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“Push how?” Jimmy asked.
“I don’t know. Just push!” One hand reached for the metal frame of the pilot’s seat, then like a champagne cork, the pouf exploded into the cabin with a breathless “oof.”
Sean stared at the white explosion. The dress covered his feet and was even uglier close up. The whole scene was getting crazier by the minute. Maybe he should slow down on the Grey Goose.
Jimmy untethered the Sea Hopper and climbed into the cockpit. He wore his headset over the top of his helmet and he shut the door behind him. He pushed buttons and flipped switches and pulled away from the dock. “Belt yourselves in,” he said through his microphone as the seaplane taxied to the red buoy in the center of the lake. The small craft rocked, and the woman at Sean’s feet struggled to her knees within all that dress. He heard a “Dang!” and then a total collapse. She lay facedown for several heartbeats before she managed to turn onto her back. The Sea Hopper shifted right, then picked up speed.
The woman’s eyes were closed and a tiny microphone sat at one corner of her full red lips. A red mouth that was in stark contrast to all that white. Her lips moved and he thought he heard her whisper, “I’m in deep, deep trouble.” As the seaplane hurtled across Lake Union, she kind of moaned and whimpered at the same time. The top of her dress hadn’t exactly rolled with her, and her right breast looked like it just might pop free. One big, perfect breast pushing against all those rhinestones sewn onto the satin. Maybe he should help her fix that dress and adjust her boobs for her. He was good at adjusting boobs. He was real helpful that way.
She pushed the veil from her face and spit a piece of hair from her mouth. Her dark blue eyes opened, a little wild and crazy, and she had long black lashes. Not that Sean usually noticed a woman’s eyelashes, but hers were hard to miss. Her cheeks were almost as white as her dress. She pulled air deep into her lungs, and her chest rose and fell. Her breasts strained the fabric to the point of bursting all those rhinestones. The seaplane lifted, and this time he definitely heard her say, “I can’t believe I just did that. Everyone is going to kill me.”
Sean chuckled and snapped the seatbelt in his lap. His chuckles turned into soul-deep laughter, drowned out by the three-hundred-horsepower engine. He guessed someone wasn’t gettin’ hitched after all.
Chapter 2
•love wholeheartedly, but always have an escape plan
Alexis Mae Kowalsky placed a hand on her stomach and closed her eyes. Through the earphones Jimmy had managed to get around the back of her head, she heard someone laugh. It wasn’t Jimmy, but at the moment she didn’t care. The floor beneath her rocked and rolled, and it wasn’t the Sea Hopper that made her stomach jump around. “I’m going to be sick,” she whispered. It was the thought of her father, waiting for her in the hall at the Fairmont, ready to walk her down the aisle, that made her stomach hurt. Her parents had been against her marriage to Peter Dalton. Her mother thought she should wait. Her father thought Pete was a sissy boy. They both couldn’t believe she was getting married to someone she’d met on a reality TV show. They’d been right about everything, but Lexie had been too caught up in Gettin’ Hitched fever to listen.
She’d really done it this time.
There had been moments, though, when her saner side had popped up and forced her to stop and think. In those few moments of sanity, her rational brain reminded her of the good and valid reasons to call
off the wedding. The most important of all:
She didn’t love Pete. a. Not one bit.
In those few moments of rational thought, she knew that marrying him was insane. Anxiety gripped her stomach and choked her throat, and she’d felt like screaming at the top of her lungs, “I can’t marry Pete!” Just as suddenly, denial soothed her like a warm bath filled with rose petals and she embraced it. Denial whispered comforting lies in her head and told her exactly what she wanted to hear:
Pete seemed like a nice guy. a. He had good manners and opened doors.
She could grow to love him. a. He was handsome and he’d chosen her out of twenty women.
She didn’t have the best of luck choosing men on her own. a. She was cursed with being a bad picker as evident in her pick of former boyfriends: (1) Tim.
(2) Rocky.
(3) Dave.
Millions of people thought she and Pete made a good couple. a. The whole country expected a big wedding.
Lexie had a big capacity for denial, but she could not always ignore the second reason for rushing into marriage with Pete:
She hadn’t known how to get out of it.
The more she’d let it go on, the bigger it got. It was like a big boulder chasing her downhill and she’d felt powerless to stop it.
The only person she’d confided in was her best friend, Marie. She’d known Marie most of her life, and Marie had been the single witness to her panic attack in the housekeeping room at the Fairmont.
Fifteen minutes before she’d been set to walk down the aisle, her anxiety had grabbed her by the throat and made it hard to breathe. It grew more powerful than her capacity for denial and she’d blurted out to her best friend, “I can’t do this.”
The director of Gettin’ Hitched had stashed the two of them inside the small housekeeping room while the crew set up to get a shot of her father seeing her for the first time. The thought of involving her dad in the charade made her add, “This is wrong!” She raised a shaky hand to her mouth to keep her true feelings behind her lips, but they shot out anyway. “I have to, but I can’t! He has bad toes, Marie. Really gross!”
“And a mullet,” her best friend added.
“Our kids will have bad toes and mullets!” She moaned. “But I have to marry him.”
Marie had placed her hands on Lexie’s shoulders and looked into her eyes. “Do you love Pete?”
