Piece of Cake E-Book

Mary Calmes

• Herausgeber: Dreamspinner Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 95

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

A Matter of Time Story After years of domestic partnership, Jory Harcourt and Sam Kage are finally going to make it official in their home state of Illinois. It's been a long and rocky road, and nothing—not disasters at work, not the weather, not a possible stalker, not even getting beat up and having to attend the ceremony looking like he just got mugged—will make Jory wait one more day to make an honest man of the love of his life. Should be a piece of cake, right?

Leseprobe

Piece of Cake

By MARY CALMES

After years of domestic partnership, Jory Harcourt and Sam Kage are finally going to make it official in their home state of Illinois. It’s been a long and rocky road, and nothing—not disasters at work, not the weather, not a possible stalker, not even getting beat up and having to attend the ceremony looking like he just got mugged—will make Jory wait one more day to make an honest man of the love of his life.

Should be a piece of cake, right?

Chapter One

IT WAS my wedding day, so of course, Sam Kage, the love of my life, was standing in the middle of our quiet suburban street in a navy three-piece suit with a yellow tie and a gorgeous yellow orchid boutonniere with his foot on the jugular of a guy who’d just tried to shoot me.

The gun, equipped with a suppressor, was now in the hand of police Lieutenant Duncan Stiel, a friend and guest at my ceremony, who had picked it up using paper towels from my kitchen. He was currently standing there, also in the middle of the street, looking stunned as Sam reminded him that this was par for the course with me. Duncan’s husband—my ex, billionaire real estate mogul Aaron Sutter—was looking at me and shaking his head.

“What?”

He lifted his hands in total disbelief. “Who gets shot at on their wedding day?”

“This is not my fault.”

His squint told me he didn’t believe me.

“I—”

“Jory, goddamnit!” Sam bellowed from the road as we all heard the sirens.

I turned from Aaron to him. “How is this my fault?” I called over.

“I’m going to beat you!” he threatened, and his snarl was only made slightly less terrifying because he was in the suit we’d bought specifically for this occasion, for our wedding. The man was stunning, just the power radiating off of him making me want to run out there into the street and climb him like a tree. And since he was supposed to exchange vows with me in less than ten minutes, it was hard for me to take the threat seriously.

“We’re still getting married, right?”

ORIGINALLY WE were going to exchange vows on the same day as Duncan Stiel and Aaron Sutter and have a big party together, but the more planning meetings I had gone to with my ex, the more I realized his ideas of “intimate” and “just family and friends” were completely different from mine.

“You’re an idiot,” I told him as we drove home from an appointment with a two-hundred-dollar–an-hour event planner.

“Oh,” he said, inhaling sharply, clutching the handle above his head in my van, his other hand braced on the dash. “You know the posted signs on the side of the road aren’t a suggestion of speed limits, right? Those are for you to follow?”

“What?” I asked, turning to look at him.

“No-no-no,” he snapped, lifting his hand from the dash to point at the road. “All eyes on traffic, please. I really don’t want to die before I get a ring on Duncan Stiel’s finger.”

“He already wears a ring,” I reminded him. “With a huge-ass diamond in it, I might add. You guys got married in New York, what, two years back?”

The sound he made—half squeak, half gasp—was kind of funny. “I think that was the reddest light I’ve ever seen.”

“How can a light be more or less red?” I asked, my eyes on him.

“Don’t look at me! Look at the road!”

“You make no sense,” I assured him.

“It was a figure of––God! The lights are there for a reason!”

“I was halfway through the intersection,” I argued. “You don’t turn back.”

“You gunned it through the intersection! Jesus, don’t kill me!”

“I’m not going to kill you,” I said snidely as we were nearly sideswiped by an eighteen-wheeler while getting onto the Stevenson.

“I think I need new underwear,” he said with a gulp.

“Knock it off,” I groused, getting in a lane only to have to hop back out when another guy didn’t see us at all and tried to merge. “And stop kidding yourself about having just a big party for you and Duncan,” I pressed, glancing at him.

“The road, the road!”

“You need to have a big, lavish wedding, invite everyone you know, and make it the social event of the season. You know you want to—embrace your inner diva, Sutter.”

“I’m sorry?” Could he have sounded any more indignant?

I snorted. “Just do it.”

“But I was under the impression that if we didn’t have the party with you and Sam that he then didn’t want to celebrate a wedding.”

“Who told you that?”

“Duncan.”

“No.” I shook my head. “You’ve been misinformed. Sam’ll marry me again in our backyard and we’ll both wear suits and it’ll be a totally low-key deal. You have the diamond-encrusted forks at yours, okay? We’ll still come.”

He cleared his throat. “I’d like you to be my best man.”

“Awww,” I sighed, turning to him again.

“The road, Jory, for the love of God!”

I grunted. “You suck the joy out of everything.”

He didn’t argue, too busy tensing for sudden impact. But he must have listened, because a week later I got an invitation by private courier to his and Duncan’s nuptials in mid-July. I was surprised that it included my children, and even more surprised when he told me his brother was going to be his best man. I wasn’t hurt in the least. I was actually very pleased for Max, because finally he had the close relationship with Aaron he’d always wanted, and it was really nice to see the whole brotherly thing in action. My ex had come a long way, and it was all because of the man he loved. Duncan brought out all the best in Aaron, and it was heartwarming to see him in love and settled down and about to be married.

