by Laura Durham
Kate opened the lid to her box. “So they’re only two days old?”
“Something like that.” I took a bite of the strawberry frosted doughnut, letting the slightly stale crumbs of pink icing fall onto my lap.
“Did you do anything fun on Sunday?” Kate asked, nibbling on her own doughnut.
“Aside from sleeping in and ignoring my throbbing feet?” I took a drink of mocha and followed with a bite of doughnut. This was my ideal breakfast although I knew if I did this every day, I’d gain twenty pounds.
“No date?” Kate wiggled her eyebrows up and down. “Maybe a visit from a cute bandleader or a hot cop?”
My cheeks flushed, and I mentally cursed the fair skin that betrayed my emotions. “You know I’m not dating Ian or Mike Reese.”
“Too bad. They’re both cute in different ways.” Kate leaned back. “And remind me why you aren’t dating them?”
“For one thing, Ian’s band is on tour, and for another, we were never officially dating.” I didn’t add that I found the tattooed Scottish singer of the eighties band the Breakfast Club unnerving. I wasn’t sure whether I was attracted to his bad-boy persona or if the butterflies he gave me were a subconscious warning sign that I should not date men with body art.
“And the hot cop?” Kate asked.
“You know we’ve never gone out.” I’d never told Kate about the intense moment we’d had the last time I saw him, and I felt some measure of relief since I hadn’t heard from him since. “I don’t think he has time to date, anyway.”
Kate studied my face for a moment before shrugging and taking a swig of her latte. “His loss.” She spun around in my chair. “So now that our meeting is cancelled, what’s on our agenda for today?”
“The usual postwedding routine. Thank you notes to all the vendors. Filing the contract and paperwork. Moving Tricia’s client folder into the Past Clients folder on the computer.”
“I love that part.” Kate wiggled the mouse on my desk and the computer screen came to life. She found the folder on my desktop that read “Tricia Toker” and dragged it to our virtual version of long-term storage. “So long, Tricia.”
“We should check in with Buster and Mack and see how the late-night floral drop-off went.”
“That’s right.” Kate snapped her fingers. “They had to refresh all the centerpieces and put them in different vases for the brunch the next morning. They must have been at the hotel all night.”
“They were still there when the valet finally brought my car.” I stood and brushed crumbs off my jeans, making a mental note to find my Dustbuster. “Do you want a banana?”
“What time was that?” she asked, and cocked her head to one side. “You have bananas?”
“Two a.m.,” I said as I walked down the hall to my kitchen and scanned the counter. Kate was right. No bananas. I opened my refrigerator out of habit and noted that it was virtually bare unless condiments, beverages, and salad dressing counted as food. I eyed the leftover takeout boxes shoved in the back and decided it was too early for cold cashew chicken. The first thing I needed to do after I found my Dustbuster was shop for groceries.
“Is it too early to call them?” Kate yelled.
I headed back down the hall. “They’re florists. They’re always up early to scout the flower markets. Anyway, it’s past nine.”
Kate tapped on my computer as I walked back in the office. “I just got a notice from the Wed Boards on my phone.”
I pulled my phone out of my jeans pocket with one hand. “You check that, and I’ll call Buster and Mack.”
“I’m logging in now,” Kate said.
I punched my speed-dial button for Lush flower shop and listened to it ring.
“We have a new review,” Kate said.
“Lush Floral Designers, this is Mack.”
“It’s Annabelle,” I said, then covered the phone and asked Kate, “Who’s it from?”
“Annabelle, thank goodness you called. Buster’s going crazy. I’m afraid he’s going to hurt someone.”
“What? Why?” I asked.
Kate swiveled the chair to face me. “It’s from Tricia.”
I felt my stomach tighten. “Mack, what’s happened?”
“Have you been on the Wed Boards? That horrible woman has ruined us.” His voice shook as he spoke, and I heard Buster bellowing in the background. “She’s ruined all of us.”
