by Julia London
Marnie smiled broadly as she took the phone. “Nice one. I’ll see if I can get it to work.” And she winked back at him, touched her hand to his once more, and stepped around him. “Thanks again, Eli. For dinner. For Bingo…”
“Yeah,” he said, and shoved a hand through his hair, feeling awkward, as if he were on a date or something. But this was not a date. Not even close. This was not even in the same universe as a date.
Marnie seemed to sense his awkwardness and laughed lightly before starting up the walk to her house.
“Remember what we talked about,” he called after her.
“Manage expectations,” she responded over her shoulder and continued on, swinging that lovely ass as she walked.
Eli watched her walk all the way to the door. It was the polite thing to do, he told himself, although he knew damn well it had nothing to do with polite. She put a key in the lock, and pushed it open a little, then turned and waved to him before disappearing inside.
Only then could Eli make his legs move, and he got in his truck, started it up, and wondered what the hell just happened to him. Whatever it was, it felt alarmingly good.
CHAPTER TEN
Marnie awoke the next day feeling on top of the world. Even Bingo’s accident couldn’t bring her down. When she went to pick him up from the emergency vet, he bounded out of the back room like a puppy in a cast. Bingo, it seemed, was going to be fine.
Marnie returned the dog home to Mom, who was busy making enchiladas for the book club party that night, which, she cheerfully informed Marnie, was going to include the husbands.
“What’s the occasion?” Marnie asked as Mom got down on her knees to greet Bingo properly.
“Ah buh buh buh,” she said to Bingo as she mashed her forehead to his. “Nothing really. We just want them to feel included. Ah buh buh buh. Look at his cast. My poor puppy needs a treat,” she said, and motioned for Marnie to help her up. “They’re in the pantry, honey. Get him a pig ear, will you?”
“So okay,” Marnie said as she gave Bingo a pig ear, “I’m outta here.”
“Are you going off with that nice man?” Mom asked coyly as she rolled another enchilada.
“No, Mom,” Marnie responded, trying her best to sound disgusted. But it wasn’t working—she sounded downright giddy. Nevertheless, she continued. “That nice man is my boss, and besides, he’s out of town.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” Mom said, then suddenly gasped and jerked around to Marnie, her eyes as big as saucers. “Are you going to be with Olivia Dagwood again? Is that where you’re going? With Olivia Dagwood?”
“Mom!” Marnie cried, and slid across the saltillo tile floor to grab her mom by the shoulders. “You have got to stop saying her name! I told you, it’s a huge secret. Quit talking about Olivia to the book club, and quit running to the front window every time you hear a sports car.”
“Where are you two going today?” her bright-eyed mom asked. “Shopping? Are you going shopping with Olivia Dagwood? I wonder where she shops. Probably Montrose, right?”
“You’re too hip for me, Mom,” Marnie said, and grabbed her bag with the new cell phone in it, the very same cell phone she would never tell her mother about, and said, “I’ll see you later” as she raced out of the kitchen.
Once outside, she put a hand over her eyes and peered down the drive into the garage. “Bye, Dad!” she called.
“Bye, honey! Drive carefully now,” came a reply from within the cave.
As Marnie backed out of the drive and headed down the street, she caught a glimpse of her mother in the front window, the cordless phone on her shoulder. “Oh gawd,” she muttered, and hit the gas.
Her destination was Brentwood.
When she arrived at Olivia’s house, she punched in the pass code Olivia had given her, and a gate swung open. As she pulled through in her BMW, four men suddenly appeared in her rearview mirror and scared the crap out of her. They were all holding cameras with the long lens thingies on them. Marnie sped up and around the corner as the gate swung shut behind her. She grabbed her purse and briefcase, opened the door, and crouched low, then sort of ran and crab-walked around the front of her car to the front door.
Before she reached the door, however, Olivia opened it. And she was laughing, her hands on her bare belly, doubled over. “You look so funny!”
“Are they always like that?” Marnie asked as she slipped inside. “They just appeared out of nowhere and started firing.”
