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The Richford wedding was the only contract standing between her and a total collapse of her wedding planning business. Maybe she should have known better than to have such an important meeting on April Fool’s Day. But Jorie had fully expected to wow the Richfords—mother and daughter—with her plans to turn the Lilac Garden and Filigree Ballroom of the St. Renwick into a fifties-themed, full-on James-Dean-Rebel-Without-a-Cause fantasy wedding. She was positive she’d nailed the interviews with the bride and groom-to-be, working her trademark magic to capture the essential elements of their relationship and the way they’d want to present themselves to their guests. They were supposed to love her concepts so much, they’d fall over themselves to sign on the dotted line.
Sally Richford frowned when Jorie mentioned the skinny ties and gray suits for the groomsmen. Her daughter, Nadine, giggled nervously when Jorie started to describe her idea for red-and-white accents in the flowers and linens, based on the colors of James Dean’s iconic jacket and T-shirt.
“I really don’t think…” Sally pushed back the gold bangle bracelets on her slender, tanned wrist.
Okay, maybe they needed a visual. Jorie pulled out the planning binder she’d put together for Nadine. During her first year in business, she’d searched long and hard to find functional but pretty binders. This style, handmade by a boutique stationer in Aspen, was one and a half inches thick and bound in linen in shades ranging from pale lemonade to ice-blue to peppermint-pink. The corners were covered in white leather, as was the spine, which was constructed so the binder lay flat when it was opened. Jorie had yet to meet a bride who didn’t fall deeply in love with her wedding binder. Nadine’s was silvery-gray to go with the old-time movie theme.
“In our conversations, you mentioned that you and David went to the movies on your first date.”
“The Sing-Along Sound of Music,” Nadine said. “David sang ‘Edelweiss’ to me on the way home in the taxi.”
“Doesn’t everyone die at the end of Rebel Without a Cause?” Sally asked. She didn’t sound as if it were really a question, though. She uncrossed her legs and stood up before Jorie could answer.
“Sal Mineo’s character dies, but he’s meant to be a symbol of…” She was losing them. “That’s not the point anyway…the point is…”
Nadine clutched the strap of her purse to her chest. The corners of her eyes were red. Brides were always crying about something. Normally, Jorie would have offered her a tissue, but in this case, she didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that she’d made Nadine cry. When a bride signed the contract, she and her mother both received a green leather, custom-designed envelope perfectly sized to hold a travel pack of tissues. Gloria Santana (September 2008, four hundred guests at the Widmere) had had the tissue envelope replicated as the favor for her shower guests. Tears and tissues were a big part of Jorie’s business. The higher the tear count, the better.
Nadine’s tears, however, were the wrong sort.
Jorie had been speaking, she realized, but now she couldn’t remember what she’d been trying to say.
“Why did you think I’d want a wedding based on a movie where everyone dies?” Nadine asked. “My cousin Mira called you the wedding whisperer. Her wedding was beautiful, all springtime-in-Paris pastels and nothing about guns.”
“I didn’t mention guns,” Jorie said. “It was just the theme, you know. Movies. We could pick a different movie. Gone With the Wind, maybe.”
“That’s a war movie!” Nadine said, turning to her mother. “What did David and I say that made her think of war? Is there something wrong with us?”
“You and David have perfectly lovely ideas,” Sally said, patting her daughter’s shoulder. “This isn’t your fault.”
“Everyone says you hire Jorie Burke because she can tell what you really want.” Nadine’s voice was rising now. “Does David want to shoot people?”
They had forgotten she was there. Just as well, probably.
Jorie held her smile until the Richfords disappeared through the revolving lobby doors, then she carefully closed the binder and slid it back into her black leather shoulder bag. Her brides never abandoned their wedding binders. Or cried the wrong kind of tears. Planning weddings used to be effortless. Coming up with this idea for Nadine and David had been nothing but hard work and it hadn’t gotten her anywhere. She sat on the uncomfortable iron chair, splashed by the lucky fountain, and waited to see if she was going to cry. But the numbness that had settled on her when her mom died six months ago didn’t seem to be affected by the impending collapse of her business.
Once she was certain she wasn’t going to cry, she picked up her bag and crossed the lobby to the restroom, where she splashed water on her face and then checked her lipstick in the mirror. That was when she saw the spiky brown splotch that spread from just beneath the neckline of her gray, crepe-silk dress to the top of her left breast. It wasn’t huge, but no one would miss it. She wet a paper towel, but even as she blotted the stain, she knew it was futile—the dress was ruined. She must have spilled her coffee on the way to her appointment. She’d been so preoccupied thinking about which of her outstanding bills she was going to clear with the Richfords’ down payment that she hadn’t even noticed. The mark had been there the entire time she’d been pitching the James Dean-themed wedding.
