Tom. Tom Harrington. Tom tom tom tomtomtomtomtom.
She’d kissed Tom. She’d liked kissing Tom. TOM!
Her brain raced all night long, memories rushed and rolled, emotions swirled and puddled, all to the beat of one unavoidable rhythm: Tom Tom Tom Tom.
Even extra passes of the flat iron didn’t press that chorus from her head. What had she done? Seven years ago she’d made a huge mistake. Much like last night, Claire could blame lots of factors, but none of them absolved her from her acts. Once again, there was only one thing to do: be a Badass Bitch.
Claire knocked on Laurel’s bedroom door and Laurel sunnily answered, “Come in!”
Unfortunately, the other bridesmaids had already beaten her to Laurel’s room. They hadn’t had to use a deep conditioning hair mask this morning to repair the damage that Tom’s dollar-store sulfates had done to her hair.
Laurel was leading the gossip, probably because she had one foot in the marital grave and her life was boring already. “Ashton and Hawk didn’t come back last night,” she was telling Janine. “I can’t let Tyler know—he’ll blow his top.”
“Ashton and Hawk?” Claire scowled. What was with those names? Had she stumbled into an episode of The Young and the Restless?
Laurel waved a hand. “George Hawkins. The family calls him Hawk, remember?”
She didn’t remember, but of course she knew George Hawkins, Tyler’s best friend, who completed their foursome every time he visited New York. Thinking about the best man reminded Claire about the hen and stag party. And whether someone had remembered to put an iron in the groom’s suite. She also needed to check for hidden alcohol in the groom’s suite. And put champagne in the bride’s, and… She counted heads for glasses.
“Where’s Maggie?” she asked Laurel, interrupting Janine’s story about their brother. Cinco was a tool. No one needed to hear stories about him. “Isn’t she a bridesmaid?”
“She has to work this morning,” Laurel replied.
Claire sighed. She had to work too. But she wasn’t letting it interfere with her wedding duties. Some people just didn’t know how to multitask. “I hope she doesn’t miss the cruise tonight.”
Laurel’s cousin from Alabama snorted into her Bloody Mary. “I’ll jump on that Cruz.”
Janine laughed. “I’d be all over that Cruz.”
Claire’s heart sped up. “Senator Cruz? That Cruz?” She looked at Laurel in a panic. “Did your father invite someone else?” Kill her now. Another dignitary meant a whole lot of hassle with the seating arrangements.
But the ladies laughed like that was the funniest thing they’d heard in a year, and Laurel sweetly grasped Claire’s hand and explained that Maggie’s date was named Cruz. Which only irritated her instead of calmed her down. People shouldn’t be allowed to bring dates with weird names to weddings. It stressed out the wedding planners.
She went to pour a cup of coffee from Laurel’s carafe and Janine’s sly voice rang out through the room. “Is your head okay, Claire? Did Dr. Tom take good care of you? It looked like such a nasty cut.”
Claire pressed her fingertip to the small butterfly bandage that barely showed under her loosely styled hair.
“Yes, I was worried,” Laurel said. “I came in to check on you after the party and you weren’t back yet.”
Claire cocked her head at Laurel. There was something in her expression—guilt, maybe? But why would Laurel feel guilty? She didn’t push Claire’s forehead into an Adirondack chair.
She had stayed out late last night for perfectly innocent reasons. Poppy’s birth, getting cleaned up at Tom’s house—no one would find those explanations suspicious in the least. But when Claire opened her mouth, a new version of events came out.
“I must have come back right after that,” she said. “I took a shower and went straight to bed. The night took a lot out of me.”
That part was true, at least.
The Alabama cousin seemed to buy that. Laurel and Janine both gave her speculative glances, but Claire couldn’t handle their curiosity today. Not with the memory of Tom’s hands and lips taunting her still.
To distract them, she started rattling off her to-do list items, and Janine suddenly remembered she was pregnant and needed to lie down and Alabama Cousin was tasked with checking the mail to see if the calligrapher’s package of personalized thank-you cards had arrived yet.
