Kiss the Bride (41 page)

“None for me,” Addison said. “I have a size-six mother-of-the-bride dress to fit into.”

“I’m fine,” Felicity said.

“Could you just bring us the check?” Tish asked.

“Most certainly.” The waiter scooted off after the check.

“What are your rates?” Addison steepled her fingertips and slanted Tish a calculating glance.

She quoted a price that was slightly higher than her stiffest competition’s. She based her fees on another one of her mother’s mantras,
If you want people to think you’re the best, charge like you’re worth it.

The waiter brought the check and Tish gulped at the total. Praying she wasn’t over her credit limit, she pulled out her Visa card and handed it over to him. He disappeared to run her card.

“That’s more than your competitors charge,” Addison commented.

“Do you want the best? Or the most affordable? I can understand if budget restrictions knock me out of the running.” Tish reached across the table to turn off the DVD player and hoped her strategy would cause Addison to rise to the occasion rather than get up and walk away.

“I’m not going to pretend I don’t appreciate a bargain, but when it comes to my daughter’s wedding, we want only the best.”

“And that’s what you’ll get if you hire me.” Tish stashed the DVD player in her briefcase. Yes, okay, it was an egotistical thing to say, but she could back it up. She was damned good at her job. Why let false modesty sell her short?

“Mother, I really want Tish to video our wedding,” Felicity wheedled.

Addison shot her daughter a quelling glance and said to Tish, “You put together a very compelling video. It’s
the best we’ve seen. But there are other considerations. I also want to make sure you’re of upstanding moral character. Last year, my friend June hired a videographer who turned out to have a criminal record. He got access to their security code when he came over to interview June’s daughter and during the wedding, his accomplices burglarized their home.”

“I can assure you, Mrs. James, I don’t have a criminal record. But feel free to run a background check on me if that would ease your mind.”

“Ms. Gallagher”—the waiter came back to the table looking distressed—“I’m afraid your credit card has been declined.”

Tish tried to make her face a blank slate as she inwardly cringed. She couldn’t let Mrs. James see her sweat. Smiling back the huge lump of trepidation in her throat, she said, “There must have been a mistake. Can you run it through again, please?”

The waiter shifted his weight. “I’ve been told by the credit card company to cut it up.”

He pulled a pair of scissors from his pocket. Right in front of Addison James, the conservative banker with concerns about Tish’s moral character, he chopped the card neatly in half.

Humiliation sank its fangs into her. Her heart lurched. The waiter was killing her lifeline. Tish kept the smile plastered to her face and pulled another card from her wallet. “Here, try the MasterCard.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He left her murdered Visa behind and trotted off with the MasterCard.

“There’s got to be some sort of mix-up,” Tish said. “I’ll call my credit card company as soon as I get home and find out what’s going on here. I hope it’s not identity theft.”

Addison shot her a judgmental look. Tish felt the deal slipping away.

The waiter returned a moment later, shaking his head, her MasterCard in one hand, scissors in the other.

Not again!
Fear struck her then, hard and vicious. How on earth could she be over the limit on both credit cards? It wasn’t possible. Maybe someone
had
stolen her identity.

Snip, snip went the scissors. The desecrated MasterCard fell into pieces beside the Visa.

She felt fractured, disjointed, as if she, the real Tish, was separate from the woman who did dumb things like this. It was a feeling that dwelled in the fringes of her consciousness, a ghost of something she’d never been able to pinpoint. A feeling that she could never be whole, no matter how hard she struggled to integrate herself. It was a desolate sensation and made her want to run out and buy something expensive.

“What next?” the waiter asked. “Where do we go from here?”

“I’ll pay for the lunch,” Addison James said icily. She took out her wallet and counted out the correct amount of cash to cover the bill.

A deep silence fell over the table after the waiter departed. Tish worked up the courage to look Addison in the eyes. “I’m deeply sorry for that. I’ll reimburse you.”

Fury drew Addison’s brows down tight in a disapproving frown and her lips thinned out. “What kind of business professional does something like this? Invites clients to lunch and tries to pay for it with not one, but two maxed-out credit cards?”

The air leaked from Tish’s lungs. She couldn’t breathe, could hardly speak. “I… I…”

Addison pushed back her chair and got to her feet. “Come on, Felicity. We have somewhere else to be.”

“Please, wait.” Tish put a hand to the woman’s wrist.

Addison glowered at Tish’s arm. The price tag had fallen out of her sleeve and was dangling there for everyone to see.

“You were planning on returning that suit after you wore it, weren’t you?” Addison accused.

The deal was lost. No point lying at this juncture.

“Yes.”

“You are so pathetic,” Addison hissed. “Talented perhaps, but pathetic. Until you can pull your life together, stop shooting for the stars.”

Reeling, Tish watched her meal ticket, daughter in tow, sweep out of the restaurant. Feeling as if her arms had been amputated, Tish fumbled for the pieces of her massacred credit cards and stuffed them in the pocket of the suit that she had to return to Nordstrom’s for a refund.

Loser.

She raised her head and saw people were watching. Peeved with herself, she glared at an owl-eyed woman at the next table staring at her as if she had the avian flu.

Embarrassed but proud, Tish raised her head, pushed back her chair, and got to her feet. At the same time a waiter, zigzagging around tables with a big tray of butter-slick crawfish balanced over his head on the palm of his hand, zipped past.

The leg of Tish’s chair clipped his ankle.

The waiter stumbled. His tray slipped. The crawfish attacked—pelting Tish’s suit with red, buttery bits of seafood hail.

Horrified, she gasped.

“Oh, gosh, ma’am,” the waiter apologized as he brushed
crawfish from her clothing. He lifted his head and met her gaze. His eyes narrowed, his lips curled. “Oh, it’s you,” he said out loud, and then under his breath he muttered, “deadbeat.”