“They’re always like that. But you get used to it,” Olivia said. “Come on, we’re all in here.”
Marnie wondered who “all” was. She followed Olivia, who was wearing velour sweatpants extremely low on her hips and a tight camisole that barely concealed her breasts. She led Marnie down a marble corridor, then turned right into a large sunken room. Opposite the door was a wall of plate glass windows that overlooked the pool and tennis court.
The room itself was completely white. The carpet was white. So were the furniture and the walls. It gave Marnie the sensation of being snow-blind.
“Hey, everyone, this is Marnie,” Olivia said, and Marnie gathered her wits about her and smiled. She recognized Lucy, the assistant, and the man she thought was Olivia’s stylist. An older woman in clothes very similar to Olivia’s was lying on her side on the couch. Sprawled in a white bean bag was the biggest star in all of Hollywood, Vincent Vittorio.
Vincent Freakin’ Vittorio!
Marnie almost dropped her briefcase. She tried to come off as cool, but she could not keep the damn grin from her face.
“Marnie, this is my mom, Della,” Olivia was saying.
“Oh! Pleasure to meet you, Mrs…ah, Della,” Marnie said, juggling her briefcase to shake her hand.
“Hi, Marnie.”
She turned to Lucy. “Ah…hi, Lucy. We met once before, on the set,” Marnie reminded her, stepping over a white cat to shake her hand.
Lucy looked at her like she was nuts. “We did?” Clearly confused, she shook Marnie’s hand as she squinted up at her through matchbox glasses. “Which set?”
“It was just a few days ago. WonderGirl.”
“Huh,” Lucy said, as if she found that to be particularly curious.
“And this,” Olivia said with a sigh, “is my alleged fiancé, Vince.” And with that, she fell onto a beanbag beside him.
“Ah…it’s really great to meet you, Vince,” Marnie said.
He lifted two fingers and turned his attention back to a magazine he was reading (Star, she was fairly certain). Marnie glanced around the room for a place to sit.
“Sit anywhere,” Olivia said, flicking her wrist at the room. Marnie chose a white butterfly chair, as it seemed to be the only thing in the room sturdy enough to hold her, save the two occupied beanbags.
“So,” she said, balancing her briefcase on her knees. “We’ve got ideas for a chef, ideas about linens and the size and scope of the reception. Shall I review the details for the groom?”
“Please don’t,” Vince muttered.
“Oh,” Marnie said, taken aback. “Okay…where would you like to begin?”
“Where do you suggest?” Olivia asked with a yawn. A woman appeared from a door at the far end of the room, carrying a tray with two Perriers, a beer, and something that looked like oatmeal in a glass.
“I suggest we go over some basic questions and make sure we’re all on the same page,” she said, pulling out the pink wedding organizer. “Then we can see what needs work and more research.”
“Great,” Olivia said, and sat up to take the oatmeal. “Would you like something to drink, Marnie? Water or maybe a sea grass?”
“A sea grass?”
“Oh, it’s great for cleaning you out,” Olivia said as the maid delivered the waters to the women and the beer to Vince, who smiled up at the maid and winked his thanks. Damn. He looked as good in person as he did on the big screen.
“Bring her a sea grass, Maria,” Olivia said before Marnie could answer, and smiled at
Marnie. “You’ll love it.”
“No, she won’t. She’ll barf,” Vince said.
“Vince”—Olivia sighed—“could you please try and help us out here? It’s our wedding, remember. Not just mine.”
He tossed aside the magazine, took a huge swig of beer, and settled deep into his beanbag. “All right, so let’s go. What are the basics?” he asked Marnie.
“Well, the venue is decided, of course. Let me ask this—have you given any thought to a theme?”
“Theme?” Vince echoed, as if the very notion of a theme pissed him off.
“Yes, I have,” Olivia said instantly. “Starlight. I think it’s perfect. I mean think about it. We met under the stars. We’re getting married under the stars. We are stars. So I think starlight should be our theme…okay, Vince?”
