The Wedding Assignment

by Cathryn Clare

  “Let me dab a little more blush on your cheeks,” Lindie was saying now, reaching into her handbag. “Poor RaeAnne, are you having last-minute jitters? Everybody gets them, dear. Just keep taking deep breaths from right down below your diaphragm—like this—” She hauled in a couple of noisy breaths and let them out again in windy sighs. “And you’ll be all right,” she finished. “Of course—”

  Lindie craned her long neck toward the door in a pose that reminded Rae-Anne suddenly, hilariously, of the way Rodney’s old hunting dog looked whenever she remembered the bird-chasing glories of her long-ago youth. I can’t laugh, Rae-Anne thought. If I start to laugh, it’ll be all over. She started to rub her nose, thinking the gesture might ward off the half-hysterical giggle inside, but then she remembered the fancy makeup job the hairdresser’s assistant had applied this morning and stopped herself just in time.

  “Of course, if you want company in the limo after all, I’d be more than happy to go with you,” Lindie was saying. “I think the driver’s waiting out there now, so we could just-”

  “Thanks, Lindie, but I’d really rather go by myself.” RaeAnne spoke quickly, wondering why her heart was beating so hard all of a sudden. She could feel it at the base of her throat like a finger tapping insistently on her collarbone.

  “I understand, dear. I’m sure your parents would have been so proud to be here today, but as it is—”

  Rae-Anne didn’t want to talk about her parents. Her mother had died five years earlier in a plane crash while hopping from one high-powered diplomatic assignment to the next. And her father had been dead since Rae-Anne was three, victim of a disease that might have been cured in time if the family had been living in a country where the medical technology to save him had been available.

  Rae-Anne clasped the little heart-shaped locket she wore around her neck—a gift from her father on her third birthday—and fought off a wave of bitterness at the way her mother’s career had always had to come first. It had robbed Rae-Anne of so much in those early years.

  She squeezed the little locket harder, and then let it go, telling herself this was no time to indulge old resentments.

  Someday she would pass this locket on to a child of her own—a child who would be raised with love and respect, never shunted aside or made to feel second-best.

  But before that happy day arrived, Rae-Anne had a wedding to get through. And if she was going to get her nerves and her thoughts under some kind of control before she walked up the aisle, she knew she needed to be alone.

  But if Aunt Lindie thought she wanted to be alone in the limo to think about her parents, so be it. Rae-Anne was willing to do whatever she had to to make this trip to the church by herself.

  “It’s okay,” she said, ushering the little henna-haired woman gently but firmly toward the door. “If you go with Renee and Abel, you can help them carry the flowers in when they get to the church. And I’ll be right behind you in the limo. All right?”

  It was a little like urging a benevolently drunken patron out the door after last call, she thought. Lindie talked all the way to the front steps, and then only got going because Renee was waving at her and Abel was honking the horn.

  Rae-Anne waved at them and watched the photographer’s van follow Renee and Abel’s station wagon down the long curve of the driveway toward the road. The autumn weather had been dry, and the two vehicles left a tall plume of dust that rose gently into the blue Texas sky.

  “Dear Lord,” she muttered, inspired by the thought that the dust looked like a prayer wafting heavenward, “if You let me get through the next couple of hours without fainting or being sick, I’d be much obliged to You.”

  She shouldn’t be feeling this way, she knew. She should be happy that so many of her barely admitted dreams were beginning to come true. She was marrying a man who loved her, who had pursued her with single-minded devotion for nearly two years. He was offering her things that had been missing from her life for as long as she could remember, things like security, and love, and a family, and a home that was all hers.

  Rodney’s hill-country ranch house was luxurious, but not lonely like some of the embassy residences where she’d spent her childhood and youth. She should be happy about that fact. She should be lighthearted. But instead, she felt…

  Trapped.

  It was just the dress, she told herself. And the dainty little shoes. And the gloves, and the veil. It was the fact that she’d let Rodney talk her into a dress-up church wedding in the first place. The last time she’d worn elbow-length white gloves had been at an embassy party in Hong Kong when she’d been seventeen. It had made her feel like some kind of fashion doll then, too.

  She pulled the front door closed behind her and set the alarm code, pushing the buttons carefully with one gloved fingertip. The gloves were trimmed with delicate seed pearls, and as the afternoon sunlight touched her hand, Rae-Anne wondered why the pearls had suddenly started shimmering.

  It took a moment to realize that it was because there were tears in her eyes.

  Again.

  “Damn it,” she muttered. “This is getting worse instead of better.”

  The long white limo sat implacably next to the bottom step, like an ocean liner she wasn’t sure she wanted to board. Rae-Anne was a little surprised that the driver hadn’t come to hold the door for her, but she wasn’t sorry to have another few seconds in the sunshine to try to warm her chilly hands and collect herself.

  “You’ve gone over and over this, Rae-Anne,” she told herself out loud. “What else are you going to do? Hit the road again? Start over in some new place? You’ve been doing that for so long, and look where it’s gotten you. Rodney loves you. He wants to have children with you. You’d be crazy not to go through with this now.”

