Mother of the Bride (4 page)

It wasn't fear of failure that frightened Cydney, it was fear of success. A little niggle of worry that if her book sold and did well, she'd wake up some morning and discover she'd turned into Gwen. Cydney loved her sister, she really did, but she had no illusions about her. Which, of course, she could never tell their mother.

Why not?
her little voice asked.
Gwen is ruthless and driven.
People
magazine says so. Maybe Georgette won't admit it, but I'll bet she knows it. She's got your number, doesn't she?

Cydney still couldn't figure out when Georgette had come out of her self-absorbed fog long enough to nail her deepest fear right on the head. Maybe it was a Mother Thing. Like always knowing, when she was little and Georgette was in the kitchen, that Cydney had her feet on the couch. Every time without fail, her mother would holler: “Get your shoes off my sofa, young lady!”

Even Gwen, who most of the time made Joan Crawford look like Donna Reed, possessed a sixth sense about Bebe. Whenever she was sick or unhappy the phone would ring and it would be Gwen. Scary people, mothers.

It was 9
P.M.
and Cydney was in her office; it was the sun-porch when she'd bought the house eight years ago. She was finishing the changes on the perennial border spread for
Bloom and Bulb.
She put her T square down and smiled. Perfect. If Wendell Pickering nitpicked this, she'd tell him to take his twenty-five hundred bucks and go get a hair transplant.

Cydney didn't need the money. She had a trust fund of her
own, courtesy of her father. A nice little chunk she added to when she could and planned to never touch. Worst-case scenario, she figured it would keep her, or Bebe, who was the beneficiary, from ending up a bag lady.

So far as Cydney knew, Gwen had made no provisions for Bebe's future. They'd had a rip-snorting phone fight about it when Bebe graduated from high school.

“Only you,” Gwen said, “would give an eighteen-year-old girl a one-thousand dollar savings bond.”

“She can use it for college,” Cydney retorted, affronted. “What's she supposed to do with a trunk full of silk lingerie?”

“Catch a man,” Gwen replied bluntly. “Preferably one with a degree in something that will earn a nice living. Why do you think I'm sending her to college? I just hope she lands a pre-med or a pre-law student before she flunks out!”

In Aldo Munroe Gwen had gotten her wish and then some.

Her writing room over the garage had once been a studio apartment. Cydney rubbed her right temple where her headache still pulsed and gazed at the glare of the security light on the apartment's dark windows. How many weekends had it been since she'd climbed the stairs and turned on her spare PC? Two?

Three,
her little voice said,
but who's counting?

A breath of cool autumn evening drifted through the two jalousie windows Cydney had cranked open, rustling the box hedge she kept clipped even with the brick half walls of the sunporch. Leaves skittered across the patio. She shivered and rubbed her arms. Wednesday was Halloween, Thursday the first of November.

What would she do for the holidays without Bebe? Georgette went skiing on Thanksgiving and took a cruise over Christmas. A wedding cruise this year if things got that far, which Cydney still didn't believe. Her father would be in Cannes with Nymphet Wife Number Six, and Gwen who-knew-where with her new husband. Cydney hadn't asked Bebe who Gwen was marrying because it didn't matter. Like father, like daughter, it wouldn't last. Cydney figured she'd discover the name of Gwen's intended on the front page of
The National Enquirer
the next time she went to the grocery store.

Which reminded her—she was out of checks. Cydney got up from her drawing table and started up the two brick steps that led to the dining room, stopped and stared at the dark windows of her writing room again. Was it really three weeks since she'd been up there?

The desk clock beside the lamp said it was 9:15. Two hours until Bebe was due home. Cydney didn't feel like writing. Her late night and rotten day were catching up with her. She ached all over, especially behind her right knee, where she just
knew
that damn bruise was blossoming into a spider vein, but two hours were better than nothing. She hadn't turned on the wall furnace in the apartment yet. She'd need a sweater and a cup of tea to keep her warm while she lit the pilot.