He looked at Olivia as if he couldn’t believe she was serious. She returned his look with one that said she was dead serious. “Sure. I guess. Whatever,” he lazily gave in.
Olivia frowned darkly.
“Hey, no one told me weddings had to have a theme.”
“Really? You didn’t have a theme in any of your other weddings?” Della asked Vince in all seriousness.
“Ah…if you want to make starlight your theme,” Marnie jumped in, “then you might want to choose colors around that idea. Maybe a pearl white and midnight blue?”
“Oh, that sounds gorgeous,” Della said. “Are you getting this down, Lucy? Starlight. Pearl white and midnight blue.”
Lucy wrote it on her iPad.
“I don’t get this theme business,” Vince said, looking very perplexed.
“Come on, Vince, it’s not rocket science,” Olivia said testily.
“If your theme is starlight,” Marnie said, “you could do something like have a lot of tiny tea candles around to represent stars. And in the pavilion, you could have a midnight-blue cover and suspend white roses to represent stars in the night sky.”
“I don’t want a pavilion,” Olivia said instantly. “I want it all to be under the real stars!”
“Well…you might want to have something set up in case of rain,” Marnie suggested. “Eli said it will be monsoon season, and there are not a lot of places to take shelter from what I understand.”
“I don’t care if it rains. I think that would be beautiful,” Olivia said, and smiled sweetly at Vince.
He shrugged. “I don’t care.”
Marnie made a quick note to speak to Eli about that. She felt very strongly there needed to be some sort of shelter. She wasn’t a mountain woman or anything, but she had an idea that if it rained at ten to eleven thousand feet, it would be a very cold rain. “What do you think of the candle idea?” Marnie asked.
Olivia looked at Vince, who looked at his bare feet. “I guess that’s okay,” she said with a shrug. “But I sort of wanted flowers.”
“Oh, you’ll have flowers, too,” Marnie assured her.
“No, I mean like…flowers. Thousands of them. Flown in from somewhere. That’s it! I want white tulips or roses flown in from Holland. We can decorate the arch with it.”
“The arch?” Vince repeated, and looked at Olivia. “What arch?”
“You know what arch, Vince! The one from The Dane.”
Vince blinked and looked at Marnie. “But…how are you going to get that arch up to the top of the mountain where there is nothing but four-wheel access? Am I right, Marnie? There’s only four-wheeler access, right? Remember, Livi? They couldn’t even get that fat-as-shit producer up there.”
“Transportation is something we haven’t quite figured out,” Marnie said with a bright smile. “I’m working on that.”
Vince snorted. “Sounds like a huge problem to me. Forget the arch.”
“But I don’t want to forget the arch!” Olivia cried. “That was the most romantic thing we ever did, Vince. You remember that night on the soundstage after we wrapped and we made love beneath that arch?”
“Jesus, Olivia!” Vince cried. “Your mother is sitting on the couch right there.”
“Oh, I’ve heard it all before, believe me,” Della said cheerfully.
“Vince, I want that arch,” Olivia insisted.
“No. There is no way we can get that arch up there again, and I am not paying TA a ton of money to get it up there. This gig is already costing a million five, remember?”
Marnie choked on a small shriek.
Olivia and Vincent looked at her. “Are you all right, Marnie?” Olivia asked as the maid came into the room carrying oatmeal in a glass.
“Fine, fine,” she said hoarsely. Her eyes were watering. She was literally choking on “a million five.” Her poor brain could not compute. She could not, even in her fantasy, spend a million and a half dollars on a wedding. The maid handed her the oatmeal, and Marnie took a big swig of it.
It was nothing short of a miracle that she managed to keep from spewing that slop all over that insanely white room.
“Don’t you like it?” Olivia asked, and seemed genuinely disappointed that Marnie’s eyes were bulging out of their sockets.
“Love it,” she croaked.
“No arch, Livi,” Vince said again. “I’m not going there.”
Olivia gave him a look as Marnie discreetly put the sea grass aside. “We’ll talk about it later, Vince.” And she turned a smile to Marnie. “What about the flowers? Can I have the flowers?”