After they were alone, Claire turned on Laurel. “You didn’t tell me Tom Horrible was going to be at the clambake.”
Laurel examined her pores in the magnifying mirror. “Honestly, Claire. Are you really still calling him that?”
“You should have given me a warning, at least. I could have hauled my hazmat suit out of storage. I probably need shots.”
Laurel rolled her eyes. “Tom doesn’t have cooties.”
“Don’t mock me. I’m trying to do my bridesmaidly duties and protect you from your mortal enemies—”
“Tom is a groomsman—”
“—and I can’t do it if I’m too busy juggling garlic, holy water, and a stake.”
“Funny.” Laurel quirked her lips at Claire’s reflection in the mirror. “He’s said the same about you.”
“You talked to him?”
“Yes, we talk. That’s why he’s a groomsman. Not to mention a good friend.”
Claire coughed obviously.
Laurel repeated herself firmly: “Tom and I are friends.”
“You can’t be friends with everyone.”
“I can.”
“You’re too nice. Would you be friends with Hitler?”
“No, and don’t compare Tom to Hitler.”
“I’m pretty sure he took German in high school.”
“I studied in Paris. That doesn’t make me Napoleon.”
“That’s different. You’re sweet and beautiful and you don’t have creepy taxidermied animals all over your office.”
“He’s a vet.”
“And a bad one, if his patients are all stuffed with sawdust.”
“They’re left over from the guy he bought the practice from.”
Claire crossed her arms.
Laurel sighed. “Look. I’m friends with both of you. If I told you Tom was back in Bar Harbor with his vet practice and we were hanging out when I came back to Virtue Cove, you would have been angry. What am I supposed to do?”
“Does your granddad still have access to the nuke codes? CIA agents?”
Laurel laughed. “Claire, I love you.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. And I’m friends with both of you. This is my wedding, so can you please try to get along with him for just the next few days? Then you can go back to bickering.”
Bickering? Laurel made it sound childish. Like Claire didn’t have a really good reason to dislike Tom Harrington.
“Okay, fine. I will be nice to Tom Horri—”
She broke off when Laurel glared.
“It’s a hard habit to break!” And such a perfect nickname.
“Try.”
Claire took a steadying breath. What if she opened up to Laurel now, explained the full history between her and Tom—what happened last night and what happened that night before graduation? Then Laurel would understand why having Tom around was going to be traumatic and then Tyler could demote Tom from groomsman status and, preferably, ask Senator Ramsey to deport him to New Zealand immediately.
She decided to test the waters. These things needed to be handled delicately.
“Laurel, I’m sorry. You know that if I get worked up about something, it’s for a really good reason…” Like the fact I slept with your ex-boyfriend…
The bride picked up a makeup brush and started applying her favorite Orgasm blush to the apples of her cheeks. “If anyone needs to be stressed out, it’s me.” She chuckled. “Or Tyler.”
Claire stood and paced behind Laurel to fight the anxiety. “No, no. I don’t want you to stress. I want you to have the perfect day, the perfect everyt
hing.” And I can’t ruin her wedding weekend with my old mistakes.
Laurel spun around and caught Claire’s hand as she paced. “You know what will make it perfect? You and me having fun this afternoon.”
Laurel was right. This wasn’t the time for drama. This was the time for making memories. “That sounds great, after I get a few of these things taken care of.” Claire showed Laurel her phone and all the notifications that had popped up since she’d walked down the hall. “The caterers still haven’t given your mom a bill and your dad was just asking about the liquor choices at the bar.”
“I don’t want to hear it! Everyone needs to chill. You included. Delegate to Janine, to Maggie, to my cousins, to Tyler’s mom and dad. It takes a village to plan a wedding.”
“Oh! That reminds me!” Claire pulled open her notes app. “We were supposed to make sure your dad’s security sent the blueprints to the Secret Service—”
Laurel put her hands over her ears. “Stop!”
