Bliss Brothers (Complete Series), page 19
“Time for dinner, everyone,” I call, and with that, it’s too late for arguments.
9
Claire
The ballroom. I didn’t check the ballroom.
Of course, I checked the ballroom several times earlier today, but once it was time to change and get the cocktail hour started, I didn’t go back in.
I have no idea what to expect.
Actually, I have too many ideas about what to expect, and I feel I’ll shortly lose my mind if the truth isn’t revealed. Oh, God, let it be a survivable truth. Let it be something this party can come back from, even if I have to wrest it into a sane shape with brute force.
Beau is the kind of man who shows up at the office in shorts and a button-down. I’ve seen him more than once wearing swim trunks when we’re not actively planning something—a drink in his hand, heading for the pool. So my heart is in my throat and every muscle is screaming at me to run.
What’s inside can’t possibly be the elegant affair I planned. Also, I need to stop thinking about my own parties as elegant affairs. The brand is taking over my entire mind, which some people would view as a positive. I’m already focused enough on being the perfect brand ambassador, but that can’t be my only thought.
I have to focus. How much time could he have had? I scan anxiously over the doorway to the ballroom, even though the doorway reveals nothing. As expected. It’s a doorway. There’s not much to learn there, and changes to doorways take serious renovation.
We lead the party in through the wide double doors. Soft string music plays from the in-house system, not loud enough to overwhelm, just enough to set a mood. Check. The tablecloths are still the same, crisp white. Check. There’s nothing hanging from the ceiling—I’d had a terrible fear of a piñata. Not that there’s anything wrong with piñatas. I’ve bought more than a few in the course of planning events. But for this event? God, no.
“What is it, then?”
Beau pats my hand, which is hooked under his elbow. That realization comes to me with full force. I’ve been touching him, all this time, and in such a panic about what he did to the seating arrangement that I hadn’t even noticed. “What is what, Claire?”
Why does my name sound so good in his mouth?
“Or—sorry. I should call you Ms. Cashmore. I don’t think we’re on first-name terms.”
“I think we should be, since you invited me to dinner.” That’s the anxiety talking. He should not do that. We should not get familiar with each other. We should not, not, not. “What did you change?” There’s an edge to my voice that I can’t disguise.
“Just one thing. It won’t have any effect on the other seating options.” I want to sink into his voice and hide there forever, but that’s not on the table now and it never will be. I know that. I know that.
“How can that be? The way the tables are arranged—”
We reach the front of the room, by the floor-to-ceiling windows framing the brilliant glow of the sunset.
That’s when I see it.
The sweetheart table.
“Who’s sitting here?” I force the question out even though I know who is sitting here. I know it from the top of my head down to the tips of my toes. But what’s the feeling? Is it excitement, or abject terror? “Mr. Bliss, who is sitting here?”
“Beau.”
“Are you—did you refer to yourself in the third person, because—who—” This is the moment when it finally happens. This is when I finally lose my composure in front of a large crowd and my career blows away in a puff of smoke.
“You can call me Beau now. We agreed,” he says smoothly. “And I’m sitting here with you, Claire.”
I can’t.
I don’t—
What?
My brain is nothing but the whoosh of TV static. That’s all my brain is.
So my body goes along with it when Beau escorts me around to the table like the groom at a wedding escorts his bride, and oh my God I cannot let this visual happen in front of the entire dinner party.
I also can’t run away. The voice in the back of my head is curiously silent in this moment.
“We can’t do this.” I say the words, but I’m already sitting down into the chair that Beau has pulled out for me.
“Can’t do what?” He chuckles. “Did you have too many appetizers before dinner? Just pretend the food is good.”
“The food is going to be wonderful.” I personally went through an entire tasting menu with the chef. As if I would leave that to chance. “We can’t sit here and eat dinner together. At a sweetheart table.”
“Is that what this is called?” Beau takes the other chair and pulls it out. Then he looks out over the other guests, all of them sliding into chairs, laughing. For the moment, they’re completely oblivious to the scene playing out at the sweetheart table.
Beau raises his arms.
“Don’t do this,” I tell him. “Do not do this.” I want to shout, I want to create a diversion, but years of repressing any urge to make a scene hold me back.
“Don’t do what?”
Make them look at us. Don’t make them look at us. Because everyone will see me, sitting here next to you, blushing like the bride at a wedding and I am not a bride and I’ll never be your bride and—
I’ve taken too long.
Beau calls out in a booming voice, “Everyone, feel free to be seated.”
This is greeted with another wave of accommodating laughter, and then…
…everyone stares.
At us.
* * *
BEAU
I TAKE my seat next to Claire, snugged up to the sweetheart table—that’s a name—and turn slightly toward her. “Surprise.”
She takes her napkin and unfolds it briskly into her lap. “Yes. I am…I’m very surprised.”
“About the table? Because that took a bit of doing.” It really did. The ballroom wasn’t set up with a sweetheart table, and two guys had to carry it in. There was enough room between the existing tables that it wasn’t a problem, but Claire has glass everywhere. Glass vases. Glass bowls with little twists of paper in them. I’m curious about whether it’s candy or just…decorative paper. That detail doesn’t matter as much in this moment, but still.
