Abby, Get Your Groom!

by Victoria Pade

  Especially when it had been so nice—and so comfortable—having Dylan by her side the whole evening, making her forget that she was out of her depth with him.

  Especially when, as the evening had progressed, she’d begun to feel like his date.

  And that was a bad thing to have slipped into, she realized. She wasn’t here on a date with him. She wasn’t meeting the family of someone she was involved with. This wasn’t anything like that.

  This was sort of a job interview combined with the Camdens’ guilty consciences, and that was it. They seemed like genuinely nice people, but when the wedding was over and her stylist services were no longer needed, when the lockbox Gus Glassman had left was found and Dylan had helped her explore her heritage, it would be The End, Duty Done, Have A Nice Life. And she’d never see or hear from any of these people—including Dylan—again.

  And that was so, so, so important for her to remember, she told herself as she realized that she’d gone from being a nervous wreck about tonight to feeling too comfortable.

  No good could come of that.

  No good had come of it with Mark and she’d learned her lesson.

  And she wasn’t dumb enough to have to learn it again, on an even larger scale.

  She’d been in the bathroom long enough and really needed to return to the kitchen before someone came to check on her. So she opened the door and made sure it gently hit the wall to alert whoever was in the kitchen that she was coming out.

  But what look did Dylan have for her?

  That question struck her only as she made her second approach to the kitchen where Dylan was now alone.

  He spotted her the minute she got to the entrance and there was an immediate smile, a sort of perking up, and maybe a hint of something that made it seem as if he was glad to see her—the way she’d been glad to see him when he’d picked her up today.

  And, yes, maybe it did have a little something extra in it that it shouldn’t have had.

  But regardless of why that alarmed his family enough to warn him about it, it was the warm-honey feeling that it made course through Abby that alarmed her...

  * * *

  “You were right—it will take us a week to eat all these leftovers,” Abby said to Dylan as she tried to fasten her seatbelt behind the containers on her lap.

  She and Dylan were back in his SUV, parked near an enormous fountain that was at the center of the cobbled, circular driveway outside of his grandmother’s house.

  It was shortly before nine o’clock. China had hit it off with another guest at the Camdens’ Sunday dinner, and since she wasn’t scheduled to work until afternoon on Monday, she’d agreed to go with him for a drink. Abby and Dylan had been asked to go along but Abby was slated to open Beauty By Design first thing in the morning and had used that as her excuse to decline.

  Because going for a drink with Dylan, China and China’s impromptu date really would have made her feel as if she was on a date of her own with Dylan. And putting herself in that position seemed like a mistake.

  “GiGi can’t let anyone go away empty-handed,” Dylan said in response.

  He was in the driver’s seat, and in order to set down his own containers he reached around Abby’s seat to put them on the floor behind her.

  He didn’t come too close in order to accomplish that, but close enough to give her a whiff of that clean-smelling cologne he wore. And although she told herself she was imagining it, Abby thought she could feel a heady heat coming from him that her own body seemed drawn to. To the extent that it took some effort to keep herself still rather than leaning ever so slightly toward him the way she wanted to.

  Then he sat up straight, and there was the distance of the console between them again.

  Not really a safe distance, but some distance, at least. She relaxed again.

  He started the engine, and as they followed the drive around and out to the street he said, “Did I make that painless enough for you?”

  It took a moment to realize he was talking about the evening they’d just spent with his family.

  It had taken some time for her to get over her nerves when she’d first arrived, and then she’d overheard his cousin reminding him that she wasn’t good enough for him. Neither of those things were totally pain free, but she wasn’t going to tell him about them so instead she said, “On the whole, pretty painless, yeah. Thank you.”

  “I’m just glad you came. This was the first Sunday dinner since I got back from Europe that was almost painless for me, too, and that’s all because I was there with the woman of the hour.”

  Everyone whose hair she would be doing on Wednesday had wanted to talk to her about it, so she knew what he meant about her being the woman of the hour. As for it being almost painless for him, she still had no clue what was going on between him and his family but it was clear there was some tension there. She could see where having her as a buffer had probably made it easier for him.

  And that was likely the real reason he hadn’t left her side, she told herself to make absolutely sure that she didn’t lapse into believing there was any other reason—for instance that he’d wanted to be with her.

  “Your family is great,” she declared then. “You’re lucky to have them.” Regardless of whatever was amiss at the moment. “It’s bigger than the imaginary family I had as a kid, but just about as perfect.”

  “You had an imaginary family?” he asked.

  “Oh, sure. For years and years when I was little. Mother, father, grandparents, two imaginary sisters and two imaginary brothers. And there was also an imaginary big dog and an imaginary little dog.”

  “No cats?” he asked, laughing.

  “I’m allergic to those.”

  He laughed again. “Even imaginary ones?”

  Abby smiled and chastised him. “How realistic would it have seemed if I didn’t have the allergy there, too?”

