Tall Tales and Wedding Veils (7 page)

“I
said
you could keep it, didn’t I?”

“It’s just a lot of money, that’s all. You said last night you’d feel guilty if you didn’t give it to me. To tell you the truth, I’m feeling a little guilty for taking it.”

“No,” she said. “I know how much you want to buy McMillan’s. I’d never take that money back from you. I really do want you to have it.”

Finally he nodded and returned the check to his wallet.

Heather took a deep, calming breath, trying to put this whole thing in perspective, telling herself this situation was manageable if she handled things logically. She ticked off her to-do list in her mind:
Order coffee from room service. Drink three cups. Change plane reservations. Find out how to get an annulment. Mentally review your CPR training so when you get home and tell your mother the truth, you can bring her back from heart failure.

And do not, under any circumstances, fall into the hands of a man like Tony McCaffrey ever again.

Four hours later, Tony shoved his carry-on into the overhead compartment on the airplane, then sat down in his aisle seat and stuffed a pillow behind his head. He’d taken enough aspirin before getting on the plane to gnaw a hole through his stomach lining, but his head was still pounding.

He turned to see Heather coming up the aisle. The instant their eyes met, she looked away, taking her seat two rows up on the aisle across from him.

He hated that. He’d expected her to at least speak to him. Then again, he’d also expected her to collapse in a useless heap of emotions this morning, and that hadn’t happened, either.

Instead, she’d ordered coffee from room service, then got on the phone and changed her plane reservation. After that, she called a twenty-four-hour legal advice line and learned they could complete an online form to get the annulment ball rolling. She told him she’d go to the business center at the hotel to do that. It had amazed him that in spite of her tremendous hangover, she’d still taken control of the situation and handled things quickly and efficiently. He couldn’t fathom how competent she might be if she’d actually been clearheaded.

Later she went to the airport by herself, and if she hadn’t happened to book a seat near him, he wouldn’t have seen her at all. Besides some distress about passing on the news to her mother, there had been no regrets. No tears.

Not so much as a wistful backward glance.

Tony didn’t know whether to be relieved or insulted. Yeah, he wanted out of this mess. And he wanted Heather to want out, but not quite so insistently. Was the idea of being married to him really all that awful?

Stop it. You’re lucky she’s not a basket case right now, crying her eyeballs out.

After all, she wasn’t his kind of woman. Right now, she wore a pair of jeans and a blue shirt, but everything about her was beige. Every strand of her long, straight hair was like a soldier lined up for inspection. She wore makeup, but it blended into her face rather than making a statement all its own. She moved in a quiet, reserved manner, as if she’d scripted every step she’d taken since birth. Uptight women bugged him. He never knew what to do to make them happy, because nothing ever did.

Okay. A gallon of champagne had made this one pretty happy, but how often did a woman like her pop the cork and go after it?

She buckled herself in, and as they took off, she became the only passenger in the history of air travel to actually watch the flight attendants’ safety speech. Then she pulled a copy of
Forbes
magazine from her tote bag and began to read.

Forbes?
Weren’t women her age supposed to read
Cosmo
and
Glamour
and that Marie-whatever magazine?

Definitely
not his kind of woman.

He leaned his head against the pillow and closed his eyes, but even though he felt tired enough to sleep for a week, he couldn’t doze off. Over the next few hours, he listened to music, ate stale peanuts, sipped a soft drink, and chatted with one of the flight attendants who was friendly beyond the scope of her job responsibilities. When she gave him her phone number, he smiled automatically and stuck it in his shirt pocket. Later he was going to tear it into tiny pieces, shove it into his garbage disposal, and flip the switch. Casual flings had lost their appeal about the time he woke up this morning a married man. Worse, he was a married man who hadn’t even gotten a wedding night to go along with it.

Oh, hell. What difference did that make? He wouldn’t have remembered it, anyway.

When they finally landed, Heather got up right away, retrieved her bag from the overhead compartment, and got off the plane ahead of him. When he walked through the jetway and emerged in the terminal, he didn’t see her. He rode up the escalator to the parking garage level.

He went through the automatic doors and stepped outside, and when he did, he caught sight of Heather standing at the front of a line of people waiting for a cab. He started to cross the street to head to the parking garage, but his conscience nagged at him. Cab fare for the thirty-mile trip back to Plano was going to cost her a bundle.

Not your problem. Keep walking.

