by Jane Graves
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to be snippy. But it’s easy for you, you know? All you have to do is walk away. I’m the one who has to deal with the fallout.”
“Your mother.”
“Yes.”
“So what are you going to say to her?”
Heather sighed. “I don’t know exactly.”
“Does she know you drink?”
“Yes. She knows.”
“Does she know you drink a lot?”
“I don’t drink a lot!”
“You did last night. And that’s your excuse. ‘Mom. I got blasted and lost my mind. You understand.’ ”
“Just because she knows I drink doesn’t mean she’s happy about it. About the only alcohol she ever has is half a glass of champagne every New Year’s Eve. Telling her I did something stupid because I was dead drunk wouldn’t exactly win me points.”
“I don’t get it,” Tony said. “What mother wants her daughter to elope in Vegas? Don’t they like that whole wedding thing?”
“She just wants me to be married. Preferably before I’m too old to give her four or five grandchildren. She’ll take it any way she can get it. I’m just dreading having to tell her it’s not going to happen this time around.”
Evidently Tony didn’t know what to say to that, because he finally stopped talking, which made Heather feel exactly like the snippy person she’d just apologized for being.
Never mind. Just get this mess over with.
She directed him to her parents’ house in east Plano, and as he pulled up to the curb, she had to resist the urge to tell him to just keep on driving. Preferably right off a cliff, so she wouldn’t have to deal with this.
They got out of the car. Tony opened the back hatch and retrieved her suitcase.
“I’ll contact you when I hear more about the annulment,” Heather said.
Tony handed the bag to her. “Good luck.”
She nodded, then looked at the house. It’s now or never. And never’s not an option.
Then all at once, the front door opened, and her mother stepped onto the porch. Then her father. Then she saw Uncle Burt. Aunt Sylvia. Her cousin Kelsey. Grandma Roberta. Grandpa Henry. And other assorted aunts, uncles, and cousins.
Heather froze. What was going on?
They were coming down the steps. Hurrying along the sidewalk. Spilling across the lawn. Given the size of her parents’ house, it was like watching circus clowns climbing out of one of those tiny little cars, and more kept coming.
Oh, God. No. This couldn’t be happening!
“What the hell is going on?” Tony said.
“I don’t know,” Heather said warily. “But it doesn’t look good.”
“Why are all these people at your house?”
“It’s not my house. It’s my parents’ house.”
Her mother reached the car first, grinning like a lunatic. She stepped off the curb, walked right up to Tony, and stopped in front of him, her hand fluttering against her chest.
“Oh, my God, Heather! He’s every bit as handsome as you said he was!” She threw her arms around him and gave him a big, smacking kiss on the cheek. “Welcome to the family!”
Chapter 6
Tony couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. He just stood there, his mouth hanging open. Cameras sprouted in everyone’s hands and began snapping, as if they were the paparazzi and he and Heather were superstars du jour.
“I’m Barbara,” the huggy-kissy woman said, grinning like a lunatic. “Heather’s mother.”
She was dressed like a mom, wearing a flowered cotton shirt, baggy jeans, and sandals, with her bobbed hair tucked behind her ears. She grabbed a man’s sleeve and pulled him over.
“And this is Heather’s father, Fred.”
Heather’s mother was smiling. Her father wasn’t. He was a tall, solid, chunk of a man, the kind who ripped phone books in half for fun.
“What are all of you doing here?” Heather said.
“Your mother called to tell us you’d gotten married,” one of the women said. “Of course, we all want to meet your new husband.”
Translation: They all wanted to see if Heather really had lost her mind. From the way a few of them were looking at her right now, the jury was still out on that, but that didn’t stop them from drawing her into hugs and Tony into handshakes, introducing themselves as Aunt this and Uncle that and Cousin somebody-or-other. Tony wanted to say something, but then he and Heather were sucked into a vortex of bodies moving toward the house. He shot her a helpless get-me-out-of-here! look, but she appeared to be just as flabbergasted as he was.