  “Good point,” he agreed.

  She glanced over at him, craving the sight of him as if she’d gone months rather than minutes without it.

  He was wearing khaki slacks and a dark green sport shirt that did nothing for his eyes and wasn’t a color she would ever put him in. And yet she still thought he looked amazing.

  Searching for something else to talk about as he drove through the streets of Cherry Creek, she said, “I really liked Margaret and Louie, too. I see what you mean now about how even though they work for your grandmother, they are still sort of your foster family, too.”

  “Yep.”

  “And did I hear you right? Did you say they helped your grandmother raise you all? Because I didn’t really think at the time where your parents might have been in that but today—”

  “There weren’t any parents there,” he finished for her. “Because when I was eight all the adults in my family—except for GiGi and H.J.—”

  “Your great-grandfather, the guy who started it all.”

  “Right. All the rest of the adults in my family were killed in a plane crash.”

  He went on to tell her that GiGi had denied herself the family vacation to care for her father-in-law when he’d hurt his back, sparing the two of them, who would otherwise have been lost, too.

  “Oh! I didn’t know. I’m sorry!”

  “It was a long time ago.” He deflected her condolences.

  “I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “It’s really okay. It was too long ago to be a sore spot,” he answered.

  “But, still, that’s the kind of story that got kids I knew into foster care. You were orphaned.”

  “We were lucky. We had GiGi. And H.J. And Margaret and Louie. They moved us all into GiGi’s house, and that’s where I grew up from eight years old on—I’m betting that doesn’t compare to foster homes.”

  “But you still grew up without
any parents,” she mused, stunned to have learned that about him. “It just never occurred to me that something bad—especially that bad—could have happened to you. To your family...”

  He took a deep, steeling breath, as if he needed it even to think about the past. “Money doesn’t protect you from tragedy,” he said. “And that was definitely a tragedy. But at least we had each other.”

  She knew he was referring to her being alone in the world. But she also recognized that the difference in their situations didn’t make his any less difficult for him.

  “What was the worst part for you?” she asked, to let him know that she understood what he must have gone through.

  “I hated Mother’s Day and Father’s Day,” he said with a slight chuckle, as if that wasn’t really a monumental enough thing to be the worst part. “Especially in elementary school when we’d have to make cards—it would raise questions I didn’t want to answer when I made them for my grandmother and Margaret or for my great-grandfather and Louie instead.”

  So he’d gone through some of what she had.

  “I know. Me, too,” she said, stunned that they had this—of all things—in common when she’d been so sure that he’d come from just the kind of family she’d wished for.

  Then she said, “I remember things from when I was eight—a few anyway—so you must have some memories of your parents.”

  “Some, yeah,” he admitted. “I remember enough to have carried with me a sense of them, I guess. I remember when we were all together in our own house, the last Christmas when I got my first two-wheel bike, and my dad worked with me until we could take the training wheels off. I remember some birthdays—with six kids, how could I not? I remember going as a family to GiGi’s for Sunday dinner—”

  “Even then?”

  “Always.”

  “And you must remember what it was like to lose them,” she said softly as he drove out of downtown, feeling sympathy for the eight-year-old Dylan for having endured something she’d gone through at too young an age to clearly recall.

  “That I remember pretty well, yeah,” he answered somberly. “For the vacation my brothers and sisters and I were staying at home with our nanny, and our cousins were staying at their house with theirs. So I remember when we were all picked up suddenly and brought to GiGi’s house—all of us and all of the cousins. When GiGi and H.J. and Margaret and Louie sat us together in the living room and told us what had happened. It didn’t seem real at first—although I couldn’t figure out why the four of them would play such a mean trick on us. And then there was the funeral—five coffins. I kept counting them over and over... I guess that’s weird,” he said with a humorless little laugh and a glance at her.

  Abby shrugged. “You were a kid. It just seems like something you did to get you through it.”

  “Yeah, I suppose that’s true,” he agreed.

  Abby was still watching him, studying his profile, and she saw a muscle flex and unflex in his jaw as he seemed to relive some of that time.

  “You must have been sad after that,” she said. “Kids who came into foster care after the deaths of parents usually cried a lot, through the night... I always felt so bad for them. For me, being in foster care, not having parents, was just the way it had always been. I didn’t remember anything else. But kids who remembered having parents really suffered.”

  “We were all sad,” Dylan said. “GiGi had lost her husband, her sons, both daughters-in-law. Even H.J.—I’d never seen him look the way he did then, and that was scary to me as a kid. Even though he was in his eighties, he was still a big man, and strong. But after the plane crash... I don’t know, he looked...smaller. Defeated. For a while. Then he went back into action, running the business again at eighty-eight—”

  “That old?”

  “Yep. But knowing his own limitations, he went back mainly to put together a board of directors that he could trust to run things, making it clear that they were only in place until we all grew up and could take over. At home he started training us for that, to make sure we all knew running the business was going to be our job.” He shrugged. “And that’s what we did.”

