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Countdown to the Perfect Wedding
Teresa Hill
Tate Darnley approached his nuptials like a business transaction – romance wasn’t a factor.But the minute he met unassuming chef and single mum Amy, he knew there was more to marriage than sealing the deal. Now, as the clock ticks down to his perfect wedding, he has to ask himself – which woman will he marry?!
Amy and gorgeous man both froze, leaning over the spilled bag of powdered sugar.
The cloud had enveloped them—sugar was sprinkled over their faces, their hair, getting in their mouths, even up their noses.
She blinked. Yes, there was a bit on her eyelashes, too.
The man coughed. Amy did, too, sending tiny puffs of white powder into the air once again.
“Oh, my God, I’ve probably ruined your suit,” she said, afraid it had cost more than several months’ rent on her apartment.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll just take this off right here.” He shrugged out of his jacket, more powder flying as he did.
He peeled off his tie next. He started to unbutton the shirt, but then quit when he had it half-off. “Is this…Do you mind?”
Amy shook her head.
Mind was not the word.
More accurate ones would be…
Appreciate the sight before her?
Oh, my.
About the Author
TERESA HILL tells people if they want to be writers, to find a spouse who’s patient, understanding and interested in being a patron of the arts. Lucky for her, she found a man just like that, who’s been with her through all the ups and downs of being a writer. They live in Travelers Rest, South Carolina, in the foothills of the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains, with two beautiful, spoiled dogs and two gigantic, lazy cats.
Countdown
to the Perfect
Wedding
Teresa Hill
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To my niece, Rachel, who has welcomed her first child,
Ashley Nicole, into the world and brought incredible
joy to my parents, now the happiest
great-grandparents ever.
Prologue
Eleanor Barrington Morgan smiled and nodded, she hoped with nothing but a mixture of happiness and acceptance showing in her face, as her most favorite person in the whole world, her godson, Tate Darnley, told her he’d met yet another woman.
This one was an investment banker.
“Mmm.” She nodded, having to grit her teeth beneath her smile. “Someone from your office?”
“Yes,” Tate said.
Eleanor could just picture her, disciplined as could be; fastidious in her dress, diet and exercise plan; highly intelligent when it came to numbers and strategy; working her little fanny off to get ahead.
She probably came to bed clutching a spreadsheet, not quite able to let it go completely.
Eleanor’s husband used to be that way. He was an investment banker, cool, calculating, highly intelligent and with the warmth and interpersonal skills of a deep freeze. She’d endured thirty years of trying like a fool to change him, to figure out what was wrong with her that she couldn’t make him love her or want her the way she wanted to be loved, and she wanted so much more for Tate.
Instead, he’d been raised by a stockbroker, become a venture capitalist himself, and showed all the signs of following in all of their footsteps.
Especially in his choice of women.
She wanted to weep, to scream at him, to try to knock some sense into him, to tell him there was so much more to this world and to life other than money, the latest business deal and numbers. But of course, a Barrington-Holmes woman simply did not do those kinds of things. She’d been raised to be too dignified for that.
So she sat there and smiled and nodded, until he kissed her on her cheek and left. Her best friends at Remington Park Retirement Village, Kathleen and Gladdy, saw him go and came to hear the news right away.
“He found another one,” Eleanor told them. “Just like the last one and the one before that, it sounds like. How can men be so stupid?”
Kathleen and Gladdy shook their heads and sighed, having heard it all before.
“That first woman like that? Did she make him happy? No,” Eleanor said, answering her own question. “The second one? Was he happy with her? No. The third one? Not even close, and now, here we are. Number four, who sounds like a clone of the first three. I could tell by the way he talks about her. No real emotion there at all, no excitement, no warmth. Just all this bunk about compatibility and shared goals. Please! It sounds like they’re going into business together.”
Kathleen frowned. “What exactly is your objection to… trying to gently nudge him toward someone else? Someone you think would make him happy?”
“Well, Mother always said we shouldn’t meddle,” Eleanor said.
