She told herself it was only a friendly gesture. They were spending a lot of time together, getting to know a little about each other. Being friendly, that was all.
But she already had kissing on the brain so she half expected him to pull her toward him.
And half expecting it, she found herself tilting her chin upward invitingly....
Until she realized what she was doing and pulled back.
No kissing! she commanded herself.
And there wasn’t any.
Because a moment after that, Dane gave her arm a second squeeze and took his hand away as he told her he hoped everything went well for her the next day. Then he said good-night.
“’Night,” Vonni said after him.
But as she locked the door behind him and replayed the past few moments in slow motion in her mind, she realized that he just might have leaned toward her a little, too.
Chapter Five
“This is a beautiful house,” Vonni said when she entered the Camden family home a little before eight o’clock on Saturday night. “It’s amazing from the outside and inside it’s warm and comfortable and inviting—you don’t always find that with houses this size.” She liked it much more than the places she’d had occasion to visit in meeting with other clients.
“It’s all GiGi,” Dane said as he showed her into the foyer of the enormous Tudor mansion.
The foyer had a high vaulted ceiling with a crystal chandelier centered over a large round entry table. Dane introduced the older man and woman standing near it as Margaret and Louie Haliburton. After exchanging convivial small talk, they left—with a reminder from Margaret that there was a plate of cookies for them in the kitchen.
“How are you holding up?” Dane asked when they were alone.
It wasn’t a question she heard from clients and he asked it with genuine interest and consideration—all things that felt good to come home to.
Not that she was coming home to him. But for some reason he made it seem as if she was. And it felt good. It just felt good to be with him again—something she’d wanted since he’d left her shop the night before.
But she couldn’t let herself consider the implications of that. Especially not when she’d sworn to herself on the way over that she was not going to let tonight go the way previous evenings had—she was going to keep this visit strictly professional, go in, do what she’d come for and go home. Without thinking about kissing the client. Or imagining that he might be on the verge of kissing her.
“I’m holding up okay,” she answered. “Both weddings went as planned, without any glitches—”
“I heard you’re known for your glitch-free weddings—I figure you can set up a training program for Camden wedding planners so they’ll learn your tricks.”
Vonni chose to ignore that. “So besides being a long day, it was fine.”
“But it was a long day,” he persisted. “If you want to kick off your shoes and walk barefoot around here, I won’t tell.”
Vonni laughed. She was tempted. But in keeping with her determination to make this quick and professional, she declined. “Thanks, but the feet are doing okay.”
He bent over slightly to look down at the strappy wedges she’d chosen specifically because she could be in them for hours without a problem.
Then his eyes went slowly—and appreciatively—up her nylon-encased legs to her dress. It was one of the many she specifically wore on a wedding day—a navy blue, knee-length sheath with a boat neck.
“You certainly don’t look like you’ve been working all day and most of tonight.”
“That’s the goal, so thank you,” she said.
She’d removed the matching jacket, but her outfit was still work attire, and she envied Dane his more casual gray golf pants and yellow polo shirt.
She also noticed how the shirt accentuated his broad chest and shoulders, but she tried to ignore it.
“Margaret was baking the cookies when I got here,” he said. “We can dig into those when we’re finished looking around and really put your workday behind you.”
Vonni thought she’d smelled fresh baking when she’d come in the door. “I’m a sucker for chocolate-chip cookies,” she said, knowing even as she did that she was going against her vow to do this quickly and leave. But how long could it take to eat just one cookie?
“Let’s get this over with, then, so we can relax,” he suggested. “The den is over there.” He motioned to the right of the entranceway. “That’s where the ceremony itself will be—GiGi and Jonah are having a judge do that part without fanfare. While it’s going on, you and the caterers and whoever else on your staff can be working out here—we’ll close the doors to the den and you can have free run of the place.”
The double doors to the den were open now and Vonni glanced through them at the stately oak-paneled room. But because she didn’t have anything to do with that portion of the event, she had no reason to poke her nose into it and didn’t.
“Can we use this table for the guest registry and gifts?” she asked, nodding at the entry table. “I’ll cover it with a cloth to protect it, but the positioning and size are perfect. Unless you don’t want it used, and then we can move it somewhere else and set up another table for the gifts and a podium for the registry. Or...” she said, looking at the wide curving staircase with its carved oak posts and banister rising to the second floor, “we could put gifts along the side of the stairs—by the way, do you want them blocked off so guests only have access to this floor?”
“It’s just going to be friends and family so I don’t think we have to worry about anybody wandering. And as for the table, this is a user-friendly place—it’s had to be—so the table can stay and be used.”
He pointed to the left where a wide passageway led to a formal living room. “They want the reception to be on the patio, but there’s no way back there from outside—”
“Is there a rear entrance for the caterers to use?”
