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2
BEAU
The first wedding of the day was officially over, and just as I’d predicted, my client didn’t need me to drive her home. She left with her ex-husband, which was the exact outcome she’d been hoping for when she hired me.
Apparently, he’d been so blinded by rage that she’d brought another man to their daughter’s wedding that he’d admitted he still loved her and begged for a second chance. And so, hiring me to escort her had been worth every penny. Her words, not mine.
Mission accomplished, I undid the buttons at my wrists and cuffed my sleeves. Then I grabbed a coffee from the bar on the main floor of the B&B and took it out back to relax before round two.
I had a few hours, but it didn’t make sense to leave the venue. It would take me over an hour to get back to the base from here, so it wasn’t worth the trip for an hour at home. Besides, tonight’s client was in the wedding party and would be arriving with the bride, so I might as well hang here until showtime.
Looking around the sun-drenched pavilion at the back of the main house, I tried to figure out what to do to kill some time. The brunch wedding had been held in the ballroom, but the next one would be out here under a large white tent.
Would it be weird to linger for a few hours even though I wasn’t a guest of the B&B? I could go over to my buddy Zac’s house and hang out with him and his awesome kid, but his fiancée was a high school teacher who’d been bogged down with finals this week, so I figured they’d want to spend the day together.
I meandered over to a group of wicker tables and chairs, considering pulling up my Kindle app and reading the thriller I was in the middle of. The massive pond and trees dripping with Spanish moss would be the perfect setting to read a book about a woman who’d mysteriously drowned in a lake.
I was fairly sure it was her husband who did it, but the writing was good, and there was still a chance it was the creepy sister who’d moved into their house and started raising her nieces and nephews like they were her own.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I smiled when I fished it out and saw my dad’s info on the screen. I set my coffee on the table and slid my thumb across the screen, bringing it to my ear with a chuckle. “Hey, Pops. Perfect timing.”
“Why’s that?” His hoarse voice with its thick Cajun accent came through the line followed by a nasty cough.
The smile fell from my lips, and I looked at my feet, jamming my free hand into my pocket. “Uh, I’m between weddings, so I’m free to talk. And I was bored, so I might as well talk to you, old man.”
“Between weddings, huh?”
“Yeah. This morning’s was a brunch thing, so now I’ve got some free time until the next one. Thankfully they’re at the same venue. That never happens.”
I was used to driving all over the place on the weekends to attend weddings at various venues, churches, or homes. Sometimes I even went to a wedding in one state on Saturday and another one on Sunday, only staying long enough at either one to fulfill the terms of my contract.
It was exhausting. But it was necessary.
“Son, when are you going to stop doing all of this fake date nonsense and find somethin’ real?”
I gulped, the hand in my pocket clenching into a fist. Not this again. “Pops, come on. We’ve talked about this.”
“We sure have. And we’ll keep talking about it. I don’t like this whole thing. It’s all a bunch of lies.”
“It’s not—” I stopped, sucking in a breath of air like it would somehow ease the weight on my chest. It didn’t. “It’s not about the lies.”
“What’s it about then?”
I scrubbed my hand over my mouth, not bothering to answer him. He already knew. Money. Plain and simple. The Marine Corps was an amazing organization that I was proud to be a part of, but they didn’t pay me nearly enough to manage my old man’s medical bills. And since I was the one who’d have to pay them anyway after he was gone because I was all he had left, I didn’t have a choice.
So, after a friend of a friend paid me a few hundred bucks to take her to a wedding so her brother wouldn’t suspect that she was secretly in love with his best friend, a business idea was born. It’d been full speed ahead ever since.
“What about bartending?” he asked. “I bet you could make a killing working at some fancy martini bar.”
“This isn’t New York City, Pops. It’s South Carolina. There are no otherlegalside gigs that would pay this much. Not any that I’d want to do, anyway.”
“Ah, see,” he said, pausing to cough again. “That’s it right there, isn’t it? Youwantto do this. Why not just be honest about it?”
I looked up at the sky, the pale blue a total contrast to the blackened storm clouds hovering around the edges of my mind. “If it’ll make you quit asking me to stop doing it, then fine. Yeah. I like what I do. I like helping these women with whatever it is they need me for. And trust me, you don’t know all the stories I’ve heard. These women aren’t lying to be cruel. Well, most of them, anyway. They have good intentions.”
“You know what they say about good intentions,” he croaked.
Man, he sounded terrible. Something deep inside the walls of my chest cracked as I pictured him sitting in his worn-out La-Z-Boy, oxygen tank at his side, tubes in his nose. I swiped the image away. “Listen, let’s not talk about this anymore, okay? How are you doing?”