Ten minutes later, with matches and the key in the pocket of an old snagged navy cardigan and a tea bag steeping in a mug, Cydney climbed the stairs, unlocked the door and groped for the light switch. She meant to turn on just the lights, not the ceiling fan, too, but accidentally flipped both switches.

The blades whipped to life on high, raising a cloud of dust thick enough to be called a sandstorm in the Sahara. A sheaf of manuscript pages on the desk took flight, three of her Angus Munroe pinups spun off her corkboard onto the floor.

Cydney sneezed, turned off the fan and set her cup on the Formica bar that separated the rest of the small, one-room apartment from the even smaller kitchenette. Batting dust out of her face, she made her way to the windows and opened them a couple inches to let in some fresh air, then dropped to her knees to pick up the pictures.

The pine tree pose from the jacket of
Paid in Full
had landed on the seat of her old office chair, one of the over the shoulder, go-away glares on the floor next to it and the other facedown under the desk. She whacked her head retrieving that one, hard enough to see stars and send her headache soaring. She sat back
on her heels and rubbed her stinging, pounding head as she turned the picture over and looked at it.

She couldn't remember which magazine she'd cut this one from. It was black and white and showed Angus Munroe in a cable-knit sweater against a foggy shoreline dotted with pine trees. His arms were folded, his dark hair lifting off his forehead. He looked like a baby in this picture. And he didn't look happy.

Cydney picked up the color book jacket photo and compared it to the black and white. Same scowl, same crossed-arm pose. A fiercely private man, she guessed, and very protective of Aldo, Bebe said. If he came to the wedding, would he eat cake, drink punch and kiss the bride? Or would he just sit in a pew scowling with his arms folded? It was hard to picture him doing anything else since that's all she'd ever seen him do.

It struck Cydney that until today, until she'd met Aldo and heard his angry voice on the phone, Angus Munroe hadn't seemed real. Now he seemed so real that her breath caught as she studied the photos and noted the resemblance between uncle and nephew—the shape of Angus Munroe's jaw, the length of his nose. So much like Aldo's it was scary.

So was the thought of meeting him at the wedding. Panic clutched Cydney's stomach. How much weight could she lose in a week? What would she wear? What would she say to him?

“Hello, Mr. Munroe.” She put on her best smile and offered her hand to the book jacket photo. “It's a pleasure to meet you.”

Her voice sounded funny over the tinny ring in her ears from the whack she'd taken on the head. It throbbed with every beat of her heart and made the deep voice that answered— from the depths of her imagination, Cydney thought—sound like it was coming from the bottom of an empty fifty-five-gallon drum.

“Nice to meet you, too, Miss—?”

“Parrish. Cydney Parrish. I'm Bebe's aunt.”

“I thought she had an Uncle Sid?”

“That's Bebe's nickname for me, Uncle Cyd.” Cydney
laughed, pretending. Hey, this was fun. She ought to whack herself on the head more often. “I've read all your books, Mr. Munroe.”

“So I see,” the deep voice answered. It didn't sound hollow anymore. It sounded like Angus Munroe was really in the room, standing behind her, eyeing his books lined up inside the barrister bookcase. “Are all those pictures of me?”

“Pictures?” Cydney laughed again, charming the scowl off his face. “What pictures, Mr. Munroe?”

“The ones in your lap,” the voice snapped, sharp and edgy and very close. “The ones on the wall over the desk.”

Cydney not only heard the floor creak as if someone were walking across it, she felt it. Her heart seized as she shot up on her knees and whirled around. Angus Munroe—tall, dark and drop-dead handsome in indigo jeans, hiking boots and a navy suede bomber jacket—jammed a pair of wire-framed half glasses over a nose shaped just like Aldo's. He grasped the back of her old desk chair and leaned over it to take a closer look at the photos on her corkboard.

