The Substitute Bride (The Great Wedding Giveaway Series Book 7) (2 page)

Marly must
not
get stuck in Marietta.

“Excellent.  I’ll put out a few feelers, too.  I have a few decent contacts left, I think.” Her mother nodded thoughtfully, gave Marly a slightly abstracted smile, and then she was gone.

Oh, thank goodness
.  Marly waited another second or two, so the door could close completely, and then she dashed to the employees’ bathroom.

She ducked her head, praying she’d make it. She knocked over a pile of papers and a box of pens, and something heavier she hoped wasn’t a laptop.  She flung open the door and found the stall just in the nick of time.

The sickness was violent, but blessedly brief. After a couple of minutes, she rose on wobbly legs, flushed, and let go of her hair, which she’d grabbed in one desperate fist as she bent over the bowl.

Thank goodness, Joey, the Courier’s only other full-time reporter, was filing from home today, and Marly was alone in the office. She had a feeling she’d been loud enough to penetrate even these thick, nineteenth-century walls.

She washed her face and hands, rinsed her mouth about a dozen times, and raked her fingers through her hair. Mascara made dirty tracks under her eyes, and tap water glistened on her lashes.

She grabbed a paper towel and dabbed her face dry. “Guess I’d better start carrying a toothbrush,” she muttered as she pulled open the door and returned to the main office.

And then she clamped her lips shut.  To her horror, she was no longer alone in the newsroom. A man stood just inside the front door, next to the ancient granite counter where locals used to pencil out their want ads, or their ‘found: brown dog’ notices.  Today, most people posted such things on the Courier’s website, but the counter remained, too historic to tear down.

The man must have heard her being sick.  The whole Courier newsroom, from bathroom to front door, wasn’t much bigger than the typical living room.

Maybe he was a total stranger—a passing tourist who didn’t know Marly or her mother. Maybe he was deaf. Maybe he was blind.

But probably not, not with the way her luck was running.  He stood in shadow, backlit by the light from the glass door.  But even the basic outlines told her he was young, with a great body and a thick, healthy head of hair.

“Hello.” She moved toward him, praying the mouth rinsing had done the trick. “May I help you?”

“Yes, actually, you may.” His voice was cool, with undertones of amusement. “If you’ll accept these, and the long-overdue apology that comes with them, it would help me a great deal.”

He was, amazingly, holding out a bouquet of flowers. She moved around the last desk cautiously, trying to get a view that wasn’t in shadow. That voice...  She knew that voice.

When she saw him clearly, she froze in place.

Oh, no
.

Maybe she really was cursed. 

“
Drake Everett
?”

“I’m afraid so,” he said, smiling with the same artless charm he’d always possessed by the gallon. 

Her hand shot to her hair, praying nothing disgusting had flown up and nested in the shoulder-length bob.  She wished she’d bothered to style it this morning. She wished she’d reapplied her melting mascara. If only she’d had more sleep, last night or anytime over the past two weeks. She probably looked as if she’d been tossed out a car window and rolled to the curb.

In a wretched injustice, Drake Everett looked almost exactly the same as when he’d been the eighteen-year-old star of the Marietta High School baseball team.

If she had her mother’s talent, she could have drawn him using only memories, and he would have looked just like the man facing her now. 

He was tall, with broad shoulders, bulked up from all that pitching, but otherwise still slim; as economically muscled as a knotted whip.

Still twinkling out of those blue eyes, as if everything and everyone amused him. His voice still gold and mellow, as if his tongue were made of honey.

A wide, clear brow with that golden-brown hair tumbling over it like handfuls of silk straw. Then wide-spaced, dark-lashed blue eyes, and high cheekbones tapering elegantly down to a chin so beautiful...

She took a breath, yanking her emotional reins.
Absurd
. How could a
chin
be beautiful?

And yet it was. Drake Everett was, without question, the most beautiful man she’d ever met.  He’d made her knees weak when she was seventeen, and he was doing the same thing right now, though she was twenty-seven and seriously down on men.

Of course, she reminded herself tartly, the weak knees might just be a gift from the morning sickness.  And don’t forget...he was also the most
self-centered
man she’d ever met.

