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“That’s a good one, Sean,” Jimmy said through a laugh. Sean waited for the pilot to say more, to finally give Lexie a clue. Instead he pushed aside the small Bluetooth microphone and communicated with the ground below.
“What takes you to Sandspit?” Lexie asked.
“My mother lives in Sandspit.” It was inevitable that she would learn who he was. He wasn’t purposely keeping her in the dark—ok, maybe just a little—but he’d sleep easier tonight knowing he wasn’t going to get a call from John in the morning. If that made him a coward, he could live with it. “My mother is ill.” In fact, she was dying. Again.
“I’m sorry.”
This time she said she had pancreatitis. “She’ll pull through.” For as long as he could remember, his mother had been sick. If she hadn’t been sick with one ailment or another, she’d made him sick. His childhood had been filled with unnecessary doctor and hospital visits, and she’d shoved unnecessary medicine down him until the age of ten when his uncle Abe had intervened and they’d gone to live with him in Edmonton.
“What time are we leaving in the morning, Jimmy?” Lexie asked.
“I want to be in the air by nine.”
“I don’t know if I can face everything that early.” She moaned. “I’ll need a pot of coffee.”
“If you want to hide out, I’m flying back to pick up Sean in a few days.” Jimmy glanced back at her. “You might consider laying low until things settle down.”
“No. I have to get back.” She yawned. “By the time we land tomorrow, I’m sure everything will have blown over.”
Chapter 4
•love hides in strange places
“Where in the world is the Gettin’ Hitched bride?”
Lexie sat cross-legged in the middle of her bed at the Harbor Inn. She stared in horror at the Today show and co-anchor Savannah Guthrie. “Lexie Kowalsky left a stunned Peter Dalton at the altar last night,” she added, “leaving a sour taste in the mouths of millions of fans.”
“Millions?” Lexie uttered.
“Cynics speculate it’s part of the storyline, that it was planned from the beginning, but Pete says he’s truly heartbroken.”
Savannah Guthrie? It was a big enough story that the co-anchor was reporting on it? In the first hour? So much for things blowing over.
“No one seems to know what has become of the Seattle native who competed with twenty women to become this season’s Gettin’ Hitched bride.” Savannah continued as NBC cut away to footage of a bewildered-looking Pete standing at the altar, surrounded by white roses and lilies. “The producers of the reality show insist this came as a complete surprise. Telepictures, a division of Warner Bros. Television, released a statement that reads in part, ‘We at Telepictures want to assure fans of Gettin’ Hitched that this was in no way part of the show. Lexie Kowalsky had given us no clue that she wasn’t one-hundred-percent happy with the show and committed to Pete.’” Footage of a director holding the note Lexie had written in the housekeeping room cut to footage of her dad’s black Land Rover. “The would-be bride’s parents, Seattle Chinooks coach John Kowalsky and his wife, Georgeanne, had no comment.”
Most major networks had camped outside the Fairmont, waiting to get videotape of the hitchin’ bride and groom. Instead, they got footage of a KIRO 7 reporter jumping out of the way seconds before getting hit by an SUV speeding away from the Fairmont. The cameraman did manage to get shots through the windshield of her father’s scowl and her mother’s hand over her face.
The reporter turned his microphone to people on the street. Several claimed to have seen her racing away from the scene in a MINI Cooper. Others said a Harley. The footage then cut to photographers camped out in front of her apartment in Belltown and the gates to her parents’ house on Mercer Island.
“Stay tuned to our fourth hour,” Savannah said as the camera came back to her. “Kathie Lee and Hoda will take calls from the thousands of fans who believe they’ve spotted Lexie Kowalsky, the woman that viewers are now calling the ‘Not Gettin’ Hitched bride.’”
“Thousands?” Lexie said weakly and got a little light-headed. “Kathie Lee and Hoda, too?” She kind of hoped that she’d pass out and put herself out of her misery. If only for a few moments. Not that it would matter. When she came to, nothing would have changed. She’d still be the runaway Not Gettin’ Hitched bride.
There was a loud knock on the door, and she jumped like a parolee on the run. Her light head spun a little more and she almost fell on her face when she stood. Her feet moved across the beige carpet and she looked through the peephole. Jimmy stood on the other side, a
nd she quickly let him in before leaning her back against the door. It had been Jimmy who’d seen the news and alerted her to the rapidly growing fiasco. She couldn’t go home or even to her parents’ house. She felt like a Whack-A-Mole, afraid to pop her head outside, and both she and Jimmy had agreed that she had two choices:
Stay out of sight.
Try and blend with the locals.
“Feeling any better?” he asked over his shoulder. This morning he wore some kind of gnarled-up sweater and worn corduroys. If her life wasn’t such a mess, she might have suggested, in the kindest way possible, that he burn those clothes in order to save himself and those around him the horror. But her life was a mess, and she said, “No! People are going to call Hoda and Kathie Lee if they spot me.” She swallowed hard. “Like that book, Where’s Waldo?”
He shook his head and turned a plastic sack upside down. “Hunted down Pokémon-style.”
A weird little choking sound came from her mouth and she raised a hand to her lips. It was worse than Waldo or Whack-A-Mole. “Pokémaniacs.”
The contents of the bag spilled on her bed. “Well, Pikachu, if it makes you feel better, no one at the Sandspit Mart or the Waffle Hut is talking about anything but the four-hundred-pound halibut someone caught yesterday. I’m going to see if I can get a look at it before I take off.”
