Page 100 of How to Say I Do
“Noël!” I stood on my running boards, watching him over the roof of my truck.
He spun, but he didn’t stop moving. He was walking backward away from me and shaking his head as his expression melted from strong-willed and fierce to broken and vulnerable. Two solitary tears rolled down his cheeks. He mouthed,I’m sorry, and then disappeared into the churning morning crowds.
I stood there for a long time, watching the place where he’d been like he would reappear, like he’d come out of the airport and back to me, his cell phone dropped in a trash can. He’d say,You know what, fuck this, let’s drive to Mexico. You and me, what do you say?I’d say,Hell yeah, get in,and we’d drive to Cancun, to our beach, and—
“Sir?” An airport police officer broke me out of my daydream. “Sir, you’re going to need to move along. You can’t wait here.”
I nodded to him and slid back into my idling truck.
I could still smell Noël on me. Our lovemaking was still on my skin. The most melancholy sunrise I’d ever seen sparked on the horizon.
I’m here, Noël. I’ll be waiting for you.
Come back to me.
Please.
CHAPTER26
Noël
“Harrison!”
I squeezed through the gap in the office’s elevator gate and tore across the loft. Harrison was at my desk, standing over my papers and my computer. Dinah was in my chair, clicking on files and opening up emails for Harrison to glower at. She looked like a hostage held captive in a YouTube video, her eyes wide, jaw clenched, one hand trembling over my mouse and keyboard. “Harrison, youhaveto let me explain—”
He whirled. “Explain?” he roared. “You think you can explainthis?” He gestured to my desk, to my torn-apart files and my cracked-open inbox. Papers fell to the floor. My iPad teetered precariously on the edge of my desk. Dinah backed off, wheeling away in slow, unnoticed centimeters.
“What the fuck have you beendoing, Noël?” Harrison left my desk and Dinah behind and advanced on me. “Eliteis furious. You know they’ve paid for the Yarborough wedding, right? You know they getwhateverthey want. Youtoldme you were clearing up whatever the fuck had gotten twisted between you. So imagine my fucking shock when I get a call from the editor-in-chief herself at four in the fucking morning, firing us for failure to perform. Thismustbe a mistake, I said. We’ll clear this right up. But then I went to check on everything that you’ve done, Noël, and what did I find? Nothing! You’ve donenothingfor the wedding! Who is the photographer? Who is the gown designer? Where’s the guest list? Where are the PR plans? The logistical arrangements for the VIPs? Have you booked the A-listers yet? Have you doneanythingat all?”
“Tessa wants her wedding to be small and intimate. There isn’t going to be a large A-list presence.”
Harrison’s jaw turned granite hard. A vein in his temple throbbed.
“The gown designer is a Texas artisan. Tessa picked the dress out herself. And the guest list has been cut to close friends and family only—”
“Are you fuckingkiddingme?”
“—and as for the publicity…”
I faltered.
This was it. I was crashing. That freefall wasn’t glorious, it was terminal velocity. Sometimes during Tessa’s wedding planning, I’d leaped off the top of a skyscraper, and now the ground was coming up fast.
Today was the day all my fuck-ups were going on parade. I hadn’t been able to force myself to talk to Tessa about theElitedeal, or cajole her into a couture gown, or arm-twist her into the A-list, celebrity-festooned wedding of everyone else’s dreams. Tessa didn’t have a clue thatElitewas paying for her wedding—or everything else they were demanding—because I had never told her.
Six months ago, Tessa Yarborough was just a name on a TMZ headline, another link click, another tabloid screamer. I didn’t care about her or what she wanted, and if I ever did hear her name, all I thought about were dollar signs. But now I’d seen her in fuzzy socks with her hair up in a mess, and I’d seen her whittle down a guest list and quietly eliminate people who’d hurt her and had traded on her name and fame. I knew how Tyler woke her up in the morning, and how she helped him grade papers, and that they both liked pizza from the neighborhood place by his apartment. I knew her now, and I knew that most of all, more than anything else, she wanted her wedding, the symbol of the most meaningful relationship in her life, to be her own.
She wanted to run away to the tranquility of Wyatt’s ranch, where she and Tyler could put the finishing touches on their love story surrounded by people who honestly cherished them, and where they wouldn’t have to worry, for at least one perfect day, about the world’s telephoto lens zooming in where it didn’t belong.
My fingernails dug into my thighs. “Tessa doesn’t want anything invasive at her wedding. She’s decided to keep it a closed event.”
“Excuse me?” Harrison hissed.
“So there won’t be any A-listers, or PR events, or photo shoots, or—”
“Tessa doesn’t get to decide that.” Harrison’s voice was low, and his unblinking eyes bored into mine. “Because Tessa hasn’t put up over $10 million to pay for that wedding.”
“It’s her life, Harrison. She does get a choice—”
