Save the Date (17 page)

“Any guesses why Brooke got her way and hired you?” he asked.

“Because it’s her wedding, and I’m good at what I do?”

“Don’t be naïve,” he snapped. “Brookie is still pissed off that Gordon left Marie for Patricia. She can’t get it into her head that after years of being trapped in a loveless marriage, Gordon actually had the balls to be with a real woman.”

“A real woman named Patricia.”

“Exactly. Yes, Patricia. Who in no way broke up that marriage. Anyway, it’s been ages, but Marie still can’t deal, which means that her daughter can’t deal. And Brookie, PS, doesn’t actually give a rat’s ass about flowers, or any of this. So she’s torturing Gordon with all this wedding crap, just to get back at him. It’s all about retaliation with that girl.”

“Thanks for the backgrounder,” Cara said. “Or, at least, your theory of the background.”

“And I hear you’ve now signed on as wedding planner too. Quite a coup. Let me ask. Have you ever actually planned an entire wedding before?”

She felt her face grow hot. “Obviously.”

“A wedding with a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar budget? With a high-profile client like the Trapnells and Strayhorns? Were you aware that Patricia’s been in contact with
Town and Country
to have the wedding covered by them?”

Cara’s mouth went dry. Patricia hadn’t bothered to mention she was angling for a glossy society-magazine story about her stepdaughter’s wedding, but she shouldn’t have been surprised. The woman was dying for attention.

“As far as I’m concerned, all my weddings are high-profile,” Cara said. “All my brides are incredibly special to me, and I try to give each one exactly the day of their dreams. No matter what the budget.”

“How sweet,” Cullen purred. He glanced over at the table where her order had been assembled.

Cara’s buckets held bunches of cheerful Shasta daisies, red zinnias, yellow gerbera daisies, and Queen Anne’s lace. A grand total of $867, by her calculator.

“Looks like you’re doing a children’s birthday party,” he observed. “Let me guess. Circus theme?”

She chose to ignore the taunt. Instead she pointed at the masses of flowers covering the counter next to hers. It was piled high with exotic flowers, all in vivid tropical shades of orange, purples, hot pinks, and lime green.

“Gypsy wedding?” she asked.

He smiled blandly. “Just a dinner party Patricia is throwing tonight for Alexandra Skouras. Do you know her? She’s the new head of marketing for General Mills. She and her husband Creighton just bought a second home over at Palmetto Bluff.”

“Never met them,” Cara admitted. Or heard of them, she wanted to say.

Her sales rep had finished tallying her order, and silently handed her the receipt.

Ignoring Cullen Kane, Cara checked the total on the receipt against the one on her calculator.

“Looks fine,” she told the young woman, whom she hadn’t worked with before. “Just put it on my account, please.”

“Name?”

“Cara Kryzik. It should be under Bloom.”

The clerk tapped her keyboard, found Cara’s name in the system, but frowned.

“Um. It looks like there’s a hold on your account.”

Cara felt the blood drain from her face.

“Ouch,” Cullen said, under his breath. He gave Cara a mock sympathetic smile, and finally moved back to his own side of the counter. But Cara knew he was watching. And listening intently.

“That’s got to be a mistake,” Cara said quietly.

The girl shook her head. “I only know what’s in the system. This says you’ve got an outstanding balance.”

“Look,” Cara whispered. “I paid that bill yesterday. In full.”

“But it’s not been entered into the system,” the girl said.

“I get that,” Cara said, losing patience. “But the check is probably in your accounting office right now. Maybe it hasn’t been posted yet.”

“Probably not.” The girl shrugged and looked meaningfully over Cara’s shoulder, at another florist, who was hovering nearby with a bucketful of pink and white carnations.

“Okay. So what are we gonna do?” Cara asked. “I’d just write you another check, but I didn’t bring my checkbook with me. I literally just ran over here to get these flowers for the wedding I’m doing tonight. I can come back later. All right?”

“Nope,” the girl said. “Sorry. New policy. I can’t let you take any product out of here until that hold is lifted.”

“This is crazy,” Cara moaned. “I’ve never had this happen before. And I need these flowers.”

“Sorry,” the girl said, but clearly, she wasn’t sorry. She wasn’t even terribly interested in Cara, or her credit hold. “Next.”

The florist with the carnations stepped around Cara, giving her a quick, pitying look, the kind you’d give a crazy bag lady with a shopping cart full of recycling.