“No, that was turned into an entrance from the house to GiGi’s greenhouse a long time ago. They’ll have to come in the front and so will the guests. The caterers can go straight back to the kitchen from here—” he pointed to a corridor that ran the length of the staircase “—but the guests are going to have to pass either through the kitchen or go through the living room and out the dining room doors to get to the patio. And I don’t think we want them going through the kitchen.”
“No, the caterers will be in there and foot traffic would be bad. But before we get to that, let’s talk about parking,” Vonni said.
She’d taken note of the arrival-and-departure situation when she’d driven up the stone-paved drive that circled a large fountain and passed in front of the five-car garage. “I think you’re going to need to hire valets to park cars. Not too many more than the family’s cars are going to fit out front.”
He agreed with that and she assured him she had licensed and bonded people she used.
Then she asked him to show her the path he wanted the guests to take through the spacious and elegant living and dining rooms to get to the four sets of French doors that opened to the outside. Along the way they discussed several carpet-saving possibilities and Vonni assured him she would make it elegant.
From there they went out onto a tiled patio that was partially covered and provided a full outdoor kitchen complete with sink and running water. There was more than enough space to accommodate tables and chairs for a hundred people as well as a dance floor, and they needed only to discuss where to set everything up and whether or not to erect a tent in the area that wasn’t covered.
Before all the decisions were made the sun went down, allowing Vonni to see the lighting that would be available. That was when she suggested that rather than a tent, they put up a canopy of white lights on wires strung from the house to the fore
st of oak trees that surrounded the patio.
“It will give a lot of extra light and look beautiful against the sky and the overhang of the tree branches,” she told him.
Dane agreed, and after going through her checklist to make sure she had all she needed, Vonni said, “I think that’s everything.”
“Now we can eat cookies—they’re just waiting for us in the kitchen.”
“Actually that’s perfect because I need to check the kitchen so I can let the caterers know what kind of area they’ll have to work in.”
“And then we’ll be done....” he said with feigned exasperation, as if he’d reached his limit on wedding talk. He ushered her back inside, this time through a set of sliding doors that led directly into the kitchen.
It was restaurant size but as warm and homey as the rest of the place. Navy-blue-and-white tile formed a checkered pattern in the floor, there were tarnished brass lighting and plumbing fixtures, pristine white cupboards, a commercial-size refrigerator, a six-burner gas stove, built-in grill, double ovens, three sinks, an expansive island in the center of the room for ample workspace and a breakfast nook large enough to be a conference table.
“Oh, there’s no problem in here, either,” she said with relief after just one glance around. “The caterers are going to be thrilled—there’s plenty of room to work and more than enough surfaces for trays and platters and food.”
“Great! Now are we done?” Dane asked.
Vonni made a few more notes for the caterers then said, “Okay. Done!”
Dane snatched her binder out of her hands and set it where she couldn’t reach it on top of the enormous refrigerator.
“Don’t let me leave without that!” she said fearfully.
“Leave your pen on the counter as a reminder so we can have cookies in peace.”
One cookie and she should go—that was what Vonni had told herself.
But it had been a terribly long day and the kitchen still smelled of freshly baked cookies and she just couldn’t make herself turn him down when he pulled out a bar stool and ordered her to sit.
“We could go the tried-and-true route of milk with the cookies,” he said then. “But there’s a nice little dessert wine GiGi has that’s especially for chocolate—what do you say we do this that way?”
“Cookies and wine instead of cookies and milk?” Vonni repeated as if she needed to think it through. But she wasn’t much of a milk drinker so what she was really doing was trying once again to talk herself into taking one cookie and leaving.
It didn’t work this time, either. Not when she factored in that it was Saturday night and she had just worked until after nine o’clock, and being with him somehow seemed to naturally relax her to such a degree that she wanted to wind down the rest of the way, too.
“Okay, I’m game,” she heard herself say, even as a voice in the back of her mind told her she shouldn’t.
“Wine it is!” Dane said, grabbing a bottle from the counter beside the refrigerator as if he’d known all along he would be able to persuade her and had set it there just for the taking.
But rather than giving that too much thought, Vonni glanced through the windows of the breakfast nook toward the patio in the distance. “This is a beautiful place for a wedding—no wonder your grandmother didn’t want to have it anywhere else.”
“They really just wanted it to be at home,” he answered as he poured the wine.
Then he brought the two glasses to the island and sat on a bar stool adjacent to her. “Shoes off, hair down now?” he said like the spider to the fly, making her laugh.
It was tempting to kick off her shoes and take her hair out of the French twist it was in. But she couldn’t go that far. “I’m fine,” she insisted, taking a cookie from the plate he held out to her.
He gave her a napkin, then took a napkin and cookie for himself.
“These are one of Margaret’s specialties. She says she uses three different kinds of chocolate chips so there are levels of chocolate, and she toasts the nuts—whatever that means—before she puts them in. Pecans, I think,” he informed her.
