2 Months 'Til Mrs. (2 'Til Series) (11 page)

“Georgia, you are not going to believe what just
happened,” Catherine whispered, her body hardly even cold yet from the warmth
of Fynn’s clutches. She’d bided her time as long as she could, basking in the
glow of
the ring
, but when he went to start dinner, she ran to the
bathroom to get out of his earshot so she could call her best friend and share
the incredible, unbelievable, delectable news.

“He did it!” Georgia squealed in triumph.

“Wait a second… you know?” Catherine asked, her
excitement noticeably cooled.

“Know what?” her friend pulled back quickly.

“Spill it. Tell me what you know and why.”

“I know nothing—” Georgia hemmed for a mere second before
it gushed out anyway, “—except that he wanted help deciding on the cut of diamond
you would like.” Maybe she thought that the faster it came out the less treasonous
it would sound.

“So you
knew
he was going to ask—”

“But I didn’t know
when
,” she clarified.

“And you didn’t tell me?” Catherine dropped ass-first
onto the toilet in shock, thankful after the fact that the lid was down—
he
always puts the lid down
.

“Really, Cat, you wouldn’t have wanted me to spoil the
surprise.”

“That should have been for me to decide.”

Silence greeted her on the other end as they both
realized the impossibility of what she’d just said. Ridiculous or not, though,
her friend’s loyalty to the other side could have cost her the chance to become
Mrs. Trager at all.
I almost F’d the whole thing up! If I’d known it was
coming, I never would have dumped him. And I wouldn’t have spent my New Year’s moping….
To think I could have ended up single forever all because my best friend doesn’t
know proper etiquette about spilling the beans.
It is quite clearly in the
girlfriend code from the moment girls become boy crazy that anytime a friend
knows of a boy who likes, plans to ask out, plans to break up with, or of
course plans to
propose
to her friend, she is supposed to tell her.
Maybe
I should get her a handbook about these things.

“I just can’t believe you would keep something like
that from me,” Catherine muttered.

“You act like I took the easy way out. God, Cat, I
have been absolutely
dying
. And when I saw you at your parents’ the
other day I almost lost it. I even called Fynn in a panic.”

“You called him?”

“Well, you were acting so weird. I was sure that
something had backfired. I was going to give him a piece of my mind, but he
still hasn’t returned my call. Tell him to check his voice mail in the future. Except
for that last call—I guess he isn’t actually dead to me, considering—”

“You didn’t say that!” Catherine breathed, unwilling
even now to admit what actually happened over the weekend.

“Of course! I had your back. But now you’re there and
everything is fine and—tell me everything!” Georgia gushed, onto the more
important things like the what, when, where of the proposal.

Catherine froze, realizing there wasn’t much that she
wanted to share when it came to the nitty-gritty of the event. Hissy fit about
missing her flight? No. Fainting? No. This went nothing like Georgia’s perfect
engagement story—on one knee at The Met because, as Thomas said, Georgia is a
work of art that surpasses anything on display in a museum. Corny but
exquisite.

“Well?” Georgia prodded impatiently.

“I was getting ready to leave and he asked me to
stay—forever,” she paraphrased.

“Oh my God, how beautiful!”

It really is… when you put it that way.

“And the ring?”

“It’s gorgeous!”

“Isn’t it?” Georgia agreed.

“Wait a minute, you’ve seen it already?” Catherine
challenged, seething. Part of this whole engagement thrill was unveiling
the
ring
.

“I told you, he asked me what kind you would like.
Remember a few years ago when we stopped at that café and you saw that woman
with the amazing engagement ring? You said
that
was something you could
wear for the rest of your life.”

Catherine looked at her hand, realizing that this was
indeed just like the one she’d seen.

“He wanted it to be something you would love forever
and he—”

“Doesn’t know me well enough to know what that is,”
Catherine finished for her, feeling squeamish.

“No guy knows his woman well enough to know that.”

“Thomas did.”

“Only because we talked about marriage until we were
blue in the face even before we got engaged. He’s a planner, remember? We
shopped for a ring together…. You got the real fairytale surprise,” Georgia
said, a touch of envy in her words.

