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“No? Then explain it to me.”
I wished I could.
He stood, eerily calm, waiting for an explanation.
I broke into a full-body sweat. “I…” Swallowing, I tried to figure out where to begin but I was missing ninety percent of my short-term memory. “Let's just get out of here and get some coffee. Once I have food in my stomach?—”
“Whose shoe is this, Rayne?”
Before I could answer, something clattered to the shower floor. Hale’s gunmetal eyes shot to the bathroom door and he dropped the shoe, his hands balling into fists as he barreled forward.
“Hale wait!”
He shoved open the bathroom door and flung back the shower curtain.
Barrett froze like a deer in the headlights.
Hale’s rage shifted to shock and he staggered back. We were fucked.
If at First You Don’t Succeed
SKYDIVING ISN’T FOR YOU
Three Months Earlier
“Trade,” I said, dropping the enormous wedding planner binder Seraphina had gifted us for Christmas into Hale’s lap and scooping up Elara from his side.
He lurched forward under the weight of the intimidating book. “What the hell’s in this thing?”
“Our to-do list. Did you know that there are roughly six phases to an engagement? If your sister’s plan was not to overwhelm me, she failed miserably.”
I snatched a diaper out of the basket under the coffee table and laid Elara on the floor. She instantly rolled to her stomach and tried to escape, but I caught her ankle and dragged her back.
Hale opened the cover of the mammoth book and read the personalization Phina had professionally inscribed with our names and photos. “That’s why I hired you a wedding planner.”
“Us. You hired us a wedding planner.” Bundling up the soiled diaper I hurled it toward the kitchen. It landed on the tile floor with a heavy splat.
Hale sighed, already getting up from the couch to move the dirty diaper into the trash can. He was always cleaning up my messes—and Elara’s. “Don’t let that book intimidate you. It’s just a suggestion.”
My head perked up. “Do you really mean that?” Dreams of a small, intimate ceremony came to mind. It could be on an exclusive beach with only our best friends and immediate family present. I envisioned our casual wedding clothes luffing in the wind against a cerulean coast and pink sandy beaches as the scent of coconut danced in the air. “I thought you wanted to do the whole New York thing.”
“I do.”
A tsunami appeared in my fantasy, wiping out the entire peaceful picture. I didn’t tell my future husband that the thought of a big wedding made me physically queasy, because I didn’t want to disappoint him.
This was Hale’s wedding as much as mine. Plus, he was perfect in every pleasing but irritating way. He earned the perfect wedding. I wanted to give him everything he deserved, a sort of pre-marriage gift for the smoke-show groom before it sank in that he wasn’t getting anything close to a perfect bride.
In my head, if I could pull off Hale’s version of the perfect Hale wedding, then I could fool all of high society into believing he wasn’t marrying a woman way below his station. Who even said words like station and high society nowadays? Davenports did. That’s who. They and the rest of the elite upper class lived their day-to-day lives like American royalty, whereas I lived my pre-Hale days like a person who took no issue with shopping in pajamas or using a marker to fix a scuff in a pleather shoe.
I lifted Elara by the waist of her candy cane pajama pants and let gravity do the rest as she sank back into her clothes—fresh diaper in place.
“So we’re back to phase one—operation New York skyline.” Otherwise known as wedding-gate and the greatest threat to my worried intestines of late.
Hale pressed a kiss to my head and took Elara. “You’ll love it. Once we find the perfect venue, everything will fall into place.” He shoved the enormous wedding planner aside as if it wasn’t a book full of expectations and impossible standards.
To think, I once feared handling Hale’s daughter as if she were a grenade with a loose pin, but now I’d take a hundred Elaras to just one of those books. My greatest fear was letting Hale down. No. Scratch that. I would most definitely let him down before we said I do. My greatest fear was disappointing him so much that he called the wedding off.
“You’re sure you don’t want to do a private ceremony like your dad and Jasmine did?”
