For His Trust (12 page)

This was too much. And now she was supposed to sit and wait like a good little girl for her man to come home and give her his excuses again, and again, and again.

No. She was really and truly sick of being kicked around today. Nicole walked upstairs with a purpose and grabbed the stack of papers that Red had printed out and left on the desk.

Next, she went to the office and began faxing them over, en mass, to Marcie.

Nicole called Marcie a few minutes later and left her a voicemail. “Hey Marcie, it’s Nicole. Looks like the wedding is going to be quite a bit bigger than originally anticipated. I’m faxing you Red’s guest list now and it’s quite extensive. I’ll be sending you a follow up email with my list attached.”

She got on her laptop and spent the rest of the afternoon adding every single friend and family member to her list.

Pointedly and with great self-righteousness and indignation, Nicole left Danielle off her guest list. Danielle would not be receiving a wedding invite. Nicole knew it was a loud an irrevocable message on the state of their friendship, but at that moment she didn’t particularly care.

Marcie called back soon after and said that she was sending it all over to the vendor who was handling the printing and mailing. It looked like there would be just over four hundred people invited to their wedding now. Of course, many of them wouldn’t be able to attend on such short notice. Marcie said that they should plan for something on along the lines of three hundred guests.

***

Red texted her once, around six o’clock and said that he loved her and that he’d be home in the next two hours.

She didn’t respond. It was too little too late, as far as she was concerned.

Instead, Nicole made herself dinner (steak and corn and potatoes), drank a glass of wine, and settled down on the couch with a book.

At just past eight thirty, Red came home. “Nicole?” he called, wandering through the house until he found her in the living room. He smiled warily. “Hey, didn’t you hear me calling you?”

She looked up from her book briefly. “I heard you.” She went back to reading.

“So, I brought home food from a great burger joint and I figured we could make it a working dinner. I’m ready to hammer out this guest list thing.”

“It’s already done,” she said, still not taking her eyes from her book.

“What do you mean, it’s already done?”

“I sent out the list to Marcie hours ago.”

“But how?”

“I just sent it.”

“Nicole.” His voice grew firm, insistent. “Nicole, look at me.”

She looked up at him, defiant. “Yes?”

“I want you to tell me just what’s going on right now. I see that you’re angry with me, and I understand why. But you need to communicate to me what’s going on.”

She put the book aside and sat up. “It’s really simple, Red. You kept pushing me aside over and over again, and you refused to help me. So I just did what I needed to do to get these invitations out. I used the list you’d printed and we went from there.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “How could you possibly do that? There were hundreds of names and addresses in that list and we’re only having fifty people in our wedding.”

“Not anymore. I decided to change that.”

Red’s expression changed, darkened. “You just made a unilateral decision?”

“Just like you do all the time. Leaving the house when something’s more important, even though you promised to be here for me and discuss our wedding. Putting your assistant on your cell phone so I can’t reach you. There’s lots of things you do that I don’t understand or like very much.”

“Gia was answering my phone today for about half an hour when I couldn’t, and she never told me you called.”

Nicole shrugged. “That’s some assistant you’ve got there.”

“You hired her. Or did you forget that part?”

“I don’t want to argue, Red. I made a judgment call. I just went with your whole list and I invited everyone on my side. So now we’re having a very large wedding.”

He stared at her, incredulous. “Nicole, that’s not going to happen. We cannot send out all of those invitations. There are people on that raw list that would be totally inappropriate to send an invite to. Clients, friends I haven’t seen in a dozen years, vendors that work with Jameson International, you name it. That’s why I wanted to sit down tonight and go through it with you.”

“You want me to cancel the damn invites?” she said, her voice rising.

“Yes.”

“Fine.” She grabbed her phone and called Marcie. Of course, it went to voicemail. “Hi Marcie, it’s me—Nicole. I really need to make a change on those invites, so could you call me back as soon as you get this, please?”

When she hung up, Red began pacing. “This is totally ridiculous. I wish you would have told me you were so upset, Nicole.”