“Ooh...they are fantastic!” Vonni judged after taking a bite.
“Now sip the wine—that’s how you get the full effect, I’m told.”
They both tasted their wine and agreed that the combination was surprisingly complementary.
“Wine and cookies—I would have never thought of that,” Vonni said.
“My cousin Cade discovered the wine at a wine tasting he went to with our groom’s granddaughter—and now Cade’s fiancée—Nati Morrison. You’ll meet them all at the wedding.”
Vonni laughed again. “I’m not usually introduced to the guests. I’m a behind-the-scenes person.”
“Maybe not so much for this one—we all want you to run Camden’s wedding departments, so everybody is interested in who you are and will want to meet you.”
Not only would she be working, she would be on display and on a job interview for a position she still wasn’t really considering? That was more than she wanted to think about at the moment, so she changed the subject.
“You always refer to this as your grandmother’s house,” she said. “But you mentioned last night that this is where you grew up?”
“From when I was nine. That was when my parents, my aunt and uncle and my grandfather were killed in a plane crash.”
She hadn’t meant to get into a subject quite that dark. “I’m sorry. I knew there was some tragedy a long time ago in the Camden family but I didn’t know what it was—”
“It was a long time ago,” he said, dismissing her concern. “But that’s when I came to live here. With my three younger brothers, my younger sisters Lindie and Livi—who, along with Lang, are triplets—and our four cousins. You met Jani, and there’s Seth, Cade and Beau, too.”
“Ten kids came to live here all at once, without any parents?”
“And GiGi raised all of us,” he confirmed. “With the help of H.J.—who had to come out of retirement at eighty-eight to run the business again—and Margaret and Louie.”
“I can’t imagine....”
He laughed. “As an only child, no, I don’t suppose you can.”
“Ten kids all in one house....”
“The place is looking a little smaller to you now, isn’t it?”
“I can’t even picture what that might be like.”
“Never-ending summer camp or boarding school—a whole lot of chaos and commotion and noise and activity and work.”
“Did you like it or not?” she asked when they both started on their second cookie. She couldn’t tell from his tone.
“It was the way things were,” he said with a shrug. “At first it wasn’t so great. We’d lost our parents and grandfather and aunt and uncle—so there was grieving and what that brings with it in kids. And we’d had to leave our homes—we all liked visiting GiGi and Gramps, but now we had to live here. None of that was easy on anybody. But once we all got over the hump, it just was what it was—a great big family with GiGi at the head of it—”
“Not H.J.?”
“He was eighty-eight,” Dane repeated. “He was doing his best to keep the business going and set it up to be maintained until we were all old enough to take it over—which he did with a board of directors he handpicked and trusted in case he didn’t live long enough to hang on to the reins himself.”
“Did he?”
“He lived to be ninety-six, but the oldest of us—my cousin Seth—was only nineteen then, so no, there was a period of time when the board of directors ran things with GiGi overseeing them, too, to make sure nothing went wrong. We all took over little by little as each of us graduated from college—we were mentored by the members of the board until the ten of us could do it on our own. But around here, GiGi was the undis
puted head of the family. She ran the household, with H.J., Margaret and Louie her support team, and older kids delegated to take care of younger kids, too.”
“And you’re where in the age range?”
“Top three of the heap—Seth is the eldest, Cade and I are the same age and just two years behind him. Of course the rest only drop down in age about a year at a time, but when there are so many to wrangle, Seth and Cade and me had to look after the seven younger kids a lot.”
He spoke unemotionally, leaving Vonni wondering how he felt about that arrangement. “Did you resent being one of your grandmother’s delegates?”
“You know...sometimes. I was a kid. At home, before the plane crash, we’d had a nanny who had been responsible for us all, so even though I was the oldest kid on that side I hadn’t had to do anything with my younger brothers and sisters—”
“There weren’t any nannies when you came here?”
“Nope. GiGi didn’t like the idea of nannies. She’s from a small town in Montana where ‘family takes care of its own’—that’s what she’s always said. Where the oldest looked after the youngest. And that was how she wanted it here. I don’t know if it was part of her plan to make us all close—to make us all feel like brothers and sisters rather than cousins—but it accomplished that. I don’t feel any different about any of my cousins than I do about my own brothers and sisters. We really are all just one great big family.”
He said that proudly, fondly.
“So it wasn’t bad,” Vonni said over her third cookie.
“After the initial stuff, no. There was always somebody to kick the football with or play hoops. No game of any kind was ever undermanned. There was always backup if we had problems at school. There was a lot of work, but there were a lot of advantages, too.”
Advantages Vonni had missed and longed for as an only child. Which she had no doubt was a contributing factor to her own determination to find a husband and have a family of her own.
But if Dane found family life to be a good thing, why was he so opposed to having one of his own?
A Camden Family Wedding Page 8
