The Barefoot Wedding

by Bella Andre

  Maya wrapped her long arms around Amy and hugged her tight. “Now there’s the stubborn, strong, amazing woman I know and love.”

  Amy felt tears come again, but this time they were tears of appreciation that she had such a good friend in her life. “Nolan really is a lucky guy to have you, you know.”

  “I tell him that all the time,” Maya said with an impish grin. And then, “Do you feel any better? Or did I just make everything worse?”

  “I do feel better, actually.” Amy took a deep breath to let the ocean air fill her lungs. “I’m not going to lie and say that everything is rainbows and butterflies, when we both know that isn’t true. But for the first time in a very long time, at least I know my mind, and my heart. And I have faith that Travis will eventually know his too.”

  Hopefully sooner rather than later…

  Chapter Twelve

  Maya and Nolan’s wedding day dawned clear and beautiful.

  Married in Malibu had been transformed into an elegant party scene, awash with blues and creams that mirrored the ocean and beach. Their families had already arrived, and a quartet was playing lively Irish reels to celebrate the heritage that Maya and Nolan shared. Actors, models, and musicians who were friends with Maya mingled with Nolan’s accountant, engineer, and academic friends. In another setting, the mix might not have worked, but Liz was brilliant at setting the stage for diverse guests to feel comfortable getting to know one another.

  And, of course, there were plenty of photographers waiting outside the gates, hoping to catch a glimpse of the supermodel, who was in the bridal suite with her bridesmaids.

  Everything was set for another perfect Married in Malibu wedding…and yet Travis wasn’t at all sure he’d make it through in one piece.

  He hadn’t heard from Amy since yesterday afternoon, and hadn’t let himself text or call or visit her either. She’d promised to wait for him to change his mind, but he knew that the only way she’d ever be free to find the kind of man she deserved—one without dark stains on his soul—was to make a clean break and go cold turkey.

  Somehow, he needed to manage the extra security staff brought in for the day, deal with the endless parade of paparazzi determined to get their shot no matter what, and reassure the famous, wealthy guests that they could let their guards down for once—all while making sure that he didn’t run into Amy. So when one of the photographers tried climbing the wall for a better view, Travis almost felt grateful to the guy for providing some distraction.

  “Travis!” He was surprised to find Maya hurrying toward him after he made his way back from having a stern word with the photographer. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Is everything okay?” The last thing anyone wanted at Married in Malibu was an unhappy bride on her wedding day.

  “Of course everything isn’t okay!”

  “Tell me what we can do to help,” Travis said.

  “You can stop breaking Amy’s heart, for starters.”

  A bolt of pain slashed into his chest at the knowledge that Amy was hurting. Which was why it took several beats longer than it should have for him to remember that he was head of security and couldn’t stop doing his job just because his personal life was falling apart.

  Knowing the paparazzi would give their left arm and their left leg for a photograph of Maya in her wedding dress, Travis quickly took steps to block her from view.

  Telling himself he was only doing his job, instead of talking with Maya about Amy, he said, “You shouldn’t be out here right now.”

  “It’s my wedding. I can go where I like.”

  “There are photographers everywhere. It’s my job to make sure they don’t get shots to sell to the highest bidder.”

  “Do you think I care about that? You and I need to have a very serious talk, Travis. If we have to do it in full view of photographers, so be it.”

  Realizing Maya’s iron will—and her desire to take care of her best friend—meant that he had no choice but to give in, he said, “Okay, we can talk. But can we please do it inside?”

  Nodding, she followed him into his office. Once they were inside, she said, “Do you know why I decided to have my wedding at Married in Malibu when I could have gone to the Rose Chalet in San Francisco, or even arranged it in Paris?” She pinned him with a laser-sharp look. “Because I knew you work here.”

  He was stunned. “You deliberately booked your wedding here because you wanted Amy to see me again?” If anything, he would have thought the exact opposite—that Maya would have been desperate to shield her friend from a guy who had proved himself to be heartless.

  “I would do anything for Amy. And if you truly loved her, so would you.”

  “I would do anything for her,” Travis insisted.

  “Anything except accept her love in the same open and honest way that she loves you.” Maya didn’t pull a single punch. “Anything except actually doing the work to get over your past, no matter how difficult, so that you can be with her.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said in his politest voice, even as the words came from between clenched teeth. “But I really don’t think my life is your business.”

  “You’d better believe it is when it’s my best friend you’re hurting by not coming to your senses. I asked Amy to come here early this week to make absolutely sure that the two of you would have to spend time together. And for a little while there, it looked like you might finally have gotten things right. But then you went and blew it.” She was pacing his office in her gown, getting more riled up by the moment. “I tried setting her up with plenty of great guys over the years. Men with looks, success, money—who were also kind and generous.”

  Though he didn’t have a right to be jealous, Travis couldn’t fight back the surge of possessiveness at hearing about these other men.

  “But nothing I did to make Amy happy worked,” Maya declared. “Because she couldn’t be happy. Not when she was still desperately, totally in love with you. Being 2,500 miles away in Michigan and having three years pass since the last time you saw or spoke to one another didn’t change how she feels about you.”