“I did tell you. I tried over and over again to tell you and you kept ignoring me.

It’s not fair.” The tears stung her eyes and she was angry with herself for being a crybaby yet again.

Red shook his head. “I’m sorry that I wasn’t available, that I dropped the ball on this. But that doesn’t mean you go out and try and take revenge on me by sabotaging our wedding.”

“Me, sabotaging our wedding? You left me hanging in the breeze,” she said, getting off the couch, taking her phone, and walking out of the room.

“Nicole!” he called after her.

“Just, please leave me alone!” she called back, and went to walk the property.

During her walk she called Marcie over and over again, to no avail—and she even sent an email just in case Marcie couldn’t get to her phone for some reason. Then Nicole tried her mother. Her mother said she was in bed and didn’t have time for hysterics (even though Nicole was mostly calm by that time). She assured Nicole that Marcie would call her back soon and not to worry.

When Nicole got home from her walk, she was a bit more in control of her emotions. Red was having a beer on the verandah.

“Hey,” she said.

He stared outside and nodded. “Hey.”

“Isn’t it funny how we have this huge mansion but we only use a few of the rooms?” she said.

“That’s hilarious,” he said, without smiling.

“Red, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I freaked out.”

Red turned to her. “I just wish you’d held off on doing what you did. I mean, I trusted you.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’ll fix it.”

“How?”

“I’m going to get in touch with Marcie and have the order stopped and changed.”

“But she hasn’t called you back yet?”

Nicole shook her head. “Maybe she fell asleep early. As long as I get her by the morning we should be fine.”

Red took a long pull from his beer. “Man, what a day.”

“Can I sit with you?”

He nodded, and she came and sat beside him. Soon they were holding hands and even though she knew everything wasn’t back to being okay—at least it was a start.

***

That night they went to bed together and Nicole slept curled in Red’s arms. There seemed to be an unspoken agreement not to discuss any of the wedding stuff and just be good to one another.

The next morning, Red was off to work before six a.m. The only thing he said before leaving was that she should call him with any “important updates.” And then he hugged and kissed her and told her he loved her.

Nicole was anxious enough after he left to put in an early morning call to her wedding planner and send another email marked urgent.

Two hours later, she still hadn’t heard back.

Now she called her mother again, this time at work, and asked if she could swing by Marcie’s house on her lunch break. Her mother said that she would, but called back later to report that Marcie wasn’t home and hadn’t called her back either.

Nicole was partly worried that something had happened to Marcie, partly worried that the woman was just a total fruitcake, and also annoyed that nothing could seem to go right in regards to this wedding.

She also knew that if Marcie had actually put in the rush order yesterday, then in all likelihood the place would be printing and possibly sending them out by now. A few more hours and it would be too late to take it back.

Marcie called her at just after five p.m. “Oh, honey, I can’t tell you how absolutely terrible the last fifteen hours of my life has been,” she said, to start the conversation off.

“Are you okay—is everyone all right at your house?” Nicole said.

“Well, they are now. But it was touch and go for a while there. First off, I lost my phone—or it was stolen. I’m not sure which. My husband and I went out to eat last night and I realized I’d left my phone in his car in the parking lot. So I went out, assuming it would be on the seat or whatever—and nothing. At first I thought it must be somewhere else, but then we started looking and looking and it just never did turn up.”

“Wow,” Nicole said, swallowing her annoyance. She wasn’t even sure she believed what this woman was telling her.

“And you know I would have checked my voicemail from my hubby’s phone, or checked email from my computer, but then Harold started having chest pains on top of everything else. And he’s got a heart condition, mind you.”

“Is he okay?”

“We had to go to the emergency room and then they ran him through so many tests…at one point it seemed certain he’d had a heart attack. But by early this afternoon they seemed pretty sure that he was okay and I could take him home. But I had to stop off and fill some prescriptions for this new medication they put him on and then I went out and immediately bought a new phone.”

