Mother of the Bride (13 page)

A horn beeped and Cydney started, blinking at the Cadillac's red taillights. Herb waved at her in his mirror. She waved back and followed him down the rutted gravel road.

It took them an hour to find Double Y, where, sure enough, she'd turned at Gib Elbert Junior's mailbox. Damn it to hell. Cydney made a left behind the Cadillac at Gib Elbert Senior's mailbox, rubbed the headache pounding above her eyes and glanced at her watch. Two-thirty. Georgette had faxed Angus Munroe to expect them by one.

Cydney switched on the wipers and the washers to clear gravel dust from the windshield and turned behind Herb onto a narrow and pitted but mercifully paved road. The glass swept clean and at last she saw a sign, nailed to a weather-beaten post:
CROOKED POSSUM, POPULATION
162, with an arrow pointing left. Herb made the turn and so did Cydney, slowing down behind the Cadillac at the 25
MPH CITY LIMIT
sign.

“Don't blink or you'll miss it,” Aldo joked.

Bebe sniffed. Cydney cranked the mirror toward her and saw Aldo's hand creeping toward hers across the backseat.

“Touch her,” Cydney warned, “and you'll draw back a stump.”

Aldo snatched his hand away, and Cydney looked at the
road in time to see a second sign,
THANKS FOR VISITING CROOKED POSSUM, Y'ALL COME BACK,
slide by on the right. Well, hell. She'd missed it.

“You've been a crab all day, Aunt Cydney,” Bebe whined tearfully. “What's wrong with you?”

“I'm exhausted,” she said, steering the Jeep through a right-hand curve behind the Cadillac at a Y-split in the road.

“You should've come to the spa yesterday with me and Gramma.”

“Oh really?” Cydney challenged her in the rearview mirror. “If I'd gone to the spa who would've designed your wedding invitations and taken them to Kinkos to be printed? Who would've spent last evening addressing and mailing them because you and Gramma didn't want to chip your freshly manicured nails?”

“I don't know.” Bebe's mouth trembled and her eyes filled. “You make it sound like it's all my fault.”

“It
is
your fault, Bebe. This is
your
wedding, not mine.”

“But Gramma said I should ignore you. She said you're in a bad mood 'cause everybody's getting married but you.”

“Did
she?” Cydney glared at Georgette's profile in the Cadillac's front seat. “Well, she's wrong. I do
not
feel left out.”

Ob, who are you trying to kid?
her little voice asked.

Okay. So she felt left out. She'd been left out of things before, like the
People
magazine article. That was tough, to feel so insignificant, but feeling undesirable, knowing Angus Munroe had kissed her just to prove his point … hearing him say he thought he'd proved it perfectly while she stood there in front of him, reeling and weak-kneed from the crush of his mouth against hers … That hurt.

A lot, but it wasn't the end of the world. Crooked Possum was the end of the world, and Tall Pines was the X marked on the map. Cydney plucked her copy off the dashboard, caught a look at her watch and realized she'd been blindly following Herb for a good ten minutes. Not bright if she wanted to find her way out of here again.

The road they were on dipped through a shady hollow at the foot of a wooded, round-topped hill. A mountain in Mis-
souri, a big grassy hump with lots of trees on it in Colorado. The Ozarks were sloped and sleepy, friendly, nonthreatening mountains, unlike the sheer, steep Rockies that always overwhelmed Cydney.

“Whoa, Miss Parrish,” Aldo piped up. “We just passed Tall Pines.”

“We did?” Cydney stepped on the brake and looked in the mirror. All she saw was a solid wall of trees on both sides of the road, but she blew the horn at Herb and saw the Caddy's brake lights flash. “Where?”

“I'll hop out and show you,” Aldo said, and sprang his door open.

“High time you did something,” Cydney muttered, watching him lope up the long, curved hill they'd just come down.