But Cara wasn’t budging, and she wasn’t leaving Breitmueller’s without her damn flowers.

“Call Wendy,” she told the girl. “Please.”

*   *   *

Thirty minutes later, they found Cara’s check in a stack of unopened mail on the bookkeeper’s desk.

“Cara, I’m so sorry,” Wendy Breitmueller said. They were sitting in her glass-walled office, located on a catwalk overlooking the warehouse. “Obviously, Janet didn’t handle that very tactfully.”

“No,” Cara said, remembering the looks of pity and contempt she’d been given by the other customers in the warehouse. “She didn’t. I was mortified.”

“She’s new,” Wendy said. “But I’ve explained to her that that’s not how we handle credit issues. You have my promise, it won’t happen again.”

“Hope not,” Cara said, standing. She looked down at her phone. Two texts from Bert had popped up while she was dealing with this latest snafu.

WHERE R U?

And then,
NEED THOSE DAMN FLOWERS.

Wendy followed her to the office door. “I hear business is looking up. You’re doing the Trapnell wedding?”

“Damn!” Cara said. “Word travels fast.”

“It’s a small town,” Wendy said with a smile. “People talk.”

“People like Cullen Kane?”

“I think he’s jealous of you,” Wendy told her.

“Me? I’m no threat to him.”

“Anybody who gets what he thinks he wants is a threat to somebody like Cullen Kane,” Wendy advised. “Remember that.”

21

Bert was standing at the worktable, fastening sprigs of rosemary and daisies together with floral tape. He looked up as Cara came in the door, weighed down with the flowers.

“Thought maybe you’d been abducted by aliens,” he said, putting down the boutonniere he’d been working on. “Everything okay?”

“Grrr” was her only answer. “Ask me later. I’ve got to get moving with these bouquets and arrangements.”

Fortunately, Maya had chosen only two attendants for her wedding. Cara went to work first on the most important bouquet. And as she bunched together the sunny reds, whites, and yellows for the bride’s bouquet, snipping their stems and stripping the lower leaves, she felt her anger and frustration melt away. She reached into the cooler and brought out a handful of lemon leaves she’d trimmed from the tree in the courtyard garden, and tucked the glossy leaves in and around the flowers, turning the bouquet in her hand as she worked, studying it to make sure it worked from all angles.

She put the bouquet down in a Mason jar of water on the worktable, stepped back, and thought. It needed a touch of drama, she decided. After another moment, she walked out the back door into the garden, and stood there, hands on her hips, surveying what she had in bloom.

Finally, she spied the happy green and yellow zebra-striped leaves of the canna plant that had been left behind by a long-ago gardener. Cara wasn’t normally a fan of the lowly canna, but she’d loved this zany striped foliage the moment she spotted it among the weeds and underbrush in the courtyard. With her scissors, she cut two of the long, straplike leaves and brought them back inside.

Bert watched while she split the leaves in half lengthwise, then wound them around and around the bouquet stem, like so much living ribbon, finally fastening the ends together with a large vintage enameled daisy brooch from the 1960s.

“Ohmygod, that’s awesome,” he laughed, when she held the bouquet up for inspection. “It’s so Maya! She’ll love it.”

*   *   *

Maya Gaines knew what suited her. She was Amerasian, petite, just over five feet tall, with a mop of shiny dark curls. Her wedding dress was a short, pale yellow eyelet frock with spaghetti straps and a yellow satin bow at the waist. Her shoes were red ankle-strap heels, and instead of a veil she wore a narrow-brimmed straw fedora trimmed with yellow ribbon and a jaunty red fabric daisy.

She hopped up and down and hugged Cara when she walked into the K of C hall and saw the tables, with their white paper toppers and centerpieces of flowers and candy. Hanging from the ceiling at random heights were oversized red, yellow, and white tissue-paper flowers Cara had assigned for Maya and her sisters to create.

“I love it,” Maya exclaimed, twirling around and touching the Mason jars. “It’s what I dreamed about, only better. Twizzlers! And Pixy Stix! Wait until Jared sees these.”

Cara laughed. “I really don’t think Jared is going to get all that excited about Twizzlers on his wedding day.”

“You don’t know Jared,” Maya replied. “He’s a total candyholic.”

