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Annie Says I Do
Carole Buck
Single Guy's Proposal When Matt Powell asked Annie Martin to help him get back into the "singles scene," she figured he needed some advice about women. But Matt's suggestion that they share a few practice dates threw Annie for a loop. Could she really "date" her best friend? Single Gal's Reply The answer was a resounding yes!Matt was sexier - and a better kisser - than Annie could have imagined. Suddenly, marriage-shy Annie was considering saying "I do." But first she'd have to convince her reluctant would-be groom to do the same… .
Annie Says I Do
Carole Buck
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To the “real” Annie, who’s actually an Ellen. May all your ever-afters be as happy as you deserve.
Contents
Prologue (#u5c040d1a-23a0-5caf-8bd7-eea1e7ebbc51)
Chapter One (#u9c7277bf-e52b-5524-83ca-73fff30d6702)
Chapter Two (#u018e5c70-44f5-5ac6-bdf8-9148c9434dbc)
Chapter Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
While they were known to friends and family as Annie, Zoe and Peachy, they called themselves the Wedding Belles.
None of them was absolutely certain who had first suggested the nickname. However they all agreed that the appellation had been inspired by the bridesmaids’ gifts given to them by Eden Marie Keene the weekend before she married Richard Powell.
The gifts were bell-shaped silver lockets on delicate silver chains.
“Oh, wow.” Eden’s thirteen-year-old sister, Peachy, breathed when she opened the velvet-covered box that contained her present. She looked up at the bride-to-be, her green eyes luminous with pleasure. A flush pinkened her freckle-dusted face, clashing with her incorrigibly curly red hair. “This is great.”
“It’s beautiful,” Zoe Alexandra Armitage declared softly, lifting her locket with slender, impeccably manicured fingers. A willowy, blue-eyed blonde of twenty-two, she was one of two women who’d spent four years sharing a college dorm suite with Eden.
She was also living proof that looks could be very deceiving. Judging on appearances alone, few people would ever guess that such a coolly elegant young woman had spent a significant portion of her formative years in places where the only available running water was that found coursing between the banks of a river.
“Let’s wear them for the wedding,” Eden’s other roommate, Hannah “Annie” Martin, suggested with characteristic decisiveness. Where Zoe resembled a picture-book princess, she was the epitome of the All-American, no-artifice-necessary girl. Of average height, Annie had an athletically slim figure. Her sable brown hair was thick and glossy, her creamy skin glowed with good health. She exuded an aura of energetic confidence.
Eden’s lips curved into a radiantly satisfied smile. “I was hoping you’d want to.”
“These will look terrific with our dresses,” Peachy commented, tracing the exquisitely engraved surface of her locket.
“Anything would look terrific with those dresses, Peachy,” Annie declared, her long-lashed brown eyes sparkling. “Unlike some brides I could name, your sister has excellent taste.”
“You’re not going to start complaining about your second cousin’s wedding again, are you?” Eden grimaced. “It happened years ago!”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Annie countered. “I still suffer from flashbacks about being one of Barbara Jeanine’s bridesmaids. I think I’ve got some kind of postnuptial stress disorder. Or maybe a chronic case of taffetaphobia.”
Eden and Zoe looked at each other and groaned.
“What was so awful about your second cousin’s wedding, Annie?” Peachy—whose given name was Pamela Gayle—wanted to know.
“Chartreuse,” came the succinct response.
“Huh?”
“The bridesmaids’ dresses were chartreuse,” Zoe explained. Her uninflected tone suggested she was repeating information she’d heard many, many times before.
Peachy pulled a face. “Oh, gross.”
“The dresses also had hoop skirts,” Annie noted.
“Oh, seriously gross!”
“Don’t forget the parasols,” Eden said.
“Or the picture hats,” Zoe added.
“I looked like a bilious mushroom.” Annie gestured expressively. “It was a marriage made in heaven, with bridesmaid dresses straight from hell.”
“Heaven?” Eden scoffed. “You said Barbara Jeanine and what’s-his-name—Marvin? Melvin?—got into a raging fight at the reception and wound up throwing chunks of wedding cake at each other! I thought they filed for divorce before the honeymoon even started.”
“They did,” Annie conceded easily. “But I don’t believe in letting facts get in the way of a clever turn of phrase.”
“No wonder you’re planning to go into advertising,” Zoe quipped.
“Well, we don’t have to worry about food fights or ugly dresses where Eden’s wedding is concerned,” Peachy asserted. “It’s all planned out and it’s going to be perfect.”
