you ever told me that stuff. She’d just like you to come, to meet you.”

  “I...it’s...no... I wouldn’t know what to do with myself at something like that.”

  “A Sunday dinner? We eat, drink, talk—I haven’t seen you eat or drink but I’m figuring you have some experience, and I know you can talk because, look at us, here we are, doing that. I promise you we’re a group that’s easy to be with. But if you want, you could bring China as your plus one, if that would make you more comfortable. And I won’t leave your side for a minute.”

  Oh, that by-her-side thing again...

  And there it was, making what he was proposing sound less intimidating.

  But Sunday family dinner with the Camdens? With all of the Camdens? Even less intimidating was still plenty intimidating. It seemed like a bigger deal than a lot of the special occasion events she did. And if there was one thing she’d learned from peeking in or being on the sidelines, it was that foster care and group homes hadn’t prepared her to fit in herself to the things she could style other people for.

  “I wouldn’t know what to wear.” It had been hard enough trying to pick out the jeans and shirt she’d decided on tonight, just knowing she was going to see him. She didn’t own anything as nice as the lightweight pale yellow crewneck sweater he had on with those jeans that probably cost what she paid in rent every month.

  “GiGi’s one rule is that there aren’t any jeans allowed,” he said into her near panic. “But we still dress casual and comfortable. Since we can’t be sure how much longer the weather will be good we’re doing one final barbecue of the season in GiGi’s backyard. So tomorrow it’ll be a lot of khakis and capri pants. Anything that isn’t jeans will do fine.” He tipped his chiseled chin in her direction cajolingly. “Come on...you’d be doing me a favor and giving me someone to hang out with.”

  “You have your whole family to hang out with.”

  “I kinda don’t at the moment, actually.”

  That didn’t make any sense. But once again he didn’t explain himself.

  He just said, “Come on...come with China and just meet everyone and indulge in some home cooking. Trust me, you’ll have a good time. I’ll make sure of it.”

  The idea was just so weird. She didn’t hobnob with the kind of people she worked on.

  She shook her head again. “I can’t imagine—”

  “I promise you it will be fun. Don’t make me take no for an answer and have to go home a failure when you’ve made everything else work out so well for me...”

  There was only the tiniest hint of mock pleading in his tone. It actually seemed as if he genuinely wanted her to go. And it came with such an engagingly crooked smile and a glint in those striking blue eyes.

  It all made her waver—but not give in. Not quite yet. “I don’t know...” she waffled. “I don’t think—”

  “Don’t think, just say you’ll come—with or without China.”

  “Oh, China would love it! She’s very big on seeing how the other half lives.” And this wasn’t merely the other half—this was the most upper crust of the upper crust.

  “Then do it for her.”

  Abby made a face. She was tempted—as she knew her friend would be—to see what a Camden family dinner might be like from the inside, but she was still really, really unsure about it.

  “I’ll come and pick the two of you up and bring you home. You won’t have to do a thing but enjoy yourselves, and GiGi will send you off with more leftovers than you’ll be able to eat in a week. Come on...”

  Maybe it was the third come on that was the charm. Or maybe it was sitting there with him for the past hour, talking to him as if he were nobody special even as she’d been marinating in just how hot he was and how comfortable she’d felt with him in spite of everything, but she heard herself say, “China and I were just going to maybe go to the zoo.”

  “You could do that earlier in the day—we start appetizers at five, dinner is at six, so I’d pick you up at around four-thirty.”

  Dylan took his phone out of his pocket. “Tell me China’s phone number—I’ll call her right now and invite her, too. She’ll make you say that yes, you’ll both come.”

  “Nooo...you wouldn’t have to do that...” she demurred, knowing China needed to hear all of this from her or she wouldn’t believe it at all.

  “So you’ll just say yes on your own?”

  “I suppose it wouldn’t do any harm to know what we’ll be working with on Wednesday, since we’ve never met the bride and it’s such a big wedding party.”

  “Right!”

  “But aren’t we...like...the help or the employees or the service providers or...you know, something that shouldn’t really be guests?” she asked, doubting her decision even as she’d made it.

  “We don’t see things that way. Tomorrow you’ll meet Margaret and Louie Haliburton. They’ve been with GiGi since the Dark Ages, on the payroll as house staff, but they’re her best friends and they helped her raise us all so you can consider them our foster family.”

  He’d lost her—his grandmother had raised him with the help of the...help?