“You should have consulted me. It could have altered the flow of the room in a way that—”
“The flow of the room is fine. We’re not even technically in the main arrangement. Trust me. I checked.” I don’t mention that I checked by having the table moved in and visually confirming that it fits, which it does. Yet another detail that helps no one.
“Trust you?” She looks across at me, her green eyes fiery. “You are taking huge risks with this event. Massive risks.”
“Claire?”
“Yes?” She screws up her lips into a tight knot.
“Are we attending the same event?”
“Of course we are.” Her voice is tight, vibrating.
“Because you’re acting like I lit a rowboat on fire in the middle of the ballroom.”
“You might as well have.”
She’s serious, and it makes me laugh. I shouldn’t laugh, but I do anyway because I can’t help it. I am only a human man. “I am shocked that you’re not praising me right now.”
“Praising you?” Her eyebrows shoot up toward her hairline, and the expression lingers before she locks it down.
“Yeah. Praising me. First point, I did not bring a keg. I didn’t even hide any behind the bar.” She opens her mouth to interject, but I carry on. “Second, this is exactly what you wanted.”
“Exactly what I wanted? How? How could you think that?”
“The keg, for starters. You were explicit about the keg.”
She laughs, a strange little giggle as if she doesn’t want anyone to know she’s laughing. “Yeah, because if I hadn’t been, God knows what you would have brought in here.”
I frown like she’s truly wounded me. “I would never bring a keg to a dinner party.”
“Sure you wouldn’t.”
“I would bring a vodka fountain. That’s more appropriate for a dinner party.”
“See? This is—” She shakes her head. “This is not what I asked for. I don’t know why you thought—”
“I thought it because I was listening to you, a feat of which I am, in fact, very capable. You said you didn’t want to sit down to eat with the guests. Now we’re not. Yet we’re still lending our charming presence to the room. What could be better?”
Her mouth drops open. It actually drops open, and I’m swept away by how perfect her lips are, even when they’re parted in shock and not, you know, ecstasy from my talents in the bedroom. “That is not what’s happening.”
“What’s happening, then?”
“We’re the center of attention,” she frets. “I’m not ever supposed to be the center of attention. I’m only supposed to plan the events and stand by to make sure they’re going smoothly. Not take the spotlight.”
“I hate to break this to you.”
“Oh, what? That I have to be in the spotlight just because you are?” Claire’s more scarlet than pink, and while I enjoy having some effect on her, I don’t want to take this into too-far territory.
I hide my mouth behind my cupped hand. “Nobody’s looking at us.”
Claire levels me with a glare that’s composed of pure rage, and then, in an instant, it’s gone, replaced by an expression that’s just…blank.
Then she blushes.
“I don’t like this,” she says evenly.
“Just look.”
“I can’t.”
This is the most vulnerable thing I’ve ever heard her say. “What do you mean? Just look over there.”
“I can’t. I’m stricken.”
Is she actually being open with me? Now? At the sweetheart table, looking out over a dinner party for sixty? Honestly, it’s a nice view—everyone is dressed to the nines, and the air is sweet with hairspray and perfume.
“Stricken with what? Did you have some kind of accident?”
She rolls her eyes, and I get another glimpse of the Claire-Behind-Closed-Doors. It’s stupid, how much I want more of it. It’s absurd how much pride I feel in making her roll her eyes. Almost more pride than I feel when she laughs. “No. I don’t want to see how many people are staring.”
“Nobody is staring.”
They’re not. They’re used to me making big, flashy announcements. I don’t know everybody’s name, but I recognize enough faces from the beach. What Roman doesn’t seem to know is that these people—the ones we’re supposed to be apologizing to—regularly tiptoe over the property line to our beach and join in my festivities. I don’t pry too hard. That’s not the nature of the Bliss Resort. And what’s it to me if they want to make out with their silver fox husband with their feet in the sand and some fireworks bursting overhead?
It’s nothing to me.
“How am I supposed to believe you?”
I extend my hand to her, hidden beneath the tablecloth, but with every bit of Leo DiCaprio’s attitude from Titanic. “Do you trust me?”
“No. That’s why I don’t believe you.”
She doesn’t take my hand, so I lift my fingertips to her cheek and press. Gently. Feather-light. She turns her head toward the rest of the tables. “Oh. Nobody’s looking at us.”
“Don’t you wish they were?”
Claire turns back toward me. “No.”
“Not now, or not ever?”
She presses her lips closed again as the waiter comes by with a bread basket heaped with rolls so hot and fresh they’re steaming.
“Don’t worry, Claire.” I reach for one of those rolls the second the basket hits the table. “We’ve got all evening for you to think of your answer.”
10
Claire
“I don’t know, Britt. It’s been three events, and I’m—”
I can’t find the words. Here I am, on the phone with my best friend in the entire world, and I’m coming up with nothing to describe working with Beau. I’ve taken her through the cocktail hour and the dinner party, the way he quit and then made a big grand entrance, and the garden tea we put on three days after that. Maybe it’s just that my brain can’t function at this breakneck pace.