But he couldn’t get his feet to move. He just stood on the curb, looking at Heather and feeling really crappy about the whole thing. After everything she’d done for him, was it right to let her pay to get home when he could take her home himself?

A cab pulled to the curb, and the driver got out to grab Heather’s bag. Tony walked over and took it from the man’s hand.

Heather spun around. “Tony? What are you doing?”

“A cab will cost you a fortune.”

“I don’t care.”

“We’re both going back to Plano. I’ll give you a ride.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“It’s also no big deal.”

She opened her mouth to protest, then closed it again. “Fine,” she said, “I’ll ride with you,” even though she didn’t seem the least bit happy about it.

Ten minutes later, Heather and Tony were in his Explorer heading east on 635. And being with him felt every bit as awkward as Heather had expected it to.

After the plane landed, she’d grabbed her stuff and gotten off as quickly as she could so she wouldn’t have to talk to him. She’d spent the past three hours thinking about him sitting two rows behind her, telling herself the whole time not to turn around, not to look at him, not to give him even the tiniest indication that she couldn’t get last night out of her mind.

Because she couldn’t. Not for five consecutive minutes.

And she hated that. When she should be smacking herself for her spur-of-the-moment wedding, all she seemed to think about was every sizzling moment that had led up to it.

But apparently she was the only one who felt awkward. Tony didn’t seem uncomfortable at all. He’d jacked up a country-and-western CD and was tapping his fingers on the steering wheel along with the music. She glanced at the speedometer. The speed limit was sixty. He was going almost seventy. It didn’t surprise her that he was one of those men who took traffic signs as suggestions, not rules.

“You were reading
Forbes
on the plane,” he said.

She looked at him warily. “Yeah.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever met a woman who read that before.”

“Then you probably don’t know many women who are CPAs.”

“You’re a CPA?” He laughed a little. “Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.”

Heather sighed. Just once she’d love to hear a man say,
CPA? No way! I would have sworn you were a supermodel!

Maybe in her next lifetime.

“What I mean is that you seem pretty detail oriented,” Tony added.

She shrugged.

“Not me. Guess I’ll have to learn to be, though, right? Running a business and all?”

“Uh-huh.”

Silence, except for the country music twanging through the speakers.

“So where did you go to college?” Tony asked.

Did he
always
chatter like this? “Rice University.”

“Good school. I went to the University of Texas. Only one year, though.” He smiled. “I majored in tequila drinking and minored in class skipping. As soon as they offer a degree in those things, I’m going for my Ph.D.”

She didn’t respond, so he kept talking. He was clearly one of those people who didn’t like dead air and felt obligated to fill it. She would have asked him if he’d consider becoming the strong, silent type, but she couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

“Tell me why you’re not talking to me,” he said.

She whipped around. “What?”

“You didn’t speak to me on the plane. You’ve barely said anything to me since we left the airport.”

“I’m just tired after last night.”

“A little conversation might be nice.”

“I’m really not in the mood.”

“Come on, Heather. It really doesn’t take much to—”

“Look, Tony. I know we spent last night together, doing God knows what, because I still don’t remember everything, but I barely
know
you. What more could we possibly have to talk about?”

His smile evaporated. “Okay. I just hoped there weren’t going to be hard feelings.”

She turned away to look out the window again, only to feel her conscience nag at her. She was just as responsible for this mess as he was, yet she was treating him as if it was all his fault.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to be snippy. But it’s easy for you, you know? All you have to do is walk away. I’m the one who has to deal with the fallout.”

“Your mother.”

“Yes.”

“So what are you going to say to her?”

Heather sighed. “I don’t know exactly.”

“Does she know you drink?”

“Yes. She knows.”

“Does she know you drink a lot?”

“I
don’t
drink a lot!”

“You did last night. And that’s your excuse. ‘Mom. I got blasted and lost my mind. You understand.’ ”

“Just because she knows I drink doesn’t mean she’s happy about it. About the only alcohol she ever has is half a glass of champagne every New Year’s Eve. Telling her I did something stupid because I was dead drunk wouldn’t exactly win me points.”

“I don’t get it,” Tony said. “What mother wants her daughter to elope in Vegas? Don’t they like that whole wedding thing?”

“She just wants me to be married. Preferably before I’m too old to give her four or five grandchildren. She’ll take it any way she can get it. I’m just dreading having to tell her it’s not going to happen this time around.”

