The Wedding Planner: A heartwarming feel good romance perfect for spring!

Chapter 7

Show Me The Way To Armadillo

Seth

‘… So looking at the income versus the amount of time the crew would be on-site,’ Seth murmured, sitting on top of the gate and pointing with his imaginary pointer to his imaginary screen.

At the ensuing silence Seth turned back to look out over the paddocks of the last tenanted farm on Knightley Hall land. With not a cloud in the sky and the grass holding onto the last of its green after the spate of hot summer days, it was easier to picture the positive look on Jake’s face when Seth explained why allowing a film company to film at Knightley Hall could only be a good thing.

But then the double-guessing kicked in. ‘Maybe instead of a pie chart, it should be a Gant chart? What do you think, Old Girl?’ he asked, and promptly received a moo back from Gertrude, his favourite Friesian in Felix’s herd. ‘I had you up until “Old Girl”, didn’t I?’ Seth asked with a grin. After moving back to Knightley Hall and bumping into Gertrude it hadn’t taken long to remember the cow had a penchant for wandering around. She was the nosiest resident in Whispers Wood and preferred listening to the problems of humans over the more generalist mooing from her herd.

Looking at him now, she mooed again, clearly calling disdain on his moniker of ‘Old Girl’.

‘Okay,’ Seth said decisively. ‘I’m going to pull the charts from the presentation. Let’s face it Jake isn’t impressed by a chart unless it contains a weather report or the pH levels of the surrounding soil.’

With a glance at his watch and wishing he felt as confident as he sounded, he hopped off the five-bar gate, gave Gertrude a quick pat and a ‘Good chat,’ and vaulted back over the gate to head on over to the clock house.

Ten minutes later he stepped onto the village green. Pulling his messenger bag across his body, he opened the main flap, peered inside and then lifted his head in disappointment. All the chat about pie charts with Gertrude had made him hungry but he’d forgotten to grab some food.

Then, as if his appetite had conjured the perfect amuse-bouche, he spotted her.

Gloria Pavey.

Sitting under his favourite tree.

Well, the tree he’d fallen out of more times than he cared to remember at any rate, mostly after rescuing various kittens, balls, and on one memorable occasion, Crispin Harlow’s wig. Don’t worry, no animals, wigs, or balls (either sort) were harmed during these falls.

He watched as Gloria brought a big, juicy red apple up to her lips and immediately illuminated in his head like one of those de rigueur lit message boxes everyone thought were super-cute but were really just annoying because there was never enough space to write a phrase proper, flashed the words: Behold! Here Lies Pure Tempt—

His stomach rumbled in agreement and he got all confused about the amount of French words he was suddenly using.

He had a feeling Gloria could make grown men speak in tongues, but French?

As he crossed the green towards her, he reminded himself the key to sustaining his friendship with her was to enjoy how their flirtatious personalities butted enticingly up against each other, while taking care not to cross a line she’d be able to tease him about forever.

He glanced at the apple again. Yep, it wasn’t like he’d been christened Adam. He wasn’t doing temptation at the moment. He was only doing friendship.

‘Well don’t you look adorbs sitting under my tree, reading,’ he called out and had to bite his lip to stop the grin from appearing as she fumbled the book she was reading and looked up at him.

Actually glared would be a much more fitting description.

Had he mentioned her eyes?

They were the colour of sea-green glass and could cool you down quicker than a cold shower or heat you up faster than a laser beam. Stunning and mesmerising in equal measure, they could observe a scene in a second, judge in a nano, and hand down a sentence with one perfectly-timed blink.

They could also twinkle.

Sparkle.

Beckon.

‘Adorbs?’ she spluttered. ‘Adorbs?’ With a look of utter disgust, she added, ‘get away from me Purloiner of Tween Words.’

Now his mouth did split into a happy grin. There was just something so soul-lifting-satisfying about riling her.

She was never going to believe she really did look adorable with the sun catching the auburn streaks in her hair, serenity vying for concentration on her face as she read her book.

Gloria didn’t often look at peace. Maybe when she stared at her daughter sometimes. But other than that, what she usually looked was ready to do battle. Lip-Sync Battle, Battle Rap, Battleship. Basically any kind of let’s-do-this battle.

It used to be she’d battle her own shadow along with everyone else and their shadows. These days she chose more wisely and battled mostly for those who couldn’t. Making her, in his humble opinion, charmingly righteous.

‘Language is for anyone and everyone to use,’ he replied. ‘If it wasn’t, you’d be in breach of copyright for every combination of swear word a sailor or trooper ever came up with.’

She scowled up at him. ‘Does Beth use word contractions like,’ she stopped, shuddered and declared, ‘no, I won’t say it again.’

