Wooing the Wedding Planner

by Amber Leigh Williams

  “You let me know how that pecan-lemon-meringue surprise turns out,” Vera said.

  Roxie hiccupped. She settled for a nod.

  It wasn’t until after Vera departed with the paperwork that a third drink clunked onto the tabletop in front of Roxie. She recognized the amazing Lewis Painkiller.

  Olivia topped it off with a cherry before banding her arm around Roxie’s waist in commiserating support. “Is it time for me to go into the men-are-stupid invective?”

  Roxie did manage a smile. “I don’t think so.”

  “How ’bout the you’re-better-off-without-him rant?” An idea crept across Olivia’s face and she perked up. “Or...”

  “I’m scared,” Roxie claimed.

  Olivia held up a finger. “Hold that thought. Gerald!” she called to her husband behind the bar. “Get me an amp!”

  “What are you doing?” Roxie asked.

  A mic passed hand-to-hand from the bar to Roxie’s table. Olivia cursed at it when it wouldn’t switch on. She tapped it and half the crowd ducked at the deafening sound from the speakers. “Is this bitch on now?” Olivia asked, putting it to her mouth. “’Bout damn time.” She lifted her hand to the crowd, simpered. “Hi, everybody. It’s your favorite kickass bartender, back from maternity leave.”

  Wolf whistles and rebel yells cascaded through the crowd. Gerald hit the old-fashioned order-up bell behind the bar and grinned at his wife.

  Olivia held up a hand. “Thank you, thank you,” she said. “I know you’ve missed me. And since it’s my first official night back behind the bar, I think we should have a little fun.” She glanced sideways at Roxie. “Y’all know Roxie, right?”

  Roxie’s eyes widened in awareness as attention and more whistling greeted her. She offered those assembled a stilted smile before narrowing her eyes on Olivia.

  Olivia chuckled. “You all know how great she is. So I’m going to give you the chance of a lifetime. We’re going to have ourselves a little—” she wiggled her brows “—auction.”

  Cheers went up through the crowd and Roxie nearly shrank into her seat. Diving for the mic, she groaned when Olivia danced out of her reach.

  “One night only!” Olivia continued, merciless. “We know that our girl is far outside the league of any man here...” General agreement went up among the men in question. “So whoever wins her will be required to treat her like the lady she is. Buy her a few drinks. Make her smile. Proceeds will go to the charity of her choice, which is...” She held the mic up to Roxie’s chin.

  “I’m going to kill you,” Roxie said into it.

  “Yes! Murderesses for Hire. My favorite.” Olivia pumped her fist into the air. “Is everybody ready?”

  “Me! I’m not ready!” Roxie hissed as she watched bidders fumble for cash.

  “Oh, come on,” Olivia said, lowering the mic. “I can’t stand to see you this sad all over again. And this way we all have fun.” She put the mic to her mouth once more. “The bidding starts at twenty-five dollars. Do I have any takers?”

  “Thirty dollars!”

  “Oh, mother help me,” Roxie said, dropping her face into her hands. As the bidding continued, she groped blindly for the Painkiller in the glass on the table. She’d gulped half of it by the time the bidding escalated to a hundred dollars. If this went on, she’d have to ante up on her liquor intake and order a Face-Eraser. For the knock-out.

  “Do I have a hundred and twenty-five dollars?” Olivia called out. “Come on, gentlemen. This is Roxie Honeycutt we’re talking about here! That’s like having Grace Kelly in the house!”

  Roxie groaned again as the bidding rose, using the straw from her water glass to suck the Painkiller down faster.

  “Five hundred dollars!”

  Everyone pivoted toward the bar. Roxie looked around and her heart bounded in relief when she saw Gerald standing on top of it holding five crisp one-hundred-dollar bills overhead. Hoots of laughter rose through the room. “Oh,” Roxie breathed as he jumped down and made his way through the throng to stop the proceedings. “Oh, thank you!” she cheered, leaping up from the chair and throwing her arms around his neck. “Thank you, Gerald! Thank you!”