  Every time she got to this stage in her chain of reasoning, her stomach gave a horrible lurch of panicky protest. She waited for it now, and clutched her hands over her still-flat belly when she felt it arrive.

  This lurch was worse than the last one. Rae-Anne closed her eyes and tried to pull in a long breath of the clear hill-country air.

  Her stomach wouldn’t let her. Her stomach, in fact, seemed to have gone on strike completely a couple of days ago, and all of Rodney’s coaxing and Rae-Anne’s own common sense hadn’t been able to get it to eat or calm down or do any of the things it was supposed to do.

  “Fine,” she said now. “Be jittery, then. Aunt Lindie says that’s what’s supposed to happen, and Aunt Lindie’s clearly been to enough weddings that she ought to know.”

  Without waiting for the driver any longer, she negotiated the four shallow steps between her and the waiting limo and opened the rear door for herself.

  The car was about the size of a regulation football field. Inside, it was dim and cool. The air-conditioned breeze pumping out of the vents near the windows immediately canceled out the soothing warmth of the sunshine outside.

  “Do you think you could turn the air-conditioning down, please?” she asked, leaning forward so the driver could hear her.

  That was good, she thought. Her voice had sounded firm, almost as though she really was the same Rae-Anne Blackburn who’d always prided herself on her ability to fend for herself, on her independence and her certainty.

  The trouble was, one of the things she’d been most certain about was that she was never going to settle down until she met the man of her dreams.

  And yet here she was, doing just that.

  “Oh, hell,” she said, and felt the treacherous tears starting to spill over again.

  “Ma’am?”

  The driver thought she’d been speaking to him, she realized. She cleared her throat and leaned forward a little, wishing the stays at the sides of her bodice didn’t cut into her ribs as she moved.

  “Let’s get moving,” she said, trying for the authoritative tone she’d managed a moment ago. “You know which church it is, right?”

  That was better. Her voice hadn’t quivered at all that time.r />
  But she was still cold, although the driver had adjusted the control on the dashboard. She was about to walk up the aisle with the man she’d promised to marry, and it was all she could do to hold back her tears.

  The worst part was that she knew exactly why.

  It was because of Wiley Cotter.

  Rae-Anne had learned early in her life that it didn’t pay to pin too much on your dreams, especially if those dreams depended on other people. But there were a few secret hopes that she’d hugged in the secret recesses of her heart all these years.

  She had always hoped that someday she would meet a man who would stir her body and soul in a way too powerful to resist. She hoped that after so many years of restless traveling, she would find a place that felt like home. And— assuming dreams number one and two were possible—she had a deeply buried hope that someday she might be a mother to children of her own in a way that her own mother had failed to be to her.

  Well, Wiley Cotter had taken care of the first requirement in a way more spectacular than Rae-Anne had ever even let herself imagine.

  And then, instead of turning magically into Mr. Right, he’d become Mr. Disappearing Act. And even before he’d vanished from her life, he’d made it very clear that he wasn’t the man to fulfill the rest of Rae-Anne’s secret hopes.

  Rodney was. Rodney had always wanted children. And he was as settled and secure on his ancestral hill-country property as it was possible to be.

  But Rodney had never turned her heart to pure flame the way Wiley Cotter had once done. And that was why she had cold feet—hell, cold everything—on her wedding afternoon.

  Wiley was dead, and there was no use thinking about him now. But her mind kept confronting her with thoughts of that tall, lanky, heart-stoppingly handsome Texan who’d swept her heart away, with memories of the way his laugh could fill a whole room. And in spite of everything, in spite of the fact that she was about to become Mrs. Rodney Dietrich and a respectable and wealthy hill-country matron, Rae-Anne couldn’t stop thinking about the way Wiley had made love to her, wicked as sin and as sweet and hot as her wildest dreams.

  The limo was passing the tall limestone gates now, and gliding onto the road that led to New Braunfels, five or six miles away. Rae-Anne settled herself against the upholstered back seat and tried to clear her mind of Wiley’s ghost, the way she’d tried to clear it in the early days of pain and grief when she’d first heard he was dead.

  She wanted to arrive at the church composed and confident and untroubled by any of the unhappiness in her past. That was why she’d needed this last ride by herself, away from Aunt Lindie and all the other well-wishers who thought it was just wonderful that dear Rodney had finally chosen a bride. She took in as deep a breath as the restrictive bodice would allow and tried to calm the fluttering in the middle of her body.

  It wasn’t working. As the limo started to pick up speed on the winding road, Rae-Anne clutched her hands together in sudden panic. It’s too late now, she thought. The words hit her hard, compounding the chill she was feeling inside.

  Was she really doing the right thing? Wouldn’t it have been better to be completely honest with Rodney, to say, “We like each other, but that’s not enough"?

  She could still do it. They weren’t married yet. It would cause a stir, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world. She could be free again to live her own life, with those improbable dreams of hers hidden but still intact. She could be her own woman, as she’d always been.

  Except that that wasn’t possible anymore.

  The answer came from inside her almost as if the new life forming in her belly had heard her thoughts and disagreed with them. It wasn’t anything as tangible as a small body stirring, not this early in her pregnancy. But she could feel something, some certainty that she wasn’t alone in this body of hers anymore, that she would never quite be her own woman again, because there would be this child to share herself with.

