“If Mom fusses any more over him, people will thinkshe’sthe one marrying him,” my sister Agnes whispered as our mother plied Dante with another drink.
We only called her Mom to each other and never to her face.
“Imagine Father negotiatingthatarrangement,” I whispered back.
We burst into giggles.
We were in the living room after our Christmas Eve dinner—my mother and Dante by the fireplace; my sister and me on the couch, and my father and Gunnar, Agnes’s husband, on the other couch by the bar.
I didn’t see Agnes much now that she lived in Eldorra, but whenever we were together, we reverted to being teenagers again.
“Girls, want to share what’s so funny?” our father asked pointedly, looking up from his conversation with Gunnar.
Tall, blond, and blue-eyed, Gunnar was my sister’s polar opposite looks-wise, but they shared a similar sense of humor and easygoing manner. He watched, his expression amused, as my sister and I sobered.
“Nothing’s funny,” we said in unison.
My father shook his head with an exasperated expression. “Vivian, put your jacket back on,” he said. “It’s freezing. You’ll get sick.”
“It’s notthatcold,” I protested. “The fireplace is on.”
But I put the jacket on anyway.
Besides marriage, my parents were forever fussing at me about wearing enough layers and drinking enough soup. It was one of the few holdovers from our pre-wealth days.
When I looked over at Dante, I found him watching us with narrowed eyes. I raised an eyebrow, and he gave a small shake of his head.
I had no clue what that meant, but my curiosity over his reaction melted in the whirlwind of Christmas morning (where Gunnar announced he bought Agnes another pony for their country manor) and the Legacy Ball and wedding planning that dominated the weeksafterNew Year’s.
Before I knew it, it was mid-January, and my anxiety had peaked to an all-time high.
T-minus four months until the ball.
T-minus seven months until the wedding.
God help me.
“You need a spa retreat,” Isabella said. “Nothing restores the body like a weekend in the desert filled with deep-tissue massages and yoga.”
“You hate yoga, and you once left a retreat early because it was too ‘boring and woo woo.’”
“Forme. Not for you.” Isabella lay stomach-down on my office couch, her feet kicked up in the air as she scribbled in her notebook. Occasionally, a.k.a. every two minutes, she’d stop to sip her soda or nibble on a piece of dark chocolate. It was lunchtime, but she said she wasn’t that hungry, and I hadn’t had a chance to order takeout. “You should take Dante with you. It’ll be a couples’ getaway.”
I looked up from the Legacy Ball seating chart. “Aren’t you supposed to be writing the next great thriller instead of providing unsolicited advice on my love life?”
Sometimes, Isabella used my office as her office because the silence in her apartment was “too loud,” which I was fine with as long as she didn’t distract me while I was working.
“I’m drawing inspiration from real life. Perhaps I can write about an arranged marriage gone terribly wrong. The wife murders her husband after having a kinky affair with her sexy doorman…or not,” she added hastily when I glared at her. “But you have to admit, sex and murder go hand in hand.”
“Only to you.” I moved the sticky notes with Dominic and Alessandra Davenport’s names to the table with Kai.Much better. The last setup had Dominic sitting next to his biggest rival. “Should I worry about your exes?”
“Only the ones that pissed me off.”
“That’s all of them.”
“Is it?” Isabella was the picture of innocence. “Oops.”
A smile pulled on my lips. Her dating history was a string of red flags encompassing race car drivers, photographers, models, and, in one truly spectacular lapse of judgment, an aspiring poet with a Shakespeare tattoo and a penchant for spouting lines fromRomeo and Julietduring sex.