  “Take the money, Mrs. Leighton,” Gerald said when Olivia propped a hand on her round hip. He held out the Benjamins and lowered his brow when she stared good and hard. “You’ve had your fun. Take the money and give our good friend Roxie a break.”

  Olivia took the hush money, trying to hide a smile while she counted it. As she lifted herself onto her toes to brush her mouth across his, she murmured as an aside to Roxie, “Just so you know, he doesn’t put out until he’s had tequila. Lots and lots of tequila.”

  Gerald chuckled, patted his wife on the bottom, then, as she backed off announcing an end to the contest, he dipped his head in a polite bow to Roxie. “Shall we order another round?”

  “Absolutely,” Roxie agreed heartily as she took a seat again and thanked every star for the friends she had left.

  * * *

  “IT’S NOT A good day today,” the attendant told Byron a little while after he entered the nursing home.

  Byron held up the caramels. He’d also brought flowers today. White hyacinths from the garden of the Victorian. They had bloomed early this year. He’d mixed a few clustered shoots with small branches from the Japanese magnolia and wrapped the bouquet in a layer of newspaper to protect against the weather. With spring only a few days out, the rain had decided to challenge the wind for sway over the coastal lowlands. “What do you mean?” he asked, dropping the hood back on his raincoat. “Is everything all right?”

  As caretakers were trained to do, the nurse hid much behind a placid gaze. “It’s nothing serious. There’s been more pollen in the air so her coughing is worse. She’s resting now.”

  “I won’t agitate her,” Byron pledged. “I’d just like to hold her hand for a few minutes.”

  The nurse’s mouth slowly bowed. “Are you the nephew?”

  “The better one, yes,” Byron confirmed.

  She nodded. “She told me if you visited to let you back or there’d be hell to pay.” Motioning him forward, she said, “This way.”

  Byron tailed her to the door of Athena’s suite. The nurse knocked and called out, letting Athena know she had a visitor.

  The room beyond was dim. With the curtains pulled, the light from the television was the only thing left to penetrate the darkness. There was an old movie playing on low volume. The needlepoint chairs were empty and, as the nurse strolled into the room, Byron saw that Athena was tucked into bed. He lingered on the threshold until the nurse propped Athena higher in the comfortable pillows stacked at the head and rearranged the sheet and comforter. Athena sought the door and smiled when she saw him.

  He held up the bouquet. “May I come in?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said on a quiet laugh. The nurse took his raincoat and left him with instructions to call the front desk if necessary.

  Byron showed the flowers to Athena. “Hyacinths,” she observed, pleased. “Blooming already?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, changing out the drooping bouquet from the vase on the table between the chairs for the new one. In the bathroom, he freshened the water before putting the vase back where he’d found it. “The lady said you weren’t up to your old tricks today.” Scooting a chair closer to the bedside, he took a moment before sitting to place his hand over the ones she’d clasped on top of the covers and plant a kiss on her nose. “Everything okay?”

  “They can’t keep a good girl down,” Athena informed him. “Not even here.” She took a caramel when he handed it to her, tutting happily.

  Byron lowered to the seat and eyed the black-and-white film stars onscreen. “All right! Bogie. Pass the popcorn.”

  Athena sighed as Humphrey Bogart’s stoic visage filled t
he screen. “You remember, don’t you, how you and Ari stayed up summer nights to watch Bogie film noirs?”

  “The Maltese Falcon was his favorite.” Byron nodded as he unwrapped a caramel for himself.

  “Which was yours?”

  “Key Largo,” he said readily. “Though if ’Cilla stayed up with us, we were forced to watch Casablanca. All she had to do was bat her eyes at Ari.”

  Athena began to chuckle. It deepened into a cough. As it rattled into her chest, Byron snatched a tissue from the box at her bedside and tucked it against her hand. She pressed it to her lips and waved him off when he hovered. “Don’t fuss over me,” she said, shooing him back into his chair.

  “I shouldn’t have brought the flowers.”

  She shook her head, wiping her nose and mouth. She sniffed. “What is this place without flowers? A box with no soul?”