They went up the steps, through the door, and into the living room, surfing along on the tide of humanity. He had a vague sense of the room around him. Neat and clean but very dated, with a flowered sofa that had to be twenty years old and walnut veneer furniture. Over the fireplace was a horrendous portrait of some old woman, the kind of thing some oddball families displayed rather than cramming in a dark corner of the attic. And somewhere in this house there had to be doilies. And in the bathroom, one of those crocheted toilet-paper covers. He’d stake his life on it.
Two people were sitting on the sofa who hadn’t greeted them at the curb. One was an older lady Tony didn’t recognize. The other was Heather’s cousin Regina, whom he’d met last night.
Regina rose from the sofa, looking as impeccable as before. Sleek hair, perfect figure, flawless skin, breasts she’d probably paid a fortune for—the kind of woman he usually went for. But her snooty expression backed up what Heather had told him about her last night, which meant if he ever cracked that gorgeous shell, she’d be bitchy all the way to the bone.
The family parted, and Regina came to stand in front of Heather and Tony, smiling sweetly even as insincerity oozed from every pore. “Well, it looks as if congratulations are in order. Heather, you could have told me when I talked to you this morning that you’d gotten married.”
She shot a nervous glance at Tony. “I . . . I guess I was still half-asleep.”
Regina turned to Tony. “I had no idea when I met you last night I’d be welcoming you to the family today. Imagine that.”
Yeah. Imagine that.
The older woman rose from the sofa. She wore beige pants and a silky blouse with lots of gold jewelry, her hair an unnatural shade of red-blond.
“I’m Heather’s Aunt Beverly,” she said. “Regina’s mother.”
Sweet smile. Calculating brain. Tony could smell that kind of woman at twenty paces. Like mother, like daughter.
“So tell us about your wedding,” Bev said. “I can’t think of anything more lovely than a spur-of-the-moment midnight wedding in a Las Vegas wedding chapel.”
“Yes!” Barbara said with a heavenly little sigh. “Isn’t it romantic?”
Tony didn’t know if Barbara was always a little dim or whether she was so caught up in the blessed event that her sarcasm detector had stopped functioning.
“So tell us all about it!” one of the women said. “We want to hear every detail.”
“There’s not much to tell,” Heather said.
“You might start with how you ended up married after only four hours,” one of the men said, and the woman next to him jabbed him in the ribs. He whipped around and whispered, “Cut it out, Sylvia! It’s a fair question!”
“Hush, Burt!” she whispered back. “It’s none of your business!”
Then Sylvia turned and gave Tony and Heather a smile that said she was trying really hard to believe this was all for the best. Looking around, Tony realized everybody else’s smiles had that same tinge of hopefulness. He figured only one thing was keeping the rest of the crowd from expressing the suspicion they obviously felt: Heather’s reputation for being sane, smart, and logical, no matter how much it looked as if she’d lost every one of those qualities the moment she’d stepped foot in Vegas.
“Regina told me you two knew each other before you went to Las Vegas,” Bev said.
“Uh,
yeah.” Heather glanced at Tony, speaking carefully. “Tony’s a regular at a bar where I go sometimes.”
“How nice,” Bev said, then turned to Barbara, crinkling her nose as if she’d caught a whiff of sulfur. “They met in a bar.”
“And now he’s buying the place,” Barbara said. “Heather told me last night. Did I tell you that, Fred? He’s going to be an entrepreneur!”
“Yup, you told me,” Fred said. “About ten times.” And then he turned to look at Tony, his eyes narrowed and his heavy brows scrunched up. You had better be on the up and up, that look said. Or I’m squashing you like a bug.
Tony had gotten stuck in some pretty odd situations in his life, but this was getting a little weird even for him. Somebody—preferably Heather—needed to stop the madness, but she looked just as stunned as he felt. And he wasn’t sure if saying the wrong thing would turn this large crowd into a large, angry mob.