“Eden does seem remarkably calm,” Annie observed, cocking her head to one side. “I mean, most brides-to-be I’ve known spent their final weekends as single women popping tranquilizers, breaking up with their fiancés, or plotting to murder their mothers. Sometimes all three.”
“My mother and I did have a minor disagreement before I came to meet you,” Eden admitted with a smile. “But aside from that, everything’s fine. I’ve only got one real concern.”
“That Rick won’t show up at the church?” Annie was teasing, of course. She had good reason to know that the chances of the groom in question leaving his bride-to-be standing at the altar were nil. After all, she was the one who’d introduced the couple and seen the romantic sparks fly. If ever two people were made for each other...
This wasn’t to imply that matchmaking had been Annie’s objective when she’d invited Eden to spend part of their sophomore year spring break at her home in Atlanta, Georgia. Heavens, no! Love at first sight had been the last thing on her mind when she’d casually presented her college roommate to her longtime next door neighbor. Yet within thirty seconds of their eyes meeting and hands touching, it had been obvious that Eden and Rick were bonded for life.
Of course, tumbling into love like the clichéd ton of bricks seemed to be standard operating procedure where the Powell men were concerned. According to family lore, Rick’s father had proposed to his future wife in the middle of their first date. And Annie had watched Rick’s younger brother—her best buddy, Matt—lose his heart to a girl he’d never met, whose name he hadn’t even known, on the first day of their junior year of high school.
“Bite your tongue, Annie,” Eden retorted. While her tone was chiding, her serene expression indicated that she harbored no doubts about the strength of her husband-to-be’s emotional commitment to her.
“I know,” Zoe said, her sky-colored eyes dancing. “You’re worried about what you’re going to do with four food processors.”
“Five,” Peachy corrected with a giggle. “There was another one delivered to the house yesterday afternoon. I heard Uncle Ralph tell Dad he should raffle off the extra ones to help pay for Eden’s reception.”
“Aha!” Annie fixed the prospective bride with a triumphant look. “You’re worried that your uncle Ralph is going to do something embarrassing at the wedding!”
“Uncle Ralph always does something embarrassing at weddings,” Eden responded dryly. “At funerals, too. It’s a family tradition.”
“So what do you have to worry about?” Zoe questioned. She frowned consideringly for a few moments then continued in a pseudomelodramatic whisper, “Could it be...the wedding night?”
“Oh, I’m all prepared for that,” Eden replied airily. She cast a conspiratorial wink at her younger sister. “Peachy lent me the textbook from her sex education class.”
“Really?” Annie looked intrigued. “Has Rick seen it?”
Eden’s mouth quirked provocatively. A wicked glint appeared in her crystal gray eyes. “Actually,” she drawled, “I thought I’d let the facts of life—ahem—come as a surprise to him.”
“Eden!” her roommates gasped.
“What?” The inquiry was the essence of innocence.
“Girls who plan to get married in virginal white aren’t supposed to make dirty jokes,” Annie informed her primly.
“Who’s joking?”
“Well, if that’s the case,” Zoe said, “you should at least give Rick a chance to skim the table of contents of Peachy’s textbook.”
“Maybe there’s a video version of it,” Annie suggested. “That way he could fast-forward through the boring stuff.”
“I’d be glad to lend him my notes,” Peachy volunteered. While the blush on her cheeks hinted she was not completely comfortable with the bawdy banter going on around her, the impish light in her eyes indicated she was game to join in the fun. “I mean, I did get an A in the class.”
“Really?” Zoe asked, arching her well-groomed brows. She sounded sincerely impressed.
The color of Peachy’s face intensified. “Well, actually, it was an A-plus. I did an extra-credit project.”
“Forget about lending your notes to Rick, Peachy,” Annie said, starting to chuckle. “Give them to me!”
“Me, too,” Zoe concurred, joining in Annie’s humor. A split second later Peachy was laughing, too. Within a matter of moments, all three prospective bridesmaids were helpless with hilarity.
“Ladies...please...” Eden reproved, gesturing for decorum like an old-fashioned schoolmarm. “Settle down.”
It took a while, but order was eventually restored.
“You...” Annie paused to catch her breath. “You still haven’t told us what you’re worried about, Eden.”
The soon-to-be Mrs. Richard Powell looked blank for an instant, then the corners of her lips curled up. “Oh. That.”
“Yes?” Zoe prompted.
