by Julia London
“Asshole,” Ming said with a flick of her wrist. “Men are such chickenshits. They don’t like to fall too hard or too fast, and when they do, forget it. They try and act like nothing happened, that it was only you and not him, blah blah blah. But he won’t be able to keep that up if he’s really fallen for you. He’ll come crawling back with some lame excuse.”
“Really?” Marnie asked hopefully. “You think?”
“Bullshit,” Olivia opined. “He got what he wanted, and now he’s done. Don’t kid yourself, Marn,” she said, studying her hair in the mirror as Ming pinned her gown. “Men are beasts. They will do or say anything for a fuck.”
“Really?” Marnie asked, slumping in her chair.
“Really. Forget him. He doesn’t deserve you anyway.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Ming said. “He’s getting his nerve up.”
“He’s not getting his nerve up. He got his dick up and now—Ming!” Olivia cried. “You pinned me!”
“Sorry!” Ming said, and yanked the pin clear of Olivia.
Marnie put her fist on her chin and moped.
With the dress crisis resolved, she returned home to work from the kitchen table. Only she didn’t get much work done, because she couldn’t stop thinking about what Olivia and Ming had said. It was sort of hard to argue that Eli had been after only one thing, especially when she’d done the initiating. But neither could she buy the theory that he’d fallen fast and hard.
She didn’t know what to make of it, and sat with her feet propped on one of her mom’s silk-covered dining chairs, drumming her pen against the table.
“Marnie, honey?” Mom asked, poking her head out of the kitchen. “Could you stop that, please?”
“Mom,” Marnie said, tossing her pen aside and dropping her feet. “Tell me what you think of this. I have this friend who is sort of seeing this guy, and things got a little close between them, and they ended up sleeping together. Then he did a one-eighty and said he didn’t really want to date her. But…but then he kissed her.”
“Are we talking about Eli?” Mom asked cheerfully.
“NO!” Marnie cried. “We are so not talking about Eli.”
“Because I think he is very fond of you,” Mom blithely continued. “But I wouldn’t put too much stock in a kiss.”
“Why not?” Marnie demanded testily.
“Men don’t like confrontations with women. They’ll do just about anything to keep from having one. Kissing is an avoidance technique. What do you think about stroganoff tonight? I haven’t made my stroganoff in a long time.”
“Stroganoff is fine,” Marnie said absently.
“Don’t worry about Eli, honey,” Mom said.
“Mom, it’s not Eli,” she insisted, and in a huff, gathered up her stuff. “I’m going to work in my room.”
“Okeley-dokeley!” Mom sang after her.
Marnie didn’t get any more work done there, either, and after pacing her floor, stepping over clothes and bridal magazines and more clothes in an attempt to pace, she finally got annoyed enough that she picked up the cell phone to call Eli.
Wait. The damn thing was off. Christ, he’d probably been trying to call her all day and she’d had it off. She turned it on, waited for it to power up, then noticed she had a single message. “See? He called me,” she announced to Bingo, who was lying on a pile of her dirty laundry, and retrieved the message.
“Marnie…”
She grinned with delight at the sound of his voice.
“I’m leaving for Colorado in an hour. They’ve had a wildfire that screwed up our canyoning route, so I’m going to go and redesign it. So listen, Jack is going to fly you and the chef dude up a week from Thursday. All you need to do is get you and the chef to the OC airport that Thursday morning around nine. Okay. See you.”
The message clicked off. Her grin faded. Confused, Marnie stared at the phone. He was gone? Just like that? If he’d really wanted to talk to her, he could have called her house. Okay, but maybe he’d been really busy. Maybe all the guys had been standing around, and he couldn’t really say anything like…great kiss, or you rock.
Damn. Part of her thought she was still getting dumped. Another part of her said he wouldn’t have kissed her like that if he was really dumping her. Another part altogether said she hadn’t eaten since this morning, and she was starving, but she wasn’t ready to carbo-load on stroganoff.