  He gripped her hand when it came to rest at her side. “I’ve been thinking.”

  “Deep thoughts, I see,” she discerned. “Tell me about them.”

  He leaned toward her. “I think you should move back home to the Victorian.”

  Her frown was pronounced. Before she could protest, he said, “Before you say no, hear me out. I think you and Vivi were right. It is too much house for one man. We can turn the sitting room into a bedroom. We could hire a home nurse. Ma and Pop could lend a hand when necessary...”

  “Nephew.”

  “I’d take care of you,” he assured her. “You’d be home.”

  “Oh, paidi mou.” She cupped her hand warmly around his cheek. “No auntie’s ever had so fine a nephew as you.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Yes. But this is where I am. This is where I’ll stay.”

  When Byron shook his head automatically, Athena grasped his ear in a habit from his boyhood that instantly brought him to attention. “You listen to me, Byron Atticus. However long I lived there, it wasn’t the Victorian that was ever my home. My home is wherever my Ari was. I have no illusions about that. The house belongs to you.” Shrewdness bled into her exotic eyes. “Especially since your father tells me that Roxie has given up her lease for you.”

  Byron’s jaw tensed. “He told you that, huh?” Shifting on the chair, he gripped his knees. “What else did he tell you?”

  “That you’re both hurt,” she said, “and you don’t seem to know where to place your next step.”

  “She’s gone,” Byron said, dipping his chin to avoid that wise stare. “There is no next step.”

  “He was talking about you, the man you’ve made yourself out to be.” When Byron’s brows came together, Athena inhaled. A wheeze rose with her chest but she went on. “It takes more strength than we’re certain we are capable of to move on after the one we love moves on to the next life. Your strength has always been your greatest gift. These past six years, it has shined in ways that you cannot see. It’s shined so brightly, I’ve admired it. Envied it, perhaps.”

  “I took notes from the best,” Byron admitted.

  Athena pet the hair on the back of his head. “There is such a thing as too much strength. We rebuild. We make an inner fortress, if you will, with stones so thick piled high enough that no one can conquer them. No one but ourselves. No matter how the light may shine without, no matter how the chambers may want that light to shine within, we stay behind the stone. We may wish to, but we do not tear down those walls we worked so hard to build. I know a bit about this,” she said, dabbing the center of his chin with a light fingertip. “I have known loss and I speak to you as someone who has retreated. But it is not me who has the luxury of time. We are lucky in life to find the love that we have had—me with Ari Papadakis. You with your Daniella. It is a rare thing to find someone else we can love as much as we once did. It is even rarer to open ourselves to it, to leave what was behind and embrace the new. And there are those, Byron, like you, who have enough time left to enjoy it. To learn about one another as loved ones do. To make babies together as you ought. To lie down and rest beside each other night after night and know life again in its purest form.”

  Byron had raised his clasped hands. He rested his chin on them, pressing his knuckles to his mouth. The voices of Bogart and Hepburn bantered back and forth in the interlude as he culled up enough will to broach what he’d been holding back since Evangeline’s birth. “What the hell’s the matter with me, Athena?” he whispered. “Why can’t I wake up?”

  “You’ve woken up every day for the past six years,” she informed him. “You’ve gotten up and dressed and gone on with it. You survived. But survival is just the beginning, a small step up from simple existence.”

  She scrubbed his temples, head low again. “That’s...blunt. Thank you, Auntie.”

  “You’ve already taken the first step beyond that anyway,” she informed him.

  He raised his eyes to hers. “I have?”

  “Yes. You admit the house is too much for one man. Why?”

  Rubbing his palms together, he thought about the Victorian and the things that weren’t there anymore. “It’s quiet,” he muttered. “It’s quiet there without her.”

  “Uh-huh. What else?”

  He exhaled, releasing the air trapped inside him. “I wanted the house. Growing up, visiting you and Ari in the Victorian was my great escape. Everything seemed simpler there. Time even seemed to stretch. Over the last few years, the idea of moving there was just an ideal. It wasn’t that I couldn’t imagine myself growing old in those rooms alone. I don’t think I ever thought about the reality of having it to myself. It wasn’t until Roxie...”

