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She purses her lips. “How about some dessert to go with it? We have sweet potato pie, apple pie, and peach cobbler today. Made from scratch in-house by our chef, Diego.”
“I don’t really need a staff rundown.” I sit back with a sigh. “Just bring the grown-up food, if you please.”
“You’ve got it, hon.” Her tone of voice says that she feels sorry for me, but I’m not too interested in that. She picks up the stack of laminated menus and sticks them under her arm, then pats my hand. “I’ll be back with a warm-up on that coffee, shortly.”
I snatch my hand back and glare at her. She’s already turning away and misses my show of distaste. As she leaves, Rex makes his way back to his seat. He sits down with a sigh.
“You know, I always dreamed of being a famous baseball player. Now I am one, and I am totally sick of being recognized.”
“Uh huh.” I don’t mention that he would probably die without the attention of his adoring fans. “Just don’t go making any career-altering decisions without telling me. I am your agent, after all.”
“I don’t think you’re on the clock right now. The fact that you’re not three sheets to the wind right now is honestly pretty impressive.” Rex waves me off. “Besides, I love baseball. I love being a pitcher. And I love my team. I’m definitely not making any moves. If the team ever talks about trading me, you’ll be the first to know.”
He grabs the full glass of water that Pearl dropped off and guzzles it down in the blink of an eye. I nod, trying not to glare at him for taking the second water without asking. Even my four-year-old son would know better than that.
I come up with, “You are my biggest client… and the biggest pain in the ass I’ve ever known.”
Rex grins at me, his dark blue eyes sparkling. “You’re damned right.”
Just then, the restaurant door swings open. A bunch of high school girls enter, their gazes fixed on Rex. They start moving toward us.
“Fans incoming,” I say, nodding toward the girls.
Rex turns, lets out a little groan, and starts to get up. “I’ll head outside and sign autographs while we wait on food. Then we’ll talk.”
I stifle a snort. “Yeah. Sure.”
Rex gives me a hard look, his eyes flashing. But in the next second, he’s gone.
I nod and let my gaze drift back out the window. Rhett is still on the phone, which is fine by me. He has a certain voice that he uses when he’s talking about sensitive topics, one I’m sure that they taught him in med school. His comforting-a-patient voice. I’m not sick and I’ve had just about all I can take of being a sensitive topic today.
I pull my wallet out of my pocket and take out the piece of ripped notebook paper that I’d tucked inside. Smoothing it out on the white Formica table before me, I blink at it.
The only message from the missing bride.
Cole, I’m sorry. I can’t marry you. I can’t be Charlie’s mother right now either. I’m going away for a while to find myself. Please take care of Charlie for me until I get back. Kisses, Holly
This piece of paper provides me with almost no answers. And yet, it tells me everything I need to know.
She doesn’t want to marry me.
She doesn’t want to be a mom to her four-year-old son.
Every time she said I love you, it was a lie.
What more did I really need to know?
I crumple the note and push it aside. Staring blankly out the window, I try to figure out just where I went wrong.
Was it pushing back on Holly’s insane demands for a luxury wedding with seven hundred guests? Or maybe putting my foot down when she wanted to start her own line of purses even though she had almost no business sense?
It could have been the time I got angry that she came waltzing in from Paris Fashion Week with over fifty thousand dollars’ worth of luggage from Louis Vuitton. Or the time that she went to her plastic surgeon for what I thought was a little Botox and came out with a completely different face and a new set of breast implants. On top of all that, I was expected to drop everything to help her while she recuperated as well.
If I really think about it, there are probably a dozen more incidents where Holly spent a lot of my fortune to make bad choices.
Pearl arrives at just the right moment with a coffee refill. She slides the steaming mug across the table and then lays down a slice of appetizing-looking peach cobbler. Before I can protest, she holds up a hand.
“The pie’s on the house. We give it to all heartbroken men in tuxes who were just left at the altar,” she jokes. “And I already served it to you, so there’s no taking it back. It’s yours now.”