She showered, changed clothes, picked up her purse, and headed out.
“Marnie,” Mom called, waving a hand at her from the front room as she walked to the door. “Come here for a minute, will you?”
The book club was meeting, and Marnie sighed to the ceiling and reluctantly walked into the room, fanning the smoke from her face as she did.
“I was telling the girls about your friend,” Mom said with a not-too-subtle wink.
“Mom,” Marnie said through clenched teeth. “That was between me and you.”
“And I think we’re in agreement. He probably doesn’t want to date your friend.”
She forgot her embarrassment. “Really? Did you tell them that…you know, a good time was had by all?”
“I did.”
“The thing is, Marnie,” Mrs. Farrino said, pointing a cigarette at her, “if he really wanted to date her, he’d be calling her and sending flowers and trying to get in her pants again. But if he hasn’t called her, and he even told her he didn’t want to date her, it doesn’t matter about the kiss. She should move on. He’s just not that into her. I saw it on Oprah.”
“I saw it, too,” Mrs. Campbell said, “and I think we should read that book for our book club.”
“Bev, honey…we don’t read,” Mom said.
Mrs. Campbell shrugged. “Well, anyway, I don’t think it’s quite that simple, Marnie. I think sometimes men get hit over the head by a woman and they don’t know how to act. They are basically chickenshits.”
So to sum up, today she’d had two votes for chickenshit, three for asshole.
“Dal is a chickenshit, Bev, but most men aren’t your husband,” Mrs. Farrino said.
“Hey! I resent that. In Dal’s day, he was very decisive.”
“Don’t listen to them, Marnie. If this man wanted to be with you, you’d know it, because it’s all right here,” Mrs. Donaldson said, tapping her chest where her heart was.
“Thanks,” Marnie said, smiling weakly, aware that her heart was feeling a little empty at the moment. “I’ll tell my friend what you said.”
“You do that,” Mom said sweetly, and the others exchanged a look and a snicker.
Fabulous. By morning, it would be all over the neighborhood that Marnie had been dumped, poor dear.
She spent the next several days in a whirl of activity and frustration, trying to tie up all the loose ends of Olivia and Vincent’s wedding. The Chiavari chairs she had ordered had been scheduled for the wrong ship date. The BBJ linens to cover said chairs and tables and tent poles could be shipped to Durango, Colorado, with time to spare. But getting them from Durango to the lodge was another issue.
The security team Cooper had hired had a scheduling conflict, and the three hundred bottles of Cristal champagne Marnie had ordered were lost in transit somewhere. She still had two interviews to conduct for the professional guests Olivia wanted, plus Olivia’s hairstylist and makeup artist had left several messages, demanding more information on the climate in Colorado.
Furthermore, the lighting was coming from Denver, and she could not get the driver on the phone. She left message after message, and missed two of his calls, which essentially said, “Hey, don’t worry, be happy. I’ll show up.”
She figured he’d show up. The big question was when?
And last, but certainly not least, the tent guy called her to say he’d made his way up to the lodge and had done some preliminary work. “I gotta tell ya, Miss Banks, this is a tough one,” he said, and she could practically hear him scratching his head on the other end of the line. “Either you put up
two tents to accommodate the guests, or you build some sort of staging to even the ground out. The thing is, the lodge is in the mountains, and it’s not like ya got a level playing field up there.”
“Two tents?” Marnie cried. “Where would the band be?”
He didn’t answer for a moment. “Good question.”
“Okay, how much to build the staging?”
He did some quick calculations, and gave her a figure that gave her a headache. She was barely managing to hang on to the million five budget as it was. But she couldn’t imagine having the reception split into two tents. “Do it,” she said with great authority, and hoped to hell no one came after her for the extra ten grand this guy was going to want when it was all said and done.
In between the actual logistics of setting up this wedding, Olivia was getting increasingly frantic. Marnie had told her, pleaded with her, insisted that she would handle every aspect of the wedding and Olivia did not have to worry about a thing.