For a moment he had no clue who she was referring to, and then with an embarrassed sweep of his hand to the back of his neck, remembered Beth was the name of the girl he’d been talking to in the bar all evening, a few nights before.

‘Ah. Sweet Beth,’ he murmured. Truthfully, sweet Beth was so saccharine she set his teeth on edge. She certainly didn’t challenge him or appeal to his sense of humour or engage his brain like … he looked at Gloria …

Steady.

… other women he knew.

Now was not the time to allow the stress of getting Jake to recognise he’d be an asset to the Hall to mess with his head. He might have been impulsive over the years but never self-destructive.

Maybe it was only natural to feel drawn to someone the complete opposite of his now ex-wife, Joanne.

Or not.

There was nothing like signing your name on a legal document to inform the opinion that you didn’t need to team up with anyone for life to still be all right.

‘She’s not for you, you know,’ Gloria said, before raising the apple to her mouth and taking another bite out of it.

‘Not for me?’ His gaze zoomed in without his permission to study the way she chewed sexily on the flesh of the apple.

Nope.

He gave himself a mental slap upside the head.

Thoughtfully.

He watched her chew thoughtfully before she swallowed and added, ‘Think about it … If you became “exclusive”, your “ship name” would be either “Seth” or “Beth”. How could Whispers Wood possibly invest in that?’

‘What the hell is a ship name?’ Seth asked, lowering his six-foot-two frame down to the ground so that he could settle himself comfortably beside her.

It was weird to have Gloria show any kind of interest in his love life.

If a scowl could be considered interest, that was, and not that he had a love life.

Steering clear of that for the foreseeable and maybe even the ‘foreverable’.

Gloria shook her head sadly at him. ‘You have adorbs down but not ship and exclusive? Ship – as in relationship. A ship name is where you merge your names together for added impressiveness. Like Kimye.’

‘Okay. Pretty sure any ship I was supposed to be in has sailed. And exclusivity hardly ever stays that way. We have the battle scars to prove it.’

Gloria didn’t say anything and instead focused all her attention on her apple.

What no comeback?

Without stopping to think too much about it he reached out, enclosed her hand and the apple in his and brought the two up to his mouth. He paused for a moment to take in the shocked bounce of her gaze to his and then, caught up in the darkening shade of green, bit into the apple to appease some of the gnawing hunger. He chewed, swallowed and had a thought. ‘So if you and I were shipping we’d be referred to as Gleth or Sloria?’

She stared at his mouth and he felt the crazy little jump in the pulse-point at her wrist. Reward in and of itself, he mused, instructing himself to let go of her hand. Stroking his thumb over that jump of flesh would start something he had no business starting and he had a new rule about not being a dick.

‘You see,’ she mumbled. ‘Either way it just doesn’t work.’

‘Well, phew, right?’

The way she licked her lips didn’t look accidental and his body said screw it. With his eyes on hers he took another bite of the apple, his lips accidentally-not-accidentally grazing the skin of her thumb.

She snatched her apple back and rubbed her thumb. ‘Hannibal much? How can you always be so hungry?’

‘Appetite for life,’ he said, trying not to focus on the jaw-dropping news he had the power to get Gloria to full-on blush from a simple touch.

‘Appetite for life?’ she snorted. ‘I suppose it’s about time.’

He forgot about flirting as her words struck home. For a while, particularly the while right after seeing Joanne so happily shacked-up with another man, he had lost his verve … his zest … his you-only-get-one-life approach.

It wasn’t jealousy that had zapped it. His free-falling pride-tumbling descent had been more to do with his brothers and sisters considering it their duty to issue well-meaning lectures on the steps to maintaining a happy and stable relationship. Each offering had been delivered first-class signed-for and fully-tracked to ensure maximum overlap.

He hadn’t been able to take a breath for all the ‘You know if you’d …’ and ‘I think for the future …’ And ‘You have to stop thinking you can just do what you want, when you want …’ advice.

Advice that had made him question if they knew him at all.

‘So what’s got you so peckish?’ asked the woman who, instead of offering advice had simply served him a drink when he’d needed it, let him talk when he’d needed it, flirted with him when he’d needed it and riled him right on out of his pity party when he’d needed it.

His gaze snagged on her mouth and for a moment he couldn’t seem to get his brain to follow through on her question. ‘Even if your name was Eve our ship name wouldn’t work,’ he muttered.

‘Huh?’

‘Huh?’ he repeated, and then as a bee buzzed madly over the prop in her hand, and she, thankfully, swatted lazily at it, bouncing it back out of whatever kind of crazy magnetic field they’d created, the spell was broken. ‘What’s got me peckish? I’ve a little idea I’m busy working on.’

‘Is that right?’ Her gaze slid over him slowly. ‘You sure you haven’t got hours of manual labour you need to be conducting?’

