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“Maggie Sanders, plus one,” Maggie said, leaning over me.
“Oh, here you are,” the door matron said, after flipping through some pages on her clipboard.
She followed that up by speaking into her gamer-style headset.
“We’ve got another one coming through.”
At her order, we drove into a makeshift parking lot. When we stepped out of the car, a valet jumped into the driver’s seat like a carjacker, barely taking time to retrieve my keys and give me a token that would let me pick up the Prius when we were done.
“Shall we?” I asked Maggie, crooking my elbow in a chivalrous way.
“Let’s.”
“She’s done well for herself,” I said, trying to be charitable as we walked up the literal red carpet toward the tent erected in the garden.
“Her dad paid for it. He’s richer than God and dumber than a sack of hammers. I never really knew what my mom saw in him. She’s not a gold digger, but maybe she saw him as a kind of security blanket. Thank God she finally saw sense and divorced him. Moving to Florida and away from him was the best thing she ever did.”
“Eventually, we all wake up and realize the mistakes we’ve made,” I told her. “Well, if we have any level of self-awareness, that is.”
“Yeah.” Maggie sighed. “Kenny was my mistake. But I least I woke up. If I hadn’t discovered him with Raquel, I’d still be asleep at the wheel and may never have realized how awful was capable of being.”
“Definitely don’t beat yourself up over that,” I said, squeezing her hand and liking the way she squeezed mine back. “You had no reason to think he was capable of something like that, until he did it.”
“True,” she said, seeming to feel better about it as we walked around.
I had to hand it to the designers: the inside of the tent was amazing, looking very much like a ballroom, though one with a translucent room with a view of the night sky. There were no chandeliers, for obvious reasons, but there were several well-placed candelabras.
Of course, there was a wooden floor lest her ladyship and her guests actually come into contact with filthy, brutish nature.
That wasn’t an attitude I particularly understood. I’d grown up in a city as well but I also had always gone out into the country at every given opportunity, driving every inch of the coastline to partake in the world’s finest supply of green rolling hills and breathtaking scenery. It made no sense to me why anyone would ever be afraid of nature.
Everyone in attendance was fancy, what we would have called a “toff” back home. No one was looking out of sorts or out of place. All looked completely at ease in the elegant surroundings.
Even so, several of the guests did a double take when they saw us coming, causing the the attention that had been on the happy couple to be momentarily broken. Maggie was simultaneously beaming and blushing, which only made her look all the more radiant.
All the men’s eyes took her in from head to toe. Part of me wanted to pound my chest with pride.
Everyone wanted her, and yet she was mine.
Raquel’s face soured, and she shot us several dirty looks as we whirled around the dance floor. She probably wasn’t expecting us to be so good at it.
My father may have been a useless lump of nothing, but my mother, God rest her soul, was a different story. She made sure we were polite, knew which knife and fork to use, and how to take the lead on the dancefloor. And, if the occasion called for it, we could Irish Dance better than Michael Flatley.
Maggie and I did so well with our attention-grabbing gambit that there were several occasions during breaks that Raquel tried to entice me to dance with her. I was always nice, never directly insulting her, but still making it clear that I wasn’t interested.
And it wasn’t just because I knew how evil she could be. The simple truth of the matter was that I only had eyes for Maggie.
Then things took a turn for the worse. Following her fifth attempt to cut in, Raquel stormed over and ranted at Kenny. I couldn’t hear what she said, but I knew it wasn’t good.
I didn’t think any more of it, though— that was, until Kenny went over to Maggie as soon as I had left her side. I was sure that he thought I couldn’t hear him, but he didn’t know that I had exceptionally good hearing— a MacBride family trait that had been passed through the generations.
“You can’t bullshit me,” he snapped. “No way a guy like that is really interested in a cow like you. He must have no money or self-respect at all because you clearly had to pay for him to come with you and pretend to be your fiancé. You can’t bear to see Raquel happy, so you’re doing your best to upstage her.”
