at the moment she was less concerned with the details of the wedding venue than the identity of one tall dark and handsome stranger. Laurel had a pretty good idea of the identities of all the guests at her sister’s wedding; after all, Kara had originally run all the guests’ names past her when this was supposed to have been her own wedding.
And the stranger with the dark, exotic good looks hadn’t been on it.
So where did Kara know him from? And why had her sister never mentioned him before?
If she didn’t quit shooting surreptitious glances at the man her sisters would have her married off to him in an instant. And she wasn’t interested in him; she simply wanted to know who he was.
Laurel averted her gaze and watched as Eli took Kara’s hands in his, the gold of their newly donned wedding rings glinting in the late afternoon sun. Unexpectedly her throat tightened.
Oh, no. She wasn’t going to cry!
She’d never been the type to gush tears at weddings…. She always smiled and said the right thing at the right time. So why was she suddenly feeling like this? This wedding was a joyous occasion, not a time to shed tears.
And heaven knew what interpretation people would put on it if she did start to cry. She scanned the enormous number of guests all dressed up and smiling. Laurel could think of at least one or two who would put the worst possible slant on it. Then the damage would be done, and rumors would be rife around the city that she was heartbroken about Kara marrying Eli—after she had broken off her own engagement to him.
Laurel was utterly delighted for them both. She was relieved she wasn’t marrying Eli.
But no one would believe that if she started to weep.
Get a grip.
Her eyes fell onto her mother.
Now there was reason to cry. Elizabeth Kincaid was a legendary Southern beauty. Everyone said she’d have been crowned Miss South Carolina, if she’d ever entered—but soft-spoken, eternally elegant Elizabeth had too much class to enter beauty pageants. Instead, after her family had fallen on hard times, she’d married Reginald Kincaid and become one of the most accomplished hostesses in Charleston and brought cachet to the nouveau riche Kincaid name.
She was smiling as she watched Kara and Eli tie the knot.
Yet the mother of the bride almost hadn’t made it to the wedding. She’d been arrested for killing her husband. The police had believed they’d had enough evidence to make a case. In the past months, in the very darkest moments, Laurel had worried that her mother might actually be convicted of her father’s murder.
But her mother had been cleared.
And now suspicion for her father’s death rested on the brooding half brother Laurel and her siblings had learned about at her father’s funeral. Laurel would never forget that day—or the shock that her father had been living a secret double life for decades.
Now Jack Sinclair sat beside his mother, Angela Sinclair. Her father’s mistress—and life-long love.
On Angela’s other side sat her other son. The Sinclairs had been invited here today because Elizabeth Kincaid believed in always doing the Right Thing—even when it cost her dearly. The contrast between the half brothers was stark. Alan had none of Jack’s dark moodiness. Blond and light, he was like the sun bursting through his half brother’s dark thunder cloud.
Laurel decided she was becoming fanciful.
“You may kiss the bride,” the celebrant was saying.
Eli bent forward, a head taller than his bride, and Laurel found herself looking away to give the couple a moment of privacy. Of course, she looked straight into a pair of dark eyes.
The generously proportioned bedrooms that Laurel, Kara and Lily had once occupied on the second floor of the historic federal mansion had been transformed into an impromptu bridal dressing-room wing for the wedding day. Pausing just inside the doorway of Kara’s childhood room, Laurel took in the leftover feminine paraphernalia scattered around the room.
Open shoe boxes spilled tissue paper over the carpet. A posy abandoned by one of the flower girls lay on the bed. The fine lace veil that Kara had worn for the ceremony was already carefully draped over a chair back. On the dresser, between cut-glass perfume bottles, were four sparkling tulip glasses, and a bottle of champagne chilled in an ice bucket beside the dresser. A good way to calm the bride’s nerves while she freshened up, Laurel decided.
Amidst the mayhem, Kara stood in front of a cheval mirror examining the hem of her wedding dress critically. “I haven’t torn a hole in the hem, have I, Laurel?”
Moving forward, Laurel squinted at the delicately scalloped edge that Kara was holding up. “Not that I can see.”
“Thank heavens.” Relief filled her younger sister’s voice as she let the beautiful white fabric drop. “I thought I might have put a heel through it when I came back down the aisle.”
“Relax. It’s all fine.” Laurel scanned her sister’s face. Kara’s skin glowed, needing no added artifice. The shimmer of eye shadow accentuated her green eyes, but her lips had lost the gloss they’d worn before the ceremony. Laurel’s mouth quirked up. “You make a beautiful bride, Mrs. Houghton—even without touching up the gloss that your groom kissed off.”
It was true. Kara’s radiance had given her the kind of beauty that came from inner happiness. Taking care not to crush the delicate wedding dress, Laurel gave her sister a tentative hug. But Kara had no such scruples and flung her arms around Laurel.
“Thank you, oh, thank you, for jilting Eli!”
Laurel looked into eyes almost the same green as her own, eyes they’d inherited from their mother. “Believe me, if I’d married your groom it would have been the biggest mistake of both our lives.”
It had been one thing to drift into an engagement with Eli, but once the time to plan the wedding had arrived, Laurel had been distressed to discover her heart wasn’t in it.
Instead of daydreaming about wedded bliss, she’d found herself dwelling on how static her life had become.
How predictable.
How boring.
And what it would take to get a life. To her discomfort, writing out lists of wedding guests who’d accepted their invitations to the big day had not even featured.
That was when Laurel had created the How to Get a Life List.
Jilt Eli. Item No. 1 on the List, as she’d started thinking of it, had looked so stark, so cruel when she’d stared at the two words topping the otherwise blank piece of paper, that she hadn’t known if she was capable of breaking off her engagement to Eli.
His feelings would be hurt. Her family would be devastated. But writing it down had brought such a sense of catharsis that Laurel had known she’d had no other choice.
She and Eli were simply not meant to be.
To spare his feelings, she’d told him she couldn’t marry him until the upheaval in her life—her father’s murder, the shocking
