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Amy and gorgeous man both froze, leaning over the spilled bag of powdered sugar.
The cloud had enveloped them—sugar was sprinkled over their faces, their hair, getting in their mouths, even up their noses.
She blinked. Yes, there was a bit on her eyelashes, too.
The man coughed. Amy did, too, sending tiny puffs of white powder into the air once again.
“Oh, my God, I’ve probably ruined your suit,” she said, afraid it had cost more than several months’ rent on her apartment.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll just take this off right here.” He shrugged out of his jacket, more powder flying as he did.
He peeled off his tie next. He started to unbutton the shirt, but then quit when he had it half-off. “Is this…Do you mind?”
Amy shook her head.
Mind was not the word.
More accurate ones would be…
Appreciate the sight before her?
Oh, my.
TERESA HILL tells people if they want to be writers, to find a spouse who’s patient, understanding and interested in being a patron of the arts. Lucky for her, she found a man just like that, who’s been with her through all the ups and downs of being a writer. They live in Travelers Rest, South Carolina, in the foothills of the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains, with two beautiful, spoiled dogs and two gigantic, lazy cats.
Countdown
to the Perfect
Wedding
Teresa Hill
www.millsandboon.co.uk
To my niece, Rachel, who has welcomed her first child,
Ashley Nicole, into the world and brought incredible
joy to my parents, now the happiest
great-grandparents ever.
Prologue
Eleanor Barrington Morgan smiled and nodded, she hoped with nothing but a mixture of happiness and acceptance showing in her face, as her most favorite person in the whole world, her godson, Tate Darnley, told her he’d met yet another woman.
This one was an investment banker.
“Mmm.” She nodded, having to grit her teeth beneath her smile. “Someone from your office?”
“Yes,” Tate said.
Eleanor could just picture her, disciplined as could be; fastidious in her dress, diet and exercise plan; highly intelligent when it came to numbers and strategy; working her little fanny off to get ahead.
She probably came to bed clutching a spreadsheet, not quite able to let it go completely.
Eleanor’s husband used to be that way. He was an investment banker, cool, calculating, highly intelligent and with the warmth and interpersonal skills of a deep freeze. She’d endured thirty years of trying like a fool to change him, to figure out what was wrong with her that she couldn’t make him love her or want her the way she wanted to be loved, and she wanted so much more for Tate.
Instead, he’d been raised by a stockbroker, become a venture capitalist himself, and showed all the signs of following in all of their footsteps.
Especially in his choice of women.
She wanted to weep, to scream at him, to try to knock some sense into him, to tell him there was so much more to this world and to life other than money, the latest business deal and numbers. But of course, a Barrington-Holmes woman simply did not do those kinds of things. She’d been raised to be too dignified for that.
So she sat there and smiled and nodded, until he kissed her on her cheek and left. Her best friends at Remington Park Retirement Village, Kathleen and Gladdy, saw him go and came to hear the news right away.
“He found another one,” Eleanor told them. “Just like the last one and the one before that, it sounds like. How can men be so stupid?”
Kathleen and Gladdy shook their heads and sighed, having heard it all before.
“That first woman like that? Did she make him happy? No,” Eleanor said, answering her own question. “The second one? Was he happy with her? No. The third one? Not even close, and now, here we are. Number four, who sounds like a clone of the first three. I could tell by the way he talks about her. No real emotion there at all, no excitement, no warmth. Just all this bunk about compatibility and shared goals. Please! It sounds like they’re going into business together.”
Kathleen frowned. “What exactly is your objection to… trying to gently nudge him toward someone else? Someone you think would make him happy?”
“Well, Mother always said we shouldn’t meddle,” Eleanor said.
“Oh, please.” Gladdy dismissed that with a huff and a smile. “What kind of mother is that? And besides, you told me your mother died twenty years ago. It’s not like she’s going to come scold you for anything now.”
“I know, but…well, the honest truth is I’ve tried before to steer Tate in a different direction, and…I’m afraid I’m just no good at it,” Eleanor admitted, much as it cost her to say so. She was raised to never admit any kind of inadequacy she might have.