Letting the counter remain between them, she glanced at the flowers.  “What are these?”

“Daisies.  From Sweet Pea, down on Main.”  He extended them another few inches.  “At least, that’s literally what they are.  Symbolically, they’re a peace offering.”

“For what?”

“For standing you up.”  He put his free hand over his heart.  “I’m nine years late, Marly Akers, but I wanted to tell you how sorry I am.  It was a low-down, lousy thing to do.”

She frowned, partly because she had no idea what the appropriate response was.  Should she pretend she’d forgotten the whole thing? 

Maybe.  She could have, over nine whole years. 

She could have, and she
should
have.

So he’d asked her out, then stood her up.  So what?  It hadn’t mattered, not in the grand scheme of her life.  Stung a little, that was all.

Unfortunately, she did remember, and with a clarity that made no sense.  Senior year, right after graduation, still in his cap and gown, he’d come up and asked if she’d like to go to a party.  She’d said yes.  Then she’d gone home and combed her closet for a cute dress and sexy shoes, arguing the whole time with her mother about the wisdom of wearing such things on a first date with...
a boy like him
.

And then she’d waited.  And waited. 

She’d stood at her window for hours, ignoring every time her mother came to the door, oozing pity.  Even without turning, she’d known how her mother’s face would look—the same way it had when, at six years old, Marly had secretly mailed a letter addressed to
Marly Akers Father, The Woolfe Den, Marietta
, and then spent the next month watching for an answer that, naturally, never came.

As she stood there, she’d gripped her curtains so long and hard the dye had come off on her palm.  She’d actually been able to feel her curls wilting and her pride bleeding as she slowly comprehended that Drake really wasn’t coming.  That the smoking-hot, uber-cool jock had just been playing games. 

That
boys like him
didn’t date girls like her. 

But that was ancient history. Everybody had one of those stories, right? And hey...compared to being jilted mere days from the altar, the fact that her high school crush had dissed her seemed pretty trivial. 

Still...something about this glib apology, almost a decade later, irked her. He’d always been facile, which had annoyed her even back then, because she’d suspected he had depth, somewhere underneath that silky surface. 

Apparently he was still doing the same slick song and dance.  And he was still holding out the daisies with that rascal’s smile on his face.

“Nonsense,” she said finally. “Those flowers couldn’t have been bought for me. You couldn’t even have known I’d be here.”

His brows arched, touching the silken straws of golden hair. “Why not?”

“Even
I
didn’t know I’d be at the Courier this morning. I just got into town last night.”

“So? If you think the Marietta scuttlebutt machine hadn’t broadcast your arrival by dawn, you’ve been gone too long.” He grinned. “I know all.”

Her stomach squirmed uncomfortably. “
All
?”

“All and then some.” He wiggled his eyebrows like a silent movie villain.  “Let’s see...word is, either you’re running from a two-headed fiancé with six butchered brides in his closet, or you’ve been callously abandoned by said fiancé, even though you’re carrying his two-headed spawn.”

Suddenly dizzy again, she reached out and touched the nearest desk for balance. Drake was teasing, but he must be working with kernels of gossip he’d actually heard. Which meant the grapevine had been uncannily accurate.

Months ago, her mother would have told everyone in Marietta about Marly’s upcoming wedding, of course. She’d been so proud of her successful daughter; the daughter who proved history didn’t have to repeat itself.

She smiled noncommittally. This might be Drake’s way of trying to tease the true story out of her, but she had learned a few things from covering local politics in San Francisco. Chiefly, she’d learned the art of ‘no comment’.

“Interesting,” she said with a small smile. “And which of those lovely scenarios sent you running to the florist to buy me daisies?” 

He tilted his head, letting the flowers drop against the countertop forlornly. “You’re not impressed, I see. Risa—she owns Sweet Pea Flowers—warned me I should spring for the big mother-load of roses. Would that have helped?”

“No.” Marly made a face that said he was being absurd. “I mean, nothing would help. There’s nothing that needs helping.”