WHILE SITTING in the second row in the Waldorf Astoria ballroom—the entire fifth floor set aside for the wedding—I wondered aloud why they had picked the hotel when Aaron could have flown everyone to Switzerland, if he wanted.

“Because Duncan loves Chicago.”

I turned to look at Sam. “What?”

“You just asked why the Waldorf, didn’t you?”

I nodded.

“Yeah so, Duncan loves Chicago and the Waldorf is one of the quintessential venues here so that’s why.”

“Quintessential?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a word you don’t hear every day.”

“Are you making some veiled disparaging remark about the state of my vocabulary?”

“No, I’m just commenting on the fact that you don’t often hear it.”

He grunted.

“And that was certainly nice of Aaron to defer to Duncan’s wishes.”

“Well, it’s not like this place is a slum, right?”

“No,” I agreed. “But Aaron could have rented out the Field Museum or—”

“It smells weird there,” my daughter, Hannah, all of nine years old, told me. “I mean, it’s cool and all, but it smells like Nana’s attic.”

“So you’re saying it smells like mothballs,” I translated.

“Yeah.”

“Yes,” my son, Kola, two years older than her, corrected. “Uncle Dane says that ‘yeah’ is for slackers.”

I groaned.

“He says you know better, Pa.”

“Just agree with him,” I told them, knowing how adamant my brother was about the weirdest things. “It’ll make him stop talking.”

“I like it when he talks,” Hannah chimed in. “Uncle Dane makes me laugh.”

Only her. He drove the rest of us bananas.

I watched people take seats around us during a few minutes of silence before, “What are you looking at?” Hannah pried.

“I wonder what’s under the tablecloth,” Kola answered, tipping his head, staring at what I’d thought was just another table up by the minister.

“Cages.” Sam yawned beside me, not all that comfortable in the row we sat in, his long legs a bit scrunched up even with him sitting on the end.

“What?” Hannah asked her father.

“There are doves in there.”

“Isn’t dove just a fancy name for a white pigeon?” Kola inquired.

“I’m not sure,” Sam replied thoughtfully, because he never blurted with his kids. If he didn’t know, he said so. “You want to use my phone to look it up?”

“No, that’s okay,” Kola said, crossing his arms just like Sam did when he was thinking. It was so funny to see the learned mannerisms. “But what if people shoot the pigeons when they get released?”

“They’re not pigeons, they’re doves,” Hannah corrected. “And who would shoot at white doves? That’s crazy.”

“Like how people shoot skeet, to see them explode.”

“You’re disgusting. Why would someone want to make a bird explode and rain down blood on them?”

“Dad says that people do stupid crap all the time.”

I groaned before talking to him in a whisper since we were sitting in the second row. “Could we maybe not say ‘crap’ at a wedding?”

They both turned to look at me, Hannah scowling, Kola with a similar expression.

“Oh God, what?”

“We agreed that any word we wouldn’t feel weird about saying in front of Nana we could use whenever we wanted. So since ‘crap’ is okay to say at Sunday dinner in front of her, it should be fine for a wedding.”

I had no comeback, so I looked at Sam for support.

“Don’t say ‘crap’ at a wedding,” he directed.

“Oh, dear God,” I moaned.

“Wait,” Hannah instructed, lifting her hand. “Don’t say the word ‘crap,’ or don’t ‘say crap’ like ‘don’t say anything bad’?”

She was so my daughter.

“Because ‘crap’ could mean—”

“I mean specifically the word ‘crap.’”

“Okay, got it,” she said with a smile.

I ignored them all because the ceremony was about to start.

They walked in together to the front—Aaron in a gray tuxedo, Duncan in a black one—and then turned and welcomed all their guests. As usual, they were jointly stunning, the sleek golden billionaire real estate tycoon and his ruggedly handsome, recently promoted police lieutenant.

The night before, at the rehearsal dinner, I’d watched them as they stood in the gazebo of their newly purchased home in Highland Park. Aaron had just bought the seven-bedroom, five-bathroom residence that sat on ten acres of land. The abode itself was ten thousand square feet and, as my kids had discovered, had a home theater, a gym, an indoor pool, a sauna and steam room, a tennis court, a six-stall barn, a huge greenhouse, and a gun range.

The ridiculous house—who needed that much space for two people?—was Aaron’s wedding gift to Duncan, who in turn had taken care of the honeymoon. They were going to some sweet little bed-and-breakfast in Florida. It turned out that what had bothered me for years with Aaron—my inability to reciprocate his generosity—didn’t even give Duncan pause. He did what he could based on what he made and what he wanted to do. I used to get wrapped up in Aaron wanting to take me to Rome for dinner, but Duncan, he would say okay, as long as the following night they’d have McDonald’s. That was how it worked. Aaron had wild, lavish plans, and Duncan had the same, just on a budget. What was fun was seeing the compromise. Duncan would have the billionaire standing in line at a food truck with his bodyguard, and the next night they’d be on a plane on their way to Paris. What made it work was Aaron’s absolute willingness to do whatever Duncan wanted and Duncan feeling the exact same way. They fit like two parts of a whole, and since I’d been the one to introduce them, I patted myself on the back quite a bit.

“They look good in their tuxedos,” I whispered to Sam.

He scoffed.

“You know they do,” I insisted.