Catherine was silent, unsure what to say to that. Sure
every girl loves a good fairytale, but marriage was
real
. Georgia and
Thomas had dated for
two years.
You could know volumes about someone in two
years, and you certainly couldn’t hide much in that amount of time. She was
capping out an eight-month relationship that whittled down to less than eighty actual
days with the guy.

“So when is this fine event going to happen?”

“I don’t know.” Catherine was hardly paying attention,
trying to calm her sudden onset jitters by focusing on
the ring
as she
wiggled her fingers in the glow of the vanity light. The glory of diamonds! She
had never owned or even worn them before in her life. She’d been saving herself
for marriage.

“Well, let me remind you that I need time to get into
bridesmaid shape, so fair warning would be appreciated.”

“Maid of honor shape,” Catherine corrected, suitably
dazzled out of her nerves.

“Really?” Georgia shrieked. “But what about Tara,
isn’t she going to be pissed?”

“Seniority rules. You’ve been putting up with me for
way longer. Besides, we made that pact well before I even met Tara.”

“Penn State Homecoming, junior year,” Georgia
squealed.

“When we were
so
sure
Chad Beaumont was
going to be
the
one
and you were going to carry his Beaumont
babies!”

“Thank God for birth control… and for that skank who didn’t
know how to lock a door,” Georgia said of the girl she caught screwing Chad in
his Presidential Suite in the Phi Gamm house during a toga party. It was a
crushing cliché. The maid-of-honor pact was all that had survived that
relationship. “You know, I heard he’s on his second marriage already.”

“I’m sure number two is just lovely,” Catherine
snorted.

“Oh, sure.”

She could hear the eye roll in Georgia’s words. “And speaking
of seconds, Tara can have my
next
wedding.”

“I’m sure she’ll be thrilled.”

“She’ll probably think she actually has a chance,”
Catherine chuckled derisively.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Georgia admitted before
seamlessly slipping into her latest role like it was made for her. “So when are
you going to be back in town so we can start getting to work on this thing?”

Catherine heard the knock at the bathroom door like it
was a gunshot to the head and she literally ducked down, taking cover.

“Are you okay in there?” Fynn asked from the other
side.

“Yeah!” she choked out. “I was just… caught up…”
Oh
my God, it sounds like I’m constipated!
“… in this article…” she corrected.
And now he thinks I’m reading on the toilet!
She cringed. In all these
weekends she had been careful to avoid bathroom-related talk at all, basically
living as if her body didn’t evacuate waste. She flushed the toilet and whispered
into the phone, “I’ve got to go.”

“Are you going to the bathroom?” Georgia asked, the
eew
in her voice unmistakable.

“I’m
in
the bathroom—for privacy,” she
whispered.

“Dinner’s ready!” Fynn hollered. “Why don’t you tell
Georgia you’ll call her in the morning?” And then his footsteps retreated to
the kitchen.

“I gotta go,” Catherine said guiltily.

*****

She watched Fynn washing dishes at the sink, a
dishtowel slung over his shoulder, when suddenly it hit her, “What am I going
to tell my parents?” she blurted out, almost dropping the basket of leftover
dinner rolls on the floor at her feet where Magnus would have vacuumed them up
in one swallow. He had come to learn she was an awful klutz, the weakest of the
humanoids in his midst, so he shadowed her every move when food was about.

“Excuse me?” Fynn asked, shutting off the faucet and
turning to her.

“My parents….” 

“What about good old William and Elizabeth Hemmings?”
he sighed lightly, leaning back against the counter in expectation of a tirade
or a meltdown or some such Catherine-esque reaction.

“What am I going to tell them? They’re going to think
that I’m nuts—that we’re nuts,” she said, complete with flighty hand motions
that had Magnus’s head spinning as he watched the basket like a hawk.

“Tell them that you’ve decided to stop giving the milk
away for free. I think they’ll appreciate that,” he said playfully.

“Fynn!” she exclaimed.

