“How did you get mixed up with Allie?” he asked. “You do not look the way I would expect a high-profile Hollywood event planner to look.”
“How would you expect one to look?” she countered, insulted.
“Not, um, wholesome.”
She frowned.
“Take it as a compliment,” he suggested.
She looked uncertain about that, but marshaled herself.
“I’ve run a very successful event planning company for several years,” she said with a proud toss of her head.
“In Los Angeles,” he said with flat disbelief.
“Well, no, not exactly.”
He waited.
She looked flustered, which he enjoyed way more than he should have. She glared at him. “My company serves Moose Run and the surrounding areas.”
Was she kidding? It sounded like a name Hollywood would invent to conjure visions of a quaintly rural and charming America that hardly existed anymore. But, no, she had that cute and geeky earnestness about her.
Still, he had to ask. “Moose Run? Seriously?”
“Look it up on Google,” she snapped.
“Where is it? The mountains of Appalachia?”
“I said look it up on Google.”
But when he crossed his arms over his chest and raised an eyebrow at her, she caved.
“Michigan,” she said tersely. “It’s a farm community in Michigan. It has a population of about fourteen thousand. Of course, my company serves the surrounding areas, as well.”
“Ah. Of course.”
“Don’t say ah like that!”
“Like what?” he said, genuinely baffled.
“Like that explains everything.”
“It does. It explains everything about you.”
“It does not explain everything about me!” she said. “In fact, it says very little about me.”
There were little pink spots appearing on her cheeks, above the sunburned spots.
“Okay,” he said, and put up his hands in mock surrender. Really, he should have left it there. He should keep it all business, let her know what she could and couldn’t do construction wise with severe time restraints, and that was it. His job done.
But Drew was enjoying flustering her, and the little pink spots on her cheeks.
“How old are you?” he asked.
She folded her arms over her own chest—battle stations—and squinted at him. “That is an inappropriate question. How old are you?” she snapped back.
“I’m thirty-one,” he said easily. “I only asked because you look sixteen, but not even Allie would be ridiculous enough to hire a sixteen-year-old to put together this cir—event—would she?”
“I’m twenty-three and Allie is not ridiculous!”
“She isn’t?”
His brother’s future wife had managed to arrange her very busy schedule—she was shooting a movie in Spain—to grant Drew an audience, once, on a brief return to LA, shortly after Joe had phoned and told him with shy and breathless excitement he was getting married.
Drew had not been happy about the announcement. His brother was twenty-one. To date, Joe hadn’t made many major decisions without consulting Drew, though Drew had been opposed to the movie-set building and Joe had gone ahead anyway.
And look where that had led. Because, in a hushed tone of complete reverence, Joe had told Drew who he was marrying.
Drew’s unhappiness had deepened. He had shared it with Joe. His normally easygoing, amenable brother had yelled at him.
Quit trying to control me. Can’t you just be happy for me?
And then Joe, who was usually happy-go-lucky and sunny in nature, had hung up on him. Their conversations since then had been brief and clipped.
Drew had agreed to meet Joe here and help with a few construction projects for the wedding, but he had a secret agenda. He needed to spend time with his brother. Face-to-face time. If he managed to talk some sense into him, all the better.
“I don’t suppose Joe is here yet?” he asked Becky with elaborate casualness.
“No.” She consulted a thick agenda book. “I have him arriving tomorrow morning, first thing. And Allie arriving the day of the wedding.”
Perfect. If he could get Joe away from Allie’s influence, his mission—to stop the wedding, or at least reschedule it until cooler heads prevailed—seemed to have a better chance of succeeding.
Drew liked to think he could read people—the woman in front of him being a case in point. But he had come away from his meeting with Allie Ambrosia feeling a disconcerting sense of not being able to read her at all.
Where’s my brother? Drew had demanded.
Allie Ambrosia had blinked at him. No need to make it sound like a kidnapping.
Which, of course, was exactly what Drew had been feeling it was, and that Allie Ambrosia was solely responsible for the new Joe, who could hang up on his brother and then ignore all his attempts to get in touch with him.
“Allie Ambrosia is sensitive and brilliant and sweet.”
Drew watched Becky with interest as the blaze of color deepened over her sunburn. She was going to rise to defend someone she perceived as the underdog, and that told him almost as much about her as the fact that she hailed from Moose Run, Michigan.
Drew was just not sure who would think of Allie Ambrosia as the underdog. He may have been frustrated about his inability to read his future sister-in-law, but neither sensitive nor sweet would have made his short list of descriptive adjectives. Though they probably would have for Becky, even after such a short acquaintance.
Allie? Brilliant, maybe. Though if she was it had not shown in her vocabulary. Still, he’d been aware of the possibility of great cunning. She had seemed to Drew to be able to play whatever role she wanted, the real person, whoever and whatever that was, hidden behind eyes so astonishingly emerald he’d wondered if she enhanced the color with contact lenses.
He’d come away from Allie frustrated. He had agreed to build some things for the damn wedding, hoping, he supposed, that this seeming capitulation to his brother’s plans would open the door to communication between them and he could talk some sense into Joe.
He’d have his chance tomorrow. Today, he could unabashedly probe the secrets of the woman his brother had decided to marry.
“And