He leaned over and spoke softly. “Heather? Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Uh . . . sure. Will you all excuse us for just a bit?”
Heather took Tony into another room, which turned out to be a den that contained a lot of man furniture—a walnut desk, a leather sofa, and a hefty coffee table piled with magazines. Guns and Ammo. Hunting Illustrated. Shooting Sportsman.
But the manliest things of all were the hunting trophies that filled nearly every square inch of wall space. Deer. Elk. Buffalo. A few other creatures Tony didn’t even recognize. Judging from the sheer number of them, Fred Montgomery had put his taxidermist’s kids through braces, college, and funded a wedding or two for good measure. The only wall space not occupied by hunting trophies held gun racks.
“Holy shit,” Tony said, looking around.
“My father likes hunting.” She paused. “And he’s a retired cop, so he has a thing about guns.”
Oh, this was just great. A cop. The moment Fred found out Tony had married his daughter and wanted a divorce all in the same weekend, he would not only want to blow Tony’s head off, he’d also have the means to do it. Times twenty. And then successfully hide the body.
“Does your family actually believe our wedding was the real thing?” Tony asked.
Heather shrugged weakly. “I don’t really know who believes what. I only know how much my mother wants to believe. And after I told her about ten times last night how happy I was and how perfect you were for me, I think I actually have her convinced.”
“Then you need to unconvince her.”
“I know.”
“I don’t believe it,” Tony said, shaking his head. “All I did was take you home, and now I’m in the middle of this?”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t get uptight about much, but facing angry men with guns isn’t my idea of a good time.”
“My father isn’t angry.”
“Oh, yeah? He’s looking at me as if I’m at the top of the FBI’s most-wanted list.”
“He isn’t a violent man.”
“Not a violent man? Look around you. The man’s shot more stuff than a freakin’ survivalist!”
“That’s not violence. That’s hunting.”
“And he was a cop.”
“That was his job,” she said with an eye roll. “And in his whole career, he only fired his weapon once.”
“Uh-huh. Shot the guy dead as a doornail, didn’t he?”
“Uh . . . yeah.”
“You have to tell your family the truth.”
“I know, all right? It’s just that . . .”
“What?”
She sighed. “It’s just that I’ve never seen my mother like this.”
“Like what?”
“She’s just so happy. If I go out there now and tell everyone our marriage isn’t the real thing, she’s going to be humiliated. And you can bet Aunt Bev will be catty to her about this for the rest of her life.”
Tony blew out a breath. I don’t want to hear this.
“See, Bev is my mother’s sister,” Heather went on. “She has a rich husband. A big house in West Plano. A gorgeous daughter who’s getting married. My mother is married to a retired cop. They live in a twenty-year-old tract home in east Plano; I’m their only daughter. Marriage isn’t even on the horizon. Aunt Bev never lets my mother forget any of that. So imagine how my mother’s going to feel when I go out there now and tell her, in front of everybody, that our wedding wasn’t the real thing.”
This was it. This was the reason Tony was careful about getting too involved with women. The minute he was involved, he had to deal with their families, their problems, their emotions, and he just wasn’t very good at it.
He looked back at Heather. She was frowning. And—oh, God—her eyes were glistening.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Nothing.” She fished through her father’s desk drawer, grabbed a tissue, and dabbed her eyes.
Run. Leave now. It’s her family, so it’s her problem. But then he realized something else. Her mother wasn’t the only one who was going to be humiliated.
“You told me what it’s going to be like for your mother when you tell them the truth,” he said. “What’s it going to be like for you?”
She met his eyes, then looked away again. “It doesn’t matter. It has to be done.”
“Tell me.”
She sighed. “Well, let’s see. I expect Aunt Bev and Regina will pretend to sympathize with me, but really they’ll be secretly glad that Regina’s wedding isn’t getting upstaged after all and that I’m still the plain-Jane cousin they can keep putting down.”
