One Hot Summer

by Melissa Cutler

  “I think your guest list will be too extensive to hold the reception there, that will need to be in our grand ballroom, but the barn would be perfect for photographs or perhaps the rehearsal dinner,” Ty said.

  Helen slapped her knees. “What a hoot! Oh, Cambelle, this is meant to be. Wynd’s going to love it as much as he loves you.”

  “What is the wedding date you’re aiming for?” Remedy asked.

  Cambelle squirmed anxiously, but Helen patted her knee. “That’s the catch.”

  Remedy scooted to the edge of her chair. That stress knot in her stomach turned to lead.

  “It’s no catch,” Ty assured her. “No catch at all. Our girl Remedy here has everything under control.”

  Remedy unclenched her teeth. “What’s the catch, Helen?”

  Cambelle burst out, “We have to get married on the last Saturday in August.”

  “Next year?” Remedy squeaked.

  “Next month.”

  “Six weeks,” Ty said. “Plenty of time.” He winked at Helen for good measure.

  Helen reached across and clasped Ty’s hand. “Excellent. Of course, Wynd told us to tell you he’ll be paying you a premium for the trouble.”

  If Remedy squinted hard, she could probably see actual dollar signs in Ty Briscoe’s eyes. She stood and slid along the front of Ty’s desk, facing Helen and Cambelle and trying to gain some sense of control over the spiraling conversation. “And … and … how many guests, approximately?”

  “Five hundred.”

  A five-hundred-guest wedding and reception with beefed-up security and live animals and fireworks. In six weeks. With Remedy already executing more than twenty weddings in the interim, as well as the Firefighters’ Charity Ball in two weeks.

  Oh boy.

  * * *

  Three hours later, Cambelle and Helen preceded Ty and Remedy out of the resort’s special event barn, ready to be whisked away to the resort’s day spa for complimentary treatments at Ty’s invitation in advance of their late-evening flight on a private jet to New York to be reunited with their beloved Wynd.

  Ty lingered just inside the barn door. “Nice work, Remedy. I knew you were a gamble worth taking. With your parents’ help, Briscoe Ranch is on target to be the next hot celebrity wedding locale.”

  Remedy stopped in her tracks. Her parents’ help? Oh, hell, no. Her mom might have persuaded Cambelle and Wynd to hold their wedding at the resort, but that sort of thing couldn’t keep happening. How could Remedy forge her own path in the industry if her parents didn’t give her a chance?

  “All due respect, but you hired me, not my parents.”

  “On your parents’ recommendation.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He pulled a red handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at the sweat on his forehead, though his eyes remained cold and sharp. “Before I made my final decision to hire you, your parents called me personally. I assumed you knew that.”

  No, she most certainly did not. “They called you … together?”

  “Separately. One after the other. But they both said the same thing. That given their influence in the industry, I’d be a fool not to hire you. They were right.”

  The number-one rule of wedding planning was not to let ’em see you sweat. That went for brides—and bosses. She’d deal with her parents later, but before Ty left she had one last point to hammer home. “My point was let’s not forget that my parents aren’t the ones who will be planning this wedding. I will. And all of Wynd’s and Cambelle’s celebrity friends who attend will be seeing my genius, not my parents’. When word of mouth starts to spread around Hollywood about Briscoe Ranch”—and about her skills as a wedding planner—“which it will, immediately, it will be because I made it happen, along with you and the resort’s many exceptional qualities. Let’s keep the credit where the credit’s due.”

  Ty’s smile was as unexpected as it was disarming. “You’re a lot like me, you know. Ambitious. I had opportunities handed to me, just like you, and I realized right away that it’s not about who opens the door for you but about how driven you are when you walk through it.”

  She hoped to God that the two of them were nothing alike. “Yes, sir.”

  “How about I deliver the Wests to the spa and leave you to get a head start on planning this wedding?” Ty said.

  “Thank you. There’s no time to lose.”

  He flashed her one last smile. “Not for the ambitious.”