“Oh, please.” Gladdy dismissed that with a huff and a smile. “What kind of mother is that? And besides, you told me your mother died twenty years ago. It’s not like she’s going to come scold you for anything now.”
“I know, but…well, the honest truth is I’ve tried before to steer Tate in a different direction, and…I’m afraid I’m just no good at it,” Eleanor admitted, much as it cost her to say so. She was raised to never admit any kind of inadequacy she might have.
“Oh, honey.” Kathleen laughed. “We can fix that. Gladdy and I are terribly good at meddling. Just ask anyone. What we pulled off with my darling granddaughter Jane…”
“It was a thing of beauty. A master feat,” Gladdy bragged. “And now, Jane’s happy as can be, and believe me, we despaired of Jane ever truly being happy. In truth, sometimes we despaired of her ever so much as going on a date.”
Kathleen nodded. “It was bad. Very bad. I don’t think anyone but Gladdy and I ever thought we could save Jane, but we did. We can save your godson, too. Just say the word, and we’ll go to work.”
Eleanor sighed. She’d heard this story. Practically the whole of Remington Park had been involved in the match-making scheme and had a blast doing it, she’d been told.
Her people, the Barringtons, and her husband’s, the Holmes, were just repressed, stuffy, private people, crippled emotionally and quite possibly beyond all help, Eleanor sometimes thought, and it was hard, breaking the patterns of decades, the ones imprinted on the very DNA in every single cell in one’s body.
“I wouldn’t even know where to start,” she said.
“Don’t worry.” Gladdy patted her hand reassuringly. “We do.”
Eleanor tried to be good. Truly, she did. She stayed out of Tate’s supposed love life, although honestly, she doubted there was any kind of love involved, emotional or physical. Poor thing.
And what did her noninterference get her?
Six months after first mentioning her, Tate announced he was engaged and finally admitted the woman he’d been seeing all that time was none other than Victoria Ryan! A girl he’d known for years. They’d practically grown up together, acting more like brother and sister than anything else. And Victoria, unfortunately, had the most disagreeable mother. Eleanor shuddered at the thought of ever having to face that woman over a holiday dinner table or, even worse, at a wedding.
Still, Eleanor thought it wouldn’t last. No woman ever really had with Tate. She wasn’t worried, wasn’t sorry she’d stuck with her plan of not butting in.
Six months after that, the wedding—a huge extravaganza in that mausoleum of a place Eleanor once called home—a mere two weeks away, she was hungrily searching for any signs that the nuptials would somehow fail to take place.
Two days before the first of the family guests were scheduled to arrive for the five-day event, she was desperate and went to Kathleen and Gladdy.
“Well, the simplest thing, of course, is another woman,” Kathleen said quite calmly in the face of Eleanor’s outright panic.
“But, he’s not seeing anyone else,” she explained. “Not that I know of.”
“No, I mean, we have to find him another woman—a real one, not an ice sculpture,” Gladdy told her.
“Where are we going to find him a real woman in two days? He’s been dating for fifteen years and hasn’t found one yet,” Eleanor said. “And even if we did find one, what then? It’s not like we can guarantee he’s going to fall for her. I mean, he’s a man, and we all know what most of them are like. But he’s not a rat. I just don’t think he’s going to be looking for another woman on the weekend of his wedding.”
“We put them together and see what happens. That’s all it should take,” Kathleen said, sounding remarkably confident.
“Yes, and we all know just the woman!” Gladdy announced, glancing into the kitchen, where Amy, their sweet, most favorite former employee, newly graduated from cooking school, had arrived with a special birthday cake for one of the ladies in their cottage who’d always been a favorite of hers. “Eleanor, didn’t you say you were going to hire a chef for the weekend? To feed all those guests staying at your house?”
“Yes, I did. A lovely man named Adolfo.”
“He’s going to come down with something at the last minute,” Gladdy said, pointing to the woman in the kitchen. “And you’re going to replace him with her.”
