Brown-Eyed Girl

by Lisa Kleypas

  Ryan laughed, the flash of humor and warmth transforming his face. “That’s exactly what I meant.”

  “All right, then,” I said. “During the planning process, I’ll give you updates as things are decided. If there’s something you don’t like, I’ll shut it down. There may be a couple of things we’ll have to compromise on, but overall, the wedding will be elegant. And it will not turn into The Hollis Warner Show.”

  “Thank you,” Ryan said feelingly. He looked at his watch. “If that’s it for now —”

  “Wait, what about the proposal?” I asked.

  A slight frown crossed his brow. “I’ll probably propose to Bethany next weekend.”

  “Yes, but do you know how you’re going to do it?”

  “I’ll get a ring and take her out to dinner.” His frown deepened as he saw my expression. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing at all. But you could do it in a more imaginative way. We could come up with something cute and fairly easy.”

  “I’m not good at cute,” Ryan said.

  “Take her to Padre Island,” Sofia suggested. “Stay at a beachside villa for a night. The next morning, the two of you could go for a walk on the beach…”

  “And you’ll pretend to find a message in a bottle,” I said, brainstorming.

  “No, no,” Sofia interrupted, “not a bottle… a sand castle. We’ll hire some professional sand sculptors to do it —”

  “Based off a sketch that Ryan’s provided,” I said. “He’s an architect – he can design a special sand castle for Bethany.”

  “Perfect,” Sofia exclaimed, and we high-fived each other.

  Ryan had been glancing back and forth between us as if he were attending a tennis match.

  “Then you’ll get down on one knee and propose,” I continued, “and —”

  “Do I have to take a knee when I ask her?” Ryan asked.

  “No, but it’s traditional.”

  Ryan rubbed the lower half of his jaw, clearly not liking the idea.

  “Men used to kneel when they were being knighted,” Sofia pointed out.

  “Or beheaded,” Ryan said darkly.

  “Kneeling will look nicer for the pictures,” I said.

  “Pictures?” Ryan’s brows lifted. “You want me to propose to Bethany with camera guys there?”

  “One photographer,” I said hastily. “You’ll hardly notice him. We’ll camouflage him.”

  “We’ll hide him in a sand dune,” Sofia added.

  Frowning, Ryan raked his hand through the close-cut layers of his brown hair, the light picking out glints of mahogany.

  I looked at Sofia. “Never mind. A camera at the proposal sounds like a shovelful of tacky to me.”

  Ryan lowered his head, but not before I saw a reluctant smile emerge. “Damn it,” I heard him mutter.

  “What?”

  “Suggesting you as the wedding planner is turning out to be the first nice thing Hollis has ever done for me. Which means I might have to thank her.”

  “You answered,” Joe said later that night in a tone of mild surprise.

  I smiled, leaning back against the pillows with my cell phone in hand. “You told me to.”

  “Where are you right now?”

  “In bed.”

  “Should I call another time?”

  “No, I’m not sleeping, I always sit in bed and do some reading at the end of the day.”

  “What do you like to read?”

  I glanced at the pile of candy-colored novels on the nightstand and replied with self-conscious amusement, “Love stories. The kind with the happy endings.”

  “Do you ever get tired of knowing how the book’s going to end?”

  “No, that’s the best part. Happily-ever-afters are hard to come by in real life, even in the wedding business. But at least I can count on one in a book.”

  “I’ve seen some great marriages in real life.”

  “They don’t stay that way, though. Every marriage starts as a happy ending, and then it turns into a marriage.”

  “How did someone who doesn’t believe in happily-ever-after end up as a wedding planner?”

  I told him about my first job after graduating in fashion design, how I’d apprenticed under a New York designer for a bridal fashion label, managing the sample room, learning to analyze sales reports, developing relationships with buyers. I had worked on a few of my own designs and had even won a prize as an emerging designer. But when I’d tried to start my own label, it had never gotten off the ground. No one had shown any enthusiasm for backing me.

  “I was honestly stunned,” I told Joe. “The collection I’d designed was beautiful. I had a great reputation, and I’d built up all these amazing contacts. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. So I called Jasmine, and she said —”

  “Who’s Jasmine?”

  “Oh, I forgot I hadn’t told you about her. Jasmine’s my best friend in New York. A mentor. She’s the head fashion director at Glimmer magazine. She knows everything about style, and she can always tell which trends will be huge, and which ones will never get off the ground–” I paused. “Is this boring?”

  “Not at all. Tell me what she said.”

  “Jasmine said there was nothing wrong with my collection. It was competently designed. Everything was in perfect taste.”

  “Then what was the problem?”