Two years ago, when her business had been growing faster than she could manage on her own, she’d had interns, a pair of sophisticated, romantic-minded college girls from Sweet Briar. She’d trained them to look perfect but unmemorable—brides liked their wedding planners to reflect their good taste, but they didn’t like to be shown up by the help. Between the coffee stain and the fact that the wide, patent-leather belt around her waist was straining at the very last hole, she’d lost all of the image points she normally counted on during an interview. She turned sideways and ran a hand over her stomach. She’d put on weight. As much as she wished she could attribute the too-small belt to a dry cleaning accident, she knew where the blame for her expanding waistline lay. With her. Well, with her and cake. Only she and the Lord knew exactly how many slices of her friend Alice’s cakes she’d consumed in the past few months. Jorie had always loved food, but since her mom died, she’d felt a desperate inability to get full, no matter how much she ate.
Chelsea Burke was probably rolling in her grave. Actually, knowing her mom, she was plotting some way to escape her grave so she could chide Jorie in person for letting herself go. Chelsea had loved to tell people, “The Burke women have always been thin.” She never revealed that it wasn’t genetics, but hard work, strict diets and, in her mom’s case, occasional fasts, that helped maintain that image.
Jorie missed her mom. When she was little, Chelsea had moved them from city to city, searching for the next guy to support them and shelter them. They’d been a pair of chameleons, changing themselves to suit whatever guy her mom had chosen as her next possible Mr. Right. In a way it was ironic that Jorie had become a wedding planner. Building a career around the one great disappointment of her mom’s life might seem twisted, but she was successful because she’d grown up with Chelsea Burke. She knew how much the idea of a wedding meant to the women who sought her out. The ones who were so desperate for the perfect day that they’d leave the planning to a stranger. She’d worked hard to make sure her brides had the wedding they’d dreamed of and she’d been successful. Until her mom died and she suddenly lost her ability to connect with anyone’s wedding dreams.
She slid her lipstick into a small pocket in her leather bag and then checked that she had the binder for her next appointment, a cake tasting at Alice’s bakery, where she would restrict herself to the tiniest bites possible. She may have lost her last client, but she had one more wedding to plan. She was marrying Cooper Murphy, younger brother of Senator Bailey Murphy. If her fairy-tale wedding to one of the most-desirable bachelors in Washington, D.C., couldn’t put her business back on the map, she’d eat her own bouquet (blush-pink peonies, white heather and pale green hydrangea).
ST. HELEN’S CHURCH WASN’T open on weekdays. Vandalism and a skeleton staff in the parish office combined to limit the public hours. Cooper had explained to Father Chirwa that he wanted to sit in the church to write his wedding vows, and the priest had made an exception for him. If he’d been born in an earlier generation, maybe back in County Cavan before the first Murphy emigrated, they’d have said he had the gift of the gab. His brother was fond of telling people Cooper could talk Greenpeace into advocating for more whaling. Not that he would, but the potential was there.
He’d been alone in the church for two hours now. He was supposed to meet Jorie to choose their wedding cake in a little more than forty-five minutes. So far, he’d read the Stations of the Cross, lit a candle for his grandmother, said a prayer that the Nationals would find a starting pitcher and, if it wasn’t too much, a center fielder who could both catch and hit. Then he’d decided that he shouldn’t be praying about baseball so he’d lit another candle and prayed for peace and enlightenment and fortitude, because he’d always liked that word.
The pages of his notebook stayed stubbornly blank. He uncapped his favorite fountain pen and put a heading on the page. Wedding Vows. He jotted some words underneath—love, Jorie, wife, eternal and a curse word that he immediately crossed out and then apologized to God and the saints for. He took another turn around the perimeter of the church, the leather soles of his shoes making a lonely echo. When he got to the candle rack again he stopped, and this time he prayed for wisdom.
Writing the vows was his only job for the wedding and he couldn’t even do that. He slid into a pew and laid his notebook and pen down next to him. He looked at the altar; imagined himself up there, waiting for Jorie to walk down the aisle toward him. Of course, their wedding wasn’t here in his home parish, but in the National Cathedral. The Wish Team, which had fulfilled Jorie’s mom’s wish by funding her daughter’s dream wedding, had pulled strings to get the venue. Jorie was over the moon about decorating the cathedral. The exact setting didn’t matter to Cooper. Soon enough, he’d be in a church, waiting for Jorie and minutes away from vowing to…something.
