Kaye Dacus - Stand-In Groom

George sputtered to keep from spitting out the water he’d just sipped. He swallowed and wiped his mouth with the blue fabric napkin. “Sir?” He glanced around the table. Without exception, Anne’s male relatives stared at him, awaiting an answer to the preposterous question. “My intentions…” He cleared his throat. “My intentions toward Miss Hawthorne are honorable, I assure you, Mr. Guidry.”

Beside him, Forbes burst into laughter, and the rest followed suit. “They’re just giving you a hard time. Means they like you.”

Not sure he understood, George nodded and smiled. He was saved from any further embarrassment by the reappearance of the women. He started to stand, but Forbes stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “They’re going to serve dessert, so you’ll just be in the way if you do that.”

“I see.” He edged his chair closer to the table.

Maggie directed the presentation of the desserts on the sideboard. A white cake with strawberries on top became the centerpiece, surrounded by pies, dishes of petits fours, and other confectionaries.

“Coffee?” Anne leaned over his right shoulder with a carafe and a cup.

“You know me.” He winked at her.

She set down the cup and poured. “This is the real thing—genuine Louisiana coffee with chicory. Dark roast.” Her voice held a hint of warning.

He sipped the dark, rich, bitter liquid. “My favorite. Although I haven’t had it quite this strong anywhere else.”

“That’s the way Aunt Maggie likes to make it.” She squeezed his shoulder and moved on to serve coffee down the table.

Meredith placed a square plate in front of him with a sampling of each of the desserts, arranged on the plate as he would expect to see in a fine restaurant. Maggie did this for a living. Anne had suggested her aunt to make Courtney’s wedding cake. If what he’d seen today was what she did for a regular family gathering, he’d love to see what she could do for a reception for seven hundred guests with no holds barred on the price.

He stood and held Anne’s chair for her. “Everything looks wonderful. I’m not even certain what all of it is.”

Anne picked up her dessert fork and used it as a pointer. “White amaretto cake with strawberries and raspberry filling. Banana pudding. Chocolate petits fours—some have a berry filling, some are vanilla crème, and some are mint—I’m not sure which kind you got. Lemonade icebox pie. We don’t usually have this many desserts. Aunt Maggie catered the Junior League tea yesterday afternoon and had all this left over.”

“Annie, did Madeline catch you at church this morning?” one of her aunts asked as she leaned between them to refresh their coffee.

“Yes. I figured you were one of the key people who put her up to asking me to speak.”

Forbes handed George the cream to give to Anne before she had to ask for it. She answered her relatives’ questions about the invitation to speak at the Bonneterre Women in Business luncheon but fidgeted as if uncomfortable with the focus of attention on herself. As soon as the discussion turned to something else, she stopped twisting her napkin in her lap, sipped her coffee, and nibbled at her desserts.

* * *

Anne smiled at George when he brought the carafe of coffee over to refill her cup before following the rest of the men into the kitchen to help clean up. As soon as the kitchen door stopped swinging, her aunts and cousins exclaimed over him—his sweetness, good looks, charm, impeccable manners, and especially his British accent.

“Is it serious?” Aunt Maggie’s question brought everyone else to attention.

Anne shrugged. “Not really. Less than a week ago, I thought he was marrying someone else.”

Meredith leaned forward. “But could it be serious?” Her expression told Anne what answer she wanted to hear.

“I’m really not sure. I haven’t even known him for a month. I know y’all want me to find someone and settle down, but give us some time, please.” She smiled at the women staring at her to soften her words. “I promise you’ll be the first to know if it turns serious.”

Each of the younger single women was then given the opportunity to be the center of the aunts’ appetite for romance. When the masculine voices and laughter in the kitchen grew louder than the clank of dishes being washed, the women’s conference ended. Anne took the opportunity to slip off to the powder room.

On her way back, one of her younger cousins waylaid her at the entrance to the sunroom and pulled her back into the now-empty kitchen.

“What’s up, Marci?” Anne reached over and pushed a lock of the twenty-four-year-old’s honey-streaked red hair back from her face. She knew the young woman was struggling to get her parents and even Jenn, Mere, and Forbes to recognize her as an adult. But there was a lack of maturity in the way she acted around her family, compounded by the fact that she still hadn’t chosen a college major after five years, that kept her a perpetual child in their eyes.

“Annie, you’re the only person in the family who’ll tell me the truth.”

“Of course I will. What do you want to know?”

“Earlier, when I asked about Cliff Ballantine, I know Forbes was lying to me about not knowing him. Did y’all know him in high school?”

Anne’s stomach twisted. She didn’t want to lie to her cousin, but she also didn’t want the story to get beyond the family. She crossed her arms and leaned against the edge of the island. “If I tell you, you have to promise me it goes no further. There’s a reason why he’s not discussed by anyone, and that’s because of me. I’ve asked everyone in the family to keep my secret, which has become harder as he’s gotten more famous.” She took a deep breath. “Yes, we knew Cliff in high school. I tutored him in English and helped him write several papers.”

“Even though you’re two years younger than him?”