  The moment the door shut behind him, Remedy dropped to a hay bale, overwhelmed and in disbelief at the surreal turn her day had taken. She wasn’t sure what had her more off-balance. The tight time frame? That her Hollywood past had descended into her present life? That twenty-nine-year-old Cambelle was marrying her sixty-five-year-old producer? That having the wedding at Briscoe Ranch had been Remedy’s mom’s idea?

  No. Remedy knew the answer. It was the revelation that Ty Briscoe had hired her not because of her credentials or vision but because her parents had gone behind her back to ensure it. As though they didn’t believe in her ability to forge her own career separate from them.

  She would never forget the look on her mother’s face when she told her she was let go from her job in Los Angeles because of the Zannity scandal. She would never, ever get over her father’s palpable disappointment in her in that moment. Disappointment that was apparently so dire that her parents had actually, for once in their lives, overcome their mutual distaste of each other to conspire together.

  And yet, if they hadn’t intervened, would she not have gotten this job that she was genuinely enjoying? Maybe Ty was right and it didn’t matter who opened the doors of opportunity for you, but there was opening doors and then there was coddling a grown, intelligent, ambitious woman who had expressly asked her parents to stay out of her business. Maybe she should be thanking them.

  Maybe.

  She dialed her mother’s number. As it rang, she felt seventeen again, with the part of her that was desperate for freedom warring with the self-doubting part of her that feared herself incapable and wondered if independence was worth the risk of her parents’ disappointment.

  “Sweetie! What a nice surprise. And me without champagne!”

  “It’s not that kind of call.” Her pulse beat in her throat. She hated confrontations with her parents. Hated them more than anything in the world. Her parents were her home, her people. Nothing made her feel more drifting and lost and alien than being at odds with them.

  “What’s wrong, dear?”

  She swallowed hard. “I saw Cambelle and Helen today. Cambelle and Wynd Fisher are getting married here, at Briscoe Ranch.”

  Her mother gave a whoop of triumph. “Isn’t that wonderful? You should see them together, Remedy. He’s crazy about that girl. I was bursting, having to keep that secret from you for so long.”

  Remedy shook her head. “He’s only crazy about her because he’s a senior citizen and about to marry a woman thirty-six years younger than him.”

  “Don’t be such a sourpuss. They’re great together. You’ll see.”

  “Mom, Helen said it was your idea to have the wedding at Briscoe Ranch. Is that true?”

  “Of course, dear. It was the least I could do for my darling daughter.”

  “I wish…” Tears pricked Remedy’s eyes. Damn it. She stood and paced to the nearest window. “You should have come to me first to make sure it was okay with me. You need to let me handle my life. You—”

  “You’re not happy?” It was a question that seemed borne from genuine confusion.

  Remedy’s instinct to avoid conflict by lying was a strong one. But her parents had crossed the line and it had to stop. Right now. “No, I’m not.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. Cambelle and Helen are like family. And Wynd is a close friend of your father’s. There was no question that you were going to do them this favor.”

  Did her mom even realize she was fabricating the truth? “According to Helen, there was a question. She
said they’d needed some convincing because Cambelle didn’t want to get married in Texas.”

  “And, you know,” Mom continued, as though Remedy hadn’t spoken, “this wedding is a bit of a favor to you.”

  Remedy spun away from the window and flattened her back against the wall. So then, her mom really didn’t have faith in her to fix her own problems. Well, that cleared up a lot. But Remedy wanted to hear her admit it aloud. “A favor to me how?”

  Mom huffed, indignant, as though this was common knowledge that didn’t need spelling out. “Remedy, please. This is your shot to get back in the media’s good graces. This is what you were waiting for to redeem your reputation so you can come home. You should be grateful for this opportunity instead of picking it apart to find the flaws.”

  Micah was right. Telling someone that they should be grateful was the apex of obnoxiousness. “It wasn’t your place to fix this for me. It’s manipulative.”

