Guns and Roses

by Brennan, Allison; Armstrong, Lori G. ; Tabke, Karin; Causey, Toni McGee; St. Claire, Roxanne; Brown, Josie; Littlefield, Sophie; Griffin, Laura; James, Lorelei; Day, Sylvia

  …and she spun, instead, facing him, her grin going wide, staggeringly beautiful…

  And as he balled up his fist to throttle Trevor, the woman said, “Cam! I had hoped to meet you before the ceremony!”

  Then she planted a big honking kiss on him.

  It was decidedly difficult to throw a punch when a stunning woman was plastered up against you and grinning at you like you should know who she was. And then the connection hit… Isabelle. “Izzy?” Trevor’s little sister.

  Holeeeee shit.

  “Get your damned hands off my sister,” Trevor said, quiet, menacing, and Cam looked down and whoa, he’d already wrapped his hands around Izzy and had held her to him. No wonder Trevor was about to kill him.

  “Shut up, Trev,” Izzy said, grinning again at Cam. “Cam and I have gotten to know each other since the last disaster when I helped you. He’s just saying hello.”

  “He can damned well say hello from ten feet away,” Trevor snapped back, pulling his sister away from Cam, who reluctantly let go. What the hell? What was this… surge of feeling he had? No way should he feel this… this… lust like a locomotive slamming into his chest. And other parts south.

  “And just how in the hell have you two gotten to know each other?” Trevor asked.

  “Facebook,” they both answered together, and then they both grinned stupidly. Izzy’s icon had been Albert Einstein and Cam’s had been an LSU tiger. Neither of them had personal photos on their pages, but Cam knew she could have Googled him to know what he looked like. He’d tried Googling hers when she kept making him laugh, but found nothing and assumed… computer geek… introvert…. no photos… must be plain or downright ugly.

  Really, really asinine assumption.

  “Izzy,” Trevor said, turning the gorgeous creature around to face him, “not that I’m not glad to see you, but I thought you were going to keep our mother occupied so she couldn’t interfere?”

  Izzy harrumphed, like that hadn’t been a possibility and Trevor was nuts to have thought it might be. She glanced over at Cam, noticed his puzzled expression and said, “Our mother bought the little boutique hotel three blocks from here just so she could kick out the clientele on the top floor and take it over herself. We flew in yesterday. I’ve been trying to keep her overwhelmed with business, but she won’t talk to me yet, and I’m having to do everything through Deronda, her assistant.” Then the blasted bagpipes started up again and he cringed. “Courtesy of dear old mom,” Izzy shouted to Cam.

  “I’m sure that’s not the worst that she has planned,” Trevor added. He looked at Cam, then, “Can you alert those extra guards we added, and the locals, in case our mom has something more up her sleeve?”

  “She wouldn’t actually disrupt the wedding?” Cam asked, and on Trevor’s grimace, Cam blinked. “Does she have a death wish?”

  “She isn’t a mere mortal like the rest of the world,” Izzy answered and Cam frowned, seeing the hurt behind her eyes.

  It had never occurred to him what kind of family Trevor might have grown up in. His own had always been laid back and close-knit. Cam nodded and turned to leave, but… impulse, grabbed Izzy before Trevor could stop him and kissed her.

  “Hello,” he said, and she grinned again.

  ~*~

  Bobbie Faye wore the world’s most stunning dress—something the bridal shop owner offered to donate that night when it was clear Bobbie Faye had fallen in love with it, but couldn’t afford it on her own and wouldn’t let Trevor buy it for her. The proprietress decided if Bobbie Faye agreed to model the dress, the shock of the general public at the mere idea that someone would actually marry such a disaster (as the woman put it… just before realizing Bobbie Faye was standing within hitting distance, and she backed up, five steps, fast)… and that shock, coupled with her notoriety, would garner the shop and the new dress designer—a local woman—more publicity than they could have bought, so it was a win-win.

  And now, Bobbie Faye wore that dress while in a beautiful, white, horse-drawn carriage, straight out of a fairy-tale, as they rolled around the block surrounding the Cathedral… followed by a dozen bagpipers playing a funeral dirge. Bobbie Faye felt just a little like the fairy princess who’s cursed and doomed and about to damn an entire village to Hell, especially as the pipers kicked up the volume when the entire entourage stopped in front of the Cathedral doors.

