Saying Yes To The Dress!. Сорейя Лейн

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СКАЧАТЬ Happily-Ever-After. However, her career choice had quickly killed what shreds of her romantic illusions had remained after the bitter end to her long engagement. She would be the first to admit she’d had far too many fairy-tale fantasies way back when she had been very young and hopelessly naive.

      Flustered—here was a man who made a woman want to believe, all over again, in happy endings—but certainly not wanting to show it, Becky picked up the last paper Drew Jordan had cast down in front of her, the especially no one.

      It was her own handiwork that had been cast so dismissively in front of her. Her careful, if somewhat rudimentary, drawing had a big black X right through the whole thing.

      “But this is the pavilion!” she said. “Where are we supposed to seat two hundred guests for dinner?”

      “The location is fine.”

      Was she supposed to thank him for that? Somehow words, even sarcastic ones, were lost to her. She sputtered ineffectually.

      “You can still have dinner at the same place, on the front lawn in front of this monstrosity. Just no pavilion.”

      “This monstrosity is a castle,” Becky said firmly. Okay, she, too, had thought when she had first stepped off the private plane that had whisked her here that the medieval stone structure looked strangely out of place amidst the palms and tropical flowers. But over the past few days, it had been growing on her. The thick walls kept it deliciously cool inside and every room she had peeked in had the luxurious feel of a five-star hotel.

      Besides, the monstrosity was big enough to host two hundred guests for the weeklong extravaganza that Allie wanted for her wedding, and monstrosities like that were very hard, indeed, to find.

      With the exception of an on-site carpenter, the island getaway came completely staffed with people who were accustomed to hosting remarkable events. The owner was record mogul Bart Lung, and many a musical extravaganza had been held here. The very famous fund-raising documentary We Are the Globe, with its huge cast of musical royalty, had been completely filmed and recorded here.

      But apparently all those people had eaten in the very expansive castle dining room, which Allie had said with a sniff would not do. She had her heart set on alfresco for her wedding feast.

      “Are you saying you can’t build me a pavilion?” Becky tried for an intimidating, you-can-be-replaced tone of voice.

      “Not can’t. Won’t. You have two weeks to get ready for the circus, not two years.”

      He was not the least intimidated by her, and she suspected it was not just because he was the groom’s brother. She suspected it would take a great deal to intimidate Drew Jordan. He had that don’t-mess-with-me look about his eyes, a set to his admittedly sexy mouth that said he was far more accustomed to giving orders than to taking them.

      She debated asking him, again, not to call it a circus, but that went right along with not being able to intimidate him. Becky could tell by the stubborn set of his jaw that she might as well save her breath. She decided levelheaded reason would win the day.

      “It’s a temporary structure,” she explained, the epitome of calm, “and it’s imperative. What if we get inclement weather that day?”

      Drew tilted his head at her and studied her for long enough that it was disconcerting.

      “What?” she demanded.

      “I’m trying to figure out if you’re part of her Cinderella group or not.”

      Becky lifted her chin. Okay, so she wasn’t Hollywood gorgeous like Allie was, and today—sweaty, casual and sporting a sunburned nose—might not be her best day ever, but why would it be debatable whether she was part of Allie’s Cinderella group or not?

      She didn’t even know what that was. Why did she want to belong to it, or at least seem as if she could?

      “What’s a Cinderella group?” she asked.

      “Total disconnect from reality,” he said, nodding at the plan in her hand. “You can’t build a pavilion that seats two hundred on an island where supplies have to be barged in. Not in two weeks, probably not even in two years.”

      “It’s temporary,” she protested. “It’s creating an illusion, like a movie set.”

      “You’re not one of her group,” he decided firmly, even though Becky had just clearly demonstrated her expertise about movie sets.

      “How do you know?”

      “Imperative,” he said. “Inclement.” His lips twitched, and she was aware it was her use of the language that both amused him and told him she was not part of Allie’s regular set. Really? She should not be relieved that it was vocabulary and not her looks that had set her apart from Allie’s gang.

      “Anyway, inclement weather—”

      Was he making fun of her?

      “—is highly unlikely. I Googled it.”

      She glanced at her laptop screen, which was already open on Google.

      “This side of this island gets three days of rain per year,” he told her. “In the last forty-two years of record-keeping, would you care to guess how often it has rained on the Big Day, June the third?”

      The way he said Big Day was in no way preferable to circus.

      Becky glared at him to make it look as if she was annoyed that he had beat her to the facts. She drew her computer to her, as if she had no intention of taking his word for it, as if she needed to check the details of the June third weather report herself.

      Her fingers, acting entirely on their own volition, without any kind of approval from her mind, typed in D-r-e-w J-o-r-d-a-n.

       CHAPTER TWO

      DREW REGARDED BECKY ENGLISH thoughtfully. He had expected a high-powered and sophisticated West Coast event specialist. Instead, the woman before him, with her sunburned nose and pulled-back hair, barely looked as if she was legal age.

      In fact, she looked like an athletic teenager getting ready to go to practice with the high school cheer squad. Since she so obviously was not the image of the professional woman he’d expected, his first impression had been that she must be a young Hollywood hanger-on, being rewarded for loyalty to Allie Ambrosia with a job she was probably not qualified to do.

      But no, the woman in front of him had nothing of slick Hollywood about her. The vocabulary threw his initial assessment. The way she talked—with the earnestness of a student preparing for the Scripps National Spelling Bee—made him think that the bookworm geeky girl had been crossed with the high school cheerleader. Who would have expected that to be such an intriguing combination?

      Becky’s hair was a sandy shade of brown that looked virgin, as if it had never been touched by dye or blond highlights. It looked as if she had spent about thirty seconds on it this morning, scraping it back from her face and capturing it in an elastic band. It was a rather nondescript shade of brown, yet so glossy with good health, Drew felt a startling desire to touch it.

      Her СКАЧАТЬ