How to Rope a Real Man (8 page)

“Rachel looks like a whole new woman,” Amy added. “I almost didn’t recognize her.”

Rachel huffed. “Why are you saying that like it’s a good thing? I’m pretty damn happy with the old me. Don’t make me get offended or this ridiculous hairdo is coming down.”

Jenna swiped Amy’s champagne flute from the table, pushed it into Amy’s hand, and stepped between her and Rachel. “Hey, you two. It’s Amy’s special day—no bickering allowed.”

“Fine, but can you blame me for getting cranky at all the people telling me I look so much better than usual? It’s insulting.” Rachel hitched the dress higher over her bust and squirmed in discomfort, sloshing her champagne over the lip of the glass. “I’m still not convinced my boobs aren’t going to pop out of this thing at any minute.”

Jenna grabbed a tissue and dabbed at the champagne collecting on the flute’s base. “Your boobs are going to be fine. Even if they do pop out, it’ll only lend a little extra excitement to the night. And need I remind you that the only person whose opinion of your looks matters is yours?”

“And Vaughn’s.” Rachel’s shoulders rose and fell with her deep sigh. “What if he likes me better like this, dressed up like some damn princess instead of . . .” She shook her head, then guzzled the remainder of her drink. “Instead of the regular me. I don’t think I could bear it.”

Jenna snagged the bottle and refilled her flute. “Oh, sweetie. He fell in love with a tough-nut, no-nonsense cowgirl. Do you know what I would give to have a man look at me the way I catch Vaughn stealing lovesick puppy glances at you? Do you think he’d rather have himself a high-maintenance princess, even if you do look good as one?”

Rachel grunted, unconvinced. “At least we get to wear boots.”

Keeping with the rustic country chic theme, Jenna and Amy had decided to accessorize the bridal party’s formal wear with boots—chocolate brown with elaborate pink stitch work for the ladies and shiny black for the men. Being that the majority of the bridal party lived their daily lives in boots, everyone was more than happy to oblige.

Only Jake, they’d discovered, had never had the pleasure of stuffing his feet into a pair of leather western boots. In fact, Jenna wasn’t altogether sure Kellan had told his brother there’d be a pair of boots waiting for him along with his tux. Ought to be an interesting conversation in the groom’s suite right about now.

Amy draped an arm across Rachel’s shoulders and squeezed. “If Vaughn tells you he loves your dress, it’s probably only because of how much skin it shows and how fast he figures he’ll be able to get it off you tonight when you get home.”

A mischievous smile threatened to spread over Rachel’s lips. “There is that.”

Crisis averted. Jenna gestured to Amy’s still-full glass. “You’re not drinking your champagne. Still queasy from the tequila? I’m so sorry I made you drink that last night. I thought it would help, but it only made things worse.”

Amy waved off her apology. “It wasn’t the tequila. Well, it was in a round-about way, I suppose.” She looked around at the other women in the room—Marti the hairstylist, Lisa Binderman, Sloane Delgado, and Tina, Kellan’s mom—as though she had more to say about the tequila incident, but not with so many people around. “Go get your shower over with so Marti can do your hair.”

Time for some unspoken sisterly communication. Jenna leveled a look square at Amy, eyes narrowed.
What aren’t you telling me?

Amy’s eyes grew wide and flashed to the room full of people, as if to say,
Now’s not the time or place.

“Should I be worried?” Jenna whispered.

A hint of a smile flashed over her features as she gave her head a brief shake. “It’s all good.”

Maybe for Amy, but nothing was crueler to Jenna than someone letting on they had a secret to share but not just yet. And now she was contending with both Matt’s and Amy’s unspoken secrets. Torture, plain and simple. Thank goodness death by impatience wasn’t possible or Jenna would’ve succumbed years ago.

Amy handed her glass of champagne over. “Here. Take this with you into the bathroom and get a move on. Your shower travel kit’s in there already.”

The shower felt heavenly. Jenna hadn’t realized how grungy she felt until the hot water hit her skin. Stifling a moan of pleasure, she allowed herself to stand under the stream for a solid minute she probably couldn’t afford before beginning the arduous process of soaping, scrubbing, and shaving.