  So much for thinking they were setting up here as a mere coincidence.

  Nina sat beside her and Cam had shown up to sit in the seat facing her, and both were dressed beautifully: Nina, drop-dead gorgeous in midnight blue, even if she maintained that über aloof veneer that froze out almost every man on the planet and kept her secretly lonely. And Cam, in a black tux that made him so stunningly handsome, it brought tears to Bobbie Faye’s eyes.

  Cam’s gaze narrowed on hers and he went instantly from a sort of befuddled, confused expression to razor-sharp insightful, and she tried to look away, knowing he was reading the wrong thing into those tears, but she couldn’t even begin to explain. He leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees and reached for her hand—the one not holding the beautiful roses and violets bouquet Trevor had made for her.

  “Baby?” he asked, forgetting again that he wasn’t supposed to call her that, “are you okay?” If he hadn’t been leaning seriously close, she’d have never understood him above the screeching din around them. “If you don’t want to do this, you don’t have to. There’s no sin in changing your mind, you know. I can have you out of here before anyone knows what happened.”

  “I told her that, too,” Nina said, and she and Cam exchanged a look that normally would have made Bobbie Faye want to throttle them both, except they were trying desperately to help and she understood that.

  “I’m fine,” she said, trying to emphasize the words, while brushing a tear away.

  “You’re not fine,” Cam said, quietly, getting angry as he squeezed her hand, “and it’s obvious. You never cry. You shoot things.”

  Yeah, the good ol’ days. She laughed a little and squeezed his hand back. How could she explain this? It was all too overwhelming, too much. Instead, she shook her head.

  “Probably not a good idea for me to shoot things on my wedding day. Just let it go, Cam. Let’s get this over with and then I’ll be fine.”

  He and Nina shared another look and as he started to say something, Nina stopped him.

  “B—no one should ever say ‘let’s get this over with’ about their wedding and actually mean it. But clearly, you do. I think—something’s wrong here. You know it, I know it, and you can’t go through with this if this isn’t what you want.”

  Just then, she looked up at the front of the Cathedral, the huge white stucco building reaching to heaven, two giant spires and cone-shaped roofs on each side of the central entrance making it look like a castle. Mobs of people had crowded into the square, fascinated by the horse-drawn carriage and the pipers trouping behind. Cameras flashed, people cheered and shouted, and a jazz quintet tried vainly to be heard. It was chaos squared, and she motioned for Cam to step to the ground and help her out.

  She was going to go through with this stupid wedding if it was the last damned thing she did.

  ~*~

  It was Bobbie Faye’s first time to set foot in this church. Her adrenaline surged in awe of its size, and chills spread through her. Massive stonework—grey green marble with black flecks on the entry, grey stone rising to soaring heights, and that was just the vestibule. There were two double door entrances into the Cathedral, and once inside, two more massive doors that entered the actual sanctuary; those were closed now so that she could make her entrance on cue.

  She and Cam and Nina stood just inside the vestibule—a narrow space not exactly designed with wedding parties in mind—and Cam went through the inner doors to check to see if everyone was ready inside the sanctuary. Since there were almost none of her friends and family who even knew about the wedding, and since none of Trevor’s family
had been invited, it boiled down to about ten people. Maybe fifteen. They were going to look like dust motes in this huge Cathedral, barely filling up one row, much less the massive space inside. She bit back the threatening tears and shook her head to ward off the wistfulness of what might have been.

  “Ah, here you are,” a priest said as he walked through a side entrance she hadn’t noticed. A priest who looked like a reformed biker, which amused her. Only in New Orleans. “I’m Father Joshua—Josh, for short—and unfortunately, in the rush to get everything ready, we failed to get a very important signature from you. If you’ll just step this way for one moment, Ms. Sumrall, we’ll be able to get the service started as soon as we have this done.”

  “Seriously?” she asked, frowning and glancing at Nina. “Trevor left something undone?”

  “Ah, no, I’m pretty certain it was something on our end that we forgot to ask of him. If you would?” He indicated a small room just off the vestibule, and then, to Nina, he said, “I’ll have her back in just a moment. Has everyone else arrived?”

