far ahead. She went through life like a sunbeam, unconcerned about the details. And now that she was in love…Well, Miranda knew the task of putting together the wedding would fall largely to her. Somehow the details of her family’s lives always fell to her. Always had. In one way or another, they probably always would.
“October?” Erica Hibbard, Miranda’s best friend and most reliable commiserator, looked up from perusing the buffet table, a frown creasing her forehead, a cherry tomato speared on her fork. “But that’s only three months away. It’s impossible to put together a decent dinner party in that length of time, much less a wedding.”
“Try telling that to Ainsley.” Miranda searched the appetizers for something more appealing than a celery stick, but the trays were pretty well picked over already. There would, she decided, be no shortage of vegetables at Ainsley’s wedding. “She and Ivan don’t want to wait. They’ve chosen Halloween as their wedding date and, so far, I haven’t been able to persuade them to postpone their nuptials by so much as a week, much less until next year. No matter what argument I make, neither of them will budge.”
“But didn’t your parents just leave for Sierra Leone? Will they even be back before October?”
“They’ll be home in time for the wedding,” she said, not allowing the sentence to end with a sigh, although she knew Erica would have been very understanding. “Mother told me she knew Baby would be a beautiful bride no matter what the date or the weather. And she trusts me—can you believe she said that?—to help Ainsley put together a lovely wedding.”
“Have you tried talking to Ivan? Maybe he has some sense about the practicalities and can persuade Ainsley to postpone the wedding. Or at least, to choose a date other than Halloween.”
Miranda had to fight the urge to roll her eyes. “Are you kidding? Since they got engaged, he’s been even less sensible than she is.”
“But he’s a doctor…and he just started his job at the new pediatric-research center.”
Lifting an expressive “you-think-I-don’t-know-this?” eyebrow at her friend, Miranda turned back to the depleted appetizer trays. “Nothing will get done if I don’t do it,” she said. “You know that as well as I do. Their wedding could be worse than Scott’s and they wouldn’t even notice.” Deciding against the cherry tomatoes—potentially too messy—she followed Erica along the curve of the buffet table, picking up only two carrot sticks and a tiny flat-looking quiche to place beside the solitary celery stick, with some horrible-looking cheese mixture spread over the top on her plate. “That’s the problem when someone as flighty as my sister falls in love with a man who’s sunny side is always up. Practicality gets smudged in the glow of their rose-colored glasses.”
Erica nodded agreement and ruthlessly stabbed several pineapple chunks in succession, nabbing the fruit just ahead of a solid-looking woman who was wielding a skewer from the opposite side of the table. “You’ll have to handle everything,” Erica agreed with sympathy. “And on such short notice you’ll never get Amy Ellen Vanderley. She’s always booked well in advance. Suzanne Sinclair told me that Millicent Richards has already put her daughter’s name on Amy Ellen’s client list and that child isn’t even out of braces yet.”
“I’m not going to hire a wedding planner,” Miranda said, making the decision on the spot. “I’m going to do it myself.”
Erica stopped in midcapture of a cocktail sausage—Imagine! Cocktail sausages served at a Danville wedding. There would be no such hors d’oeuvre at Ainsley’s wedding. Period. No discussion.—losing the sausage to the skewer by a quarter inch. “Miranda!” she said. “You can’t do it without a professional planner. There’s not enough time. Even you can’t work miracles.”
Actually, Miranda thought she could come close…if she had enough time to make the appropriate lists, hire appropriate help and attend to the details of coordinating all the little items that made up a “miracle.” “I can do better than this—” she gestured broadly at the scanty amounts of food “—in my sleep. And honestly, how hard can it be to plan a wedding?”
Erica’s round pixyish face crimped with worry. “Three months, Miranda. Think how stressed you’ll be.”
Miranda didn’t think she would be that stressed. She loved a challenge, loved being busy, loved proving she could do what others said couldn’t be done. “Stressed is desserts spelled backward, you know,” Miranda said, apropos of nothing. “I’ll be fine.”
“But what about the election?” Erica pressed, moving on down the line to trays that still held a few tidbits of smoked salmon, boiled shrimp and some sort of pâté. “Don’t you need to do at least some campaigning to keep your city council seat?”
Miranda laughed. “The only person in my ward to file against me is Beatrice Combs and everyone knows her only reason for doing it is so she can fuss about the tourists. No one will vote for her. A sitting councillor hasn’t lost a reelection bid in years. I’m not worried.” Picking up the tongs, she captured a skimpy portion of shrimp and dropped it onto her plate. “I have several private landscape-design projects under construction and the one large project still on my desk is an update of the Foundation’s Peace Garden. But my busiest schedule is always late winter, early spring, when people start thinking about new landscaping. I have plenty of time now to plan the wedding.”
“That’s very optimistic of you.”
“No, simply realistic.” She leaned over the table, reaching with the tongs to secure a tasty-looking but rather soggy chunk of the salmon. “Ainsley is getting married in October whether I’m up to my ears in work or just sitting around twiddling my thumbs. I have to plan the wedding, Erica, or it will turn out worse than this one.” She gestured to encompass the buffet tables again to emphasize her point, but the tongs made a sudden metallic clank as they connected with an obstacle of similar size and Miranda looked up just in time to see the chunk of smoked salmon fly through the air and splatter across a crisp white shirtfront.
Embarrassed beyond belief, she sent her gaze up the lines of a funky blue-and-yellow-print tie, past a solid, honest-seeming chin at the base of a charmingly handsome face. A pair of friendly, if somewhat startled, brown eyes met hers and a response as sweet as a hug wrapped around her, followed almost instantly by a quicksilver stab of attraction. He was attractive and the air felt suddenly charged with awareness, making Miranda almost grateful for the swift and distracting infusion of self-consciousness that warmed her cheeks. “Oh,” she said, her voice a breathy rush that couldn’t all be blamed on embarrassment. “I am sooooo sorry!”
His smile curved wryly as he plucked the salmon from where it clung tenaciously, and very messily, to his chest, and dropped it onto his plate. Then he licked his fingers. “In other circumstances, I might be a little upset that my shirt’s messed up,” he said, his voice unoffended and rich with humor. “But considering how hungry I am, I think I’ll just thank you for sharing and ask you to toss over that celery stick.”
She laughed. Breathily conscious of how flirtatious, how not like herself she sounded. “Really,” she said, forcing her voice to a more normal pitch. “I’m very sorry. I don’t know how that happened.”
“Our tongs collided,” he said. “It was fate.”
Fate. He believed it was fate. The thought danced through her mind like fairy dust while she stood there smiling, feeling a loopy impulse to giggle. Except she never giggled, didn’t even know how. “I don’t believe in fate,” she said, gathering some normalcy. “But I do believe in the power of club soda, and if I were you, I’d get some on that shirt before the stain