Claire hit the “later” button and put the phone down. Laurel had been more than clear. She wanted to have a relaxing, good time this weekend. And it was Claire’s job to get every detail right so that would happen.
Chapter 7
Six months ago when Tyler had looked lovingly into his fiancée’s eyes and suggested that the bachelor and bachelorette parties should be combined into one fun outing, Claire had thought that was the sweetest, most modern idea ever. Here was a man who didn’t need a night of throwing money into strange women’s underwear to “celebrate” his impending nuptials. Claire thoroughly approved.
Now? Not so much. Not since Tom Harrington had joined the bridal party. It was a large yacht, the Stolen Virtue, but she was on a boat. With Tom.
So she kept circulating, making sure everyone had a drink, that the arugula on the lobster brioche rolls was crispy, that the whipped cream for the miniature blueberry tarts was chilled, that the captain followed the exact route she had plotted on the U.S. Maritime map the Coast Guard had provided after a few calls to their Bar Harbor office.
She’d seen Tom when he boarded the gangplank. Strangely, he’d been dressed appropriately today—no Levi’s or flannel was covering his lean, hard frame; instead he had chosen dark navy pants, a wrinkle-free shirt, and, shockingly, a tie.
Before he could look up and see any residue of approval on her face, she whipped out her phone to check her messages. Any minute now, there could be a signed contract in her inbox. This was a deal that had taken as long to plan as this wedding, and she wasn’t taking any chances with either.
Claire couldn’t be sure, but as the hen and stag yacht party commenced, she got the feeling she was being watched. Everywhere she turned, she felt Tom’s presence, his eyes on her. He’d said they had a truce—that meant he had to stay out of her way, but it was hard with only so much deck to circle.
Claire decided to visit the captain one more time. It seemed they were going on an angle from the coastline, and she had specifically requested to go parallel. She heard footsteps behind her—Tom. He was stalking her. This was unacceptable. She turned a corner and practically ran into George, Tyler’s best friend and best man, carrying two glasses of champagne. “Thank God,” she said as she helped herself to one of them.
“That was for Ashton.” George sighed.
“Give him the other one.”
“Ashton.” He repeated the name for some reason. “She’s Tyler’s sister. You know, the groom?
Right. She knew that. “Ashton James. Of course. I thought you meant the other Ashton.”
George frowned at her. “Kutcher?”
“Yeah. Whatever.” The footsteps grew closer. “Quick. Just do what I say.” She wrapped an arm through George’s and cuddled in as close as she could in the narrow space before laughing loudly. “George, you are so right. I never thought of it that way.”
To his credit, at least the best man kept a straight, if slightly quizzical, face as Tom Horrible came around the corner. Claire pressed up closer to George. “Oh hello,” she said in her best totally uninterested voice.
“Tom!” George exclaimed. “Awesome to see you, man.” Apparently George hadn’t gotten her memo to virtually ignore the idiot in their midst.
“Hey, Hawk,” Tom said easily. Claire did a mental eye roll at Tom’s use of that juvenile nickname. She called people by their proper names.
“You two know each other?”
“Yeah—when I went to that teachers’ conference in Boston. Laurel was there and she called Tom up and we went out to dinner.”
“Of course,” Claire said through gritted teeth. “Everyone loves Tom.”
“Almost everyone,” Tom said with a charming, self-effacing smile. George laughed. Claire wanted to scream. She knew what he meant by that. He meant that she was the only person that somehow didn’t see what a saint Tom Harrington was.
“In fact, someone’s not happy with me right now.” George made a sound of disbelief and Claire rolled her eyes. What was it about Tom that had everyone fooled? “That’s why I wanted to talk to you, Claire. Bits needs us to handle something about the wedding.”
“Oh sure.” George pulled away like a typical guy who didn’t want to get sucked into wedding planning details. “That sounds important.” He lifted his champagne glass. “I’ll leave you two to it.”