  “I believe so,” Nina said, peeking in the door to the sanctuary. “Looks like they’re all there.”

  “We’ll just be a few moments, then,” the priest said and smiled serenely. “Such a blessing, weddings are!”

  “Um, yeah,” Nina said, her eyes on Bobbie Faye, “when that’s what everyone wants.”

  Bobbie Faye ignored Nina and followed Father Joshua into the little room, a sort of classy souvenir sales area; they stepped forward to the counter he’d indicated, looking at the paperwork he had laid out there. He handed her a pen and she bent to read what turned out to be a note. It said:

  Trevor: I’ve been kidnapped. Do what they say or I die.

  And before she could spin around and say a single word, Father Josh or whatever his name was had a gun shoved against her back.

  “I’d just as soon kill you,” he said, “but the others think you’ll be useful for a little while. Make no mistake—you being dead works just fine for me, so if I were you, I’d shut up and not cause a scene. Now, sign that paper.”

  She hesitated, assessing the room, thinking through the strategy of trying to take on an armed gunman in her freaking wedding dress in a small, cramped room. The odds weren’t great.

  “My partner has a gun trained on your Maid of Honor, by the way. He’s not a great shot, but from ten feet, he can’t miss. She doesn’t even realize he’s there. She’ll never know what hit her, if you make the first sound.”

  She tried to think of any furniture or doors into the vestibule that were large enough to hide a man, and frankly, couldn’t remember. She’d been thinking of the monstrosity of the details of this wedding, the stupid pipers, everything else that made her nervous and sad and she hadn’t paid attention when they’d first walked into the church. He shoved the gun harder and she signed the note.

  “Move,” the fake priest said to her. “Through that door,” he pointed, and that’s when she realized that the ornate paneling along the wall had a slight crack in it—a hidden paneled door.

  “What do you want?” she asked him and he laughed.

  “Money, princess. Lots and lots of money.”

  He shoved her through the door, into the hands of another gunman, who promptly yanked her in front of him, stepped on the hem of her beautiful dress and tore it.

  She was going to kill someone. Soon.

  Then he pushed her toward a set of stairs that went down. In New Orleans. Below the level of the river just across the square outside.

  This could not be a good sign.

  ~*~

  Nina peeked into the church and suppressed a laugh; no need to freak Bobbie Faye out just yet, but Ce Ce and Monique had brought some sort of smoking… lantern… into the church and had proceeded to horrify everyone already sitting in a pew by dancing up and down the aisles, doing squats and lunges and twirls on one foot, while singing. There was no priest inside as yet, which, perhaps, was the only thing that had gone well thus far. It would be a bad thing to have to do CPR on the priests, or, worse, kill one of sheer fright.

  “Ah, Miss Nina?” Father Joshua asked from the doorway where he and Bobbie Faye had entered a couple of minutes before, and she turned, surprised she didn’t see Bobbie Faye exiting. “There seems to be some confusion on Miss Sumrall’s part about some of these questions she has to answer and Mr. Cormier isn’t answering his phone. He probably isn’t getting service here—it’s so iffy, with this construction,” he said, pointing at the forty-foot tall ceilings. Then he paused, turned to Bobbie Faye, though Nina couldn’t see her. He turned back to Nina. “She wanted me to ask if you’d mind finding him and asking him to call her?”

  “Sure,” Nina said, and the priest nodded his thanks and smiled so beautifully, it was a shame the man was a priest. As he went back into the room, she watched and turned to radio Trevor, who’d been worried traditional phone lines might not work in this old building and had equipped everyone with scarily effective miniscule microphones and earbuds. Paranoid marrying Crazy, Nina thought and laughed. At least their lives would never be dull.

  ~*~

  Andrea waited patiently in the living room of the hotel room; she’d bought the entire hotel to have all of her people nearby. Henry, her butler, was off seeing to the import of high quality linens and other necessities she had found wanting in the hotel’s amenities. The place would be renovated, of course, and turned into a small five-star boutique hotel—Cormi-Co might as well make a profit from her acquisition.

  “Drea,” Deronda said as she entered a room with a file in her hand, skimming over a report, “it’s not good.”

