The Wedding Planner's Christmas Wish, page 8
“How was your family with all this?”
“It was a shock, at first, of course. My brother, Shaun, wanted to kill Brian, as if he’d made that baby all by himself. But pretty soon everyone saw how eager he was to do the right thing by me and the baby, and they welcomed him in. You’ve seen my family. Controlled chaos. There is always room for one more. Everybody in my whole family believes a baby is always a blessing. They celebrate life, no matter what it throws at them.”
“That’s pretty amazing,” he said. “What everyone wants in a family. A great backdrop for happily-ever-after. So, what happened?”
“We lost the baby.”
“I’m so sorry,” he said, and his voice was pure gravel. “I should have known that. When I first met you, I asked about children. I’m glad you have your family.”
But that was where the love of her family got complicated. They didn’t really understand, after the loss, her need to hold that grief to herself. They couldn’t understand how everything they had—the babies, the homes, the laughter, the chaos—made her so acutely aware of a baby with perfect fingers. And perfect toes. And one shock of golden hair. Who had never drawn a single breath.
She realized she had started to tremble. He realized it, too. He came around the table, unhesitatingly, and sat on the love seat beside her. His hand covered hers. His scent—clean, masculine, spicy—was reassuring in a way she couldn’t quite understand.
“It was a stillbirth,” she told Drew. She hadn’t expected to cry. Not after all this time, but she did.
As if it was the most natural thing in the world, he put his arms around her, drew her into his chest. His hand found her hair and stroked it. It felt as if it were a homecoming. It felt as if he was pulling more words out of her. They spilled out of her mouth and onto his chest, right above his heart.
“Brian and I didn’t have anything in common beyond that baby,” she choked out. “And art. It wasn’t enough. Our shared grief held us together for a bit, but then his brush with captivity made him long for freedom, and so when that door opened, he leaped through it. We were divorced before we’d even been married a year.”
She didn’t tell him they still talked once a year. On an anniversary of sorts, and not their wedding anniversary, a day that was completely forgettable. No, they talked on that sad day that they had lost the baby. No matter where he was on the planet, when the clock struck midnight on that mid-December day, as the rest of the world was entering, in earnest, the happiest season of all, her phone rang.
She pulled away from Drew’s chest and found a beautiful, pristine white square of linen pressed into her hand. She dabbed at her eyes and gave him a watery smile.
See? I’m pulling myself together.
“When I quit college, I went to work for a company that catered events. I couldn’t go back to school. I was too changed. Over the years, the business evolved into a full planning service that did weddings. When my boss decided to retire, she split off the wedding planning part of the company and sold it to me. And so here I am, giving the beautiful wedding—and the happily-ever-after—I never had to everyone else.”
CHAPTER NINE
ALEXANDRA WONDERED IF she had ever said that out loud before. It felt as if she had just blurted out her deepest secret.
She looked into the deep green of Drew’s eyes and realized the danger of starting to believe in those kinds of dreams ever again.
Those kinds of dreams just ended in disillusionment and brokenness if you allowed them to see the light of day. But he already knew the price of believing in dreams. Their shared pain leaped between them, a bond.
She had gotten the tears under control, but she was still trembling.
But she realized the trembling wasn’t from her memories now. It was from an awareness of how close he was, an awareness that a perilous electricity was shimmering in the air between them.
She put her hand on his chest, not to push him away, but to feel the beat of his heart beneath her fingertips, and then to guide herself in closer. She leaned toward him.
He did not seem surprised.
No, it was as if he had been waiting for this. As if this moment was inevitable between them. She lifted her chin and touched his lips with her own.
That destructive force that she had been trying so hard to hold at bay—hope—crashed in around her like the sea waves exploding over rocks.
His lips carried the sharp tang of tequila. They were soft and the furthest thing from soft at the same time.
Alexandra was sure she had only had half a glass of wine, and yet the taste of his lips made her feel utterly intoxicated, as if she was swan-diving into a star-studded black night and had no idea where she would land when she finished dropping through the darkness.
She felt weak in a way that made her welcome weakness, even though she knew that the world required her to be strong.
His hands tangled in her hair, and he claimed her mouth completely. And she let him. She welcomed him.
And as their encounter deepened, she was so aware this was not the clumsy, driven passion of youth. As much as it was spontaneous, it was also a conscious choice between two adults.
The kiss was mature, like spirits aged in an oak cask, rich and deep with a hint of darkness. It was exhilarating, and she rose to it, her every nerve end singing.
It penetrated her awareness that her phone was announcing an incoming call. She didn’t care. It could wait.
Except, annoyingly, the sound penetrated the deliciously altered state she was in, like an alarm bell stridently announcing danger. Didn’t that distinctive boing, boing, boing belong to someone?
Someone important?
She drew herself away from his kiss.
“Shelley,” she announced out loud, and saw the instant fear of a man who had lost everything once already cross his face.
