by Nancy Warren
“I’ve prepared a folder for you. It’s got the highlights of my life in the last few years. Background for the interview.”
“Sorry, I forgot to print out my resume for you.”
She ignored his sarcasm. “Not to burst your balloon, darling, but they’re more interested in me.”
He pretended hurt. “You mean next time I get engaged, Cheerio! won’t want an in-depth interview?”
He’d meant it as a joke, but she turned and grabbed his arm. “You’re not thinking of getting engaged, are you?”
For a second he felt as though she actually cared about him, then reason reasserted itself and he understood she was afraid that the second the curse was lifted, he’d go marry someone else and she’d have a new PR disaster on her hands. “No. I’m not.”
“Oh, I’m so relieved.”
He couldn’t help but smile at her. “For now, I’m all yours.”
She sent him an enigmatic look. “I had a Tarot card reading, you know, as part of my efforts to rid myself of this curse.”
“Really? Did it work?” He tried to keep an open mind about things, but he didn’t seriously believe a pack of cards with pretty pictures on them could lift a curse. But then, he didn’t believe in curses either.
She shrugged. “Apparently things are going to work out in the end.”
“Now that, I do believe.”
When they got to the living room, she handed him a file folder. He knew all about the old Gabby but this new woman was a bit of a mystery. She settled in beside him, put her feet up on the coffee table and slipped a pillow behind her back. It was so familiar that a wave of nostalgia swept over him. How often had they sat together, talking about everything and nothing, their hopes and dreams, their separate paths and what he’d believed would be their shared future. He opened the file and began flipping through clippings, highlights of her life as told in sound bites and torn magazine pages.
A lot of the photos he recognized. There she was at the Oscars with her movie star boyfriend. Here was the opening of her design studio. She’d invited him to that event, but he’d been in Beijing on business. “I’m sorry I missed your opening.”
“We had quite the party,” she recalled, looking over his shoulder.
“What’s this?” he asked, looking at a photograph of Gabby with four young women and a young man in front of a depressing brick building.
“Those are my scholarship students,” she said, with a hint of pride.
“So, you did it then?” She’d said she wanted to provide a chance to London kids like her who’d grown up with nothing.
“Sure, but let’s not bring that up. It’s not relevant.”
“Okay.” But he was happy that Gabby had indeed fulfilled that dream. He liked that she played it down.
She shifted so she was facing him. Mimed holding a microphone. “Wade, tell me how you and Evangeline met?” She asked as though she were an interviewer. She’d been interviewed often enough that she could easily imitate the upbeat, staccato tones of a reporter.
He let his memory drift back. “I was in London. I was a young international banker. I’d just come off a trip to Hong Kong and Zurich. London was my last stop before heading back to New York.
“The firm we were affiliated with had bought a table at some big charity event with everybody who was anybody. We were doing the rounds when I glanced up and there you were. You were what, nineteen? And you looked a bit like a kid at her first grown-up party. Your eyes were big and round and you were taking it all in. You held a glass of champagne but you didn’t drink. Every guy there wanted to be with you. I knew I couldn’t leave without at least talking to you.”
She smiled. “You were very persistent. Very American.”
“You were wearing this amazing black dress and I couldn’t take my eyes off you. You were all legs and there was some kind of lace panel in the chest area that drove a man crazy wondering.”
She laughed. “I can’t believe you remember that dress. It was on loan from a designer, but he gave it to me in the end. He said I was his muse.”
“I remember the dress, but I don’t even remember what we talked about. I know I tried to impress you, acting like I was such a big shot and I was all of, what, twenty-four?”
“You did impress me. You seemed wildly sophisticated to me when you talked about politics and books and music as though you knew all about them.”
“I was faking it, mostly.” He settled back, his hand drifted to her knee. “We talked and danced all evening and then, when the party was breaking up, I said to you—”
“Don’t make me leave England without knowing you better.”
He squinted his eyes in pain. “Remember, I was only twenty-four. I’d be smoother now.”
“You were plenty smooth for me.”
“And from that moment until five days later when I got on the plane to go back to New York, every second we weren’t working, we were together.”
He used to tell people that he fell in love in five days. It wasn’t true. He fell in love the first second he saw her.
“Those may have been the best five days of my life.”
“And then you got a modeling job in New York.”
“Excuse me, I got plenty of jobs in New York.” She stuck her perfect nose in the air. “I was a success.”
He chuckled. “You were at that. A genuine supermodel.”
“And within a year we were engaged.”
“That we were.”
She leaned over and put her head on his shoulder. He smelled the familiar scent of her and she said, “What happened to us, Wade?”
He shrugged and felt the silky thickness of her hair against his shoulder. “I don’t know. Fame? We both got too invested in our careers?” He shot her a sideways glance. “Your temper?”
She dug an elbow into his diaphragm but softly. “You never minded my temper. In fact, I think you were the only one I never scared away.” She let out a sigh. “I am impossible, aren’t I?”
“Not impossible. Challenging.”
There was silence for a moment. “Did I break your heart?”