  Before she could ask him to explain, he said, “Say I can count on you.”

  It was a command as he looked intently into her eyes with those devastatingly blue ones of his. And they somehow mesmerized her for a moment, drawing her out of herself, to him.

  He was clean shaven again...as if he planned to be kissed. Or to be doing the kissing.

  She didn’t know why that popped into her head, but it did.

  And for no conceivable reason she was suddenly imagining him leaning forward and kissing her...

  Until it struck her that she’d gone out of her mind.

  Because what else could explain thinking of kissing him? Him, of all people—a Camden!

  She mentally shook herself back into the real world, and knew she probably should firmly decline his invitation, after all.

  And even if she’d come too far for that, she certainly shouldn’t ever be thinking about kissing him!

  “Say it,” he demanded.

  Say what? she wondered before she recalled that he wanted her to tell him he could count on her for dinner the next night.

 
Could he count on her?

  For haircuts. For hairstyles. But for anything else? He’d likely be disappointed.

  But despite thinking that, she said, “Okay, but it might be the dumbest idea you’ve ever had.”

  He grinned. So charmingly.

  “Oh, Abby, this is so far from being that!” he said.

  Then he got down from the pedicure station and held out his hand to her to help her down, too. “I’ll let you get home—you worked all day and here I’ve kept you working tonight.”

  Nothing about tonight had felt like work.

  But she didn’t say that.

  And without thinking about it, she slipped her hand into his.

  Why, she didn’t know. It wasn’t as if she needed the aid. And she definitely shouldn’t have done it, because the minute her hand was nestled in his big, warm one, it felt like heaven.

  Forbidden heaven because he was a client and a Camden, and she reminded herself that she couldn’t possibly be more out of her depth than she was with him.

  So she retracted her hand the very second her feet were on the floor and said, “You can go ahead. I need to do a couple of things to get ready for Wednesday.”

  It was a bold-faced lie. But she was afraid if she walked out with him she might lapse into thinking about kissing him again and she couldn’t risk it.

  He didn’t question her, though. He merely headed for the shop door.

  “Four-thirty tomorrow,” he repeated. “Text me your address and I’ll bring a car with no dents and more than two seats.”

  That confused her, too. But she felt so dazed by then that she thought it might have been perfectly clear to someone else.

  She only nodded and watched him open the door.

  As he went through it he cast her one last glance over his shoulder. He had the kind of smile on his face that said he liked what he saw when he caught that final sight of her. Then he pulled the door closed after himself and he was gone.

  And that was when Abby deflated. Swallowed hard. And wondered if she’d stepped into some other world or something.

  Because somehow she didn’t feel as though she was still in her own.

  Chapter Four

  Abby didn’t know why she didn’t have the same attitude toward the Camden Sunday dinner that China had.

  “Woo-hoo! Partying with the rich! Better than the zoo!”

  That had been China’s response to the invitation.

  But, for some reason, the upcoming event carried more weight for Abby.

  She couldn’t decide what to wear and tried on half the clothes in her closet before finally choosing a red-and-white cap-sleeved sundress that was snug through the top and connected by a high, banded waist to a flowy knee-length skirt.

  She only owned one pair of dressy sandals so there was no other option in footwear, but she redid her hair three times—all up, partially pulled back, all pulled back—before China convinced her to just let it fall freely into its own full, natural curls around her shoulders.

  She also let China do her makeup—not the more elaborate version that China did on herself, which sported her trademark sultry eyes, but a natural look that still managed to be slightly more party-like than usual. Then she made China tone that down some because she was afraid it was too party-like.

  And even after she was mostly satisfied, she was still such a bundle of nerves that it was palpable when she and China went out onto the old Victorian house’s wraparound front porch to wait for Dylan.

  “This is only a lark,” China reminded her. “It doesn’t make any difference what they think of us or whether they like us or they don’t.”

  Abby was haunted for a split second by the mental image of Dylan in response to that and the strong sense that it did make a difference. At least to her.

  But then she shoved it away.

  Because, no, it didn’t make any difference whether he liked her or not. Even if she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him for more than five minutes since she’d watched him walk out the door last night. She’d had him in mind the whole time she was getting ready for this barbecue today.

  “It just seems weird,” she told her friend. “Should I be mad at these people or hate them or something? I mean, if their family hadn’t been hardnosed to their employees and sent Gus Glassman to take care of their problems he wouldn’t have gone to jail and I would have grown up with a father. Now here I am going to their house for a barbecue as if it’s some kind of reunion. Is that something I should be doing?”