  “Oh, honey, don’t be that way. We were devastated when you became persona non grata in our circles. No parent should ever have to hear the kind of slander we were subjected to about you. It broke our hearts. We’re only trying to help.”

  “Since when do you refer to you and Dad as ‘we’? You hate each other.”

  “We don’t hate each other. We have a child together, for God’s sake. We still talk, especially when you need us.”

  Remedy couldn’t wrap her brain around that one, not after years of listening to them each complain about the other’s lack of communication, from her dad missing Remedy’s school events and blaming her mom for not telling him about them to her mom bitching about her dad’s failure to inform her of travel plans he’d invited Remedy along on. “I’ll plan Cambelle and Wynd’s wedding, but after this, no more help from you. Or Dad. When I make my triumphant return to Hollywood, it’s going to be on my terms, because I revitalized my career, not you.”

  That had been her goal all along, but it didn’t explain why the words sounded hollow to her heart all of a sudden. She was falling in love with the quirky town of Dulcet and its even quirkier resort. She wasn’t ready to end things with Micah. Was she really that person who’d walk away from a good job, a good town, and a good man to mollify her ego and show up all the people who’d spurned her? That plot belonged in one of her mother’s movies, not Remedy’s life.

  “Don’t be mad at us, sweetheart. We’re trying to help you bust out of there.”

  There was that we again. Bizarre. “I’m not in prison, Mom.”

  “I miss you. Don’t you want to come home? By the time the dust settles and Wynn realizes what an asset you could be to his company in Los Angeles, planning all their big events, I’ll be done filming. We can be a family again for the holidays.”

  Remedy bit her tongue against asking who she was including in the we this time or from pointing out that she and her parents hadn’t been together as a family since she was twelve and that Remedy’s holidays ever since had been a complicated dance of divided time between her parents’ households.

  The holidays were the busiest time of the year at Briscoe Ranch Resort, as well as the most beautiful, she’d heard, with the whole resort transformed into a winter wonderland. Remedy couldn’t wait to be a part of that and to see Granny June’s Mistletoe Effect in action. Already Remedy was busy planning weddings for nearly every day of the month of December for so many sweet, optimistic, love-struck couples. She’d have to pass that off to a new planner or to Alex. How could she leave Granny June, Alex, Emily, and the rest of her coworkers in the lurch like that? How could she leave Micah like that?

  “I’ve got to go, Mom. I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  Regardless of the choice she made or if Cambelle and Wynd’s wedding marked the beginning of Remedy’s end at Briscoe Ranch, there was one inescapable truth. Hollywood was about to invade Dulcet, Texas, and there was no way, no how, this town—or Remedy—was ready for it.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Every year, Micah sprung for tux rentals for his crew to wear at the firefighter ball. It was his thing, and the day of the tux fittings was always a great chance for them to take a pause from the stress and danger of the fire season to get together and let loose. The tux rental rep made a house call to the firehouse, and they all chipped in for pizza. But this year, the tension Micah had first sensed at Albert and Tabby’s wedding was thick and uncomfortable.

  Micah had all kinds of theories, most of them revolving around the possibility that his crew had somehow gotten wind of Ty Briscoe’s threat to separate the fire marshal job from the fire station, but that seemed improbable, given that Briscoe hadn’t yet acted on his threat in any measurable way.

  It was a safety issue now, because if they got a call for a fire they’d need to work like a well-oiled machine, not a dysfunctional family. By the time the tux rental rep had taken all the measurements and left, the chilly silence in the room had Micah ready to burst. He shut the door and faced the dozen men in the room. “All right. That’s enough. Time to clear the air. What’s going on with you guys? Why are you pissed at me?”

  Nobody spoke. Dusty and Chet exchanged a look.

  “Dusty, start talking.”

  All he did was shoot another look at Chet.

  Chet stepped forward. “You’re a hypocrite is what the problem is.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Remedy Lane. You threatened us all within an inch of our lives to stay away from her. You kept insisting that Briscoe Ranch Resort executives were off-limits, so that’s what we’ve been doing all these years, but I suppose you wanted to keep them all for yourself, because there you were at Albert’s wedding, kissing Remedy. And almost every morning since then she’s doing the walk of shame out of your house.”