She’d used a rusty cleaver, sawed through his sternum, ripped open his ribs, grabbed out the tender still-beating heart and stamped on it in her brand-new Louboutin heels. But he wasn’t going to acknowledge how completely she’d eviscerated him. “I haven’t been lonely if that’s what you mean.”
It wasn’t and they both knew it.
“If I’d ever married anyone, it would’ve been you.” Instead, within weeks of their scheduled wedding she’d left him a note on his pillow and fled back to England. It wasn’t long after that she’d taken up with a pretty Brit movie star. For a while he’d believed she’d left him for a celebrity, but he’d kept up with her over the years as she jumped from man to man, and he’d begun to believe she hadn’t left him for another man. She’d left because she was terrified.
He chuckled. “Same. And here we are both crusty old bachelors.”
“Did you get close to marrying? After me I mean?”
“Sure I did. But the allure was never enough to make me give up my freedom.”
Also, no one had ever come close to being to him what Gabby was. He glanced at her. “How about you?”
Those deep sapphire eyes connected with his. “Not really. Peter was very sweet but even more insecure than I am. And I think he wanted the limelight more. Of course, that would never do. Then I thought I was in love with a Russian. Of course he called himself a prince but he probably wasn’t. He was lovely though, and very, very rich. He was devoted to me but he was much too jealous. And, other than that, nobody really.” She snuggled against him. “I had forgotten how comfortable you are. And how well my head fits on your shoulder.” She glanced up and the lips he had lost himself in so many times were mere inches away. “Why did you come to me, Wade?”
“Because you asked.”
Their past hovered in the air between them the way the possibility of a kiss hovered
and then the moment was shattered by the pealing of the doorbell.
In a second he watched Gabby retreat and the very businesslike and much less lovable Evangeline take over. She replaced the cushion to the exact spot where it had been then stood to check her reflection in the mirror over the fireplace.
Juanita answered the door but Evangeline strode out to help welcome the journalist.
Wade ditched the folder in a nearby antique chest of drawers, stood and waited as the entourage piled in. Soon the elegant room seemed full.
Phoebe walked over and shook his hand. “So glad we could do this.”
She had a photographer with her and the photographer had a helper and equipment. He’d forgotten what this was like. The lights and the big umbrellas. The assistant fussed with his hair and pushed his tie a quarter-inch to the left. He wanted to smack the young woman. Finally, they were arranged. Gabby took his hand but he felt it was a calculated gesture. She held it in such a way that her brand-new engagement ring faced forward. It reminded him of the official photo ops of a royal engagement.
Phoebe placed a sleek microphone on the table in front of them and drew a notebook from a large leather bag. She was as well dressed and as perfectly made up as Gabby was; he assumed it was in order to make the celebrities feel comfortable that she dressed like one of them. He was wrong. It turned out that she wanted to get pictures of herself with the happy couple. As well as writing a feature article, she was to make their engagement the subject of her own monthly editorial.
The three of them posed and lights flashed, and cameras snapped. Then they were released and allowed to sit on the couch once more.
“Do you mind?” she asked, and then without waiting for an answer carried a gilt armchair closer.
“No, of course not,” Gabby replied. “Can I offer you some coffee?”
“Oh yes. Thank you. Coffee would be great.”
He didn’t think either of them really wanted coffee. Gabby nearly always drank green tea. In fact, she put almost nothing toxic in her body, which was why it had always amused him that she fought a constant craving for tobacco. He wondered if she still did.
He thought the point of the coffee was the visual clue it offered to Cheerio! readers. Here were a couple of nice English women chatting over a cup of coffee, catching up on each other’s lives. While they were fully dressed to the nines and a photographer recorded every moment.
They got comfortable and chatted for a few minutes, mostly about British celebrities living in LA, and then Juanita brought in the coffee. In British bone china cups with gold rims and what looked suspiciously like a coat of arms.
Then they settled back and the interview began in earnest.
“Remind me how you two met?” Phoebe asked as her opening interview question.”
Gabby giggled, and even he had to smile. She glanced at him. “Why don’t you take that one, Wade?”
He got through a much shorter version of them meeting so young and their engagement the first time. She listened, nodded and when he was finished, Phoebe pulled a folder from her bag and passed it over to them. “Look what I found.”
With a quizzical expression Gabby opened the folder. For a moment he felt her utter stillness as they both stared down at a photo of the two of them he’d forgotten all about. Cheerio! had interviewed them when they got engaged back in the nineties. How young and hopeful he looked. How absolutely convinced that everything would turn out perfectly. And Gabby, a goddess, her sensual beauty almost breathtaking. The golden couple.
After a moment, Gabby laughed, her trained Evangeline laugh. “Oh my goodness. Where did you find this old thing?” And she put a hand to her chest. “What about the way I wore my hair back then? There was so much of it!”
“So, what’s different about being engaged this time?” The reporter asked.
He got the last question, let Gabby take this one. For a moment he saw her brain race and then, once more reaching to take his hand, she said, “I think we’re older and wiser. Wade and I were engaged almost twenty years ago. We were too young to realize what we had. But now, I think we know. I’ll never find a love like that again and I don’t want to go the rest of my life without it.”