Argh
...her head wasn’t clear yet.  She was making a hash of this. “I mean, you don’t need to bring flowers, because I—”

“How about if I throw in lunch? We could go to the Graff, which has become quite posh lately.” He grinned, that lopsided smile that still seemed to infect her lips with the urge to curve back at him. “The food is fabulous—and even more expensive than the roses.”

“Sounds nice. But I’m sorry. I’ve already eaten.” 

The fib made her flush, and she mentally sent a sardonic
gee-thanks
to her mother. A good white lie was one of the basic tools of social interaction, and yet, because of her mother’s obsession with honesty, she’d never mastered the art of telling one.

He let his blue gaze scan her face, and she had to fight the urge to reach up and do a spot check for raccoon eyes...or worse.

“You don’t
look
like you’ve eaten,” he said matter-of-factly.  “Not today, definitely.  And maybe not even this week.” 

He smiled.  “Come on, Marly. Let me dazzle you with how metropolitan Marietta has become while you were gone. And you can tell me all about San Francisco.”

She prevented the knee-jerk answering smile by not meeting his gaze. Instead, she kept her eyes focused just to the left of his ear, toward the rack over which a week’s worth of Couriers had been draped for the public to browse.

She didn’t get it.  Why on earth was he making such an effort to ingratiate himself? They’d been nothing to each other nine years ago, and they were less than nothing to each other now.

Back then, she’d been the editor of the Grizzly Growl, the student newspaper at their high school, and he’d been the hotshot who wrote a sports column.  Not the sports
reporter
, mind you, because he couldn’t be bothered with facts and statistics, and wouldn’t be caught dead at the boring sports, like bowling. 

No, he’d been the popular wise-ass who’d typed two hundred irreverent, opinionated words each week with one finger.  She’d been the Honor Society nerd who’d tried to keep him from libeling the coaches, or slipping in some double entendre she wasn’t always cool enough to even understand.

He’d only asked her out because he’d been ticked off at his current girlfriend, who had gotten herself grounded for having a boy in her bedroom.  A boy who, most importantly, was not Drake.  Word was, Drake had called her a moron and said he was sick of dating females with the intellect of amoebae.

And why had Marly said yes, when she knew she was a rebound pick chosen primarily to make his point about amoebae?  Because she’d been dreaming about him for months, about that cock-eyed smile, and that golden straw hair, that one long, tanned finger punching at the keyboard.

And maybe to annoy her mother, who had been more judgmental and repressive than usual lately. 

And definitely because she’d gotten tired of being the good girl.

But Drake hadn’t showed, and he hadn’t called to explain.  So why come around now, all these years later, offering posies? 

If it had been anyone else, she would have assumed he wanted to be the first to get the dirt, to worm out the details of her story so he could spread them around town. But Drake Everett? Rancher, smart-ass, playboy? What did he care about why boring Marly Akers had quit her job, or how she’d managed to misplace her groom?

“I’m really not hungry,” she said. “Anyway, I shouldn’t leave—”

Mercifully, at that moment the phone rang. She thrust a hand out to answer it, as if the fate of the free world depended on her not letting it ring twice.

Old habits didn’t die, luckily.  Wrong-footed as this conversation had left her, the brain served up the appropriate greeting.

“Copper Mountain Courier,” she announced into the phone.

“Oh, good, Marly, you’re there!”  Her mother sounded rushed.  “I need you to get over to Joseph Butterworth’s law office right away.”

“Um...okay.” She wasn’t quite sure where that was, and she didn’t have her rental car yet.  But she didn’t really care. She glanced at Drake, wondering if her relief showed on her face. “What’s up?”

Her mother related the pertinent details cogently, providing everything important and leaving out anything irrelevant, like the seasoned good newspaper editor she was. Marly listened, jotting down notes. Then she hung up and turned to Drake with a smile.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to go. Breaking news.”

“Really?” He tilted his head skeptically. “It’s been quite a while since Marietta needed to stop the presses.”

“Well, today’s the day.” She hitched her purse over one shoulder, then scraped the front door key from the pen well of her mother’s desk drawer. “Apparently Otis and Erica Applebaum are getting a divorce, and Erica just showed up at his lawyer’s office with a shotgun. She says she’s not letting anyone out until Otis agrees Skippy stays with her.”