  And at that thought, all her wild ideas about cutting loose and running evaporated into the still-cool air inside the limousine. Rodney Dietrich might not be the man of her dreams, but it was still his child she was carrying, and he was offering—gladly, eagerly—a home and a family for the baby to be born into. No amount of dreaming about Wiley Cotter could ever provide that.

  And Rae-Anne was determined that her child would never know the constant uncertainty and uprooting of her own childhood. She pressed both gloved hands over her stomach again and wondered if it was just her overexcited imagination that made her think she felt an answering flutter under her quivering fingertips.

  “You’re a bit young yet to be a ring bearer,” she murmured. “But we’ll go up the aisle together just the same.”

  She smoothed her hands over the white expanse of the skirt, feeling the swirling patterns of the seed pearls under her fingertips. She felt a little calmer now, or at least she did until the driver’s voice startled her.

  “Did you say something, ma’am?”

  Rae-Anne lifted her head suddenly. The driver’s voice was deep and husky, with a slow drawl in it.

  Of course it reminded her of Wiley, she told herself. He’d been lurking in her thoughts all week, inviting himself in, making himself hard to forget, the way he’d done when she’d first met him. It was no big mystery that men she didn’t even know were starting to sound just like him.

  Still…

  Rae-Anne frowned and tried to get a look at the driver’s face in the rearview mirror.

  She couldn’t. The limo was too long, and she was stuck at the very back of it, miles from the driver with the sexy drawl.

  “I was just muttering to myself,” she said. “I do that, when I get worked up about something.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  She must be losing her grip, she thought. She was almost sure she heard him snort, a familiar, earthy sound that had her heart pounding before she realized it.

  She was almost sure she saw the edge of his profile quirk upward in the kind of lazy, tilted smile that sometimes got into her dreams.

  She was less sure—but not completely unconvinced— about his muttered answer.

  I know.

  That was exactly what it had sounded like.

  She made herself sit still for a few minutes, but her curiosity kept building, especially when she remembered that there’d been some last-minute snafu about the car. Some change of limousine companies, or something.

  She hadn’t paid much attention, because Rodney and his assorted aunts and cousins had seemed happy to take over all the details of running the hastily planned wedding. It was Aunt Lindie who had sorted out the last-minute misunderstandings, like the flowers being delivered a day early and no one thinking to tell the restaurant that the groom’s godmother was allergic to seafood.

  But now she wished she’d been a little more attentive to the arrangements about the limo. There was something funny about switching companies at this late date, wasn’t there? And why did the dark-haired chauffeur seem to be taking such care that she didn’t get more than just a glimpse of his profile? She slid sideways on the wide back seat, trying to get a better look at the man behind the wheel.

  “Are you sure this is the right way?” she asked sharply. “I don’t recognize this road.”

  “It’s a shortcut.”

  The driver muttered the words, as if he didn’t want her to hear him clearly. And he was keeping his head tilted so she couldn’t see him, either.

  They were still cruising through the open, scrubby landscape of the hill country, but this wasn’t the main road into New Braunfels. They must have made a turn while RaeAnne was too preoccupied to notice. The realization kicked her nerves into high gear again, and her imagination started churning out all kinds of alarming possibilities.

  She was about to marry an extremely wealthy man. She remembered the elaborate security procedures she’d lived with as the daughter of a diplomat, all the warnings about not making herself a target, not taking any chances. Dear
Lord, she thought, what if some idiot had read the announcement of her wedding and decided that absconding with her would be a good way to make a quick million bucks?

  The word kidnap spun into her thoughts before she’d realized the idea was even there.

  She leaned forward again, silently cursing the formfitting gown she was fastened into. If there was something going on—if she had to give a description of the man-

  He had a map out, she noticed. The sight of it brought her fears even more sharply into focus. Didn’t limo companies hire people who knew their way around? Suddenly all her prewedding uncertainty magnified itself into a sense of dread, a feeling that she had gotten herself into a place she really didn’t want to be. Without realizing she’d done it, she put her open hands over her stomach again, hugging the invisible new life inside her with sudden, protective strength.

  She looked at the door handle closest to her right hand and wondered what would happen if she jumped out of the car. They were going at least forty miles an hour. Was it an impossibly dangerous idea for a pregnant woman to be entertaining? And even if it wasn’t, how far was she likely to get, wearing this tight-fitting white dress with its outrageously long skirt and train, and shoes that were made for tiptoeing, not running?

  The idea didn’t appeal to her. She was stuck, trapped in a Titanic-size limousine with a man who was being extremely careful that she didn’t get so much as a glimpse of him.

  Well, there was always the direct approach. Rae-Anne could be tactful when the occasion called for it, but this one didn’t seem to. As clearly as she could, she said, “How far are we from the church?”

  He didn’t answer her. She repeated the question, but it was like talking to a stone statue.

  Rae-Anne felt panic starting to erode her nerves again. Think, Rae-Anne, she told herself. Don’t lose your head.

  The direct approach had failed, and leaping out of the car seemed foolhardy at best. She was going to have to try something else.