Eden’s smile widened to embrace her two dearest friends and her kid sister.
“I’m worried about which one of you is going to catch my bouquet...and be the next bride.”
One
“I‘m still having trouble believing you saved that thing, Annie,” Matt Powell said, plunging a tortilla chip into the bowl of salsa in front of him. “It’s been nearly nine years since the wedding.”
The “thing” to which Matt was referring was Eden Keene’s bridal bouquet. He’d discovered it in Annie’s possession—pressed and carefully packed away—several hours ago while helping her settle into her new condominium in Atlanta’s fashionable Buckhead area. He’d been teasing her about it ever since.
Teasing was one of the hallmarks of Matt and Annie’s three-decade-old relationship. They’d been born in the same hospital just twenty-four hours apart and had grown up living next door to each other. They’d shared baths and sandboxes as toddlers, schoolwork and secrets as preteens, and a unique bond of understanding throughout adolescence and into adulthood.
If Annie had been given a dollar each time somebody had told her that she and Matt were “just like brother and sister,” she would have been able to retire as an extremely wealthy woman before reaching age thirty. Heck, receiving just a dime per repetition would have allowed her to build up quite a respectable nest egg!
She’d never liked the sibling analogy. It was such a cliché. More than that, it failed to reflect the fundamental truth about her ties to Matt.
Brothers and sisters were supposed to be close. It was more or less written into their genetic contracts. She and Matt had chosen to bond with each other. Theirs was a purely voluntary alliance that, despite a blood oath of mutual fidelity sworn at age eight, was subject to unilateral abrogation at any time.
When asked how she’d describe her relationship with Matt—and his with her—Annie usually replied that the two of them were best buddies. People unwise enough to suggest that there might be something sexual percolating beneath the apparently platonic surface of their friendship provoked either hoots of laughter or offended glares, depending on her mood.
This wasn’t to suggest that what went on between Hannah Elaine Martin and Matthew Douglas Powell was all sweetness and light. Heck, no. They’d been trading verbal jabs from the time they’d learned to talk. They’d even had a few playground skirmishes that had degenerated into fistfights. But when push came to shove...
Put it this way: Annie was absolutely certain that if she ever telephoned Matt in the middle of the night from equatorial Guinea and said she needed him, he’d come rushing to her aid on the first available plane—no questions asked.
What’s more, she was equally positive that she’d respond in the same unreserved fashion should he ever call her for help.
“I don’t understand why you’re making such a big deal out of this,” Annie complained, selecting a tortilla chip and skimming it across the surface of the salsa. Both she and Matt loved spicy, south-of-the-border food. The Mexican restaurant in which they were sitting was one they’d patronized together many, many times. “I caught the bouquet at Eden’s wedding and I kept it. So what?”
“I don’t remember you actually catching the bouquet,” Matt drawled, picking up the long-necked bottle of beer at his elbow and taking a healthy swig. He surveyed her with amused blue-gray eyes. “It seems to me the bouquet bounced off somebody’s head and fell into your hands by default. You didn’t look very pleased when it did, either. In fact, I think there was a second or two when you seriously considered dropping the thing.”
Annie crunched down on the salsa-coated tortilla chip. In point of fact, Matt’s recollection was right on the money. She’d definitely experienced a moment of dismay when she’d realized that, despite some determined maneuvering to avoid doing so, she’d somehow ended up clutching Eden’s bridal bouquet.
There’d been plenty of female guests who’d tried to catch the ribbon-trussed bundle of flowers, of course. Had there been an inconspicuous way of handing the bouquet off to one of those want-to-be-wedded types, Annie would have opted for it. But there hadn’t been. So she’d been forced to smile and laugh and graciously respond to a lot of prying questions about her matrimonial prospects.
The one thing nobody had asked her nine years ago was, “Do you want to get married?”
Her answer—had someone put the query to her—would have been succinct.
“No,” she would have stated. “I don’t.”
If pressed, Annie would have gone on to explain that although she had nothing against marriage, it wasn’t high on her list of priorities. She craved a challenging career and the opportunity to establish herself as an independent woman. When she imagined the sweet smell of personal success, it didn’t include the delicate odor of orange blossoms.
Her feelings about getting married hadn’t changed much in the nine years since Eden’s wedding. She’d thought they might when she’d reached thirty. This expectation had been the result of watching a significant number of her contemporaries go into husband-hunting frenzies after they’d passed the Big 3-0 unwed.
