Billionaires, Bad Boys, and Alpha Males (145 page)

“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!”

“You didn’t send her an invitation?
 
Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m positive,” Nicole said.
 

“Well, we only sent out four hundred
invites—who’d have thought one of those random idiots we invited might
leak the story?” he said, laughing again—but not really.

“Please don’t make this worse by poking
fun at me,” she told him.

“Nicole, if I can’t even make a joke
about how badly this whole thing has gone, then what can I do at this point?”

She didn’t have an answer.

Nicole wasn’t in the mood for cake
tasting after that, but she had no choice.
 
Her mother and Marcie drove all the way down from Syracuse for the
appointment, and so she put on her best fake smile and tried to pretend everything
was hunky dory.

The bakery was a cute, small place that
Nicole had found online because of its astounding reviews.
 
Marcie and her mother loved it from the
moment they set foot inside.

The baker was a short, lithe blond woman
with a pastry chef hat and tiny hands.
 
She gestured constantly as she spoke and gave tons of information about
what services she provided.

During a break, the baker went in back
and Nicole took the chance to tell Marcie and her mother about the leaking of
all the important wedding information.