  Sitting hard on the edge of his desk, he asked, “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because you need to see just how badly you’ve blown everything by walking out on her. Again!” Maya gestured to his office and then out the window at her wedding guests. “Is this really enough for you? Is this really all you want out of life? To protect famous brides and grooms from photographers?”

  “I’m keeping people safe.”

  “You’re keeping yourself safe,” Maya snapped back. “Safe from ever having to take a risk with your heart. Safe from ever having to put yourself in someone else’s hands.”

  Travis started to rise to that, then stopped himself. He’d had a lifetime to practice being calm, to work on not giving in to his negative emotions. Especially when someone was poking him exactly where it hurt the most.

  A knock came at the door before he could respond. Not that he had known what to say when he felt more broken now by the hard truths Maya had spoken than he ever had by his father’s and brother’s fists.

  Recognizing Meg’s and Kate’s voices in the hallway, he opened the door to find them both looking extremely anxious.

  “Meg, Kate, what is it?” If there was a security problem, it was his job to deal with it, no matter how torn apart he was on the inside.

  “Sorry to interrupt your conversation, Maya, but we need Travis to come take a look at something.”

  “Is anything wrong?” Maya asked.

  “Nothing we won’t be able to deal with,” Kate assured her. “In fact, why don’t I take you back to your dressing room? I know Amy and your other bridesmaids are wondering where you are.”

  Maya nodded, but before she left the office, she gave Travis a look that made it clear she had expected better from him.

  She wasn’t the only one.

  “I hope that was nothing serious?” Meg said.

  Unable to answe
r her question honestly, Travis didn’t even try. “What did you come to talk to me about?”

  “We have a problem. A big one. Amy has agreed to try to keep Maya in the dressing room for as long as she can, but we don’t have that much time to sort things out.”

  “Have photographers gotten somewhere they shouldn’t?”

  “I wish it was something that simple.” She took a breath, then hit him with it. “The groom is missing.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Liz and Nate were waiting in Nate’s office, squeezed in between the computers, monitors, servers, and seemingly endless coils of wires. Jenn, Daniel, and Kate would remain in the hall and gardens to keep the festivities running smoothly until they could find Nolan.

  “Meg told me the broad strokes of what happened,” Travis said to Liz. “Do we have any idea where Nolan went? And should we alert Maya to the situation?”

  “Unfortunately,” Liz replied, “he didn’t leave any clues. But we’ve discussed things with Amy, and she agrees that it’s better if Maya doesn’t know just yet.”

  “No bride wants to hear that her groom has run off just minutes before she walks down the aisle,” Nate commented in a wry voice. “It kind of ruins the mood.”

  “Travis,” Liz said, “you’ve spent more time talking with him that any of us. Did he say anything that might give you an idea of why he might have gone? Or where?”

  It wasn’t much of a stretch to look back on the conversation he’d had with Nolan in the gardens, where Travis had been saying he could never be good enough for Amy. Though he’d tried to smooth things over at the end, the truth was that he’d been too wrapped up in his own emotions to set Nolan back to rights. Instead of helping convince Nolan that everything was okay, he’d clearly exacerbated the other man’s fears.

  “It’s my fault.” He needed to own up to what he’d done, even if he didn’t feel right divulging the actual details of their conversation.

  “I don’t see how the groom doing a runner could possibly be your fault,” Liz said.

  Knowing they didn’t have time to argue about it right now, Travis simply said, “Trust me, it is. But I’m going to fix it by finding him and convincing him that marrying Maya today will be the best decision he ever makes.”

  “Okay, but no search parties. Amy is the only one not on staff who knows about this, at least for now. And I’d like to keep it that way if we can.”

  “She’s practically one of us anyway,” Nate said. He looked around. “What? She might not have accepted the job yet, but she’s going to. I mean, who would turn a gig here down, especially when you can do what you love?”

  Travis knew it wasn’t as simple as that—love never was, it seemed—but right now he had a groom to find. Especially given that it had been his focus on his own love life, rather than Nolan’s, that had helped get them into this mess. It was up to him to get them out of it.

  “Nate, can you pull up the security feeds?” A few taps on the keyboard brought them up. “Let’s rewind to the last point where we can see Nolan still mingling with the guests.”

  One of Travis’s best skills was the ability to pick faces out of a crowd. It was vital for catching journalists trying to push through a gate in the middle of a group, or spotting a photographer following a client, or picking out a crazy fan in disguise. Travis had never thought, however, that he would use the skill to find a missing groom.

  “There,” he said, pointing at one of the screens. “I see him. Now move slowly across the feeds from the nearby cameras so that we can see which way he went.” At Travis’s direction, Nate panned from one camera to the next. “Now over to the garden doors.” At last, Travis knew exactly where he was. “He headed towards the beach.”

  Nolan had been particularly interested in the private cove when they’d been checking out the security setup the day before. Right now, the cameras confirmed that Maya’s fiancé had just climbed up on the rocky promontory that separated Married in Malibu’s private cove from the wider beach around it.

  “He’s not going to do anything stupid, is he?” Meg asked.