I looked at Kate’s face and I knew, without reading a word, that Tricia the Troll had trashed us online.
Chapter 5
Not more than an hour later, I rubbed my arms briskly for warmth, wishing I’d worn more than a T-shirt as I pushed through the heavy plastic flaps leading to the refrigerated area of the flower market. I held the flaps back for Kate, who had her bare arms crossed tightly in front of her. Rows of industrial orange buckets filled with cut flowers covered the cement floor in front of us—roses bundled tightly together with thick Cellophane, unopened lilies hiding their pink throats, and white orchid sprays bursting in all directions.
“I thought you said Buster and Mack would be here.” Kate stamped her high-heeled feet for warmth as we surveyed the room.
“This is where they told me they’d be.” I backed out of the room, wishing I hadn’t left the hot mocha at my apartment. The coffee would be the perfect thing to warm me up. “Mack said they were selecting flowers for Jessica’s sample centerpiece on Friday.”
“Is that this week?” Kate shook her head. “I’m losing track of time.”
“That’s what happens during wedding season. The days and weeks start to run into each other.” I wound my way around buckets of filler flowers like Queen Anne’s lace and baby’s breath as we walked back through the unchilled area of the warehouse.
“Why do I never feel that way about vacation?” Kate asked. “Oh, wait. It’s because I never get vacation.”
I gave her a push. “You do, too.”
“Only in the dead of winter or maybe one week in August when it’s a thousand degrees.”
“You’re a wedding planner,” I reminded her. “That’s one of the hazards of the job. Working every perfect weekend of the year and only getting free time when no one wants to be outside.”
“This job has a lot more hazards than you’d expect.” She held up the fingers on one hand. “A bad vacation schedule, mentally unstable clients, paper cuts galore—”
“There they are.” I interrupted Kate’s laundry list of complaints when I spotted our friends Buster and Mack—or the Mighty Morphin Flower Arrangers, as they liked to be called—at the far end of the warehouse floor.
Mack waved his arms when he spotted me, and the chains on his leather vest jingled. Buster barely cracked a smile as we approached, but he hugged us when we reached them. Even though Buster and Mack always wore black leather, they usually accented their pants, vests, and jackets with colored T-shirts, but today both men were in black from head to toe and their faces looked just as somber.
“So these are the flowers for Jessica’s sample?” I asked as I looked over the selection of peonies, roses, and blooming branches in the buckets at their feet. “I know she’s going to love it.”
Buster furrowed his brow, and his black goggles rose. “I hope so.”
“Look who it is!” A petite woman with red hair and so many freckles that they all ran together walked up holding a clipboard. She was a sales assistant for the floral wholesaler, but it was well known that she wanted to use the job as a springboard into wedding planning.
“Hi, Callie.” Kate gave her an air kiss. “You missed happy hour last week.”
Callie was a part of the group of younger wedding assistants that Kate went out with from time to time. They were all single and looking, some more successfully than others. Kate had confided in me that Callie had dated nearly all the guys who worked at the floral warehouse, including her boss. I concentrated very hard on not judging her.
Callie beamed. “I had a date with Jonathan.”
Kate
had mentioned that Callie had gotten very lucky when she’d gone home with a lawyer after one of their girls’ nights a few weeks ago but she hadn’t mentioned that she had a boyfriend.
“Well, well, well.” Kate put her hands on her hips. “You go, girl.”
Callie bounced on her toes. “I think he might be the one.”
Kate scrunched up her nose. In all her dating adventures and misadventures, she’d never used that phrase and usually dismissed it when other people did. Sometimes it amazed me that Kate had ever wanted to work in weddings considering her tenuous belief in “happily ever after.”
Callie leaned into us. “I think he might propose.”
Kate rolled her eyes, and Buster and Mack muttered a few half-hearted congratulations. Callie’s face fell.
“Ignore them,” I said, shooting daggers at my friends. “We’re coming off a rough wedding and some bad reviews from the bride so we might not be in the happiest wedding mood right now.”