And he was back in that crazy magnetic field again.

Usually a slow and thorough assessment from Gloria was followed by a quick and equally thorough putdown designed to indicate she was bored of playing but today’s was accompanied by another bloom of heat that swept in across her cheekbones and caused her eyelids to flutter shut as if in denial.

The fact she’d actually noticed the affect all the manual labour had had on his body ran quick and hot through him, making him nearly acknowledge how handy the new layers of muscle tone were for his job.

Nearly.

Not actually, thank God.

Because Gloria finding out where he went most nights?

The Captain Kirk inside him might think it was worth brazening out just to see her reaction.

The Spock inside him told him if he wanted any chance of living long and prospering, not to be so stupid.

‘So what are you reading?’ he asked, his gaze snatching on her other prop. ‘Is it for Book Club?’

‘Oh my God, Book Club …’ Immediately she started trying to shove the book into her small bag without him seeing the cover. ‘I have to leave Book Club. I can’t take it anymore.’

‘Anymore?’ He laughed. ‘There’ve only been two meetings.’ Juliet had set up the book club, which met in Cocktails & Chai every other week.

‘It’s awful,’ Gloria said, with a shake of her head. ‘Crispin keeps choosing romance books.’

‘What’s wrong with romance books?’

‘You mean apart from the part where it’s all mahoosive BS?’

‘You think romance is massive bullshit?’

‘I think books based around those six deadly words, is.’

‘Six?’ Seth was no mathlete but even he knew ‘I Love You’ was only three words. ‘Your problem is you’ve had too little romance in your life.’

She did the contemplative stare down at the apple thing again and then added softly, ‘I’m not totally averse to the “I Love You” stuff. I get it makes the world go round.’

Something inside of him broke free so that little remote robots, like the kind found in bomb disposal units, scuttled quickly to the unidentified feeling within him and dealt with it by rolling it back up and pushing it back into the box it had appeared from.

‘It’s what happens afterwards I have the problem with,’ she added.

‘Something to do with those six words?’

‘You know the ones,’ she sighed, then lifted her hands up and moved them apart as if to showcase a headline. ‘And They Lived Happily Ever After’.

Even in his cynical state there was something so sad about her absolute conviction. Like for her those six words would always amount to six hundred degrees of separation from the world.

‘You don’t believe in Happily Ever After?’

She glanced at her watch presumably to check how much time she had left on her lunch break and relaxed back against the tree. After a few moments she said, quietly, ‘It’s like everyone thinks it’s an actual place and once they’re there that’s it. They don’t have to do anything. They just have to be.’

‘In Happily Ever After Land?’ he finished for her.

‘Exactly. Like it’s some Nirvana. I mean,’ she turned her head to look at him, ‘what a load of crock, right?’

‘There she is,’ he said looking back at her relieved.

‘There who is?’

‘The cynic.’

‘Thank you,’ she said with a nod before shooting him a look from under her lashes. ‘You’ve missed her, right?’

Idly he wondered what kind of man could get her to believe in And They Lived Happily Ever After again but because he suspected they might not actually exist, and because her cynicism was a known factor and therefore easier to deal with, he confirmed, ‘I actually have. And to think all it took to bring her back out was getting asked to be a bridesmaid.’

‘Well, don’t worry. You’re going to be seeing a lot more of her. The cynic, that is. Not the bridesmaid.’

‘What do you mean not the bridesmaid?’ He’d been thinking the wedding was going to be much easier to handle if he got to tease her about having to be a bridesmaid.

‘I’m about to be fired from the role.’

‘Emma isn’t going to fire you from being her bridesmaid.’

‘She most definitely is.’

He watched her carefully. ‘You look a little sad about that.’

‘It’s for the best,’ she replied, nibbling at the apple.

Deliberately he plucked the fruit from her hand so she had nothing to hide behind when he asked, ‘Are you sure about that?’

Gloria’s eyelids slid swiftly down to cover her eyes and when they lifted again her expression was emphatic. ‘Who wants a bridesmaid with the ability to go rogue at the drop of a wedding hat? Have you ever in the history of bridesmaid tales heard the one about the bridesmaid arbitrarily picking out a wedding date for the engaged couple, and then telling everyone else about it before them?’She looked thoroughly unimpressed with herself. ‘I proper stuffed up, Seth.’

‘Emma is not going to sack you, okay? Have faith.’

She shrugged and lifted her determined gaze to his. ‘At least now I won’t have to be all high-school cheerleader “Oh, my God, this is, like, SO exciting” about every little wedding detail, when what I’d really be fighting to stop myself saying, is “I lost interest in this conversation the moment you lead with, “Off-white or Ivory: discuss.”’

‘You wouldn’t do that.’