Alexandra wrenched herself completely away from Drew and pawed through her bag for the phone.
She put it on speaker. “Shelley? Is everything okay?”
“There’s just a little problem at the party.”
“Is Genevieve all right?” Drew asked, despite Shelley’s relaxed tone. He went from seductive kisser to protective daddy in the blink of an eye, and there was something extraordinarily compelling about that transformation.
“Oh, yeah, nothing urgent. No blood, hysterics, tears or bruises. But Genevieve has retreated to the upstairs linen closet. She would like her daddy to come get her now.” Shelley’s tone was amused rather than concerned.
“What brought that on?” Alexandra asked, worried.
“Apparently Macy told her she doesn’t like Bonnie dolls. A catastrophe in a four-year-old’s world.”
“Tell her Daddy is on the way,” Drew said.
He got up, dropped some bills on the table and reached for her jacket and helped her slip it on before he put on his own. That gesture made her aware there was no point in offering to pay her share.
His smile was self-deprecating. “So much for the confident little girl who feels safe and secure in the world,” he said.
“You’re way too hard on yourself about this parenting gig.”
“Easy for you to say. It’s not your kid crying in the closet.” He started humming. “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to...”
She smiled at him, and they went out into the crisp night. Somehow everything seemed more vibrant than it had before they had gone into the pub. Before he had kissed her.
She felt like a princess, awaking from a long sleep. The autumn night seemed alive. The air tingled in her nose and throat and lungs. Leaves, enchantingly outlined in gold under the streetlights, shivered on their branches.
“She’s four,” Alexandra said, “and I assume she’s not used to being around a ton of people. She wants her daddy. You’re what makes her world safe and secure.”
He looked at her, and she saw she had managed to validate him in an area where he felt insecure. He looked like the kind of man—confident, successful, in charge—who was probably very unaccustomed to insecurity in his world. Being a daddy had humbled him.
His hand closed around hers, and the feeling of the night being alive intensified as they walked through it hand in hand.
Also intensified was Alexandra’s awareness that a man like this could set back the recovery of a wounded heart.
Could she enjoy this moment and not ask for others? Maybe she should enjoy this moment all the more for knowing she would have to let go of this man after tonight.
Of course, they would still have to discuss some details about Ivy and Sebastian’s wedding. Of course, she would still have to confer with him.
But the dreams that had been let loose with that kiss—all her wild need, and her desire so long bottled up, so long seen for what it was, disruptive and dangerous—needed to be put back in their vessel.
Before it was too late. Before they passed the point of no return.
She slipped her hand from his as they approached the house. There was no need to add to the complexity of this with family conjecture, since she had already decided it must end before it started.
Really, it was akin to stamping out a little tiny spark before it was allowed to become something else.
A single spark of passion had ruined Alexandra’s whole life once already, burned it to the ground. She, of all people, should know the danger of playing with fire. And there was no denying it was fire she had felt when she had invited Drew’s lips to her own.
By the time they arrived at the house, Genevieve had emerged from the closet. In fact, she danced to the door, her face alight as Drew walked in.
“Look, Daddy, I have a Bonnie doll.”
Genevieve looked like a different child to the one who had been dropped off. Her sparkly tights had a rip in them, and her dress was crumpled and had a cake stain on it. Her hair was also a mess under a princess party hat.
Though her cheeks had tear streaks on them, she looked all better now. Still, in retrospect, Alexandra thought, she might not have been quite ready for this rambunctious crew.
Not that that was her call to make! She had better be very careful before playing mommy without an invitation.
Did she want that invitation?
“So I see,” Drew said, his lips twitching, thankfully with amusement and not horror. “How did you happen to get a Bonnie doll?”
“I gave it to her.”
“This is my niece Macy,” Alexandra said, scooping her cowboy outfit–clad niece up into her arms and kissing her plump cheek. “Macy, this is Drew. He’s Genevieve’s daddy.”
“She was in the closet,” Macy reported. “So I went and got her. I told her she could have the doll if she came out.”
“That was very nice,” Drew told her.
“Not really. I don’t like dolls.”
Macy was apparently impervious to the fact that her rejecting the gift might have driven poor Genevieve into the closet in the first place. For someone who had been contemplating the role of mommy just moments ago, this was one of those times where it was a relief to be an auntie. Shelley could deal with the etiquette of rejected gifts.
Or maybe she had—maybe that was why the peace offering in the closet had been made. And it had worked, too.
“Macy’s my best friend now,” Genevieve announced solemnly. “We’re coming here for trick or treat, aren’t we, Macy?”
Macy scrambled down out of her aunt’s arms. “Yup,” she cried.
Shelley came across the living room. She looked nearly as disheveled as Genevieve.
“Yes, please come,” she said. “It’s a block party. So much fun. Everybody dresses up. Adults and kids. I think they’ve booked some kind of spooky bouncy tent.”