  Micah’s stomach dropped. So that was it. This was about Remedy. Of course. He should’ve predicted his guys’ hostility. More than that, he should’ve been the one initiating this conversation the minute he’d learned that word had gotten out that he’d kissed Remedy. First things first, though. “Don’t let me be hearing that term again, and not just with Remedy. You don’t get to shame someone for doing something you’d do in a heartbeat, just because she’s a woman.”

  “Way to deflect the issue, asshole,” Dusty said.

  Chet squared up to Micah, a smirk on his face. “Like I said, I suppose you wanted to keep her for yourself.”

  Dusty piped in. “That’s low-down, Chief. Not that I wouldn’t have done the same thing, but that’s low-down that you didn’t even give us a shot at winning her.”

  “She’s not some prize to be squabbled over.”

  Chet swaggered forward. “So that’s how little she means to you, boss? Better not let her hear you talk about her that way. For the record, if she’d been mine I would’ve treated her like a prize. Like a goddamn treasure. But I guess we’ll never know, because you didn’t give me a chance with her.”

  This was spiraling out of control way too fast. Time to dial it back. “That’s not what I meant. She’s not a prize, because she’s a person who makes up her own mind.”

  “Seems to me like you helped her make up her mind. Once you laid claim, there ain’t another man in this county who’d dare cross you on it. Must be nice to be the top dog.”

  The idea that Remedy was so weak-willed as to be so easily influenced about who to date or that he had the power to claim a woman as wildly independent as her was laughable, but he kept a stony expression firmly on his face. “I didn’t know this was going to happen between me and Remedy.”

  He let their scoffs die down, then added, “I didn’t. Truly. I’m fully aware that I broke my own rule about fraternizing with resort executives. It wasn’t my intent to keep you all from having a chance with her. Or keep you from socializing with any other Briscoe employees, either.”

  “But that’s exactly what happened,” Chet said.

  Other than the whole “laying of claims” objectification of Remedy and the assumption of her lack
of agency in her romantic affairs, they were right about him forbidding them from pursuing her only to go and pursue her himself.

  “You’re right. You’re all right. It was hypocritical of me and I should’ve come talk to y’all straightaway when I realized things were happening between her and me. I can’t turn back time and I don’t know how to make this right with you, because what’s done is done.”

  “You’ve got to break it off with her.”

  That wasn’t going to happen. “Next suggestion?”

  “What about that slippery slope you’re so fond of preaching about? About us getting complacent, about us crossing lines and bending rules about public safety if we let ourselves succumb to the charms of the Briscoe Ranch people?”

  For the first time, Micah considered Ty Briscoe’s threat of shifting fire marshal duties to a different department. What if that was for the best? Micah and his team could concentrate on fighting fires instead of enforcing the law and worrying about conflicts of interest with the resort staff. The only trouble was, whoever Briscoe handpicked to be the new fire marshal would be little more than his bought-and-paid-for puppet, which would put the entire county—the entire hill country region—in grave danger. Micah couldn’t let that happen any more than he could let his crew be divided by his lack of leadership since Remedy had crashed into his life.

  He felt like asshole number one when he said, “I know what this looks like, but the safety of the people of Dulcet and the guests at the resort is still my top priority. I’m determined to keep the boundaries between my personal life and professional life as firm as possible.”

  Chet gave a hard laugh. “Yeah, while you’re banging Ty Briscoe’s top employee. Do you really expect us to believe you’re not going to be skipping an inspection here or there, or making special allowances for your new bed warmer?”

  A sudden burst of anger gripped Micah’s chest. Calling him on his mistake was one thing, but nobody was going to get away with disrespecting his woman. He dropped his voice low so there would be no room for misunderstanding of Micah’s intent. “Do yourself a favor and never talk about any woman that way again—especially Remedy.”