“What about everyone else?”
“They won’t be mean. It won’t be like that. They’ll just ‘bless my heart’ until the cows come home and wonder how such a smart girl could get involved in a situation like this. I must have been desperate, you know? And then there’s Regina’s wedding. I’ll be up there in a month as a bridesmaid. Again. Everyone will remember my wedding that wasn’t. They’ll ‘bless my heart’ all over again and pledge to each other that they have to find poor Heather a man before she’s too old for anyone to be interested anymore. And then come the blind dates with forty-year-old men who still live with their mothers and play video games.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish I was.”
“Is that really what it’s going to be like?”
“That’s the sanitized version. But it’s no concern of yours.”
“Wrong. It is my concern. I owe you, Heather. After what you did for me last night, the last thing I want is for you to get hurt by all this.”
“It can’t be helped.” She tossed the tissue into the wastebasket. “Why don’t you just go? I can handle this. There’s no need for you to hang around.”
As Heather turned and left the room, Tony blew out a breath of frustration. He was getting everything out of this situation he ever wanted, and all she was getting was an overdose of humiliation.
No, he thought with sudden conviction. You have to do something so Heather can save face in front of her family.
He just wished he knew what that something was.
Heather walked back to the living room to find her mother still grinning.
“Heather! Where’s Tony? I have coffee and cheese- cake!”
Heather cringed. Her mother had always been an exclamation-point kind of person, but this was ridiculous.
“I have something to tell you,” Heather said, then turned to the rest of the family. “Actually, I want to tell all of you.”
“Whatever it is,” Aunt Sylvia said brightly, “it can’t top what you told your mother last night.”
Everybody laughed. Then the laughter died away, and Heather stood there in the yawning abyss of expectation, waiting for the words to come to her.
“So where’s your husband?” Regina said, looking around, practically sniffing like a bloodhound.
“Uh . . . that’s what I need to talk to you about,” Heather said.
A calculating look came
across Regina’s face. “He didn’t . . . leave, did he?”
Heather started to say yes, only to hear Tony’s voice behind her. “Of course not. I’m right here.”
When he walked over to stand next to her, she figured he must have a masochistic streak a mile wide. But that didn’t change anything. She had to tell the truth, and she had to do it now.
“It’s about our wedding. This is not exactly what it appears to be.”
Her mother’s smile dimmed considerably. The relatives stopped smiling altogether.
A gleam entered Regina’s eyes.
“See, what happened was—”
Tony put his arm around her shoulders. “Let me.”
She started to speak again, but he gave her arm a squeeze to quiet her. “Heather’s right,” Tony said. “This is not exactly what it appears to be. It appears that we were two impulsive people doing something really stupid. I mean, we barely knew each other, and yet we ended up married.”
Regina’s eyes shifted wildly back and forth between the two of them, clearly hoping for a catastrophe. Heather looked at her mother, whose hand was on her throat, her eyes wide with dread.
“And you would have thought that I’d have woken up this morning thinking what a crazy thing it was to do,” Tony went on. “I mean, married in Vegas? How insane is that? But then I took one look at Heather, and I thought . . .” He turned to stare at her. “And I thought, how in the world could something that should have been so wrong have led to something so right?”
With that, he took Heather in his arms, bent her backward, and kissed her.
Several gasps went up from her family, and Heather might have gasped herself if Tony’s lips hadn’t been smothering hers. For a few seconds, she forgot she was in her mother’s house, forgot she was surrounded by her family, forgot everything except Tony and his wonderfully talented mouth.
As he slowly brought her back to her feet, everybody clapped. Catcalls all around. Finally Heather came to her senses. She wasn’t dumb enough to believe that somewhere between the den and the living room Tony had fallen madly in love, so what in the world was he up to?
Tell them the truth. You can’t let this deception go on. Fix this ridiculous, out-of-control situation right now.