“Did you get my messages?”

“I did, honey and I put in a call to the vendor.”

“They’ve already sent them out, haven’t they?” Nicole said, already knowing the answer.

“I’m so, so sorry, sweetie. I wish I could take it back. I really do. But it was just a run of bad, awful luck.”

Nicole sighed, her brow furrowed, thinking. She didn’t honestly know what to do now but just accept that it had happened and it was a disaster. Mostly, it was her own fault. Had she not been angry and impulsive, they wouldn’t be in this situation. “Well, I’m just glad your husband is okay,” she said, finally. “Health is the most important thing.”

“So true, dear. So true. And I know, having a sick husband, just how true those words really are.”

***

When Red came home that night, Nicole told him about her call with the wedding planner and he listened with a skeptical expression. After she was done explaining, he said, “Do you believe her?”

Nicole shrugged. “I honestly don’t know what to believe right now. Do you?”

He smiled slightly. “It’s kind of a stretch, but anything’s possible.”

“What reason could she have for not cancelling the order?”

He laughed. “Plenty of reasons. Maybe she gets a kickback from the vendor on big orders. Maybe because she knows that the more people there are at this wedding and the bigger it is, the more her stock goes up when she says she planned it on her resume and website.”

“Or maybe she lost her phone and her husband got sick.”

Red smiled. “Wedding pictures on her site will look a heck of a lot more impressive when there’s a huge crowd in attendance.”

“I blew it and it’s all my fault. Let’s just call a spade a spade,” Nicole said.

Red didn’t reply. He just gave her a meaningful look.

“Oh, so you do think it’s all my fault,” she said, suddenly angry and guilty all at once.

“I didn’t say anything. I think I’m being pretty nice about the whole thing, considering we just went from a little intimate wedding with our closest friends and family to becoming Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Maybe we should just invite the paparazzi in while we’re at it.”

“Fine with me,” Nicole said. “I’m not ashamed to be marrying you.”

He made a disgusted face. “Don’t pull that crap with me, Nicole.”

“What crap?”

“Ashamed to be marrying you? Seriously? Is that the best you’ve got?”

“I’m not trying to prove I can keep up with you in the witty banter department, Red. That’s not one of my life goals.”

He shook his head and walked away from her.

She wanted to yell and scream and get his attention, but it was a lost cause.

This stupid wedding had nearly ruined everything.

***

A couple of days had gone by and things hadn’t gotten any better between them.

Red was immersing himself in work and Nicole was still planning their wedding, which had now become so elaborate and expensive that it was defying explanation and reason.

Simply having the deposit in for the venue, the booze, the catering, the tables and chairs and custom decorations—all of it had become an issue because everyone needed the money yesterday.

She’d lost track of how many times she’d been told that large weddings like this were usually planned further in advance.

It became embarrassing to keep going to Red for a new series of checks to be written for the gigantic wedding that he didn’t approve of and she didn’t truly want.

Finally, he’d just handed her his checkbook and told her to “have a party.”

But she wasn’t having a party—quite the opposite, in fact. She felt sick and depressed and out of control, both of her wedding and her relationship.

Nicole thought that at least the worst of it was hopefully over, but she was wrong.

The morning of her cake tasting at Lady Cakes Bakery with her mother and Marcie—

things actually, somehow, got worse.

Red came into the bathroom while she was putting on makeup and handed her his phone. “Well we just got the biggest leak of them all,” he said, almost sounding proud of it, as Nicole looked at the screen.

There was yet another article in The Rag that revealed not just the date and time of their wedding, but the location as well. It went into detail about the kind of huge event the wedding would probably be, and of course made plenty of fun of Red and Nicole and the notion that the wedding would probably last longer than the marriage itself.

“I’m even impressed at just how badly our privacy has been compromised,” Red laughed. “I mean, this is a whole new level.”

Nicole bit her lip and tried to steady her nerves. “I don’t understand how this happened. I thought Danielle was the leak!”