With Matt’s and Amy’s secrets nagging at her, as well as all the last-minute wedding prep she’d be doing in the next two hours until the ceremony, her mind whizzed with disparate thoughts. If only she had a waterproof pad of paper and pen to jot it all down so it wouldn’t crowd her mind.

She’d finished shaving her legs and was in the middle of a final rinse when curiosity about whether Rachel had brought Tommy’s tux led her train of thought in an entirely horrible direction that had slipped her mind in all the hubbub of the flower and best-man emergencies.

The Parrish family would be at the wedding. Every single one of them, save for Carson. And the secret she’d vowed to take to her grave was in imminent danger of exploding into public knowledge tonight—because Tommy was the spitting image of his father.

She sagged against the white tile wall, the bite of cold making her wince as much as the epiphany.

She’d known Carson her entire life, and when she looked at Tommy, she saw Carson’s essence through and through. For the longest time, she’d rationalized that maybe the image of Carson in her mind was wrong. Memories were faulty, the victims of time, distance, and experience. Besides that, a lot of people looked radically different as children than they did as adults and it was quite possible that Tommy and Carson looked nothing alike.

But the older Tommy got, the more obvious the resemblance. In March, Carson’s mother, Patricia, had cornered Jenna and Tommy at the church donut table after the service, remarking about how handsome a young man Tommy was and how familiar he looked, though she couldn’t place how.

That night, Jenna had stolen away in a panic to the storage cellar beneath the farm’s big house, rifling through Christmas decorations and old quilts until she’d found a bug and rodent-eaten cardboard box filled to the brim with yearbooks. She’d emptied the box until she found Catcher Creek Elementary School’s yearbook from her kindergarten year, then flipped to her class page to take a good look at Carson at Tommy’s age, hoping to quell her fear.

The photographs of the students in their kindergarten class were faded, but Carson’s picture was clear enough to make her stomach turn. Tommy looked exactly like his father at age five, from the goofy grin, sandy blond hair, and shape of his head to the layout of his features and his lanky body.

Sitting on the floor of the dusty, stuffy storage cellar, Jenna had allowed herself a good, long pity party, complete with tears, about her past and the unfairness of life. She’d cried until the hollowness of solitude had wrapped around her like creeping ivy. Then she’d continued to sit there, watching particles of dust whip in the air, until self-preservation won out over despair. She and Tommy would leave Catcher Creek, as had been her plan all along, and until that day arrived, they would keep far away from the Parrishes.

Yet, though she was painstakingly careful not to take Tommy to downtown Catcher Creek except when she couldn’t avoid it and though she’d never returned to First Methodist Church since that fateful Sunday in March, Jenna knew with fatalistic certainty that it was only a matter of time before Lou and Patricia Parrish or Carson’s sisters realized who Tommy resembled.

She hadn’t anticipated Amy’s wedding or what that would mean for her secret. In ninety minutes, give or take, Tommy would be paraded in front of the Parrish family as a ring bearer. They’d have the entire ceremony to watch him and put together the pieces of the puzzle—and there was nothing Jenna could do to stop it.

She closed her eyes in prayer that she would get through the night with Tommy’s true parentage protected. The alternative was too overwhelming to bear. If the truth came out, she and Tommy would have to pick up and leave town immediately, in a middle-of-the-night, desperate-woman-on-the-run type of move. Away from her support system, she had no idea how she’d take care of Tommy and still get through her last month of college.

Stumbling out of the shower, she wrapped a towel around her middle and drained the champagne. Then she did the only thing she could think of. She found her phone in her purse and called her best friend, Carrie. “Hey.”

“Hi. Didn’t expect to hear from you this weekend. Shouldn’t you be getting ready for your sister’s wedding?”

Jenna sat on the closed toilet lid. “I am, but I needed a break.”

“Uh-oh, what happened?”

Nothing wrong with a little white lie when the truth was too dangerous to share. “Just bummed I don’t have a date for this thing.”

“What about the hot lawyer?”

She and Carrie had had many talks about Matt, from PMS-fueled bitch-fests to diabolical strategy sessions. “He’s not ready for a relationship right now. He tried to let me down easy today.”

Carrie sighed into the phone. “What is it with this guy?”

Jenna didn’t have the slightest idea, but even if she did, she would never divulge Matt’s private life to her friends. “No clue.”

“I’m sorry, chica, but I think it’s time for you to give up on this particular fish and go back out in the sea.”