Evidently Tony didn’t know what to say to that, because he finally stopped talking, which made Heather feel exactly like the snippy person she’d just apologized for being.

Never mind. Just get this mess over with.

She directed him to her parents’ house in east Plano, and as he pulled up to the curb, she had to resist the urge to tell him to just keep on driving. Preferably right off a cliff, so she wouldn’t have to deal with this.

They got out of the car. Tony opened the back hatch and retrieved her suitcase.

“I’ll contact you when I hear more about the annulment,” Heather said.

Tony handed the bag to her. “Good luck.”

She nodded, then looked at the house.
It’s now or never. And never’s not an option.

Then all at once, the front door opened, and her mother stepped onto the porch. Then her father. Then she saw Uncle Burt. Aunt Sylvia. Her cousin Kelsey. Grandma Roberta. Grandpa Henry. And other assorted aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Heather froze. What was going on?

They were coming down the steps. Hurrying along the sidewalk. Spilling across the lawn. Given the size of her parents’ house, it was like watching circus clowns climbing out of one of those tiny little cars, and more kept coming.

Oh, God. No.
This couldn’t be happening!

“What the hell is going on?” Tony said.

“I don’t know,” Heather said warily. “But it doesn’t look good.”

“Why are all these people at your house?”

“It’s not my house. It’s my parents’ house.”

Her mother reached the car first, grinning like a lunatic. She stepped off the curb, walked right up to Tony, and stopped in front of him, her hand fluttering against her chest.

“Oh, my God, Heather! He’s every bit as handsome as you said he was!” She threw her arms around him and gave him a big, smacking kiss on the cheek. “Welcome to the family!”

Chapter 6

T
ony couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. He just stood there, his mouth hanging open. Cameras sprouted in everyone’s hands and began snapping, as if they were the paparazzi and he and Heather were superstars du jour.

“I’m Barbara,” the huggy-kissy woman said, grinning like a lunatic. “Heather’s mother.”

She was dressed like a mom, wearing a flowered cotton shirt, baggy jeans, and sandals, with her bobbed hair tucked behind her ears. She grabbed a man’s sleeve and pulled him over.

“And this is Heather’s father, Fred.”

Heather’s mother was smiling. Her father wasn’t. He was a tall, solid, chunk of a man, the kind who ripped phone books in half for fun.

“What are all of you doing here?” Heather said.

“Your mother called to tell us you’d gotten married,” one of the women said. “Of course, we all want to meet your new husband.”

Translation: They all wanted to see if Heather really had lost her mind. From the way a few of them were looking at her right now, the jury was still out on that, but that didn’t stop them from drawing her into hugs and Tony into handshakes, introducing themselves as Aunt this and Uncle that and Cousin somebody-or-other. Tony wanted to say something, but then he and Heather were sucked into a vortex of bodies moving toward the house. He shot her a helpless get-me-out-of-here! look, but she appeared to be just as flabbergasted as he was.

They went up the steps, through the door, and into the living room, surfing along on the tide of humanity. He had a vague sense of the room around him. Neat and clean but very dated, with a flowered sofa that had to be twenty years old and walnut veneer furniture. Over the fireplace was a horrendous portrait of some old woman, the kind of thing some oddball families displayed rather than cramming in a dark corner of the attic. And somewhere in this house there had to be doilies. And in the bathroom, one of those crocheted toilet-paper covers. He’d stake his life on it.

Two people were sitting on the sofa who hadn’t greeted them at the curb. One was an older lady Tony didn’t recognize. The other was Heather’s cousin Regina, whom he’d met last night.

Regina rose from the sofa, looking as impeccable as before. Sleek hair, perfect figure, flawless skin, breasts she’d probably paid a fortune for—the kind of woman he usually went for. But her snooty expression backed up what Heather had told him about her last night, which meant if he ever cracked that gorgeous shell, she’d be bitchy all the way to the bone.

The family parted, and Regina came to stand in front of Heather and Tony, smiling sweetly even as insincerity oozed from every pore. “Well, it looks as if congratulations are in order. Heather, you could have told me when I talked to you this morning that you’d gotten
married.
”

She shot a nervous glance at Tony. “I . . . I guess I was still half-asleep.”

Regina turned to Tony. “I had no idea when I met you last night I’d be welcoming you to the family today. Imagine that.”