Chapter One
Tate Darnley was later than he’d planned getting to the house Wednesday night and a little bit tipsy. Victoria’s father and some of Tate’s colleagues had thrown a little cocktail party in honor of their upcoming wedding, and the champagne had flowed freely.
He came in through the side door leading past the servants’ quarters and the kitchen, as he always did, hoping to avoid any friends and family members who might have already arrived for the long weekend, looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet before things got too crazy for the wedding.
What he’d hoped would be a small, family-only affair had turned into an extravaganza, and Victoria, normally the epitome of calm and grace under pressure, now seemed like a woman trying to steer the Titanic through a vast, bottomless ocean, fraught with all sorts of confusion and peril.
It was a little disconcerting, but not overly so. Tate had always heard weddings made just about everyone crazy. It would all be over soon, and he and Victoria could get on with having a life together, which he expected to be nothing but smooth sailing—two intelligent, hardworking people with the same goals, same values, who’d known and respected each other for years. How could they go wrong?
Tate checked himself for any twinge of impending nerves, happy to find none. He was even whistling a bit, striding down the back hall when the most amazing smell hit him.
Tangy, citrusy…lemons, he decided.
Something sweet, too.
Lemons, sugar no doubt and…some kind of berries? He groaned, it smelled so good.
Someone preparing food for the wedding, he supposed, and yet, he didn’t remember anything that smelled that good at the various tasting menus they’d sampled, at Victoria’s insistence.
He lingered in the hallway, thinking if he couldn’t get a bit of that sweet lemony thing right now, who could? After all, he was the groom. So he turned around and headed into the big, open gourmet kitchen, finding a slender young woman clad in a starched white apron, her copper-colored hair tied back in a braid, testing the firmness of a plate of lemon bars she’d just pulled from the oven. That luscious smell was even more irresistible here in the kitchen.
A boy of maybe seven sat on a high stool beside her, pouting for all he was worth. “One?” he asked. “Come on, Mom. Just one?”
“Max, you already had two from the earlier batch. Any more and you’ll be sick, and I can’t have you sick this weekend, because I can’t take care of you and cook for all these people.”
“But—”
“No.” She didn’t let him get out another word, as she slid her lemon bars one by one onto a waiting cooling rack. “Now stay here, and guard these for me. I just used the last of the powdered sugar, and I have to search the pantry for more.”
The boy pouted mightily but held his tongue.
Tate waited until the cook disappeared into the butler’s pantry and the even bigger pantry closet in back of that and then strolled into the kitchen, saying, “Wow, that smells amazing.”
The kid looked up and frowned. “Yeah.”
Just then, from deep inside the pantry, Tate heard a woman’s voice call out, “Tell me you’re not eating those, Max? Because I counted them already. I’ll know if you do.”
The boy sighed and looked resigned to following that order. “I’m not.”
“Just not fair, is it?” Tate said quietly to the boy.
The kid shook his head. Judging by his expression, he was trying to convince Tate he was a poor, abused child, left to starve among all this bounty.
Tate finally got a good look at the things. Lemon, indeed, and something pinkish mixed in. “Lemon and strawberry?” he guessed.
“I dunno. They just taste really good.”
“I’m sure,” Tate agreed, sniffing again. “Raspberry. That’s what it is, isn’t it? Do you remember?”
“I think so,” Max said, looking none too sure of himself. “Mom calls ’em sugar daddies.”
“Oh.” Tate nodded. Interesting name. “Because she’s going to sprinkle powdered sugar on top of them?”
“’Cause of Leo,” Max said.
Leo?
Sugar daddies?
Surely the kid didn’t mean what Tate was thinking? “So, Leo is…your dad?”
“No.” Max shook his head. “A friend of mine and my mom’s. She cooked for him and stuff, and he liked her a lot.”
“Oh.” Tate didn’t dare ask another thing.
“She got to go to cooking school ’cause of it,” Max said, obviously a talker. “She always wanted to go to cooking school. And I get to go to school, too, someday. I mean, I didn’t really want to, but Leo left me some money for that, too. Not cooking school, but…the big place? You know?”
“College?” Tate tried.