“My God. They
are
pictures of me. They're
all
pictures of me.” Angus Munroe, Cydney's idol, the man of her dreams, yanked off his glasses and whipped his head toward her. “What kind of a nut are you?”

chapter

five

A very fetching nut, Gus could see, now that she stood on her knees facing him. Even with her mouth open, gaping at him like a freshly landed fish. A rainbow trout, he thought, watching her face turn every shade of red known to Crayola.

It wasn't a beautiful face. Her mouth was too big and her nose too pert, but she had lovely, almond-brown eyes tipped up at the corners and oddly dark brows for someone with such silvery blond hair. A gamine face, the face of a pixie.

The face of a nut, Gus reminded himself. Probably harmless, but still a nut. He shoved his glasses in his jacket, gripped the loose back of the old posture chair with both hands and gave her his best scowl.

“Which variety of nut are you, Miss Parrish? My biggest fan or Glenn Close?”

His allusion to the movie
Fatal Attraction
shot a fresh wash of red up her throat. She sank on her heels and ducked her chin.

“How about,” she said in a mortified voice, “the kind of nut who has no idea how to explain this and wishes she were dead?”

One hand crept up and brushed a wisp of dust out of her silver curls. She looked so waifish and woebegone Gus almost said, “Aww,” until it hit him that maybe she wasn't being charmingly coy but coolly calculating.

You make me sick, Munroe,
said the voice that occasionally spoke up from somewhere inside him. Gus wasn't sure if it was his conscience or his muse, but it was definitely a butinski.
Like she knew you were coming and planned this.
Like all the women you think are after you because you're a rich, famous writer lay awake nights dreaming up screwball scenarios like this to get your attention.

“Hey, it could happen,” Gus said, unaware that he'd blurted it out until Cydney Parrish blinked up at him and asked, “What did you say?”

“I said—” Gus shifted his gaze to the papers scattered across the desk. He picked up a handful to straighten them and asked, “What happened? Looks like a tornado went through here.”

“One did, sort of.” Cydney Parrish scooped up the pictures that had fallen out of her lap, slapped them facedown on the desk and got to her feet. “I turned on the fan when I turned on the lights and everything just—went with the wind.”

She made an awkward sweep with one arm. Gus glanced at the typed pages he held and realized they were part of a manuscript, which was no surprise since she was Fletcher Parrish's daughter. He read the title in the upper right-hand corner,
Stone Dead,
before she snatched the pages out of his hand and put them on the desk.

“Sorry for barging in,” Gus said. “When no one answered the doorbell, I walked around back, saw the lights and—”

“Caught me making a fool of myself.” She ducked her head again. “I've read all your books and really enjoyed them, Mr. Munroe.”

Gus wanted to like Cydney Parrish. If he hadn't spent half his life idolizing her father, reading and studying and learning from Fletcher Parrish's books, and if only the mean-spirited old bastard hadn't cut him dead the only time he'd ventured out of Crooked Possum to meet Fletcher Parrish at a mystery writers' conference, he might've managed it. But he couldn't— and he wouldn't—let his guard down until he found out just exactly what was going on between Aldo and Parrish's granddaughter.

“Thank you, Miss Parrish. But do you really think my nephew and your niece should get married?”

She glanced up warily. “Why shouldn't they?”

“I think they're too young. And I don't think they've known each other long enough.”

“You're entitled to your opinion, but Bebe and Aldo are both of legal age. They don't need your permission or anyone else's to marry.”

“My permission, no. My approval, yes.”

Cydney Parrish's chin shot up. “What do you mean?”

“My brother, Arthur, was a very cautious man.” Gus withdrew from his jacket a copy of the codicil to his brother's will he'd had his lawyer fax him—just in case—after he talked to Aldo. “The terms of Aldo's trust state that if I judge his behavior to be irresponsible or imprudent I can extend my guardianship and control of his trust for another five years.”

“I see.” Cydney Parrish folded the fax into her sweater pocket without looking at it. “So if Bebe doesn't meet with your approval this could be a very long engagement.”