Jenna fiddled with the tag on the towel. “I’m not sure about the merits of comparing men to fish. I think they’re more like—”

“Peacocks? Donkeys? Hyenas?”

Jenna laughed despite herself. “I was thinking more like elephants.”

Carrie gasped. “Hold on a sec. That sounds to me like you’ve seen this Matt guy naked. And he’s . . . he’s hung like an elephant! This changes everything. Honey, you can’t let this one slip away.”

“What? Sorry to disappoint you, but no. I haven’t seen him naked and I have no idea how he’s hanging.” Not actually true because she’d felt his arousal while they’d waltzed and caught a glimpse when she’d woken on Tara’s couch, so she knew firsthand that he was hanging just fine, thank you very much.

“Damn. You know that’s one of my top twenty things I want to do before I get married, right?”

“Sleep with a well-endowed man? Yeah, I’m aware of that.” As far as goals went, Carrie’s might be shallow, but it had merit.

“Just once,” Carrie pined. “One magic night of hedonism is all I’m asking. I mean, how are we supposed to know if the adage ‘size doesn’t matter’ is true or merely a cruel urban legend perpetuated by teeny-weenie men?”

That was a conundrum. Jenna tried, but she couldn’t hold back a giggle, as usual when their conversation plunged into the gutter. “I’m already feeling better. Thank you.”

“I’m here for you anytime. You know that. Okay, I’m off my magic wang soapbox—for now. Tell me, why are men like elephants?”

Jenna indulged in one more laugh. Nothing like a magic wang soapbox to put her problems in perspective. “Okay, so Tommy and I were watching this show on elephants a few years ago. Did you know male elephants don’t live with the pack of females or their kids? They can’t even live together in a herd of males because all their macho maleness makes them too aggressive. It’s the female elephants that run the show, feed the young, and protect the herd. And men . . . well, they only come around when they want to get laid.”

“That’s a really jaded view of dating and relationships for someone who’s about to watch her sister get hitched.”

“I know.”

She wasn’t entirely convinced of the accuracy of her analogy, and if pressed, she could come up with lots of examples of men who were the doting, stick-around types, her soon-to-be brothers-in-law included. But it made her feel stronger to think of herself like one of those powerful elephant matriarchs, wise and unflappable, protecting her own and dismissing the male gender as nothing but baby-making love machines. After all, she’d done more than all right for herself and Tommy without Carson’s support, or any man’s, for that matter.

“Forget about the hot lawyer,” Carrie said. “He can’t be Kellan’s only single friend at the wedding.”

She had a hunch where Carrie was going with the conversation and grinned, the last of her anxiety evaporating. “He’s not.”

Carrie always did think outside the box. Besides her wicked sense of humor, it was one of the things that made her such a great study partner and friend. She wished she could’ve invited Carrie to the wedding, but there was no way she could’ve gotten away with it without explaining where she knew Carrie from.

“So, do your thing. Shake your moneymaker and show Mr. No-Commitment what he’s missing. Didn’t you tell me Tommy was leaving the reception early with a babysitter?”

“Yeah . . .”

Carrie hummed, intrigued. “I think it’s time for mama to have some fun.”

Jenna stood and drew a heart on the fogged-up mirror. She was definitely overdue for some fun. It’d been six months since her get-your-rocks-off fling with a guy from her computer-engineering lab. That had been a nice distraction, with a lot of screwing and not much talking, but the whole time, that hollow, lonely feeling had dogged her. When the relationship had run its course, she’d been right back to wishing for something more substantial.

Something with Matt.

“I’ll see what I can manage and report back tomorrow.”

“See that you do,” Carrie said in an overly formal voice. “If I can’t live vicariously through my best friend, then what good are you?”

Jenna swallowed a comeback about how, since Carrie was single and kid-free, Jenna should be the one living vicariously through her. For all her big talk about big men, Carrie was just like every other woman Jenna knew, herself included—an old-fashioned girl at heart, waiting for Mr. Right to come along and love her forever.

After connecting with Carrie, Jenna felt more grounded and able to face Matt, the wedding craziness, and the Parrishes. Wrapped in a robe she’d found hanging on the bathroom door, she stepped from the bathroom into the main room of the bridal suite. Rachel and Amy were alone and sitting close together on the sofa.