  “I hope not,” Travis replied. “I’m guessing he was just looking for somewhere to think things through. I’ll be back with him soon,” Travis promised.

  Everyone looked at him skeptically, and he understood why. Normally, he wasn’t the kind of guy to talk about his feelings. Not when he’d spent most of his life making sure that people never got past his careful boundaries, guarding them as carefully as he now guarded the boundary fences at Married in Malibu.

  Even so, it had to be him.

  “I can do this,” he assured them. “For a start, it’s my job to keep everyone here safe, which means I can’t let any of you start clambering up steep and unsteady rocks. Plus, though I believe I helped cause this situation to occur, at the same time, I think I understand where he’s coming from. So I know how to help him.”

  Liz stared at him for a long moment before finally nodding. “Okay, then go bring him back. The last thing we want is for the world to hear that Married in Malibu is where grooms disappear from their weddings and then fall off cliffs.”

  On his way out of Liz’s office, Travis was surprised to find Amy coming toward him. “I thought you were supposed to be with Maya,” he said.

  “I’ve left a couple of the bridesmaids with her. I needed to check on what’s happening. There’s only so long I’m going to be able to keep her from figuring out that something’s wrong. And I really don’t like keeping things from the people I care about.”

  If she was trying to tell him how much it had hurt that he hadn’t talked to her about his past, Travis already knew that. And he wished more than anything that he could beg her for forgiveness, but he had a wedding to save.

  “We’ve figured out where Nolan is,” Travis told her, even though there were a million other things he wanted to say. I love you so much, even if I haven’t been acting that way. I’m sorry I keep hurting you. I wish more than anything that I could be good enough for you. “I’m going to talk with him and convince him to come back.”

  Even if he could never make things up to Amy or be the man she needed, at the very least he could fix her best friend’s wedding.

  * * *

  Travis scrambled his way up the backside of the rocky outcrop, almost making it to the top before Nolan noticed him. He sat down next to the other man, feeling the sea spray on his skin and the cold hardness of the stone beneath him.

  “I thought I’d come out to see if I could help with anything.”

  Nolan was clearly wrecked. Miles worse than he’d seemed in the garden the day before. “I blew it.”

  “You haven’t blown it. Not yet. Not if we can get you back to the wedding before Maya knows you’ve gone.”

  But Nolan shook his head. “I was standing out there with our wedding guests, and I got to the point where I couldn’t take it anymore, not when I could tell what all of them are thinking. That there’s no way I should be with her. That she deserves someone a million times better.” There was a desperate edge to his voice. “One day she’ll thank me for not marrying her. Once I’m out of the picture, she’ll find someone as perfect as her, and they’ll have a perfect life together.”

  It was the same thing Travis had told himself over and over about Amy, but hearing it from Nolan—and knowing how devastated Maya would be over losing the man she loved—made the reasons suddenly sound hollow.

  “Are you sure you really believe leaving Maya at the altar is the right thing to do? Because I’ve seen the way you look when you’re together. I see how much you love her. We all do.”

  Nolan picked up a pebble and lobbed it toward the waves. It bounced twice, then sank. “It’s not just about what I feel. It’s about doing what’s right for her. If I love her, then that also means I want her to be the happiest she can possibly be, right? Whatever that costs me.”

  Travis looked back toward the wedding party, thinking about how Maya glowed whenever Nolan was near
. “She seems really happy to me, Nolan.”

  “But she could have picked anyone she wanted. She could have had a billionaire, or an actor, or a director, or—”

  “You’re right,” Travis interrupted. “Maya could have any guy she chose. But she chose you. You’ve said how much you love her. But have you stopped to think about how much she loves you too?”

  That seemed to catch Nolan off guard. “I…”

  “You’ve been so worried about whether you can be what Maya needs that you haven’t thought about what she truly wants. And what she wants, more than anything else in the word, is to marry you.”

  Nolan swallowed. “I hadn’t thought about it like that.”

  “When you’re in a room together, when you look at her, it’s like the rest of the world doesn’t exist, isn’t it? Do you think there’s anyone else out there who will ever look at Maya the way you do? That will see the real her and love her as much as you do?”

  Looking into the mirror of another man’s life and seeing the huge mistake Nolan was about to make helped Travis finally see things clearly: No one would ever love Amy the way he loved her. Because he didn’t want to change one single thing about her. Caring, stubborn, talented. He loved every side, ever contour, every shade and shadow of her.

  It was, he suddenly realized, exactly what she had been trying to tell him. That the darkness in his past didn’t turn her away, because she not only accepted every part of him, she also loved him for exactly who his past had helped him become.

  Though Travis couldn’t force Nolan to return to his wedding, he could give him the truth—one that Travis had run from himself for way too long.

  “I’ve spent a long time in your shoes,” Travis said. “Feeling like I’m not worthy. Feeling like I don’t have enough to give. Coming up with dozens of reasons why leaving the woman I love is the right thing to do. When it turns out the truth is that loving someone—truly loving them with everything inside of you—means getting over your own fears so that you can give them every piece of your heart. Even when it’s hard, even when it’s scary. Especially then.”