  “That was the problem. I didn’t take any risks. I didn’t push my ideas enough. The extra something, that spark of originality… it wasn’t there. But she said I was a fantastic businesswoman. I was good at networking and promoting; I got the business side of fashion like no one else she knew. I didn’t like hearing any of this; I wanted to be a creative genius. But I had to admit that the business was what I’d really enjoyed, way more than the design work.”

  “Nothing wrong with that.”

  “I know that now. At the time, though, it was hard to let go of something I’d worked so hard for. Not long after that, my father had a stroke. So I flew down to visit him in the hospital, and I met Sofia, and my whole life changed.”

  “And the broken engagement?” Joe surprised me by asking. “When did that happen?”

  The question made me tense and uncomfortable. “I hate talking about that.”

  “We don’t have to.” The gentleness of his voice eased the tightness in my chest. I settled back deeper into the pillows. “Do you miss New York?” he asked.

  “Sometimes.” I paused and said ruefully, “A lot. But there are some days when I don’t think about it as much as others.”

  “What do you miss most about it?”

  “My friends most of all. And… it’s hard to put it into words, but… New York is the only place where I could be the person I want to be. It speeds me up and makes me think bigger. God, what a city. I still dream about going back someday.”

  “Why did you leave in the first place?”

  “I was sort of… not myself… after the broken engagement, and my father passing away. I needed a change. And I especially needed to be with Sofia. We had just found each other. It was the right decision to move down here. But someday, when Sofia is ready to take over, I’m going to go back to New York and give it another shot.”

  “I think you’ll do fine wherever you live. In the meantime, you can go visit, can’t you?”

  “Yes, but I’ve been too busy the past three years. Soon, though. I want to see my friends in person. I want to go to a couple of plays, and some of my favorite restaurants, and find a street fair with five-dollar pashminas, and have a slice of really good pizza, and there’s this rooftop bar on Fifth where you get the most perfect view of the Empire State Building…”

  “I know that bar.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure. The one with the garden.”

  “Yes! I can’t believe you’ve been there.”

  Joe sounded amused. “I’ve been outside the state of Texas, despite appearances to the contrary.”

  He told
me about a couple of his past trips to New York. We exchanged stories about places where we’d traveled, about ones we’d want to go back to and the ones we wouldn’t. About the freedom of traveling alone, but also the loneliness.

  When I realized how late it was, I couldn’t believe the conversation had lasted for over two hours. We agreed it was time to call it a night. But I had no desire to stop. I could have gone on talking.

  “This was fun,” I said, feeling warm and even a little giddy. “I wish we could do it again.” In the short silence that followed, I covered my eyes with my free hand, wishing I could take back the impulsive words.

  There was a smile in Joe’s voice. “I’ll keep calling,” he said, “if you’ll keep answering.”

  Eleven

  A

  s it turned out, we talked every night for a week, including the night Joe was driving back late from a photo shoot in Brownwood. He’d done a session for a young congressman who’d just been elected to the U.S. House in a special runoff. The congressman had been a difficult subject, controlling and awkward, posing like a politician, roosterlike, despite Joe’s efforts to catch him in a relaxed moment. And the guy was a braggart, a name-dropper, qualities that were nearly intolerable to a Travis.

  While we talked during Joe’s long drive to Houston, he told me about the photo shoot, and I filled him in on the planning for Haven’s baby shower. It was going to be held at the Travis River Oaks mansion, which had gone unoccupied ever since Churchill’s passing, mostly because no one knew what to do with it. None of the Travises particularly wanted to sell the place – it was where they’d grown up – but neither did any of them want to live in it. Too big. Too reminiscent of their parents, who were both gone now. However, the pool and patio on the mansion’s three-acre lot would provide the perfect setting for a party.

  “I went to the River Oaks house today,” I said. “Ella showed me around.”

  “What did you think?”

  “Very impressive.” The massive stone house had been designed to look like a château, surrounded by vast tracts of mowed green lawn, precisely trimmed hedges, and elaborate flower beds. After seeing walls sponged with a Tuscan faux finish and windows smothered with swag draperies, I had agreed with Ella’s assessment that someone needed to “de-eighties” the place.

  “Ella said that Jack had asked if she wanted to move there,” I continued, “since they have two kids and the apartment’s getting cramped.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She told him the house is too big for a family of four. And Jack said they should move there anyway and just keep having children.”

  Joe laughed. “Good luck to him. I doubt he’ll ever talk Ella into moving there, no matter how many kids they end up with. It’s not her kind of place. Or his, for that matter.”

  “What about Gage and Liberty?”

  “They’ve built their own house in Tanglewood. And I don’t think Haven and Hardy have any more interest in living in River Oaks than I do.”

  “Would your father have wanted one of you to keep it?”

  “He didn’t say anything specific.” A pause. “But he was proud of that place. It was a measure of what he’d achieved.”

