Page 23 of Hopeless Romantic
“I could use some good news.”
Annie steepled her hands. “It’s great news. Amazing, really. Now that I know there’s an upcoming opening in your calendar.”
Suspicion tingled. “An opening that requires a family-sized box of bribes from Holy Cannoli?”
“A box of celebration,” Annie said with barely contained excitement. “Emmitt and I want to hire you.”
“You want to hire me?” They’d hired her to fulfill some pretty bizarre requests in the past, including tailing Paisley after the winter ball and transforming a canoe into a gondola to take the couple down the river when he proposed. None of those had required a chocolate bribe. “Is this one of those ‘drop your keys in the fishbowl’ kind of offer?”
“Nope.” Annie tapped the lid but made no move to open it. It was like staring into Pandora’s box. Once opened, it would unleash chaos into the world, and that was the last thing she needed right then.
“Then what’s with the bribe?”
“No bribe. Just something to help celebrate our partnership,” Annie said with a smile sweet enough to cause a bellyache. “After you agree to be our wedding planner.”
“What?” Gregory squawked at Beckett’s high pitch, then fluttered to the ground to peck at a dust bunny that had caught his attention. “You want to hire me, Cupid’s kryptonite, to plan your wedding?”
“Absolutely.” Annie sounded so confident, panic wove its way around Beckett’s chest.
Planning a wedding was a huge commitment. Planning the wedding of a perfectionist was asking for trouble. It took someone with an open schedule and no other distractions, someone who could be available at a moment’s notice. Not an errand girl who disappeared at the ping of a text or walked around with chicken feathers in her hair.
Bottom line, Annie needed someone with an eye for detail, a gentle touch. Beckett was more of a sledgehammer-through-Sheetrock kind of operator. Shit got done, but it wasn’t always pretty.
“Not only do I lack the necessary style and qualifications to plan a wedding, but the last wedding I attended included me sneaking out the bathroom window of a church in a borrowed dress.”
It hadn’t helped that she’d attended the wedding with a guy who’d made her believe that one day they might be the ones walking down the aisle. That even though her life was chaotic, she was worthy of a man who would go that extra mile. Pete was winded by lap one. He’d started dragging his heels shortly after, then tapped all the way out before they’d even had a chance to hit their stride.
Turned out she was only worth the extra mile if it wasn’t uphill or riddled with any of life’s speed bumps. And Beckett’s life had more obstacles than a preschool parking lot at pickup time.
“I disagree,” Annie said simply. “I need help finding vendors. You are the walking equivalent of Rome’s yellow pages. I work most days. You’ve been trying to get more daytime clients. I need a wedding planner I can trust. You want to expand your business and take on bigger projects.”
“Not by using my friend’s wedding as a trial run!”
“You have to start with someone’s event. Why not mine?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of working with a few smaller hotels in town. Assisting their guests, arranging for transportation, things like that. Not picking out centerpieces.”
“You can assist my guests, arrange for transportation, and this is a centerpiece-optional kind of wedding,” she said. “I’m already so wound up about weddings, I’d rather give up pizza for the rest of my life than go through this process with a stranger. You know me, know what I like, and who else would I want by my side if Emmitt reneges?”
“No way would Emmitt ever stand you up,” Beckett reassured her.
“Because he loves me, or because you’d kill him?”
“Both.”
Annie laughed, but Beckett was feeling too apprehensive to join her. Mixing business and friendship rarely turned out well. Especially when said friend was a perfectionist.
“You don’t even need a planner,” Beckett pointed out. “You’ve been planning your wedding since you were a kid. You have a twenty-pound binder of pictures and magazine clippings. It’s literally the perfect wedding.”
“And someone else walked down the aisle in a knockoff of my dream dress.”
Right.There was that.
Annie’s ex-fiancé didn’t only dump her a few months before the wedding. He repurposed the venue, the date, the honeymoon, the entire wedding, all the way down to the carrot cake. He only swapped out the bride.
“Whenever I think about planning my wedding, I break out in hives.” Annie pulled up the sleeve of her sweater. Little red lumps dotted her forearm. “I’m not worried about getting married. Only the planning part.”
“Have you thought of eloping?”