Bebe turned to watch him through the rear window with a nose-in-the-air sniff at Cydney that was supposed to make her feel bad. It didn't. Bebe could pout and Aldo could call her Miss Parrish till the cows came home, and she wouldn't cave. She'd had enough of the two of them behaving like children. Spoiled, self-indulgent children who went cruising while she made lists and went to the spa while she designed invitations. Kids, not responsible young adults, who couldn't keep their hands off each other in the backseat. Just like Angus Munroe said. The smug, arrogant jerk. And to think she'd defended them.

No more, Cydney vowed, as she put the Jeep in reverse and backed up the hill. Halfway through the curve she saw Aldo standing in the middle of a wide blacktop drive edged by tall pine trees. The way their shaggy boughs overhung the edge of the road, it was no wonder she and Herb had missed it.

Cydney turned into the drive and stopped to pick up Aldo and wait for Herb. She could see the first curve in the drive, the edges marked by split-rail fences and pine trees. She looped her arms over the top of the steering wheel, leaned forward and peered up the hill. Uh, make that mountain, she amended, when she realized she couldn't see the top.

When the Cadillac turned in behind the Jeep, Cydney led
the way up the drive. It was twice as wide as the road and perfectly paved. Well, that was something. If the wedding guests made it this far, which she seriously doubted. A troop of Eagle Scouts led by a Sherpa guide couldn't find this place.

Instead of R.S.V.P. she should've written B.Y.O.C. at the bottom of the invitations—Bring Your Own Compass. She'd make signs, Cydney decided, and stake them along the road from here to Double Y, pithy little directives like, “Leave a Trail—You'll Need It” and “Ignore the Buzzards Circling Overhead.”

Bebe would get her wish, all right. No way would Gwen find her way out of Tall Pines. Cydney only hoped she could find her way
in.

Angus Munroe's driveway was 3.5 miles long—Cydney clocked it on the odometer—and wound up the side of the mountain in grades that took the steep out of the climb, the trees and the split-rail fence marching alongside. At the top they fell away where the road leveled and made a circle around a grassy area with five shaggy pines in the center.

Cydney bore to the right and saw the house once the Jeep cleared the trees—a massive, split-timbered manse with a shingled roof, two stories and two wings that flared away from a deep, covered porch that ran the length of the house.

“Oh Aldo,” Bebe gushed. “It's
beautiful.”

Cydney glanced in the mirror and saw them gazing adoringly at each other, their fingers welded together in the middle of the backseat. She opened her mouth, then shut it. Let Munroe pry them apart.

She drove past the wide, timbered porch steps and parked the Jeep with its tailgate pointed toward the house. Bebe and Aldo bailed out before she switched off the engine. Without a word, just slammed the doors, clasped hands and raced toward the house.

“Well, you're welcome,” Cydney said.

The Cadillac stopped beside the Jeep and Herb got out. So did her mother, without waiting for Herb, leaving her door hanging open a scant inch from Cydney's. She rapped on the glass, but Georgette had already moved past the window.
Cydney turned the ignition key, pressed the button to lower the glass and called, “Mother! The door!” But Georgette was out of earshot, striding briskly toward the house with Herb.

It was deja vu, just like Tuesday evening when her mother and Munroe and Bebe and Aldo trooped into her house and left her in the garage. No one had missed her. Why hadn't she stayed there? She could be there still, forgotten in her own garage in Kansas City rather than stuck in her truck on the side of a mountain in the Ozarks. When would she learn to seize these opportunities?

“Well, hell.” Cydney lowered her window all the way, released her seat belt and crawled up on her knees to reach through the window and push the door shut.

A simple plan, but gravity was against her. The ground sloped away from the porch on this side of the drive, the Cadillac's nose pointed downhill and the damn passenger door weighed four times as much as the Jeep. Or felt like it. Twice Cydney shoved the door. Twice it failed to catch and swung open again.

Once more, she thought, she'd try once more. If she didn't get it this time, she'd give up and crawl over the gearshift. Cydney drew a breath, stretched out the window and reached for the door. Just as her hand closed on the top corner, she heard footsteps and saw a flicker of movement from the corner of her left eye—a tall man with broad shoulders and a lock of dark hair falling over his forehead.