  “Whether you wanted to or not?” she asked, wondering if—for entirely different reasons—she also wasn’t the only one of them not to have had many options about the path her adult life had taken.

  “Yeah, whether we wanted to or not. But Camden Incorporated is a big organization. There’s been a lot of room for each of us to find our own niche, just within the company. But we all grew up knowing it was our responsibility to carry on the family business, that it was ours to operate, to keep going—there was no wiggle-room there.”

  “Were you okay with that?”

  “I was. I am. And I haven’t heard any complaints from anyone else. And we all work pretty well together—even lately when there’s been some other stuff going on, we still haven’t had trouble agreeing on business things.”

  They’d reached her apartment and he parked in front, turning off his engine.

  That told her he didn’t intend for her to just jump out and she thought he was merely going to be gentlemanly and walk her to the door.

  But when he unfastened his seatbelt he didn’t reach for the door handle. He pivoted toward her, rested an arm across the top of her seat and smiled. “I didn’t mean for this to turn glum,” he said.

  What he’d said couldn’t compare to some of the glum stories she’d encountered, but she didn’t tell him that.

  And since he didn’t seem to be in any hurry for this night to end yet, she said, “So, you were orphaned—sort of like me—and raised to know you had to work in the family business. But what were you like as a boy? Were you the family troublemaker?”

  He laughed. “Why? Because I’m in trouble now?”

  She arched her eyebrows in a way that said maybe, even though she still didn’t know why he was in trouble.

  “No, I was not the family troublemaker,” he said as if she was far off base. “But I guess I did have an early start in security, now that I think about it. I was always pretty protective of the girls, and when it came to the guys, a lot of the time I somehow ended up involved in everybody else’s fights as backup. Outside of the family, anyway. Which means I went home with a lot of black eyes from fights that had nothing to do with me.”

  “So were all your scrapes from somebody else’s fights? Did you toe the line completely yourself?”

  He grinned in a way that put just a touch of devilishness into his eyes. “I said I wasn’t the family troublemaker. But I wasn’t the family saint, either. Some of the scrapes were my own, too. Boys will be boys, you know...”

  “So how did you go from protecting your family and helping them fight their battles, to ticking them all off?” she ventured, dying to know what he could possibly have done to aggravate such a close-knit group.

  He looked steadily at her. “I thought I was protecting and standing up for someone else—”

  “Against your family?” she blurted out, because she couldn’t fathom doing anything to alienate a family like that if it was hers.

  “Let’s say I was defending someone who was in conflict with my family...it was all just confused and misleading and a mess, and now I’m on the naughty list for it. But I’m working on things. It’s not a lost cause. I’ll get forgiveness eventually.”

  It must be nice to be so secure in his position that he knew that would happen. That was something Abby had never had any experience with.

  But she didn’t say that. And she didn’t feel as if she could ask him any more, even though she really wanted to.

  Then, as if to fill the silence before she could press him any further, he smiled a crooked smile and said, “And pulling off the coup of getting you for the wedding is helping me make strides in the direction of forgiveness.”

  “So you
’re using me,” she challenged him.

  He scrunched up that handsome face as if she’d hit him. “Ooh, no! I’m just trying to balance things—on your side I’m trying to give you some business and some great word-of-mouth to add to your already shining reputation, along with helping you find out about your family history. On the other side, I’m trying to fix one of the glitches with my sister’s wedding. Am I hoping to come out at the end in a better light with the family myself? Yes. But I’m gonna do my damnedest to make sure there are more benefits for you than for anyone, and some for my family, too, so everybody comes out ahead. Please don’t tell me any of that makes you feel used...”

  She couldn’t suppress a grin at the lengthy explanation that simple comment had elicited. “It’s okay. I’m not worried that you’re using me. I was just giving you a hard time.”

  “Don’t do that to me. I’ve already got enough people angry with me,” he beseeched.

  She understood that because she’d seen him get a few cold shoulders today.

  “Okay,” she said, as if she were conceding to something. “You have my permission to ride my coattails if you need to.”

  He laughed. “I do, and thank you,” he said jokingly. “And I definitely like you thinking you’re doing me a favor better than thinking that I’m using you.”

  “Oh, I like that better, too,” she said as if it were a revelation.

  He was smiling warmly at her, studying her in a way that seemed as if he was again finding things in her that he hadn’t expected to find, things he liked.

  And she so liked him looking at her that way...

  Which was how they sat for a moment—a moment when thoughts of kissing came into her head again—before he raised his chin as if dragging himself out of his own thoughts and said, “You have an early morning tomorrow and here I am holding you up. Wait there and I’ll come around and help you carry all those containers up to your door.”

  Abby nodded and he turned to get out.

  While he came around to her side she unfastened her seatbelt and got her purse onto her shoulder so she was ready when he opened her door to hand him some of the containers.