Anne harrumphed. “He was only a year ahead of me in school, but I was in advanced placement classes. He wasn’t. When he started college, I kept helping him. You have to understand—I was very shy as a child and had very low self-esteem from all the teasing I got because I hit a growth spurt and was nearly six feet tall by the time I was thirteen. I never had a boy show the kind of attention to me that he did just for doing something I was good at. When I got to college, though, I wasn’t just helping him with English—it was all his classes: history, anthropology, even his drama classes. When I told him I didn’t have time to continue, he really turned on the charm. We started ‘dating.’ ” She made quotation marks in the air with her fingers. “I’ll spare you all the gory details. But when Cliff moved out to Hollywood my first year of graduate school, I sent him money every month to help him make ends meet. It got to the point where I was getting every credit card I could and maxing it out with cash advances just to have money to send to him. When the loan company threatened to repossess my car, I told him I couldn’t afford to send him any more money. That was when he suggested we get married. I was naive and wanted to be married, especially to someone as handsome and talented as he, so I agreed. I quit grad school and went to work full-time as the event planner for B-G.”

“The job Meredith has now?”

“Yes. I started planning my wedding. It was going to be small, just our families. We couldn’t afford much, and I didn’t want to ask Uncle Errol and Aunt Maggie for money because they’d already helped me out by giving me a loan to pay off all of my past-due bills and letting me move back in so that I could use my rent money to pay them back. Half of each paycheck went to them, half to Cliff in California. We set a date. I reserved the chapel, the reception hall, worked out the menu with Maggie, and had a gown on layaway at Drace’s.”

“What happened? I mean, obviously you didn’t end up marrying him…did you?”

Anne had to laugh at Marci’s incredulity. “No, I didn’t marry him. Two days before the wedding, he called me and told me to cancel everything. He’d gotten a callback on a movie role he’d auditioned for and would have to stay in California another week.”

“What a pig.”

“Yeah. So I canceled everything and lost most of the money on nonrefundable deposits. For a month, I didn’t hear anything from him. The next thing I know, I see a photo of him with some blond bombshell of an actress on the front cover of one of the gossip rags at the grocery store. Time went by, and eventually I gave up hope that I’d ever hear from him and accepted the fact he’d only been dating me to get me to do stuff for him.”

The glaze of admiration for the actor in Marci’s eyes had been replaced by disillusionment at the revelation of the man’s character. “It’s no wonder you don’t want anyone else in the family to talk about it. Did he ever pay you back all the money?”

Anne shook her head. “Nope. Never saw a penny. I suppose I could have blackmailed him by threatening to run to the media and show them all the canceled checks with his signature on the back, since he takes great pleasure in telling everyone how he struggled to make it on his own in Hollywood until he got his big break. It was a hard lesson to learn.”

“What lesson is that?”

“Don’t pour all of your emotions and energy into a relationship unless both parties are willing to give one hundred percent to it. Cliff was a taker, and he was willing to take whatever I was stupid enough to offer—my skills and education, my emotions, and my money. I’m just glad he’s out of my life.”

“How could you not tell me?” George brushed past the secretary who’d opened Forbes’s office door to announce his arrival early Monday morning.

Forbes gave his assistant a curt nod and laid his gold pen atop the paperwork on his desk. “And what is it I’m supposed to have told you?”

Although the woman closed the door behind her, George strained to keep his voice low. “That Anne was engaged to be married to Cliff Ballantine!” He crossed the office and leaned on the desk, his hands on either side of the desk blotter. “Have you lost your senses? How do you think she’s going to feel when he arrives in town next week for the engagement party and I turn around and say, ‘Surprise, you’ve been hired to plan your ex-fiancé’s wedding’?”

“It wasn’t my place to tell you.”

“Not your—” Fury clogged George’s throat. Was it all just a game to Forbes? He liked Anne’s cousin, had thought they were getting on famously and becoming fast friends. But now…

“You are the only person in this farce who knows all the players and their roles. How could you let Anne take on this contract?”

The lawyer leaned back in his chair, his fingers steepled and resting on his chin. “Are you more upset because you didn’t know or because of how you think this might affect Anne?”

George straightened and dropped his hands to his sides. “Don’t play the barrister with me, Forbes.” His so-called friend’s calm exterior only fed his anger. He wanted to see some kind of emotion, some kind of remorse or embarrassment. He took a calculated risk. “Did it make you feel powerful, knowing that you could manipulate this situation? Or do you hold some kind of shares in Anne’s business to make you trick her into taking this wedding on just to increase the return on your investment?”

Forbes exploded out of his chair, and it slammed against the credenza behind him. “There are a lot of things I’ll put up with.” Menace edged his low voice. He braced his fists against the edge of his desk. “But being insulted isn’t one of them. A hundred years ago, we would be headed to a field with dueling pistols about right now.”

“And gladly would I have defended Anne’s honor and my own.” George matched his pose, trying not to let the other man’s larger build and height intimidate him. “I’ve read about the corruption of lawyers in Louisiana, but I never expected to see it in you. To use your own flesh and blood—”

Forbes grabbed the front of George’s shirt and nearly dragged him onto the desk. “You have no right to accuse me of wrongdoing. I love Anne, and I would die before I brought her harm or unhappiness.”

Some of George’s anger dissipated at Forbes’s passionate speech. “Then tell me everything. Make me understand. Because from where I stand, you look guilty as sin. And I don’t want to be caught in the middle.”

Forbes released him, and George stumbled back a step. Balance regained, he smoothed his shirt and tucked it back into his trousers.

Letting out a low growl, Forbes straightened his tie and raked his fingers through his hair. He pulled his chair forward and sank into it with a sigh. “I never meant for you to be caught in the middle, George, and I apologize if you feel that way.” He motioned for George to sit. “How did you learn of Anne and Cliff’s engagement?”