Page 11 of 4 Weddings and a Feud

Alex groaned and buried his head in his hands. Who could he coerce to manage the party at the last minute?

A brilliant idea struck him, and he raised his face. “Mary!”

“You want me to pray with you?” Yasmin pursed her lips. “You know I’m not Catholic.”

“Not Hail Mary,” he said, though this was a desperate act. “Mary Forza. Get her on the phone, please.”

“On it.” Yasmin went to her desk outside his office, and a minute later, his phone buzzed.

Taking a deep breath, he forced a smile onto his face and picked up the handset. “Mary.”

“Hello, Alex. What’s up?” A keyboard clacked in the background.

“You busy?” he purred like they both had all the time in the world.

“Always,” she said. “It’s Saturday, and we’ve got two bachelor parties tonight, plus some airport transportation. What can I do for you?”

He remembered how she used to gripe about driving people to and from the airport. The drivers earned a pittance for the hours they sometimes waited, especially during times of extreme weather. The Forzas’ cut had to be even smaller. She must not be able to turn down customers. He hoped once she got the planning business off the ground, she could kill off the airport shuttle.

“I have an opportunity for you,” he said. “An event planning gig.”

The keyboard clicks stopped. “You want me to plan an event?”

“Here’s the best part: the event is already planned. All you have to do is execute it.”

“Execute? When?”

He winced. Leave it to Mary to cut right to it. “Tonight.”

“Tonight? What happened? Is Evie sick?”

“Not exactly.”

“Then whatexactly?”

He’d known Mary too long to bullshit her. Alex rubbed the spot over his eyebrow that twinged. “She booked the Richardson wedding into the small ballroom. The small ballroom for a five-hundred-person event! I already freed up a hundred rooms by making a deal with the Bellagio. The goddamn Bellagio! If she’d asked me, I would have shuffled things to free up the grand ballroom, but she didn’t. We argued, and I…I let her go.”

“You fired your event planner over a ballroom mixup. That you could have easily resolved. And you’ve got an event tonight?”

Put that way, it seemed ridiculous. But in the heat of the moment, he’d only seen how Evie never did things his way. Which was the only correct way. “I can’t afford for anything to go wrong with the Richardson wedding.” He had to wrestle back control of this conversation. “Tonight’s event is an anniversary party.” A high-stakes one, but he wouldn’t reveal that. “Look, I’ll pay you five thousand dollars if you can be here within the hour.”

“I don’t know, Alex.” She paused. “My brothers would be on their own tonight.”

Ah. She’d given him the lever he needed. “But I need your help, too.”

She was silent a moment, so he added one more incentive. “I’ll give you credit for the entire event. You can add it to your event planning portfolio.”

“I couldn’t. It would be dishonest to claim that I’d done the whole thing.”

Of course. Mary had always been honest. Incorruptible. That was why he didn’t regret standing her up all those years ago. He’d only have dragged her down into the dirt with him. So he appealed once more to her benevolence. He let his voice go soft, like it pained him to beg. It truly did. “Will you help me? Please?”

“Dammit, Alex.” But he could hear the laughter in her voice. “Toss in a day of spa treatments, and you’ve got yourself a deal.”

* * *

That evening, between the soup course and the entrée, Alex found Mary in the hotel’s kitchen, her dark hair piled on top of her head with a clip and sweat glistening at her temples. Wearing a knee-length black dress with chiffon sleeves that revealed her muscular arms, she stood at the stainless-steel prep counter, loading dinner plates onto a server’s tray. Her shoes were black, too. Sturdy, serviceable, unsexy heels like she’d wear to church. But when she raised up on her toes to lean over the counter to grab a plate, her calf muscles rounded in a way that made him wonder what they might feel like wrapped around his waist.

No, he reminded himself, she was a good girl. Not the kind of woman he dated these days. She was doing him a favor tonight. He’d thrown away his chance for anything else long ago.

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