Claire held on to George’s sleeve as long as she could without seeming desperate—which she was, but Tom couldn’t see her like that. No. Tom couldn’t see the chinks in her armor. She pulled her phone out and checked it, trying to ignore the disconcerting nearness of Dr. Tom Harrington.
He stayed silent as she checked her messages, which was more annoying than if he’d talked. “Stop staring at me,” she muttered.
“I’m just waiting.”
“For what?”
“To talk to you.”
She raised her eyes and saw him, lounging against the railing. His arms crossed, a patient smile, his hair ruffling in the sea breeze, he was a picture that made Claire’s breath catch.
“No,” she said, to him, to his smile, to everything.
“No? No what? No talking?”
She gestured with her phone. “I’m busy.”
“This is a party.”
“I have work to do.”
His head tilted. “You’re on a boat. It’s your best friend’s wedding. What do you have to do that’s so important?”
Really? The list was too long to go over, and he wasn’t interested anyway. Tom just wanted to needle her. “I’m waiting on an important agreement, if you must know. We’re signing a celebrity to be the face of Nicola Stanton.”
“What’s wrong with her face?”
“Whose face?”
“Nicola Stanton’s.”
Claire shook her head, fighting off the impulse to laugh. “Nicola Stanton is a brand.”
Tom frowned. “Oh. It sounds like a person.”
Were all men this clueless? “She is. She’s a British fashion designer. And an international brand. And as soon as I get the email, she will have a universally recognized celebrity as the face of the fashion house.” With that, Claire checked her phone again. Craptastic. They were out of cell range again. Was it so hard to drive a boat straight up a coastline, within a consistent distance from cell towers? She turned toward the stairs, intending to go straight to the captain and repeat her instructions again.
“Where are you going?” Tom’s voice followed her through the narrow stairwell. She turned and he was there, too close in such cramped quarters, where she could smell his clean scent, feel his straightforward gaze like an arrow to her heart.
“I’m going to tell the captain how to do his job,” she said, feeling cornered, literally and figuratively.
Concern touched Tom’s eyes. “Why. What’s he done?”
“I gave him a route. He’s not following it.”
Surprisingly, a grin broke out on Tom’s face.
“What’s so funny?” she demanded.
“You. When people don’t obey your every command.”
She was being pulled into this fight, this same old fight. She saw it happening but she couldn’t stop herself. “Some people need help from those of us who are actually capable human beings.”
“Like the captain with thirty years of experience at sea, who has been hired by a former vice president, vetted by the Secret Service, and has a dozen licenses to operate maritime vehicles?”
Did he actually think she’d back down from this argument just because he sounded reasonable? She held up her phone. “I need to be in contact with people at all times.”
Tom’s lip twitched. “That’s what this is about? Claire Portelli can’t get emails at sea?”
“Forget it.” She pushed her phone back in her pocket and started to climb the stairs as Tom’s laughter filled the air between them. “Shut up!” she yelled.
“We need to talk.”
“No.”
“You said that last night.”
Claire tossed a look over her shoulder, back down at him. Slowly, deliberately, she stepped out of her silver Jimmy Choo flats. “I believe I said that I can’t talk if I’m not wearing shoes.”
She left her shoes there on the stairs, and Tom didn’t follow her when she went back to the place where the big steering wheel was. And reminded the captain, once again, the importance of following her route, clearly marked on the map. Tom didn’t appear when she circled through the guests again, checked the arugula and the whipped cream, informed a waiter that the glasses needed to be dried more thoroughly, made small talk with Maggie’s seriously handsome date, the one who was definitely not that Cruz, greeted another old friend from Columbia, and generally ensured that everything was going off without a hitch. Until Janine saw her.
“Where are your shoes?”
“Excuse me?”
“Everyone else is wearing these flats but you’re not.”
Claire looked down at her bare feet. It had been her idea to provide the basket of flats at the gangplank for the ladies to avoid teeter-tottering into the Atlantic, but she hadn’t circled back around to find a spare pair after she abandoned her Jimmy Choos to prove a point to Tom.
The Last Plus One Page 29