“Oh, honey.” Kathleen laughed. “We can fix that. Gladdy and I are terribly good at meddling. Just ask anyone. What we pulled off with my darling granddaughter Jane…”
“It was a thing of beauty. A master feat,” Gladdy bragged. “And now, Jane’s happy as can be, and believe me, we despaired of Jane ever truly being happy. In truth, sometimes we despaired of her ever so much as going on a date.”
Kathleen nodded. “It was bad. Very bad. I don’t think anyone but Gladdy and I ever thought we could save Jane, but we did. We can save your godson, too. Just say the word, and we’ll go to work.”
Eleanor sighed. She’d heard this story. Practically the whole of Remington Park had been involved in the match-making scheme and had a blast doing it, she’d been told.
Her people, the Barringtons, and her husband’s, the Holmes, were just repressed, stuffy, private people, crippled emotionally and quite possibly beyond all help, Eleanor sometimes thought, and it was hard, breaking the patterns of decades, the ones imprinted on the very DNA in every single cell in one’s body.
“I wouldn’t even know where to start,” she said.
“Don’t worry.” Gladdy patted her hand reassuringly. “We do.”
Eleanor tried to be good. Truly, she did. She stayed out of Tate’s supposed love life, although honestly, she doubted there was any kind of love involved, emotional or physical. Poor thing.
And what did her noninterference get her?
Six months after first mentioning her, Tate announced he was engaged and finally admitted the woman he’d been seeing all that time was none other than Victoria Ryan! A girl he’d known for years. They’d practically grown up together, acting more like brother and sister than anything else. And Victoria, unfortunately, had the most disagreeable mother. Eleanor shuddered at the thought of ever having to face that woman over a holiday dinner table or, even worse, at a wedding.
Still, Eleanor thought it wouldn’t last. No woman ever really had with Tate. She wasn’t worried, wasn’t sorry she’d stuck with her plan of not butting in.
Six months after that, the wedding—a huge extravaganza in that mausoleum of a place Eleanor once called home—a mere two weeks away, she was hungrily searching for any signs that the nuptials would somehow fail to take place.
Two days before the first of the family guests were scheduled to arrive for the five-day event, she was desperate and went to Kathleen and Gladdy.
“Well, the simplest thing, of course, is another woman,” Kathleen said quite calmly in the face of Eleanor’s outright panic.
“But, he’s not seeing anyone else,” she explained. “Not that I know of.”
“No, I mean, we have to find him another woman—a real one, not an ice sculpture,” Gladdy told her.
“Where are we going to find him a real woman in two days? He’s been dating for fifteen years and hasn’t found one yet,” Eleanor said. “And even if we did find one, what then? It’s not like we can guarantee he’s going to fall for her. I mean, he’s a man, and we all know what most of them are like. But he’s not a rat. I just don’t think he’s going to be looking for another woman on the weekend of his wedding.”
“We put them together and see what happens. That’s all it should take,” Kathleen said, sounding remarkably confident.
“Yes, and we all know just the woman!” Gladdy announced, glancing into the kitchen, where Amy, their sweet, most favorite former employee, newly graduated from cooking school, had arrived with a special birthday cake for one of the ladies in their cottage who’d always been a favorite of hers. “Eleanor, didn’t you say you were going to hire a chef for the weekend? To feed all those guests staying at your house?”
“Yes, I did. A lovely man named Adolfo.”
“He’s going to come down with something at the last minute,” Gladdy said, pointing to the woman in the kitchen. “And you’re going to replace him with her.”
Chapter One
Tate Darnley was later than he’d planned getting to the house Wednesday night and a little bit tipsy. Victoria’s father and some of Tate’s colleagues had thrown a little cocktail party in honor of their upcoming wedding, and the champagne had flowed freely.
He came in through the side door leading past the servants’ quarters and the kitchen, as he always did, hoping to avoid any friends and family members who might have already arrived for the long weekend, looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet before things got too crazy for the wedding.