  She smiled softly at him. “It wasn’t until she moved in that you realized you could never live there alone.”

  “She filled it,” he said and he felt his lip twitch at the corner. “With her paint and music, messes and fabric. Somehow she made it hers as much as mine. I started to want us, as much as the house. I started to see us both there.”

  “What’s so bad about that?”

  “Nothing,” he said with a shake of his head. “But then ’Cilla had her fall. And the whole baby thing... It messed me up. I realized how far Roxie and I had come in a few weeks, how much it meant. The inertia got to me. I remembered how fast it could change, how quickly it could all fall apart. Disappear.”

  “You let your fear lead you.”

  “Yes,” he said, nodded. “Hell, yes.”

  “And so you pushed her away.”

  “Worse. I pushed her to the point of leaving.” He scowled. “I hurt her. I didn’t have to hurt her.”

  “Why would you do a thing like that, Byron Atticus?”

  “Because I’m a jackass.”

  Athena’s eyes widened. “Yes, good.” She began to laugh and cough again.

  He got up to get her a glass of tepid water. As she drank, noise from the television drew his attention for the first time since the discussion had begun. Audrey was singing.

  He turned toward the voice. It sang without music. It sang a familiar song he didn’t know the words to. A French song. “La Vie en Rose.” He listened and watched, as transfixed as Bogie himself.

  “Byron?”

  Byron pried his gaze from the TV. “Sorry. What did you say?”

  Athena lowered her chin at him and amusement danced across her features, making them young again even if only for an instant. “I said, ‘go get the girl.’ And don’t take no for an answer.”

  The grin that crept across his mouth was wide. He bent to kiss the back of her hand. Placing his palm over the blue-veined expanse, he told her, “There’s a wily gentleman two doors down who’s wheeled his chair passed your door three times since I’ve been here.”

  She rolled her eyes skyward, muttering a Greek entreaty for mercy. “You leave the matchmaking to bored old ladies. Now get out of here before I use that spray bottle on
the windowsill for something other than flower misting.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE RAIN DIDN’T stop the prep for Roxie’s latest event. With banishing thoughts from all parties involved in the affair, clouds broke and gave the Farmers and the Housings the rooftop nuptials they’d planned for with an added display of heat lightning over the Gulf to the south to spice up the untamed vista.

  The reception was rocking belowstairs in the ballroom of the spacious condominium that was located not far off Fort Morgan and well removed from the popular white-sand beaches of Gulf Shores and Orange Beach. The rain continued to hold off for Roxie and her team as they broke down chairs and disassembled the arrangements for the altar, but a light salty mist dampened things enough to make negotiating the rooftop slippery. She took off her shoes before climbing the ladder to begin unwinding the branches of the arbor, handing each piece carefully to Yuri so he could pack them in a box.

  They were losing the light. The sun had crept below the earth’s ledge a while ago and only a sliver of daylight hung around. They’d be lucky to finish before dark, and Roxie didn’t look forward to navigating the rooftop by night. Handing another branch down to Yuri, she waited for him to take it. “Yuri?” she said, shaking it to gain his attention.

  “Did I miss something?” he asked, “or was Adonis on the guest list tonight?”

  “What?” Roxie glanced over his head. She froze. “Oh, God. What is he doing here?”

  “Looking for you, it seems,” Yuri determined. He took the branch from her as well as her hand. “Before you fall...”

  Roxie followed his urging down the ladder. As Yuri climbed up to finish what she had started, she couldn’t bring herself to move.

  Byron came to her, walking down what had been an aisle moments before. He walked over fallen petals. The breeze tossed his hair across his brow. Was it just her or did he look more handsome than usual? How was that even remotely possible? The gray suit was one she hadn’t seen before and he’d left his collar open with no tie, an oddity for him unless he was stressed in some way. Yet he looked unflappable. The slippery roof didn’t even mess up his stride.