But Olivia was worried about everything, and her tone got increasingly sharp the closer to the departure date they got.
“Marnie, you must make sure my gown is protected!” she insisted rather shrilly on the phone.
“Of course I will, Olivia, you can trust me.”
“What about my other things? What about my wedding shoes?”
“I’ll tell you what—I’ll come to your house, and we can pack everything up so you can be assured that I’ve got it.”
“Why? Why can’t you and Lucy do that?” she asked irritably.
“We can, of course we can. I just thought you might feel better if you saw it with your own eyes.”
“Nothing is going to make me feel better, Marnie,” she said. “What about the beluga caviar? Did you verify that it’s Iranian? Because if it is Russian, you can tell Rhys to fucking stick—”
“It’s Iranian,” Marnie interrupted. “Hey,” she added cautiously, “is everything cool with you and Vince?”
“Of course it is,” she snapped. “Why wouldn’t everything be okay? Have you heard something? If you’ve heard something, you better tell me right now.”
“I haven’t heard a peep, Olivia,” Marnie said quickly. “I was just checking.”
By the time Olivia and Vince left with Cooper for their canyoning trip, Marnie was a worse basket of nerves than Olivia.
Marnie almost lost it when Rhys, the chef they had hired for the cost of buying a small nation, phoned a couple of days after Olivia left to tell Marnie that he did not fly.
“What do you mean you don’t fly?” she asked, gripping the phone so hard that it was a wonder she didn’t shatter it.
“Just that. I do not fly. I’m quite afraid of flying, actually.”
“You obviously flew to Los Angeles from Ireland,” Marnie pointed out, trying desperately to sound light and carefree.
“But I did not care for it.”
“Rhys,” she said sternly, “there really aren’t a lot of options. I don’t know if we can get you to Colorado on time if you don’t fly. But you mustn’t be afraid because our pilot is one of the best in the world. He was trained by the Air Force, and he has flown all sorts of—”
“I really couldn’t possibly care if he’s flown to the moon and back, Miss Banks. I do not fly.”
Marnie glanced at the calendar and glared at it. Three days. She had all of three days to convince this moron he was going to fly to Colorado or ruin everything. There was no time for the kid-glove treatment.
“Now then,” Rhys blithely chatted on, “I shall inquire as to the availability of train or bus passage, but I rather prefer a car.”
“No,” Marnie said evenly.
“No?”
“No! You are going to fly, bucko. You are going to fly if I have to come over there and personally put you on that helicopter. You signed a contract, and you are not going to muck this up for me. This is my one shot to make it in this business, and I have already endured enough with my celebrity clients changing their minds a dozen times each day! Do you realize we are on our fourth band? Our fourth band! And Olivia still isn’t happy. Do you have any idea what it takes to get some giant freakin’ arch to Colorado? You can’t just stick one of those things in your suitcase, right? And the linens have to be back in Denver the Monday after this gig, like I could possibly come down from the mountain that soon, and you are so going to fly.”
Rhys said nothing for a long moment. He cleared his throat. “I suppose I could take a pill or something, couldn’t I?”
“Yes, Rhys, I really think you could take a pill or something.”
“Very well, then. Thursday morning it is.”
“Thank you!” she all but shouted, and slammed the phone down.
It rang instantly, and she glared at it. “Uh-uh, sucker. No way,” she muttered, and clicked it back on. “Look, Rhys, I will personally take you to the doctor if that is what we need, but you are not getting out of this at this late date. You should have spoken up weeks ago when we first met.”
“Who is Rhys?”
Marnie gasped. “Eli!” she cried.
“Hey Marnie, how are you?” he asked, his voice coming in delayed over tiny little bleeps in the connection. “And who is Rhys?”
“A demanding chef. So where are you?”
“Somewhere in southern Colorado,” he said. “There’s no reception in the—reached a peak today, and—how’s everything going?”