What he’d hoped would be a small, family-only affair had turned into an extravaganza, and Victoria, normally the epitome of calm and grace under pressure, now seemed like a woman trying to steer the Titanic through a vast, bottomless ocean, fraught with all sorts of confusion and peril.
It was a little disconcerting, but not overly so. Tate had always heard weddings made just about everyone crazy. It would all be over soon, and he and Victoria could get on with having a life together, which he expected to be nothing but smooth sailing—two intelligent, hardworking people with the same goals, same values, who’d known and respected each other for years. How could they go wrong?
Tate checked himself for any twinge of impending nerves, happy to find none. He was even whistling a bit, striding down the back hall when the most amazing smell hit him.
Tangy, citrusy…lemons, he decided.
Something sweet, too.
Lemons, sugar no doubt and…some kind of berries? He groaned, it smelled so good.
Someone preparing food for the wedding, he supposed, and yet, he didn’t remember anything that smelled that good at the various tasting menus they’d sampled, at Victoria’s insistence.
He lingered in the hallway, thinking if he couldn’t get a bit of that sweet lemony thing right now, who could? After all, he was the groom. So he turned around and headed into the big, open gourmet kitchen, finding a slender young woman clad in a starched white apron, her copper-colored hair tied back in a braid, testing the firmness of a plate of lemon bars she’d just pulled from the oven. That luscious smell was even more irresistible here in the kitchen.
A boy of maybe seven sat on a high stool beside her, pouting for all he was worth. “One?” he asked. “Come on, Mom. Just one?”
“Max, you already had two from the earlier batch. Any more and you’ll be sick, and I can’t have you sick this weekend, because I can’t take care of you and cook for all these people.”
“But—”
“No.” She didn’t let him get out another word, as she slid her lemon bars one by one onto a waiting cooling rack. “Now stay here, and guard these for me. I just used the last of the powdered sugar, and I have to search the pantry for more.”
The boy pouted mightily but held his tongue.
Tate waited until the cook disappeared into the butler’s pantry and the even bigger pantry closet in back of that and then strolled into the kitchen, saying, “Wow, that smells amazing.”
The kid looked up and frowned. “Yeah.”
Just then, from deep inside the pantry, Tate heard a woman’s voice call out, “Tell me you’re not eating those, Max? Because I counted them already. I’ll know if you do.”
The boy sighed and looked resigned to following that order. “I’m not.”
“Just not fair, is it?” Tate said quietly to the boy.
The kid shook his head. Judging by his expression, he was trying to convince Tate he was a poor, abused child, left to starve among all this bounty.
Tate finally got a good look at the things. Lemon, indeed, and something pinkish mixed in. “Lemon and strawberry?” he guessed.
“I dunno. They just taste really good.”
“I’m sure,” Tate agreed, sniffing again. “Raspberry. That’s what it is, isn’t it? Do you remember?”
“I think so,” Max said, looking none too sure of himself. “Mom calls ’em sugar daddies.”
“Oh.” Tate nodded. Interesting name. “Because she’s going to sprinkle powdered sugar on top of them?”
“’Cause of Leo,” Max said.
Leo?
Sugar daddies?
Surely the kid didn’t mean what Tate was thinking? “So, Leo is…your dad?”
“No.” Max shook his head. “A friend of mine and my mom’s. She cooked for him and stuff, and he liked her a lot.”
“Oh.” Tate didn’t dare ask another thing.
“She got to go to cooking school ’cause of it,” Max said, obviously a talker. “She always wanted to go to cooking school. And I get to go to school, too, someday. I mean, I didn’t really want to, but Leo left me some money for that, too. Not cooking school, but…the big place? You know?”
“College?” Tate tried.
Max nodded. “I guess I have to go.”
“So…Leo was a good guy, I guess,” Tate said, at a complete loss as to what else to say to the kid about that particular arrangement.
“You ever have a sugar daddy?” Max asked.
Tate grinned, couldn’t help it. It was like trying to have two completely different conversations at once. The kid was talking about his mom’s dessert, wasn’t he?