Tish’s cheeks burned and her heart pounded. She wanted to throw back her head and bawl. This wasn’t the waiter’s fault. She was in a mess of her own making.

Again.

Accusing eyes scalded, judging her.

Flicking a crawfish off her lapel, she gathered up her briefcase, slung her purse over her shoulder, and strode from the restaurant. Shame tasted like heated aluminum foil in her mouth—hot, sharp, and metallic.

She dug her car keys from her purse and pressed the alarm button to locate her Ford Focus in the overflowing parking lot. No reassuring
chirp-chirp
indicated her car door had been unlocked. She hurried to the area where she remembered parking, hitting the alarm button a second time.

Nothing.

Tish was certain she’d been in this section of the lot. But an SUV sat where she thought she’d parked. Maybe, in her humiliation over what had just happened to her inside the restaurant, she was mistaken.

She retraced her steps. Yes, she was almost one hundred percent sure this was where she’d parked.

Clearly not. Your car isn’t here.

She stalked up and down the aisles, the humid Houston heat causing sweat to pool under her collar. Her stilettos were made for showing off, not for walking, and her toes throbbed beneath the leather straps. She felt a blister forming. The heels kept sticking in the heat-softened asphalt and Tish stumbled twice. Where was her car?

Dread, sudden as lightning in a cloudless sky, struck her. Someone had stolen her car!

She dug into her pocket for her cell phone and turned it on. Just as she pressed the 9 of 9-1-1 an image rose in her mind. She recalled the stack of unpaid bills on her kitchen table.

There’d been a letter or two from the finance company threatening to take back her car if payment wasn’t made soon. She thought of the phone calls left on her answering machine that she hadn’t returned.

And she realized the awful truth. Her car hadn’t been stolen.

It had been repossessed.

E
lysee Benedict was in love with love. She adored the heady rush of early romance—the kisses, the long, lingering glances, the surprise gifts, and the undivided attention. Her mother, Catherine Prosper Benedict, God rest her soul, had instilled in Elysee the staunch belief of happily ever after.

When she was young, her mother would occasionally take her out of school early on the pretext of a dental appointment. Instead, they would slip off to the matinee and watch romantic movies, eating popcorn from the same box and giggling like best girlfriends over handsome movie star heroes. Elysee loved those surprise outings in the darkened theater with her mother.

When she was ten, Catherine passed on her dog-eared copies of romance novels with muscular, longhaired men on the covers. Reading the stories had made her heart beat faster and she yearned for a romance of her very own.

When she was eleven, her mother was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer. “I’m not going to be around to see you fall in love and get married,” Catherine had told her. “So you must listen to me now.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“True love is out there for you, Elysee, if you just believe it.”

“I believe,” she vowed, believing as only a young child could.

Her mother squeezed her hand. “Don’t give up until you find him.”

“But how will I know when I meet the right one?”

“You’ll feel it.” Her mother laid her hand over Elysee’s heart. “Deep down inside here.”

“What will he be like?”

“He’ll be kind and strong and he’ll fight for you and he’ll protect you, even if it means he must give up his own life to save you, and he’ll be your very best friend.”

Six months later her mother was dead and Elysee’s longing to find her true love was stronger than ever. The problem was, she saw love everywhere, in any masculine face that smiled. She went through crush after crush, each time feeling it deep within her heart, each time thinking,
It’s him. He’s the one.

“She’s too much like her mother,” she’d once heard her father tell her nanny, Rana Singh, not long after Catherine had died. “Head in the clouds, mind filled with silly romantic notions about life. I don’t know what to do with her.”

Much to her father’s consternation, at twenty-two she’d already been engaged three times. Elysee had been on the front page of too many tabloids, their ugly headlines burned into her brain.

First Daughter’s First Romance Fizzles.

Elysee Benedict: Fickle Princess or Lonely Teen?

Beau Number Three Breaks Heart of Prez’s Only Child.

Yes, okay, she’d made a lot of mistakes, picked the wrong kind of men, gone for flash over substance.

Shane Tremont, however, was different. For one thing, he was older. For another thing, her father liked and respected him. And there was the fact he’d saved her life, just as her mother had said her true love would do. Quiet, strong, steady Shane.

She’d stayed at his bedside from the beginning. Her father had tried to talk her out of it, but she insisted on being there when he woke up. He’d been her bodyguard for over a year and while she’d always thought of him as a good-looking man, she’d never considered him in a romantic way until he’d sacrificed himself for her.

Before that, well, he’d scared her just a little with his tough masculinity. In the past she’d favored polished, soft-featured, erudite men, and Shane certainly wasn’t that. But seeing him in that hospital bed, with those tubes coming out of him and his head wrapped in bandages, he’d looked so lost and vulnerable she’d wanted to scoop him into her arms and cuddle him. He wasn’t so big and tough and scary after all.

Elysee realized what she felt for Shane was different from what she had felt for her other three fiancés. This was a quiet love, a soft love, a mature love. This was the kind of love her father told her she needed, and she’d begun to realize that this was what true love must be—a deep, abiding friendship grown stronger through sacrifice and devotion.

So what if there was no electricity? No sparks. That was the point. Chemistry had led her down the wrong path before, caused her to make foolish choices. Sometimes, she missed her mother so much, it was a physical ache. She wished Catherine was here to confirm her belief
that Shane was indeed The One. True friendship was the ingredient that had been missing from her other love relationships.

Elysee sat at Shane’s bedside day in and day out. Willing him well, willing him to love her back the way she was coming to love him. And if she squeezed her eyes closed and concentrated really hard, she could feel it deep inside her heart.