He leaned forward, resting his head in his hands.
The thing about marrying a wedding planner was that nothing was left to chance. Jorie had plans for every moment of the ceremony and the reception. She consulted him before making a decision be cause she was the kind of woman who thought men should be included in that stuff, but the wedding was really hers. Writing the vows was the only thing she’d moved permanently off her to-do list and onto his.
She said it was because he was the better writer. He’d been writing political speeches and ghostwriting op-ed pieces and thousands of other communications for close to ten years, so yeah, writing wedding vows was definitely something he should be able to do. The only trouble was…well…actually there were two problems. One, he was pretty damn sure she’d given him this job because she couldn’t have done it herself. The reality was, she didn’t know him, didn’t really love him and hadn’t ever really wanted to marry him. And number two, he was pretty sure he felt the same way.
Yeah. Those were the main issues and he had only himself to blame. It was Chelsea’s idea for them to get married, and her wish, which had been expanded into a huge fundraiser for the Wish Team’s tenth anniversary, was being granted even though she’d died months ago, much sooner than they’d hoped. But it had been his own inability to resist a romantic gesture that sealed the engagement.
He could have said no, but Chelsea’s defiant belief in the power of wishing after a lifetime of disappointment had touched him. He’d seen the hope in her eyes that she could give Jorie this one thing before she died, and he’d said yes, because how could he not help her when he knew exactly what it meant to care that much about your family?
He and Jorie had only been dating for six months at the time and their relationship was still so new he hadn’t seen any downside. He didn’t stop to think about consequences, so caught up in Chelsea’s dream that he couldn’t have said no if he’d wanted to. His mom had been complaining about this habit of acting from the heart ever since he’d set the class room pets loose in kindergarten. The rabbit hadn’t gotten far, but two of the gerbils and the corn snake hadn’t been seen again. He was the guy who always put his hand over his heart for the National Anthem. He’d given the toast at his brother’s wedding and two different women had propositioned him afterward and a guy from the World Wildlife Fund had asked him to write their annual donor appeal. Which he’d done. He liked pandas as much as the next guy.
Chelsea Burke had offered him the chance to be a knight in shining armor and he’d said yes. His fault.
His romantic impulsiveness had brought him and Jorie to this point, but his good sense had finally caught up. It was late. Too late in many ways, but they hadn’t passed the irrevocable point where they pledged some as yet unwritten vows to each other. He’d screwed up and he was going to hurt a lot of people, but he’d do the right thing before it really was too late.
When he proposed to Jorie, he knew deep down that they hadn’t been together long enough, didn’t know each other well enough, but he’d convinced himself it wouldn’t matter. If anything, he knew less about Jorie now. She was beautiful, at least to him. Her strawberry-blonde hair and sky-blue eyes meshed perfectly with creamy skin dusted with freckles. She was smart, perceptive and had a wry sense of humor he appreciated. She had impeccable fashion sense, although she tended toward the conservative, and he loved the body she kept concealed under her buttoned-up exterior.
Unfortunately, he’d found out most of those things during the first few months they were dating. Since then, he’d been unable to get closer to her. She was so guarded he couldn’t find a way in. He’d become convinced that what he’d initially thought of as sophistication was actually an ingrained reserve. Or else she didn’t much like him. Either way, he was out of ideas for how to turn his hopes for their relationship into reality.
He stood up and walked to the front of the church. Leaning on the railing around the votive candles, he watched the flames flicker. He put another dollar in the metal collection box and picked up a long wooden match, dipping it into the flame. He lit one last candle and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
He wasn’t sure who the apology was for. Chelsea, Jorie, himself? He hoped Jorie would understand.
COOPER DIDN’T KISS HER.
He had to pass her to get to his chair at Lucky’s tasting table, and he trailed one hand along the back of her seat, grazing the skin above the collar of her coffee-stained dress, but he didn’t bend to kiss her cheek.
Cooper always kissed her.
He kissed everyone—his mother, his brother, his father, his many cousins, his friends. Jorie wouldn’t be surprised to find out he’d kissed his bus driver in elementary school. A peck on the cheek in greeting from Cooper Murphy was nothing special. Not getting one was. Especially for the woman planning to marry him.
If she hadn’t been so intent on making every detail of her wedding perfect now that it was her only project, she would have worried more about the missing kiss, but she had bigger fish to fry.