“A spooky bouncy tent,” Genevieve breathed excitedly. “Daddy, we’ll come, won’t we?”
He hesitated. His eyes found Alexandra’s. In them, she saw the same struggle she was experiencing.
Did they let this spark find the life it was looking for, or did they squash it out, firmly, before it took hold?
But there were larger questions.
To be open to life, or not?
Looking into the depth of his eyes, other questions rushed at her. To be open to the unexpected? To be fully alive, instead of just going through the motions?
She had lost that baby such a long time ago. How long was she going to protect herself from pain? How long was she going to live in fear of making a mistake? How long was she going to be controlled by the past?
Maybe it had been too long already.
“It might be nice to come to a party I didn’t plan,” she said tentatively.
“Are we going to come, Daddy?”
Drew didn’t look at Genevieve. He looked at her. Long and hard, his gaze opening a world of possibility that had been completely closed to her.
“We would love to come,” he said.
Suddenly, Alexandra felt frightened. What was she doing? She was so rarely impulsive, and she reminded herself that she almost always regretted it when she was.
On the other hand, she had weeks to think about this. To back out. There was no reason he and Genevieve couldn’t come without her.
Though she knew they wouldn’t.
When had she become this person? So eager to protect her heart, she would keep a little girl—one who had lost her mother—from knowing the joy of community? Of family?
“I would love to come too,” Alexandra said.
But if it was about Genevieve, if she was being as altruistic as she wanted to be, why was she already thinking of her costume?
She already knew it wasn’t going to be Little Bo Peep or Little Red Riding Hood or any of the things anyone would expect of her.
* * *
Drew sat in the deep, luxurious leather rear seat of the car he had called. The company knew him, and so they had sent a car with a child seat. Genevieve, new doll clutched against her, had fallen asleep almost as soon as she had been strapped in.
Her hair was matted and stuck to her forehead and her cheek. Her dress was wrinkled and stained. The little stocking had a rip in it. A funny little smile played across her slack, chocolate-stained mouth.
He remembered her declaration that the house they were visiting was a real house.
And that’s what she looked like right now. A real little girl. The observation stung.
He turned his thoughts away from his failings as a parent, to the woman who had said he was too hard on himself. He’d offered to drop Alexandra somewhere, but she had said no, she lived just around the corner.
It must have shown in his face that he didn’t want her walking home alone, because she had laughed and said she would stay at the party until her brother got home, and then he would insist on walking her to her place.
One kiss.
And Drew was feeling protective of her.
One kiss.
And he felt restless.
One kiss.
And he felt hungry for more.
One kiss.
And he felt helpless to say no to that party invitation. But was it really the party invitation—and his daughter’s excitement about it—that he’d been helpless to say no to?
Or was it the chance to see Alexandra again?
He would put it all from his mind. His biggest responsibility, of course, was Genevieve. His business kept him occupied. Last time they had spoken, Gabe had said that Drew should begin to think about replacing him. It looked as if it was going to be a long haul with his mother, but now Drew realized he welcomed the extra duties to fill up his days. He told himself, firmly, that putting that kiss from his mind was going to be the easiest thing he had ever done.
The car pulled up in front of Parker and Parker. Drew carefully undid the harness of the car seat and hefted his sleeping daughter in his arms.
She nestled against him, a puddle of warmth, boneless. She barely shifted as he made his way, carrying her inside. Genevieve was trusting him completely. To put her needs first. Always.
And what did that mean in terms of that kiss with Alexandra?
Drew realized, irritated, he had managed to put that kiss—the one that was going to be the easiest thing ever for him to forget about—from his mind for all of thirty seconds.
CHAPTER TEN
ON THE DAY of the Halloween block party, Drew stared at himself in the mirror, aghast. He was aware it was possible for a man to push a kiss to the back of his mind, just as he had vowed to do. And yet, still, here he was, being confronted with how that kiss had changed him, regardless of how successful he had been at not thinking about it.
Maybe it shouldn’t be as surprising as it was that the—white-hot—meeting of lips had altered him. Heat melted things, after all. But what it seemed to be melting was some barrier around his heart.
He’d sensed it when he started calling Gabe every day, not just to discuss business, but to find out how he was doing. How his mom was doing. He’d sent dinner over for them, twice. He’d also found a rare Webber Morrison session online and sent Gabe the link.
But now the proof of some new and uncomfortable softness confronted him in the mirror.
Naturally, Genevieve had told Miss Carmichael about her new best friend, the real house and the invitation to the party.
Miss Carmichael had come to him and offered, shyly, to take care of their costumes, as she helped with costumes for an amateur theater group. She said she could borrow some things and make others.
This was one of the changes to his heart: he saw her differently. In a gentler light than he had before. As a whole person, with a life outside his household. He noticed how young she was. He noticed she’d been crying. It didn’t take much prodding of Genevieve to find out there had been a breakup with the boyfriend.