“Need a hand?” Angus Munroe asked her.

chapter

twelve

Didn't it just figure that he'd catch her doing something stupid? Cydney leaned her hands on the rolled-down window, turned her head and saw Munroe leaning against the Jeep. He wore a gray Missouri Tigers T-shirt, denim shorts and brown loafers with no socks. His arms and ankles were crossed, his long tanned legs dusted with dark hair.

Cydney hung halfway out the window, her jeans heat-stuck to her fanny, the crisp white shirt she'd started the day in, a wilted mess. He looked cool and at ease and perfectly at home—which of course he was. She was hot, exhausted and out of her element. Out of breath, too. As much from the sight of his bare muscled arms and bare muscled legs as her fight with the door—which of course she'd lost.

“If you could just close the damn car door,” she said to him.

“Whoa—profanity.” Munroe grinned, straightened off the Jeep and effortlessly flipped the door shut with one hand. “Rough day?”

“Long and hot.” She pulled her head in, rolled up the window and took her keys out of the ignition, clambered out of the Jeep and shut the door. “I got us lost. Twice, I think.”

“You should've let Aldo drive.”

“Aldo declined in favor of playing grope Bebe in the backseat. You were right. Maybe they're in love—I don't know and right now I don't care—but my niece and your nephew are definitely, positively, without a doubt in major, roaring, unbridled lust.”

So was Cydney, just looking at Angus Munroe. Good thing she was a sexually mature adult who could handle the sight
of a gorgeous half-dressed man with grace and aplomb.
Who the heck are Grace and Aplomb?
her little voice asked, but Cydney ignored it.

She hadn't meant to blurt all that about Bebe and Aldo. She'd meant to stay mad at Munroe, stay away from him as much as she could and still keep an eye on him. Then he'd grinned at her and her pulse jumped and she'd realized she didn't want to be angry anymore. She wanted to hear him call her sweetheart again, even if he didn't mean it.

“Well.” He leaned back against the Jeep and gave her a wry smile. His nose wasn't quite as swollen and the bruises around his eyes were beginning to fade. “That must've been hard to say.”

“Actually, it wasn't,” Cydney admitted. She'd just opened her mouth and it fell out. Kind of like her brain when she'd turned her head and saw him in those shorts.

“Oh, Cydney!” Georgette called from the top of the porch steps. “Bring my purse in when you bring the bags, would you?”

“What?”
Cydney wheeled toward the porch, flinging up her right hand barely in time to catch the gold key ring her mother tossed her.

“The luggage. It's in the trunk.” Georgette pointed at the Cadillac's boxcar-size back end. “Bebe and Aldo are exhausted and Herb has a bad back.”

She waggled her fingers and went inside. Munroe scowled and pushed off the Jeep.

“Give me the keys. You are not hauling luggage.” He held his hand out and she gave him her keys and Herb's. “Take her purse if you want, but I wouldn't. And tell Aldo to get his exhausted butt out here.”

He moved behind the Caddy and opened the trunk. Cydney retrieved her mother's purse, climbed the steps and crossed the porch to the front doors. A big, handsome door with stained-glass panels. She opened one and stepped inside onto a raised foyer with a pegged-pine floor. There was an enclosed staircase on her left and a huge, open living room spread out before her, a glass wall at the far end with a triple set of solarium doors framed in the center.

Another staircase, a big, wide one on the wall she faced climbed to a gallery with an archway cut in the middle and the shadow of a hallway beyond. Bookcases covered the long wall beneath the gallery with two sets of pocket doors built into them. She'd drawn the doors on the left side of the stairs Tuesday night and knew they led to the great room. They stood partway open and Cydney could hear the echo of voices, her mother's and Bebe's.

“Hey, kiddo.” Herb saluted her with a can of Budweiser from an oxblood leather bar stool. Aldo sat beside him, also with a Bud in hand, at a mahogany bar on the wall to Cydney's right. “This used to be the reception desk. Pretty neat, huh?”

“Very neat.” Cydney came down the three steps from the foyer. “Aldo, your uncle wants you to help him with the luggage.”

“Sure thing,” he said, and hopped off his bar stool.