Red velvet fish, if all went according to plan.
Alice poked her head around the door leading to the front of the bakery. “There’s our groom!” she called. “A few minutes late and Jorie had us convinced you weren’t coming. Give me one second.” She ducked back out of sight, the swinging door making a breeze strong enough to ruffle the edge of the cotton tablecloth.
“I didn’t say you weren’t coming,” Jorie protested. “I’m nervous, that’s all. Alice is being dramatic.”
He pulled his seat out but stayed on his feet, his hands wrapped tightly around the white wooden knobs on either side of the ladder-back chair. “Listen, Jorie, I almost didn’t come.” He hesitated and seemed to change his mind about what to say. “I can’t do this.”
What was he talking about? Alice’s cakes were amazing. He knew that because he’d eaten just as many pieces as she had in the past few months.
“I know you’re dubious about the red velvet, but I told you, ignore the name. You’re going to love it.” She picked up the pale aqua menu card and tried to hand it to him. “Aren’t these menus perfect? The blue and silver are our wedding colors, and see, our names and the wedding date are right here. Brides love these.” Alice made individual cake menus for all of the couples who came for tastings. As keep-sakes, they looked gorgeous mounted in Jorie’s wedding binders.
He took the menu but didn’t read it. “I was working on the vows all morning.”
The vows. She was almost afraid to ask what he’d written. Elise Gordon (348 guests, silver and white New Year’s wedding) had written rhyming vows which her husband rapped to her. (The rhymes had been planned; the rap was spur of the moment.) Jorie wasn’t interested in a rap, but she did wonder what Cooper would promise and what he’d ask from her in return. Her mom had never gotten any of her boyfriends to the vow stage, and it had seemed to Jorie that her mom had consistently given more than she got.
Alice backed through the door just then, a tray held in front of her. “I am so sorry, guys. The counter is crazy busy and my full-time help is home with a sick kid.” She slid the silver tray holding four small cakes onto the table. “I’d love to give you the full treatment, but I’m going to have to leave you on your own.” She pointed to the cake at the top of the tray. “This is the carrot. Start here.” She pointed at each one, moving clockwise around the grouping. “Carrot. Lemon. Red velvet. Chocolate. Small bites. Taste each one before you make up your mind. The usual drill, Jorie. Don’t let your man taste out of order—he’ll ruin the flavors.”
She beamed at them. “Of all the weddings we’re doing this year, yours is going to be the most perfect.” Her eyes sparkled under the brim of her Lucky’s ball cap. “Your mom would have loved this.”
The bell rang in the front of the bakery and Alice put two forks and a serving spatula next to the china dessert plates on the table. “Enjoy!” She rushed back through the door, leaving them alone.
The tasting room at Lucky’s was tucked behind the actual store. Alice had told her she’d picked grass-green for the walls with white accents because bright spaces made people hungry. Cooper, standing behind his chair, didn’t seem to be falling under the spell. Jorie leaned back so she could see him better. His thick brown hair, dark chocolate eyes and deep dimples were such a perfect combination, they still made her tingle, but she couldn’t read his expression. Cooper was characteristically open and uncomplicated. It was one of the reasons she’d been attracted to him. But today, he wouldn’t meet her eye. He still hadn’t sat down.
And he hadn’t kissed her.
She turned the tray a fraction so that the carrot cake was positioned at exactly twelve o’clock. She was reading too much into that missing kiss. He’d been late and he was distracted. She was upset about losing Nadine’s wedding. So what if he hadn’t kissed her? It didn’t mean anything. It certainly didn’t mean…
He put the menu on the table, so close to the tray that the top corner made a divot in the icing on the carrot cake. She’d have to ask Alice for an extra copy; that stained one might ruin her binder.
“Jorie,” he said, and his voice was soft. He had a terrific voice, rich and rumbly, but it could be incredibly gentle. “I wanted this to work out, you know I did. But I can’t…I couldn’t write the vows.” He looked away, his glance bouncing around the room, which was decorated with oversize black and white prints of brides and grooms. “We have to call it off.”
He wasn’t doing this. He wouldn’t. She wouldn’t let him. Her stomach was starting to hurt and she really wanted to take off her belt.
“Please sit down,” she said. “You’re too tall and I’m never going to be able to cut even slices with you looming over me.”
She pushed his chair out with her foot, a little harder than necessary. He stepped back quickly to avoid getting hit in the gut, and she panicked. He was leaving.