  “Like, are you showing some kind of disloyalty if you do?” China shrugged elaborately. “I don’t know, Ab. Do you feel like a rat for doing it?”

  She felt a lot of things. Mostly awkward and out of her depth.

  Yes, she’d been in any number of upper-class homes prepping upper-class brides who were willing to pay extra for the special occasions group to go to them, but she’d never been in one of them to attend a party and she was worried she might do something clumsy or awkward or cloddish.

  She was uncomfortable with the thought of rubbing shoulders with people like the Camdens in a completely social situation and not within her own bailiwick where she knew exactly what to do and what her role was.

  But did she feel like a rat—as China put it? Or somehow disloyal?

  No, when she analyzed her feelings, she couldn’t say she felt either of those things. Maybe because her relationship to Gus still didn’t feel quite real. She didn’t feel as if he was a part of her, so when she tried to figure out what he would have wanted, what he would have felt about her accepting this invitation...she couldn’t even make a decent guess. He might have been her father, but she didn’t know him. Not well enough to know how he’d have thought or felt, anyway.

  But what she also felt—hiding underneath all the tension and compounding her confusion—was a flicker of China’s level of excitement and an eagerness that was pressing her forward. Except that where China’s enthusiasm was all for the event and the food and the opportunity to be a guest, Abby’s excitement and eagerness seemed to be completely centered around seeing Dylan again.

  So, rather than answer her friend’s question about what she was feeling she repeated, “It just seems weird.”

  “Sure. The whole thing is weird. But I think things happen for a reason. You have to play them out to see where they lead, because where they lead is the reason.”

  Abby laughed. “You think the guy who was supposedly my father killed someone and abandoned me to grow up in foster care just so I could end up eating ribs with rich people?”

  “Oh, I hope there’ll be ribs! I love ribs!” China rhapsodized before she said, “You’ve just gotta let it play out, Ab. See where it goes.”

  But where letting-things-play-out went at that moment, when a big black SUV pulled up to the curb in front of them with Dylan behind the wheel, made her heart race. It made her have to fight the urge to rush to the car. It made the sun suddenly seem brighter and all of her stress take an instant backseat to a level of joy that she’d never experienced before, blossoming now at just the sight of him again.

  And somehow she didn’t think that was where anything was supposed to go.

  * * *

  “You’ve got that look with her, Dylan—don’t you think you ought to keep it cool?”

  “I’m cool, Cade. I’m perfectly chill. I just don’t want Abby to feel like a fish out of water with us all so I’m staying close. We’re a lot for her to deal with.”

  Abby didn’t mean to overhear what was being said between Dylan and the man named Cade, whom she thought was one of Dylan’s cousins. But Dylan had taken her inside to wash her hands in the bathroom, and he’d assured her that he’d wait for her in the kitchen. So the kitchen was where she’d headed after the handwashing and there they were.
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  Not wanting to eavesdrop or interrupt, she retraced her steps and returned to the bathroom to give them a few minutes.

  And while she was doing that, she started to think about what she’d overheard.

  Cade had sounded a little alarmed, maybe a little miffed, and there was a warning note in his voice when he’d said Dylan needed to keep it cool.

  If Dylan’s answer hadn’t been about her she might have thought the subject was something else. Because there did seem to be some tension among the Camdens when it came to Dylan.

  But Dylan’s answer had been about her, so it was her they were talking about.

  Her, who he needed to keep it cool with.

  Was it because she was, as Dylan had said, a fish out of water? And what did that mean? Was he saying that she was bound to feel out of place because she didn’t belong—as in, wasn’t good enough?

  Certainly she had experience being considered unworthy, so that seemed like the likeliest meaning to her. And it wasn’t as if it came as a surprise. She was a fish out of water here, with these people.

  The Tudor-style house was bigger than any she’d ever been in before. So big she wasn’t sure she could have found the bathroom without Dylan’s help.

  And the Camdens? All of them were smart and great-looking and accomplished, and even though they were down-to-earth people and treated her and China with warmth and kindness, going out of their way to make them feel at home and a part of everything, she and China were still...well...she and China.

  And regardless of what kind of spin was put on it, they were fish out of water here. There was just no denying it.

  So maybe it was good to be reminded of it, she thought. Especially when they’d all made her feel so at home that it was easy to lose sight of it.