“Then tell them that you
are
totally nuts and
so am I and together we plan to live happily ever after… in our own little
nuthouse.”

“Can you ever be serious?”

“I guess I just don’t see the problem here…. Mom, Dad,
I’m getting married—seems pretty simple and straightforward to me.”

“But—” She looked at him, a deer in the headlights.
“—the last they heard we’d broken up.”

“You told them?” he asked, genuinely surprised.

“My mom pried it out of me. She’s like that,”
Catherine said, absolving herself of any blame in the matter.

“Regardless, I think that Elizabeth and William
Hemmings can handle the turn of events.”

“My parents are very… traditional people. Very slow
and plodding and careful.”

“Did you ever wonder if you were switched at birth?”
Fynn joked.

She looked at him tightly, seeing as how that very
thing had poked at the back of her mind her entire life. She didn’t seem to
have any of the
steadiness
that the Hemmings clan had. But regardless of
any hospital mishaps, these people were her parents as far as her birth
certificate was concerned… so nothing was going to get her out of sharing the
news with them.

“I think you’re underestimating them,” he assured her
when he couldn’t coax her out with a smile.

“I—I just kind of figured that my husband-to-be would
ask my dad—”

“For a goat… a heifer… perhaps some land?”

“For my
hand
,” she admitted firmly.

“You aren’t eighteen anymore, you know… or twenty-two…
or twenty-five, or even twenty-nine.”

“No need to grotesquely overstate your point,” she
groused. “And don’t forget, neither are you.”

“I’m just saying that I think that the choice is yours
at this stage of the game—at least that’s what he said.”

“It’s a symbolic—” But she stopped as his words
registered. “He who? Did Connor give you his advice on this? You know, Connor
might be smart, but he is also a total idiot—common-sensically challenged.”

“I don’t think that’s a word.” He scratched his head
in exaggerated befuddlement.

“Oh, you know what I mean.” She waved him off,
semantics a nuisance when she was making a point.

He shook his head slowly, piteously. “Well, I was
talking about your father anyway.”

“When did my father say that?”

“When I asked him for your hand, milady,” he said,
literally bowing before her.

“You asked him?” Utter disbelief.

“Yes, I asked him.”

“When? How?”

“A few weeks ago. I called him.”

She stared back at him blankly like she couldn’t
understand.

“On the phone,” he added, enunciating carefully and holding
his hand up to the side of his head to pantomime the process that seemed to be
stymieing her so.

“But my dad can hardly use a phone. Did he even know
what you were asking?” Talking to her dad long distance was like being trapped
back in the days of tin cans and strings—something he would likely prefer to
cordless phones.

“Actually, first he thought I wanted to make a band of
merry men. I think he thought I was inviting him to join. But then I used a
translator and—”

She gasped. “Not my mother!”

“I’m just joking, jeez. Chill. I talked to him. I
asked him. He said fine. Whatever makes his little girl happy—”

“Makes him poor.”

Fynn cocked his head in confusion.

“That was what he always said when I asked for stuff
when I was growing up… right before he forked over the dough.”

“Perfect,” Fynn snickered, like what she’d just said
explained her wicked entitlement streak—to his attention, affection, and
all-encompassing understanding. “You are a spoiled-rotten daddy’s girl.” The
truth painfully obvious now.

“So why didn’t you just say all this from the
beginning? Why did you let me go on and on for nothing?”
And why didn’t Dad
say anything when I was home on New Year’s Eve? Did he tell Mom? Would he have
really let me throw all this away after giving his blessing?

“I get sick joy out of watching you justify yourself.”
He shrugged.

“Don’t make fun of me.”

“Aw, come on. What do you think drew me to you in the
first place? It certainly wasn’t your rational, even-keeled, proper ways,” he
said with a grin. “No, it was the petite little city girl who crashed her way
into my house and demanded what she wanted when she wanted it and to hell with
everyone else.
That
is what I love about you. You are so—”

“Completely insane?” she offered.

“Completely vested—”

“I don’t know shit about finances.”  

“Vested in
life
,” he said earnestly.