“You have to sit down!” she said and he did. She picked up the cake server. “Carrot first.”
He covered her hand with his own. “Please stop talking about cake.”
“Why? Why can’t we get this done? Why can’t one thing go right today?” She pulled her hand away from his. “My belt is too small, my dress is stained and I lost the Richford contract this morning because all of my ideas are stupid. Is it so awful that I’d like to sit here in Alice’s pretty room and eat these cakes with you?”
“You lost the Richford contract?” He shifted slightly toward her. “I’m sorry.”
For the first time, he looked straight at her. She’d always thought those deep brown eyes gave him an unfair advantage. Cooper was a truly good guy, kind, honest, romantic. He looked so trustworthy, she didn’t know how anyone could ever doubt him.
“They didn’t love my Rebel Without a Cause theme.”
“Everyone dies at the end of that movie.”
“Sal Mineo dies. Everyone else is fine.”
“That other kid dies in the chicken scene.”
“He was a bully!”
“Still, not exactly the first film you think of for a wedding.”
Jorie pulled the tray closer and cut a thick wedge of the red velvet. She wasn’t going to agree to lemon or carrot, so why mess around? “Maybe you should have come to the meeting. You seem to have the same taste in weddings as Sally and Nadine.” She flipped the slice onto his plate and speared a bite with his fork. She held it up and he hesitated, then took it. His mouth curved around the fork. Cooper had a beautiful mouth with strong, sculpted lips.
“That’s delicious.”
“See? I know what I’m talking about. I knew you’d love that one.”
“Liking the same cake doesn’t mean we should get married.”
“What?” The desperate, deliberate innocence in her voice reminded her so much of her mom that she could almost see Chelsea sitting at the table with them. How many times had her mom tried to hold on to a guy who was letting her down easy? How often had Jorie promised herself she’d never be that begging woman?
He folded his hands, pressing them together.
“It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Badly. I want to call off the wedding. If we go through with it, we’ll be lying. To my family, to our friends. To each other.”
“I’m not lying,” she whispered. She laid the fork gently down on the edge of his plate. She put her hand on his wrist, wanting to hold onto him and hating herself for wanting it.
“We are, Jorie. I tried to write the vows and I couldn’t. I kept winding up back at your mom. We’re doing this for her.” He shook his head. “We don’t even know each other.”
“I knew you’d like red velvet cake.”
“That’s not enough.”
“Of course it’s not.” She dropped his wrist. She knew as well as anyone that cake wasn’t enough. “Why is this suddenly coming up now? When you proposed, I said no. Remember? I said it was too soon and my mom was wedding-crazed as usual. But you persuaded me. You said we had a great start and we could build on it and we should give my mom this last gift because what better way to start a life together?” She slid out of her chair and walked a few steps before turning back. “You had your big romantic moment. You wrote me a fairy tale. And now I’ve got everything wrapped up in this wedding—my business, my reputation, the fundraiser for my mom’s registry, everything! And you’re going to leave me hanging?”
He poked the tines of his fork into the icing on the edge of the plate.
“I never meant to hurt you.”
“What did you mean, then? You asked me to marry you. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“I wanted to make your mom happy. To make you happy. I thought it would all work out.”
She stared at him. “No wonder,” she said. “You’re a romantic just like her. Things don’t ‘work out.’ You have to work at them. You have to try.”
“We have tried.”
“No, we haven’t,” she said quickly. “We’ve been tiptoeing around each other ever since my mom died.”
The fork clattered on the plate. He shook his head and pushed his chair back, not making eye contact. “I’m sorry. Jorie, you’re a great person. I wanted your mom to be happy and I wanted you to be happy, but I can’t marry you. It will only make more problems.”
He was walking out. Just like that. He’d decided things were over and it didn’t matter what she said or what she wanted.
“We have to at least try,” she whispered. “I can’t—” become my mother “—ruin my mother’s last wish.”
“Your mom is the reason we got engaged. I can’t get married for her, too.”
She didn’t know what to say. Her life was ending right here at the tasting table in the back room at Lucky’s. Her engagement. Her chance at being the woman Cooper Murphy chose to marry. The moment when she proved once and for all that she wasn’t going to live her mother’s life.
He leaned down and she hoped he’d changed his mind. Maybe he was going to kiss her and every thing else he’d said would fade into a bad dream. “I’m so sorry that I hurt you,” he said, very quietly.
She couldn’t speak. He didn’t kiss her. The door closed behind him and she was alone with her tray of untasted cakes and two dirty forks.