“No,” Tate said. “I haven’t had the pleasure.”
“They’re the best thing my mom cooks,” Max confided. “And she didn’t even have to go to cooking school to learn to make them. She already knew.”
“Wow,” Tate said.
Max leaned in close and whispered, “She won’t give me another one, ’cause she thinks I’ll get sick if I have one more. But I won’t, really. Maybe she’ll give you one, and you can…you know…share with me?”
Tate loved it. What a little schemer. Life would never be dull with this one around. He reached out and ruffled the kid’s hair, thick and dark reddish brown and just getting to the unruly stage where it really needed to be trimmed.
“I’ll do my best,” Tate promised.
“So, did you ever have the other kind of sugar daddy?” Max continued.
“Other kind?”
Max nodded. “Like Leo?”
Tate cleared his throat to stall for time. “I…I don’t think so.”
“Know why mom called him that?”
“No, Max, I don’t,” he said carefully.
“’Cause he was so sweet, and he was like a dad. He took care of us.”
“Oh.” Tate nodded, thinking that was about as good of a G-rated explanation as he could think of. “Well, I’m glad for you. And your mom.”
From their hiding place in the dining room, ears pressed to the wall shared with the kitchen, Eleanor groaned softly, throwing a horrified look to her friends and companions in meddling, Kathleen and Gladdy.
“Sugar daddy? Tate’s going to think Amy’s just awful!”
Kathleen, Leo’s loving widow, sighed and admitted, “Okay, so it’s not going particularly well at the moment.”
“Well? It’s a disaster!” Eleanor exclaimed.
“Not completely,” Gladdy pointed out. “I mean, your godson is surely not going to think we brought Amy here to fix her up with him. Not from what he just heard from our dear Max.”
“No, he’ll think she’s a gold digger! A kept woman, looking for her next sugar daddy to take over where Leo left off!” Eleanor could have cried right then and there.
The wedding was less than ninety-six hours away.
“Just give it a moment,” Kathleen said, calm as could be. “See what happens. Your godson barely knows Amy, but he’s clearly interested in her cooking and quite taken with Max.”
“Why would he even want to know her now?”
“For the lemon bars, if nothing else,” Gladdy said, sounding absolutely sure of herself.
Eleanor sighed, feeling doubtful about the whole mess, but stayed where she was, her ear pressed once again against the wall.
Amy found the powdered sugar, finally, but only after climbing on a rolling ladder that slid from one end of the tall pantry wall to the other and nearly climbing onto the top shelf to reach into the back and get it.
This was the most amazing pantry she’d ever seen. And the kitchen was a chef’s dream.
She climbed back down the ladder, powdered sugar in hand, her nerves still zinging from the first moment she’d seen the house—mansion was a better word, castle not far from her thoughts when she’d first seen the giant, weathered stone building—and realized what she’d gotten herself into.
She didn’t have the experience for this, having literally just graduated from her single year of cooking school last week. She’d gotten hardly any prep time at all, because she’d come in at the last minute, filling in for the unfortunate Adolfo. And just for fun, she hadn’t been able to find a sitter with so little notice, so she’d had to bring Max. Eleanor swore that one of the three nannies expected to accompany various invited relatives would be happy to watch over Max, and that there was another seven-year-old boy coming for the long weekend wedding, so he’d have a built-in playmate, too.
At least Amy had gotten a good bit of the baking done tonight. Making the lemon bars—her favorites, her specialty—had helped calm her down.
She was opening the bag of powdered sugar as she walked back into the kitchen, hoping Max had actually listened to her and hadn’t scarfed down another one, and there he was, sitting on his stool, guarding her desserts, with an absolutely beautiful man, dressed in what she was sure was a very expensive suit, talking earnestly with her son.
Amy paused there for a moment, unable to help herself. The man was standing in profile, dark blond hair, cut short and neatly, a bit of a tan on his pretty face, contrasting nicely with the stark white shirt and deep blue tie and suit. His whole image positively screamed of both money and privilege, and he looked like he’d been born to live in a place like this.
Completely out of her league, Amy knew in an instant.