Yeah. Imagine that.

The older woman rose from the sofa. She wore beige pants and a silky blouse with lots of gold jewelry, her hair an unnatural shade of red-blond.

“I’m Heather’s Aunt Beverly,” she said. “Regina’s mother.”

Sweet smile. Calculating brain. Tony could smell that kind of woman at twenty paces. Like mother, like daughter.

“So tell us about your wedding,” Bev said. “I can’t think of
anything
more lovely than a spur-of-the-moment midnight wedding in a Las Vegas wedding chapel.”

“Yes!” Barbara said with a heavenly little sigh. “Isn’t it romantic?”

Tony didn’t know if Barbara was always a little dim or whether she was so caught up in the blessed event that her sarcasm detector had stopped functioning.

“So tell us all about it!” one of the women said. “We want to hear every detail.”

“There’s not much to tell,” Heather said.

“You might start with how you ended up married after only four hours,” one of the men said, and the woman next to him jabbed him in the ribs. He whipped around and whispered, “Cut it out, Sylvia! It’s a fair question!”

“Hush, Burt!” she whispered back. “It’s none of your business!”

Then Sylvia turned and gave Tony and Heather a smile that said she was trying really hard to believe this was all for the best. Looking around, Tony realized everybody else’s smiles had that same tinge of hopefulness. He figured only one thing was keeping the rest of the crowd from expressing the suspicion they obviously felt: Heather’s reputation for being sane, smart, and logical, no matter how much it looked as if she’d lost every one of those qualities the moment she’d stepped foot in Vegas.

“Regina told me you two knew each other before you went to Las Vegas,” Bev said.

“Uh, yeah.” Heather glanced at Tony, speaking carefully. “Tony’s a regular at a bar where I go sometimes.”

“How nice,” Bev said, then turned to Barbara, crinkling her nose as if she’d caught a whiff of sulfur. “They met in a bar.”

“And now he’s buying the place,” Barbara said. “Heather told me last night. Did I tell you that, Fred? He’s going to be an entrepreneur!”

“Yup, you told me,” Fred said. “About ten times.” And then he turned to look at Tony, his eyes narrowed and his heavy brows scrunched up.
You had better be on the up and up,
that look said.
Or I’m squashing you like a bug.

Tony had gotten stuck in some pretty odd situations in his life, but this was getting a little weird even for him. Somebody—preferably Heather—needed to stop the madness, but she looked just as stunned as he felt. And he wasn’t sure if saying the wrong thing would turn this large crowd into a large, angry mob.

He leaned over and spoke softly. “Heather? Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Uh . . . sure. Will you all excuse us for just a bit?”

Heather took Tony into another room, which turned out to be a den that contained a lot of man furniture—a walnut desk, a leather sofa, and a hefty coffee table piled with magazines.
Guns and Ammo. Hunting Illustrated. Shooting Sportsman.

But the manliest things of all were the hunting trophies that filled nearly every square inch of wall space. Deer. Elk. Buffalo. A few other creatures Tony didn’t even recognize. Judging from the sheer number of them, Fred Montgomery had put his taxidermist’s kids through braces, college, and funded a wedding or two for good measure. The only wall space not occupied by hunting trophies held gun racks.

“Holy shit,” Tony said, looking around.

“My father likes hunting.” She paused. “And he’s a retired cop, so he has a thing about guns.”

Oh, this was just great. A cop. The moment Fred found out Tony had married his daughter and wanted a divorce all in the same weekend, he would not only want to blow Tony’s head off, he’d also have the means to do it. Times twenty. And then successfully hide the body.

“Does your family actually believe our wedding was the real thing?” Tony asked.

Heather shrugged weakly. “I don’t really know who believes what. I only know how much my mother wants to believe. And after I told her about ten times last night how happy I was and how perfect you were for me, I think I actually have her convinced.”

“Then you need to
unconvince
her.”

“I know.”

“I don’t believe it,” Tony said, shaking his head. “All I did was take you home, and now I’m in the middle of
this?
”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t get uptight about much, but facing angry men with guns isn’t my idea of a good time.”

“My father isn’t angry.”

“Oh, yeah? He’s looking at me as if I’m at the top of the FBI’s most-wanted list.”

“He isn’t a violent man.”

“Not a violent man? Look around you. The man’s shot more stuff than a freakin’ survivalist!”

“That’s not violence. That’s hunting.”