Damn, he had to hand it to her. If he didn’t know she was lying through her pearly white teeth, he’d believe her story himself.
Phoebe turned to him. “And you, Wade? Do you feel that way?”
What the hell. If Gabby could lie, he could tell the truth. “I’ve loved this woman since the first moment I saw her. I will love her to the day I die.”
“Oh, Wade,” Gabby said, turning to send him a melting glance. And adding the ghost of a wink.
After that it was pretty routine. “Where will you live?”
“Why, right here, though of course we’ll also keep a home in New York as Wade’s business is there.”
Did they plan to have children?
“I can’t imagine anyone who would make a better father than Wade.”
He could sense the interview winding down and then the reporter asked, “Are you really going to wear that cursed wedding dress? Won’t you design a brand new dress just for you?”
He felt her stiffen beside him. Then she said, “First of all, I don’t believe for a moment the dress is cursed. Frankly, it’s one of the most beautiful gowns the Evangeline team has ever created. I think the reason no one wore it is that it was meant for me. So no, I will not be designing myself a new gown.”
“When my predecessor first interviewed you, when you got engaged back in the nineties,” she mentioned the decade as though it were a long bygone era, possibly taking place around the same time as the ice age, “Evangeline, you were an up-and-coming supermodel, but you told Cheerio! Magazine then that you were making your own wedding dress. Is that true?”
He supposed one of the reasons she had become a supermodel was that Gabby had the ability to put forth what seemed like honest emotion at whim. She appeared both proud and a little shy as she nodded. “I did make my own dress for that wedding. I didn’t have the skills I have now, of course, or the lovely fabrics at my disposal, and I certainly didn’t have the couturier staff that we are so proud of at Evangeline Designs. But that dress was made with love.”
“Whatever happened to it?”
She shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”
“Well, it’s so nice to catch up with the two of you. I hope you’ll send us an invitation to your wedding. We’d love to cover it.”
Before she could speak, Wade said, “I’m sorry. We’re not having any media at our wedding. But, don’t worry, we’ll make sure to send you some great shots.”
She nodded graciously. And then the crew packed up. And left. As soon as the door was shut, Gabby turned on him. “Are you crazy? You just told Cheerio! they can’t come to our wedding.”
“I know I did. I don’t want my wedding to be a media circus.”
She gave a shriek of frustration and threw her arms in the air. “There isn’t going to be a wedding!”
“Then why the hell do you care if some fancy magazine covers it or not?”
She gestured as though she were tossing a football up to God. “Now I know why I broke up with you. You’re impossible.”
He shook his head. “Right back at you.”
Chapter 9
“Nice job on the Cheerio! interview,” Sarah Marsden the PR consultant said as she settled in Gabby’s office for what had become a weekly meeting.
“It did turn out well, didn’t it?” Gabby agreed. The online article was already posted along with some very flattering photographs of her and Wade during their interview at her home. However, Sarah was not one to let a person rest on their laurels. She had her tablet computer out as well as her notebook and pen.
“We need to go over the media list for your engagement party.”
It was a good thing she already knew she wasn’t marrying Wade or she’d be tempted to cancel the engagement party and the engagement. After he’d so f
oolishly told Cheerio! they weren’t invited to the wedding, and she’d told him to butt out in no uncertain terms, he’d left. As far as she knew he was buried in work.
Or simply ignoring her.
Gabby wasn’t used to being ignored and she didn’t like it one bit. She was a center-of-attention sort of person.
She gave a cursory glance at the media list. “Yes, this looks fine.”
“Good. It’s going to be an amazing party. Everyone who’s anyone will be there. Garry Greenstein agreed to give a toast to the happy couple.” Garry Greenstein was a top comedian who’d enjoyed huge success on a sit-com he’d created about living in LA. Gabby didn’t know him particularly well, but was assured he’d be funny, charming, and not controversial. “He wants to do a bit about the curse, what do you think?”
She thought for a moment. “Sure, why not? Maybe if he makes fun of it, the curse will seem like a joke.”
“My thoughts exactly. I don’t think we’ve had one ‘no’ on the RSVP list. One of your former bridal clients even rescheduled her C-section so she can come to the party.”
“That’s nice.”
Sarah studied her. “Is everything all right?”
The trouble was that interview. Gabby tried not to dwell on the past, but sitting with Wade and recalling their young love had put her in a strange mood. She couldn’t go back and yet she wanted to. She adored Wade and he drove her crazy at the same time. She wanted to lean on him and she wanted to push him away. She rubbed her temples where a headache was threatening. “I’ll be fine. Pre-wedding jitters, that’s all. Wade’s not an easy man to love.”
Sarah’s lips twitched and she could almost hear her thoughts.
Gabby felt her own lips curving in response. “You’re right. I’m not easy to love, either.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to. I know I’m demanding and have high standards, but sometimes I could cheerfully hit Wade on the back of the head with a frying pan.”
Sarah laughed. “I’ve been married for five years and I have that impulse about once a week.” She played with her tablet for a minute. “I think it’s part of being in love.”