The connection was pretty bad, and she struggled to make out his words.
“Great. Everything is under control. Why are you asking? Did Olivia put you up to this? Is she still worried?”
“Is Olivia worried?” He laughed again. “If she is—word about it. Nope, I called all by myself to make sure everything was cool and you were—”
He had called her from the mountains. He had thought of it all by himself. “Everything is fine,” she assured him.
“So listen…before I lose this connection—say I know I left a little—”
“What?” she cried, poking a finger in her free ear to better hear him over the static.
“I said I left a little abruptly.”
“That’s putting it mildly.”
“Yeah…well, I’ve been waiting—place—so I could call and tell you that I’m really—”
A weird beep and then nothing. Nothing! The connection was lost, and with a shriek of frustration, Marnie banged the phone against the table then put it back up to her ear. “Eli? Eli!”
All she could hear was a strange clicking noise. She’d lost him. I’ve been waiting—place—so I could call and tell you that I’m really…what? WHAT? Sorry? Relieved? Stupid, a moron, mean, in love?
“Augh!” she cried and cursed the heavens that ruled cell phone transmissions.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
After four days of canyoning with two preening peacocks who alternately fought, then made love so loudly that it sounded staged, Eli was exhausted, hungry, and not in a very good humor.
Personally, he couldn’t wait for the next meeting of TA, so he could announce that if any of them ever booked a wedding again, he’d personally wring their necks before he jumped off a cliff to break his own. After this week, he was certain Coop would join him in that—Olivia had turned out to be a huge whiner, her voice getting more shrill with each passing day—the water is too cold, and that’s really high, and I may hurt myself and I’m not packing anything out was all he heard from that woman’s lips for four days.
But they had done it, had canyoned down some of the coolest waterfalls and ravines he’d ever seen, had climbed up through aspen forests and walked through tiny dales brimming with flowers, had scaled northern faces, had camped under stars so bright and close it felt almost as if he were somehow suspended in the galaxy.
Now they were at the Piedra Lodge, about two thirds of the way up San Miguel Peak, where there were people and separate rooms and Eli could at last put some distance between him and the two stars.
Apparently, they wan
ted some distance from him and Coop, too, because they disappeared into their suite the moment they arrived, claiming fear of being discovered by paparazzi.
On that front, things looked pretty good. The security team seemed to be holding down the fort, even with trucks arriving almost hourly delivering tents and linens and two huge snowblowers, which were, oddly enough, accompanied by two hundred pounds of feathers.
Feathers.
He did not recall feathers being on the manifest of crap coming to Colorado, and was awaiting Marnie’s arrival so she could explain it all to him.
That wasn’t entirely accurate—he was awaiting Marnie’s arrival, period. He’d missed her smile and her pancake eyes and her exuberance, and after spending six days with the world’s whiniest woman, a cheerful Marnie Banks would be a welcome addition to this gig.
He thought of the day he’d called her. He’d wanted to talk longer, but the connection was so poor. He’d wanted to hear her laugh, but had been cut off too soon. And he wasn’t certain what she’d heard from him. Especially the part about being sorry for leaving without speaking to her. That part, he’d have to tell her in person.
If she ever showed up. She wasn’t yet at the lodge.
Jack and the chef guy, a huge mountain of a man, had already lumbered in, carrying three huge coolers, a very large clothing bag, and a smaller briefcase that the dude held tightly to his chest. “Utensils,” he had disdainfully articulated when Eli asked.
Utensils? Eli figured the guy could have borrowed a spatula from the lodge, but what did he know? The man waddled off to the bar, mopping his brow, proclaiming to one and all that if he didn’t have a bourbon neat, he’d perish, for apparently he had been unnerved by the flight to Durango and the drive up “all those ridiculously winding roads.”
“Where’s Marnie?” Eli asked Jack.
“I gave her a Jeep. She had to check on some stuff. This is a great place,” he added, looking around. “Reminds me of Mexico.”