*   *   *

The ceremony was brief, but sweet. Standing before a beaming white-haired Asian man, who Cara later learned was the bride’s maternal grandfather, Maya and Jared pledged to love each other and play nice, and hold hands through every adventure life would bring them.

When they’d exchanged rings and kissed, the crowd of around a hundred in the hall roared their approval and clapped and whistled.

Cara and Bert, who’d stayed for the ceremony, exchanged a look. “What do you think?” Cara whispered.

“They’ll make it,” Bert said solemnly. “She’s a sweetheart, and Jared’s the first non-asshole she’s dated. I mean, they’ve lived together for three years, the whole time Maya was in school.”

Cara raised one eyebrow. “Forever? Really?”

Bert nodded vigorously. “Yeah. A hundred percent. I mean, I wouldn’t want to jinx them, but if anybody can make a marriage work, it’s those two zanies.”

*   *   *

Cara was in line at the buffet, about to serve herself a pig in a blanket from the steam tray, when for some reason, a couple on the dance floor caught her eye. She had to look again.

Jack Finnerty! He wore a dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves, khaki slacks, and a straw fedora not too unlike the one the bride wore. In fact, most of the men and many of the women at the wedding wore hats. It was the new hipster thing, Bert had informed her. He himself was sporting a straw boater.

The girl Jack was with was nearly his height, with long light brown hair. She wore a strapless navy-blue sundress, and she danced effortlessly with Jack, laughing and chattering away as they moved through the crowd on the dance floor.

Bert stood beside her in the line and saw what she was watching. “Hey. Isn’t that the dognapper? Who let him in here?”

Cara shrugged. “He literally knows everybody in Savannah. I don’t know how the man has time to work, in between going to weddings every weekend.”

They found a table near the back of the room; Cara sipped a glass of pinot grigio, and Bert ate what she estimated was his weight in boiled shrimp, pigs in a blanket, and Buffalo chicken drumettes.

“How do you eat like that and never gain weight?” she asked. “I bet you’ve eaten like, twelve thousand calories, just while I’ve been sitting here.”

Her assistant was as tall and gangly as a strand of sea oats, six foot three, weighing maybe 140 on his version of a fat day. He’d died his blond hair purple in honor of his best friend’s wedding, and he wore skinny white jeans, a red shirt, and a narrow yellow tie, loosened at the neck. Bert patted the vicinity of his belly. “I don’t know. I just like food. I guess I like it as much as I used to like Scotch. So now, I eat instead of booze.”

“You’re an exoskeleton, I swear,” she countered.

They stayed until the bride and groom cut the wedding cake, which in their case was actually a huge Key lime pie, and then Cara tried to leave. She’d already stayed longer than she’d planned, lingering only because she was enjoying attending a wedding with a happy, carefree bride and groom—a rarity in her business.

“C’mon,” Bert protested. “Stay awhile. You haven’t even danced with me.”

“You dance? With women?”

He looked around the room. “Sometimes. When there are no other attractive options.”

“Am I supposed to be flattered?”

Still, she allowed him to lead her onto the dance floor, where she tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to match the rhythm of the weird technopunk song the disc jockey was playing.

“I give up,” she said finally, after the third time her sandal-clad foot had been thrashed by another dancer.

She was headed back to her table when a hand touched her elbow. “Quitter.”

Cara turned and found herself facing Jack Finnerty, who was suddenly solo.

“It’s this music,” she said. “I’m only thirty-six, but I totally don’t get it. There’s no beat, no rhythm.”

“There probably is,” he corrected her. “But I think it’s like high-pitched tones only dogs can hear. You have to be under thirty to appreciate this music.”

She gave him a rueful smile. “Your date seems to get it.”

“Date?” He looked around.

“Your dance partner? The girl you were with earlier?”

As soon as she opened her mouth she regretted it. Now he’d think she was watching him. Which she had been, of course.

“The pretty girl in the blue dress?”

“Meghan? You thought Meghan was my date?” He chuckled. “Wow. That really makes me feel like a dirty old man.”

“Aren’t you?” She was making a beeline for the table, intent on getting her handbag and going home.

“Meghan’s my little sister,” Jack said. “Wait until I tell her you thought I was with her, like with her.”

Cara narrowed her eyes. “You’re telling me you have a sister? She wasn’t at Ryan and Torie’s wedding. I know, because she’s so striking, I would have noticed her.”