“I’ve been reading the Wed Boards all morning. For work research, not for my wedding,” Callie added quickly before Kate could chide her. “Some of the girls on there are brutal. They call themselves the Weddies.”
“Oh, we know all about the Weddies,” I said.
Kate and I had decided long ago to avoid the Wed Boards if we could. We knew it would make us crazy to read amateurs giving each other incorrect advice, and we didn’t want to read snarky comments about our friends in the wedding business.
“Any chance you’ve seen a Tricia Toker on there recently?” I asked. “Maybe under the user name ‘TriciaandDaveattheHay?’”
She looked up while she thought, and she snapped her fingers. “She’s the one who posted a long rant about the lack of customer service in the wedding industry and how it’s a racket. A lot of brides jumped on and agreed with her.”
“I’m sure they did,” Buster said. “Brides can’t understand why it costs them more to have us create a rose centerpiece for them than for them to grab a dozen supermarket roses.”
“Come to think of it, that bride did complain a lot about floral designers,” Callie said. “She claimed that because she was rich, her planner had taken her to the most expensive one in town and they were gouging her.”
“Are you kidding me?” I said. “She told me she only wanted the best and not to bother showing her anything less than the most high-end.”
“Gouging?” Buster’s face reddened, and he looked as angry as I felt. “We cut out half of the original proposal.”
“Oh, no.” Mack wrung his hands. “Here he goes again.”
“Listen,” I said, linking my arm through Buster’s. “You can’t let one bad egg get you down. Tricia Toker is a horrible person and she was never going to be happy. That’s not your fault. Your work for her wedding was beautiful. I know it, you know it, even she knows it. Even if she won’t admit it.”
Mack reached up and put his arm around Buster’s massive shoulder. “She’s right, you know. We can’t sulk about one bad review all week.”
Kate hooked her arm around Mack’s tattooed bicep. “People like that will get what they deserve in the end. It’s karma. Just you wait and see. There’s a special place in hell for people who write nasty reviews just to be mean.”
“And if we’re lucky, Tricia will get there sooner rather than later,” I said.
“I’m not sure how I feel about that.” Buster’s face looked conflicted. I doubted he was supposed to wish people to hell, but maybe his Christain biker buddies would make an exception if they knew Tricia. “I’d like to be there when karma slaps her upside the head, though.”
“We’d all like to be there,” I said. “But the fact that she spends most of her life in bed pretending to be sick already tells you what kind of life she’s going to have.”
“If you think about it,” Kate added, “we really should feel sorry for her.”
Buster raised a pierced eyebrow at Kate. “I’m not at that place yet.” He managed a weak grin. “But thanks for cheering me up, girls.”
“And promise me you won’t read the review again,” I said. “It won’t do anything but make you mad.”
“And I’d advise you not to go on the Wed boards,” Callie added.
“Annabelle hasn’t even seen our review yet,” Kate told them. “I wouldn’t let her.”
Mack’s mouth dropped open. “You didn’t see what she said about you?”
Kate dug her elbow into his side, and he grimaced.
I narrowed my eyes at her. “I thought you said it wasn’t so bad.”
Kate swept a hand through her blond hair. “I said it wasn’t worth worrying about. And that’s true. It won’t do you any good to get upset by it now. Take the advice you just gave Buster.”
I agreed with Kate for the moment but vowed to read the review the second we got back to the office.
“Well, if it isn’t the Wedding Belles team and the boys from Lush.” A tall woman with blond hair approached us, her Louis Vuitton purse swinging on her arm and her southern drawl dripping like molasses off her words.
“Brianna.” Kate said her name like a curse. Brianna, owner of Brides by Brianna, was a new wedding planner but not what we would consider a friendly colleague. We met her at a recent bridal show, where she pretended not to have heard of Wedding Belles before Buster and Mack clued us in that she’d been asking all over town about us. Since then we’d learned that she was one of the few planners who talked badly about her competition when she met with potential clients and what she said about us always reached our ears.