Still, a woman could look every now and then, couldn’t she?
The last man in her life had been Max’s father, and look how badly that had turned out. She’d been understandably cautious since then.
Max spotted her and called out, “Hey, Mom! Guess what? This is my new friend Tate, and he’s never had a sugar daddy before!”
Amy stopped short, thinking she’d really done it with that name. At least the beautiful man in the hideously expensive suit didn’t know the whole story behind it.
And then, Max, who just didn’t know when to close his mouth, piped up and added, “Not one of your lemon bars or one like Leo.”
Amy winced, closed her eyes tightly for a moment and cursed inside. She must have blushed at the same time, and then she started trying to explain, talking with her hands, as she often did, forgetting all about the powdered sugar.
It slipped from her hands.
She grabbed for it and so did the man, but they both missed.
The package hit the hard tile floor with a big thump, and the next thing she knew, an explosion of finely powdered sugar rose up into the air, in her and the man’s faces.
Amy and the gorgeous man both froze, leaning over what was left of the bag, the cloud having enveloped them, sprinkled over their faces, their hair, getting in their mouths, even up their noses.
She blinked. Yes, there was a bit on her eyelashes, too.
The man coughed. Amy did, too, sending tiny puffs of white powder into the air.
Max laughed so hard he nearly fell off his stool.
It was like something out of a cartoon he would watch, this puffy cloud of sugar rising up and enveloping them like a sweet fog, coating everything in a fine sheen of white.
Max started to get down off the stool, but Amy stopped him. “No. Stay right where you are!”
“Mom—”
“I’ve already made a huge mess. The last thing we need is you over here making the mess even bigger,” she said, then turned to the man. “I am so sorry. I don’t know what happened.”
Okay, she did, but no way she was admitting it.
He didn’t look mad. He looked ridiculous with sugar all over him, and no doubt, she did, too.
“Oh, my God, I’ve probably ruined your suit,” she said, afraid it cost more than several months’ rent on her apartment.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
Sugar drifted off him as he smiled and shook his head. Even his eyebrows were coated in white.
She couldn’t help it. She reached for him, trying to brush some of the sugar off his suit. Not that it was really working. Powdered sugar was indeed the texture of powder, too fine to brush off, mostly just sinking into the grain of the fabric and leaving a faint imprint of white.
“I’m afraid I’m making it worse,” she said, still trying anyway to get the stuff off him.
He held up his hands to get her to stop, which she did, feeling even worse about how she’d had her hands all over the man. Just trying to help, truly. She honestly feared the cost of the ruined suit.
“Sorry,” she said again.
“I’ll just take this off right here,” he said, shrugging out of it, more powder flying as he did it.
“Wait, let me get you something to put that in, or you’ll have powdered sugar all over the house.” She pulled out a fresh kitchen garbage bag and held it out to him as he put the folded suit jacket into it.
He peeled off his tie next, depositing that in the bag, too.
Looking down at his shirt and pants, he brushed himself off as best he could, started to unbutton the shirt, but then quit when he had it half off. “Is this…do you mind?”
Amy shook her head.
Mind was not the word.
A more accurate one would be…
Appreciate the sight before her?
Oh, my.
He had no way of knowing what she’d promised herself long ago, when Max was born. That one day, she’d have a man in her life again. First, it had all been about Max, overwhelmingly Max, and the work she needed to do to support them both. Then she’d gone to cooking school and had no time for anything but that and Max. But she’d promised herself that once she graduated, had a good job and things calmed down, got a little easier, she’d let herself…at least think about a man again.
She hadn’t thought that would be any kind of problem. Her first and only real experience with men had been such a downer. But seven years had gone by. More than seven, since she really had a man in her life, and here she was, newly graduated, working her first real, if short-term, job and…
Maybe she was more ready than she knew, because he…
He just looked so good.
She groaned just a bit at the sight of him, lean as could be, and yet…Well, she hadn’t seen such a perfect specimen of man outside of an advertisement for cologne or men’s jeans in ages—maybe even her whole life.