“Smitten?” Her voice comes over the line against a backdrop of New York City noises. “You sound…smitten.”
“I am not smitten. I’m just…I’m out for a walk. That’s probably why I sound short of breath. It’s six in the evening, the heat a sultry, humid presence. I bought a gym membership when I moved here but couldn’t bear the thought of driving over. Walking it is.
“I don’t know. You sound smitten to me.”
Britt and I met in college, and it is, frankly, a miracle that we became friends at all. She’s an actress—no longer aspiring, since she has two recurring roles in different TV franchises that film in the city. And Britt is…open. She’s open to the world, and anything that might come along in it, and I’m not. Still, this far out from graduation, we still make time to talk several times a week. Once I have my feet under me, I’ll invite her for a weekend in Ruby Bay. She’d like it here.
I take in another deep breath and power up the hill into the residential neighborhood a couple blocks down from the English Rose. “There is no way I could be smitten with a guy like Beau Bliss. He’s…he’s out there. Totally unpredictable.”
“Has it ever occurred to you that—” The last part of her sentence is garbled.
“Are you eating while you walk home?”
“I’m eating while I walk to the set,” she says through another mouthful of whatever delicious street food she’s chosen for the day. “Sorry. Has it ever occurred to you that you might need someone a little more unpredictable?”
“Absolutely not.”
“I’m serious, Claire.”
“I’m serious, too.”
“Every time you talk about him, your voice does a…thing. I can’t describe it. You keep saying you can’t stand the way he is, the way he acts, but when you talk about him it’s like a monologue from a rom-com.”
That makes me laugh, only I’m slightly out of breath from powering up the hill, so I have to stop and wheeze a little bit. But not before checking to make sure nobody from the Bliss Resort can see. Unsurprisingly, they’re nowhere to be found, since this is the other side of town from the sprawling resort and I have no idea why any of the brothers would want to be here. “A rom-com?” This sets off another round of wheezing. “I thought I was complaining bitterly.”
“Yeah, well, with you, complaining bitterly is the equivalent of a mild scolding.”
“I’m not sure what that means.”
“It means you never let your real voice through. Everything’s so careful. Maybe you need someone in your life who isn’t careful. I would be that person—” She pauses for long enough that I think she’s probably taken another bite of whatever she’s eating. “I would be that person, but the shooting schedule right now is crazy.”
“It’s only two weeks.” I go down the next slope, then up another one. This neighborhood is cute. Why didn’t I buy here, instead of purchasing the greatest money pit known to man? Oh, that’s right—money. “Then I’ll never have to think about him again.”
“Doubt that.”
“I don’t. He’s honestly the worst.”
“Oh, yes. The worst. The man who got you your own sweetheart table at a dinner party so you could join in without really joining in—like you love—must have a black, rotted heart and a terrible personality.”
“He does. He has a terrible personality. It’s the kind of personality that—”
I can’t finish the sentence.
Britt finishes it for me. “That your mother wouldn’t approve of?”
She’s so right that I have no response. Instead, I walk faster, huffing into the phone so she knows I’m working out too hard to speak and not blowing her off.
“I know you’re faking it, by the way. You’re in too good of shape to get truly winded walking up a little hill.”
“Fine,” I burst out. “He is exactly the kind of person who would drive my mom insane.”
“Your mom is already insane. I say that with so much love, girl.” There’s a pause where something wrapper-like rustles against the mouthpiece of her phone, drowning out everything. Or maybe it’s just bad service from walking next to a skyscraper. Hard to say. “But she’s bitter. She can find a reason not to like anyone, and honestly, you’d do yourself a favor if you let that kind of thing go.”
“I have let it go. I’ve totally let it go.”
“We both know why you moved to Ruby Bay. You don’t have to pretend.” She starts to sing. “You’ve got a friend in me. You’ve got a friend in me. And I was there when the whole situation with—”
“Don’t say it.” I am over what happened, no matter what Britt thinks, but remembering it still makes my heart ache. And I hate that. “Don’t.”
“Fine. All I’m saying is, don’t let that happen again.”
“How could I? We’re not even speaking.”
“Good.” The noise in the background picks up in volume.
“It is good.”
“I know. Listen. I’m almost to the set. Don’t let her get in your head about this guy, okay?”
“It’s unprofessional,” I argue back, even though I know there’s no time for this. “I can’t be unprofessional. It’s a slippery slope into—”
“Oh, God, no—not a slippery slope into happiness! I love you. Gotta go. Bye.”
* * *
BEAU
Roman thinks I spend all my time falling-down drunk, but when Claire left the office today, I did not pass go. I went directly to the gym on the club side. It’s a separate building on the corner that’s dressed up to look like another one of the houses, and most people who live on the club side never use it. They have their own home gyms, obviously. I have a set of free weights. I like that gym atmosphere. Plus, Charlie once said that replacing gym equipment counted as a tax write-off for the resort. I understand fuck-all about taxes, but I know what a write-off is, and someone has to make sure all the cardio equipment wears out and needs to be replaced.