“Hi, Brianna,” I said, my voice flat.
Brianna gave us an exaggerated frown. “I was so sorry to see that you got those bad reviews.”
I wanted to be surprised that she would find out so quickly, but I pegged her as the type of person to have Google alerts on all her competition.
Brianna ran her eyes over Buster and Mack. “You, too.”
Buster and Mack were silent. Word had reached their ears that she thought the Mighty Morphin Flower Arrangers were too dramatic and expensive. She’d steered more than one couple away from using Lush so there was no love lost between the three.
“You know what they say.” She looked me up and down. “Out with the old and in with the new.”
She spun to leave, and her Louis Vuitton hit Kate on the arm.
Buster glared after her. “Just because she’s brand new and as clueless as they come does not mean you’re old, Annabelle.”
“Thanks.” I appreciated Buster’s words and the fact that he said them loud enough for Brianna to hear as she flounced off, but the insult still stung.
Kate rubbed her arm as we stared after Brianna. “That woman is the worst. I’d like to kill her.”
“Add her to the list,” I said.
Chapter 6
“The entire review is lies,” I said as I paced back and forth in my living room. Kate and I had driven back from the floral warehouse to my apartment, and I’d peeked at my computer screen while Kate was in the bathroom. I’d then attempted to drown my sorrows in sugar by eating all the remaining doughnut favors as I read and re-read the reviews.
“I know, I know. It doesn’t even make any sense,” Kate said from where she lay sprawled across my pale yellow couch with her phone in one hand. She’d opened the Wed Boards app so she could continue reading the library of bad reviews Tricia had unleashed only hours after her wedding. “She blames us for a level of stress that made it impossible to enjoy her wedding day.”
I paused in front of the couch. “Who is she kidding? She was never going to enjoy her wedding day. People like that are too caught up in their own pity party to enjoy anything.”
“At least she didn’t accuse us of giving her a severe allergic reaction that nearly had her rushing to the hospital, like she claims in her review of Buster and Mack,” Kate said. “Her words, not mine.”
I sat on the arm of the couch and took a deep breath. “We’ll be lucky if Buster and Mack don’
t end up in the hospital after this.” When we’d left the boys at the warehouse, they’d been planning to ride their Harleys and clear their heads. I wasn’t convinced that two livid bikers should be on the road, but I also knew that bikes were their version of therapy.
“The hotel got crucified because she claims the staff didn’t refresh her suite enough times on the wedding day.” Kate shook her head. “Ridiculous. I personally saw waiters clearing dishes twice, and I wasn’t in her room that long. Does she expect the hotel staff to be like a Roomba and walk around her room all day long picking up lint from the floor?”
“You and I know it’s ridiculous and petty, but brides won’t when they read these reviews.” My phone began trilling from inside my pocket, and I wiggled it out of my jeans and answered.
“This is one time I hate being right,” Richard said.
“How did you find out so quickly?” I asked as I mouthed Richard’s name to Kate. Kate nodded then headed for my kitchen.
“Fern.”
Of course. Fern knew most gossip in town before it even happened, usually because he started it. I wondered if he’d gotten a bad review, as well. Kate and I had only made it through three reviews—ours, the hotel’s, and Buster and Mack’s—but we knew it was the tip of the troll’s iceberg.
“So you’ve read it?” I asked.
“I’m afraid so. But look on the bright side. It’s your only one-star review, and you have dozens of five-star reviews.”
“It still brings our star rating down. Now we’re averaging four and a half stars. That means we’ll show up under all the planners with five-star ratings. It bumps us two full pages down the list.” I rubbed my temples. “We get a lot of referrals from the site. At least we used to.”
Richard didn’t reply for a moment. “I know it seems bad now but you’ll feel better once you eat a little something.”
I looked over at Kate, who stood peering into my nearly empty refrigerator. “Do a dozen doughnuts count?”
“She’s already eaten a dozen doughnuts,” he said, his voice sounding muffled.