  Joe had previously told me about his father, a tough bantam of a man who’d come from nothing. The deprivation of Churchill’s childhood had instilled a fierce drive to succeed, almost a rage, that had never fully left him. His first wife, Joanna, had died soon after giving birth to a son, Gage. A few years later, Churchill had married Ava Chase, a glamorous, cultured, supremely elegant woman whose ambition was equal to Churchill’s, and that was saying something. She had smoothed some of his rough edges, taught him about subtlety and diplomacy. And she had given him two sons, Jack and Joe, and a petite dark-haired daughter, Haven.

  Churchill had insisted on raising the boys with responsibility and a sense of obligation, to become the kind of men he approved of. To be like him. He had been a man of absolutes: A thing was either good or bad, right or wrong. Having seen how the children of some of his well-to-do peers had turned out – spoiled and soft – Churchill had been determined not to raise his offpring with a sense of entitlement. His boys had been required to excel in school, especially math, a subject that Gage had mastered and at which Jack had been proficient and Joe, on his best days, had never been more than adequate. Joe’s talents had been in reading and writing, pursuits Churchill considered somewhat unmanly, especially because Ava had liked them.

  His youngest son’s lack of interest in Churchill’s private equity investments and financial management consulting business had finally resulted in a huge blowup. When Joe turned eighteen, Churchill had wanted to put him on the board of his holding company, as he’d done with Gage and Jack. He’d always planned on having all three sons on the board. But Joe had flat-out refused. He hadn’t even accepted a nominal position. The mushroom cloud had been visible for miles. Ava had passed away from cancer two years earlier, and there had been no one to mediate or intervene. Joe’s relationship with his father had been ice cold for a couple of years after that and hadn’t entirely recovered until Joe had stayed with him after the boat accident.

  “I had to learn patience fast,” Joe had told me. “My lungs were shot, and it was hard to argue with Dad when I was breathing like a Pekingese.”

  “How did you two manage to reconcile?”

  “We went out to play golf. I hated golf. Old-man sport. But Dad insisted on dragging me to the driving range. He taught me how to swing a club. We played a couple of times after that.” A grin emerged. “He was so old, and I was so busted up, neither of us could break one thirty on eighteen holes.”

  “But you had a good time?”

  “We did. And after that, everything was fine.”

  “But… it couldn’t have been. If you didn’t talk about the issues…”

  “That’s one of the great things about being a guy: Sometimes we fix things by deciding it was bullshit and ignoring the hell out of it.”

  “That’s not fixing,” I had protested.

  “Sure it is. Like Civil War medicine: Amputate and move on.” Joe had paused. “Usually you can’t do that with a woman.”

  “Not usually,” I had agreed dryly. “We like to solve problems by actually facing them and working out compromises.”

  “Golf’s easier.”

  In less than a week, my team had put together a vintage-boardwalk-themed party for Haven Travis’s baby shower. Tank had enlisted a local theater set crew to help him construct and paint a dessert station that resembled a boardwalk game arcade. Steven hired a landscaper to install a temporary mini golf course on the grounds of the Travis mansion. Together Sofia and I met with caterers and agreed on an outdoor party menu featuring gourmet burgers, grilled shrimp kebabs, and lobster rolls.

  The forecast for the day of the party was ninety degrees and humid. The event team arrived at the Travis mansion at ten a.m. After helping the tent company reps to set up a row of open-sided cabana tents by the pool, Steven returned to the kitchen, where the rest of us were unboxing decorations.

  “Tank,” he said, “I need you and your guys to assemble the boardwalk arcade, and after that —” Steven broke off as he saw Sofia. His gaze traveled over the sleek length of her legs. “That’s what you’re wearing?” he asked, as if she were half-naked.

  Sofia gave him a perplexed glance, a large bleached starfish in her hand. “What do you mean?”

  “Your outfit.” Scowling, Steven turned his attention to me. “Are you actually going to let her wear that?”

  I was dumbfounded. Sofia was dressed like a forties pinup girl in red-and-white polka-dotted shorts with a matching halter top. The outfit showed off her curvy figure, but there was nothing immodest about it. I couldn’t fathom why Steven would object.

  “What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

  “It’s too short.”

  “It’s ninety degrees outside,” Sofia snapped at Steven, “and I’m going to be working all
day. Do you expect me to wear an outfit like Avery’s?”

  I sent her an irritated glance.

  Before getting dressed that morning, I had considered wearing some of my new clothes, most of which had hung in my closet untouched. However, old habits were hard to break. Rather than choose something silky and colorful, I had reverted to one of my old standbys: a relaxed-fit white cotton tunic. It was loose and sleeveless, worn over a pair of billowy gathered-hem pants that – despite their charming name of “poet pants” – were admittedly unflattering. But the outfit was comfortable, and I felt safe wearing it.