“Sure, sure,” Marnie said, her mind still reeling from the cost of this wedding.
“I would like…thirty thousand white roses,” Olivia said. “Flown in from Holland.”
No one else said a word. Everyone in that room—save Marnie—seemed to think that was perfectly reasonable. “That’s…that’s doable,” Marnie said brightly. “But, ah…you’ll have to have them flown in from Holland the day before, you know.”
“Yes.”
“And then transported to Colorado.”
“Right,” Olivia agreed.
Marnie cleared her throat, pasted a bright smile on her face. “The thing is, that’s a logistical nightmare to have flowers flown in from Holland, clear customs, then moved to another plane and flown to some place in Colorado or New Mexico, and then, you know, driving thirty thousand roses up the mountain…”
Olivia blinked.
“I think she’s saying shoot for a more reasonable number,” Vince suggested to Olivia. “Like maybe, ten thousand.”
“That won’t be enough,” Olivia said, lifting her chin. “I want roses at the wedding site and at the reception. I want them everywhere.”
Marnie opened her mouth to reply, but Olivia cut her off. “We’ll figure out something,” she said brusquely.
She couldn’t imagine what Olivia thought they’d “figure out,” but whatever. This little planning session was going nowhere fast. “So,” she said, smiling so hard her cheeks hurt. “We’ve got flowers and theme…What did you have in mind for the dinner?”
“Filet mignon,” Vince said at the very same moment Olivia said “Lobster. And sushi appetizers.”
Vince scoffed. “You think they can get lobster up there?”
“You think they can get beef?”
“Yes, I think they can get beef. There’s a million cows walking around those mountains, remember? Those hombres can probably slaughter a cow and cook it right there.”
“Ooh, yeah, that’s appealing!” Olivia snapped. “I’m not having food made from animals at my wedding.”
“Well, honey, what do you think a lobster is?”
“A crustacean. It’s not the same thing.”
“Then I guess you haven’t heard the lobsters scream when they put them in the pot to boil them alive.”
Marnie kept the smile pasted to her face as the conversation deteriorated into what constituted an animal, and wrote on her little notepad:
Help!!
At some point in the argument, Olivia and Vince determined they’d think more clearly about what they wanted with some wine and french fries, which they agreed
was a food group that hurt no one, and they all loaded up in a limousine and headed for Zax. Olivia and Vince decided to smoke a joint on the way over, and even Della had a couple of hits. Only Marnie declined, sitting across from them next to the hairdresser or whoever he was, with her wedding organizer on her lap, trying in vain to wave the smell of pot away from her clothes.
For the record, it was at Zax that the paparazzi got the shots of Olivia slapping Vince that showed up on Access Hollywood and E! that night, along with the speculation that the love affair between the two hottest stars was over.
It also happened to be the place Marnie was sitting when her cell phone began to ring a cheerful little tune.
“Hello?” she asked anxiously as Olivia and Vince were in a heated discussion about the use of professional guests, who would be hired to keep the dancing alive at the reception and make sure everyone was having a good time.
“Hey, it’s Eli. How’s it going?”
“Great. Just great. In fact, we’re sitting here at Zax talking about the reception.”
“Who’s there?”
“Olivia. And Vince. And Olivia’s mother and her assistant, Lucy, and—”
“I get the picture,” he said, and then he asked, so quietly she almost didn’t hear him, “Are you doing all right?”
Marnie was uncertain if he was asking her how she was after their little adventure last night, or if he was asking if she was doing her job well. In the moment she was trying to figure it out, Olivia slapped Vince.
The place suddenly erupted into a hail of flashbulbs. It seemed to Marnie as if they appeared from thin air to surround them.
“Hey!” Vince shouted, oblivious to the cameras as he caught Olivia’s hand before she did it again. “Stop that shit!”
“I’m sick of this, Vince. Every time I turn around you are checking out someone’s ass.”
“I’m not checking out anyone’s ass.”