  “What you found on that woman wasn’t good?”

  “No. What we found was nothing. Our plan of finding something incriminating or humiliating enough to stop this wedding isn’t going to happen. The wedding is set to start in just a few minutes, and I’m looking through this final report from the PIs we put on the case…” She kept skimming through more pages. “And they’ve got nothing. Well, there’s a lot of stuff, but she hasn’t made a secret of anything she’s done.” Deronda looked up from the paperwork, her eyebrow raised, waiting for Andrea’s decision.

  She had hoped Plan A would’ve done the job, but she hadn’t counted on it. She’d put a Plan B and even a fall-back Plan C into play, just in case. Plan C—worst case scenario, and it was going to generate some negative press, should she have to use it, but she had already figured out a PR campaign that would paint her as the loving-but-devastated mother at having to make the choice she might now have to make. But she’d made sacrifices before. Many. She’d taken this company from a small-town operation into the major leagues, and that sort of warfare taught a person when to take risks and when to hold the fort. Right now, she had to take this risk, because there was no one else she knew who could handle the company like Trevor.

  “Make sure the attorneys are on stand by and have the medical team prepped for my signal should we need Plan C.”

  Deronda nodded and left. Andrea watched the clock as she went through her mental checklist of all the things she needed to do: other acquisitions, dealing with the takeover attempt, trying to uncover who was at the bottom of it, handling the lawsuit from some nitwit entrepreneur claiming Cormi-Co stole his patented software, handling the multi-million-in-cost-thus-far of the newest R&D into the next wave of smart devices—ones keyed to your own thumbprint, couldn’t be stolen or hijacked, and integrated everything from your computer to your car to your home. Biotech, the next generation—

  —her cell rang and she snatched it up.

  “Ms. Cormier?”

  “Yes.”

  “We have made the arrangements we discussed earlier,” a smooth male voice said, practically purring. “We have Ms. Sumrall.”

  Ah. Plan B. She might not need Plan C after all.

  “Good. I reward efficiency. You will notify me when she’s out of the country with that ex of hers, correct?” Finally. She felt a sense of re
lief. That woman would go missing and it would look as if she’d gotten cold feet and ran off. “I want her gone. You’re certain this Alex person will do the job?”

  “Of course. No worries there—he loathes her. That’s why we sought him out. Plus, as a smuggler, he’s an asset to what we’re doing. Win-win.”

  “Excellent. If there’s nothing else, then I expect to hear, by midnight, that you’re finished.”

  “There is one other thing.”

  “Oh?”

  “It turns out that Alex has no love lost for your son, as well. He offered a sizeable discount if we could deliver both people to him, when he heard our plan. It occurred to us, being good businessmen, that there should be a bonus: we will leave your son alone, in exchange for a larger payment, or we can take him and you’ll pay even more, later.”

  Andrea paused, cold with rage. “You think you’re going to double-cross me, kidnap my son, and have me pay you?”

  “Certainly. It seems to be smart business, don’t you think, to maximize one’s investment. And we’ve invested a considerable amount of effort this week to put this into place. I expect to benefit from that. You won’t miss the money, you’ll benefit directly, and the entire exit strategy is set up to completely confirm your version of events. Set up meticulously, so that your son never doubts the veracity of his fiancée leaving with a previous lover, in spite of whatever she may have told him privately. That kind of detail—and proof—is worth the extra you’ll pay.”

  “You’re ridiculous,” she said, furious. “If you expect to double-cross me and get away with it, you’d better think again.”

  “Really? Well, here’s the thing: we have you on tape from our previous discussion, as well as this one. Any good DA would be able to prosecute you and, since they won’t be able to find us, you’ll go to jail and we’ll be fine. We’ll still have the original item we came after. So all around, we’re good here. You, on the other hand, won’t be. So you can either pay double—at the prearranged time and place—or tomorrow’s very sad headlines are going to be about a tragic murder-suicide of a beautiful young bride and her former FBI groom who just could not handle her cheating on him with her gun-runner ex. It’ll be messy, and we’ll send the tapes to the FBI, so they’ll get you for conspiracy, if nothing else. Be where you’re supposed to be, bring the bonds—untraceable—and don’t be late. I abhor tardiness.”