“And he was a cop.”

“That was his
job,
” she said with an eye roll. “And in his whole career, he only fired his weapon once.”

“Uh-huh. Shot the guy dead as a doornail, didn’t he?”

“Uh . . . yeah.”

“You have to tell your family the truth.”

“I know, all right? It’s just that . . .”

“What?”

She sighed. “It’s just that I’ve never seen my mother like this.”

“Like what?”

“She’s just so
happy.
If I go out there now and tell everyone our marriage isn’t the real thing, she’s going to be humiliated. And you can bet Aunt Bev will be catty to her about this for the rest of her life.”

Tony blew out a breath.
I don’t want to hear this.

“See, Bev is my mother’s sister,” Heather went on. “She has a rich husband. A big house in West Plano. A gorgeous daughter who’s getting married. My mother is married to a retired cop. They live in a twenty-year-old tract home in east Plano; I’m their only daughter. Marriage isn’t even on the horizon. Aunt Bev never lets my mother forget any of that. So imagine how my mother’s going to feel when I go out there now and tell her, in front of everybody, that our wedding wasn’t the real thing.”

This was it. This was the reason Tony was careful about getting too involved with women. The minute he was
involved,
he had to deal with their families, their problems, their emotions, and he just wasn’t very good at it.

He looked back at Heather. She was frowning. And—oh, God—her eyes were glistening.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Nothing.” She fished through her father’s desk drawer, grabbed a tissue, and dabbed her eyes.

Run. Leave now. It’s her family, so it’s her problem.
But then he realized something else. Her mother wasn’t the only one who was going to be humiliated.

“You told me what it’s going to be like for your mother when you tell them the truth,” he said. “What’s it going to be like for you?”

She met his eyes, then looked away again. “It doesn’t matter. It has to be done.”

“Tell me.”

She sighed. “Well, let’s see. I expect Aunt Bev and Regina will pretend to sympathize with me, but really they’ll be secretly glad that Regina’s wedding isn’t getting upstaged after all and that I’m still the plain-Jane cousin they can keep putting down.”

“What about everyone else?”

“They won’t be mean. It won’t be like that. They’ll just ‘bless my heart’ until the cows come home and wonder how such a smart girl could get involved in a situation like this. I must have been desperate, you know? And then there’s Regina’s wedding. I’ll be up there in a month as a bridesmaid. Again. Everyone will remember my wedding that wasn’t. They’ll ‘bless my heart’ all over again and pledge to each other that they have to find poor Heather a man before she’s too old for anyone to be interested anymore. And then come the blind dates with forty-year-old men who still live with their mothers and play video games.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I wish I was.”

“Is that really what it’s going to be like?”

“That’s the sanitized version. But it’s no concern of yours.”

“Wrong. It is my concern. I owe you, Heather. After what you did for me last night, the last thing I want is for you to get hurt by all this.”

“It can’t be helped.” She tossed the tissue into the wastebasket. “Why don’t you just go? I can handle this. There’s no need for you to hang around.”

As Heather turned and left the room, Tony blew out a breath of frustration. He was getting everything out of this situation he ever wanted, and all she was getting was an overdose of humiliation.

No,
he thought with sudden conviction.
You have to do something so Heather can save face in front of her family.

He just wished he knew what that something was.

Heather walked back to the living room to find her mother still grinning.

“Heather! Where’s Tony? I have coffee and cheese- cake!”

Heather cringed. Her mother had always been an exclamation-point kind of person, but this was ridiculous.

“I have something to tell you,” Heather said, then turned to the rest of the family. “Actually, I want to tell all of you.”

“Whatever it is,” Aunt Sylvia said brightly, “it can’t top what you told your mother last night.”

Everybody laughed. Then the laughter died away, and Heather stood there in the yawning abyss of expectation, waiting for the words to come to her.

“So where’s your husband?” Regina said, looking around, practically sniffing like a bloodhound.

“Uh . . . that’s what I need to talk to you about,” Heather said.

A calculating look came across Regina’s face. “He didn’t . . .
leave,
did he?”

Heather started to say yes, only to hear Tony’s voice behind her. “Of course not. I’m right here.”

When he walked over to stand next to her, she figured he must have a masochistic streak a mile wide. But that didn’t change anything. She had to tell the truth, and she had to do it now.

“It’s about our wedding. This is not exactly what it appears to be.”