Guns and Roses (64 page)

“It’s going to be a bulk-rate funeral.”

“What rhymes with bedraggled?” Roy asked, wiping tears from his too-handsome-for-his-own-good face; he had that young, hip Lothario thing going for him, especially with the tux Trevor had made him wear.

“Haggled,” Lori offered from the other side of the room and Roy kept sniffling and clicking keys on his cell phone.

“Quit encouraging him,” Bobbie Faye snapped at her little sister, and Lori smiled.

“Are you kidding? As many women who’ve gone after him with a hatchet? I could sell tickets for this and make a killing. Besides, shouldn’t you be dressed by now?”

Bobbie Faye eyed the gorgeous dress hanging on a special stand provided by the owner of the house. She was afraid to touch it. She’d been afraid to touch anything in this house, really—as stunning as it was with its original Renoir paintings and Louis XIV furniture, but she was
especially
scared of the dress.

It had been perfect. It was
still
perfect, over there, safely on the hanger.

“It’s okay,” Nina reassured her, standing close enough so that she didn’t have to shout over the pipers. “It’s going to be fine.”

Everyone in the room groaned.

Ce Ce shook her head at Nina. “Honey, don’t you know better than to do that by now?”

Nina laughed. “Look, nobody knows we’re here, nobody cares—everyone out there”—she motioned to the Quarter—“just cares about the music over on the river, or the food. We’ll get in, she’ll get hitched, we’ll get out. Piece of cake.”

 “I’m so glad I’m not standing up next to you,” Lori said. “The ceiling’s probably gonna fall in.”

“Gee, thanks.”

Nina put her arm around Bobbie Faye and leaned in close. “Look, if you’re having cold feet, you just say the word. I can get a chopper here in about ten minutes and we can leave. Trevor won’t find you until you’re ready to deal with him.”

Bobbie Faye laughed. “Man, I wish I’d known you had access to that many toys
years
ago. I’m fine.”

“You’ve been tearing up at the drop of a hat. I can count on one hand with three fingers tied down the number of times you’ve teared up over something.”

“Hey.” Bobbie Faye elbowed Nina a bit. “It’s a
big deal
. I’m a lapsed and technically ex-communicated Catholic, about to go into the oldest cathedral in the country and say my vows, because this man wants to marry me in a church so much he bribed the Pope.”

“Does the Pope know you’re going in armed?”

“We may have omitted that part.”

~*~

Cam pushed the door open, stepped into the room, right into Trevor’s space where he held the stunning blonde. The
only
reason he hadn’t decked Trevor was because the blonde was in the way, plastered up against the man who supposedly loved Bobbie Faye, who was going to marry her in less than an hour, and who bloody fucking
hell
was going to die for betraying the woman Cam had loved for most of his life. Even if they weren’t right for each other, even if he’d realized she’d been right, this
bastard
… Cam put his hands on the woman to move her out of the way…

…and she spun, instead, facing him, her grin going wide, staggeringly beautiful…

And as he balled up his fist to throttle Trevor, the woman said, “Cam! I had hoped to meet you before the ceremony!”

Then she planted a big honking kiss
on him
.

It was decidedly difficult to throw a punch when a stunning woman was plastered up against you and grinning at you like you should know who she was. And then the connection hit… Isabelle. “Izzy?” Trevor’s little sister.

Holeeeee shit
.

“Get your damned hands
off
my sister,” Trevor said, quiet, menacing, and Cam looked down and
whoa
, he’d already wrapped his hands around Izzy and had held her to him. No wonder Trevor was about to kill him.

“Shut up, Trev,” Izzy said, grinning again at Cam. “Cam and I have gotten to know each other since the last disaster when I helped you. He’s just saying
hello
.”

“He can damned well say
hello
from ten feet away,” Trevor snapped back, pulling his sister away from Cam, who reluctantly let go.
What the hell? What was this… surge of feeling he had? No way should he feel this… this…
lust
like a locomotive slamming into his chest. And other parts south.

“And just how in the hell have you two gotten to know each other?” Trevor asked.

“Facebook,” they both answered together, and then they both grinned stupidly. Izzy’s icon had been Albert Einstein and Cam’s had been an LSU tiger. Neither of them had personal photos on their pages, but Cam knew she could have Googled him to know what he looked like. He’d tried Googling hers when she kept making him laugh, but found nothing and assumed…
computer geek… introvert…. no photos… must be plain or downright ugly
.

Really, really asinine assumption
.

“Izzy,” Trevor said, turning the gorgeous creature around to face him, “not that I’m not glad to see you, but I thought you were going to keep our mother occupied so she couldn’t interfere?”

Izzy harrumphed, like that hadn’t been a possibility and Trevor was nuts to have thought it might be. She glanced over at Cam, noticed his puzzled expression and said, “Our mother bought the little boutique hotel three blocks from here just so she could kick out the clientele on the top floor and take it over herself. We flew in yesterday. I’ve been trying to keep her overwhelmed with business, but she won’t talk to me yet, and I’m having to do everything through Deronda, her assistant.” Then the blasted bagpipes started up again and he cringed. “Courtesy of dear old mom,” Izzy shouted to Cam.

“I’m sure that’s not the worst that she has planned,” Trevor added. He looked at Cam, then, “Can you alert those extra guards we added, and the locals, in case our mom has something more up her sleeve?”

“She wouldn’t actually disrupt the wedding?” Cam asked, and on Trevor’s grimace, Cam blinked. “Does she have a death wish?”

“She isn’t a mere mortal like the rest of the world,” Izzy answered and Cam frowned, seeing the hurt behind her eyes.

It had never occurred to him what kind of family Trevor might have grown up in. His own had always been laid back and close-knit. Cam nodded and turned to leave, but… impulse, grabbed Izzy before Trevor could stop him and kissed her.

“Hel
lo
,” he said, and she grinned again.

~*~

Bobbie Faye wore the world’s most stunning dress—something the bridal shop owner offered to donate that night when it was clear Bobbie Faye had fallen in love with it, but couldn’t afford it on her own and wouldn’t let Trevor buy it for her. The proprietress decided if Bobbie Faye agreed to model the dress, the shock of the general public at the
mere idea
that someone would actually
marry such a disaster
(as the woman put it… just before realizing Bobbie Faye was standing within hitting distance, and she backed up, five steps, fast)… and that shock, coupled with her notoriety, would garner the shop and the new dress designer—a local woman—more publicity than they could have bought, so it was a win-win.

And now, Bobbie Faye wore that dress while in a beautiful, white, horse-drawn carriage, straight out of a fairy-tale, as they rolled around the block surrounding the Cathedral… followed by a dozen bagpipers playing a funeral dirge. Bobbie Faye felt just a little like the fairy princess who’s cursed and doomed and about to damn an entire village to Hell, especially as the pipers kicked up the volume when the entire entourage stopped in front of the Cathedral doors.

So much for thinking they were setting up here as a mere coincidence.

Nina sat beside her and Cam had shown up to sit in the seat facing her, and both were dressed beautifully: Nina, drop-dead gorgeous in midnight blue, even if she maintained that über aloof veneer that froze out almost every man on the planet and kept her secretly lonely. And Cam, in a black tux that made him so stunningly handsome, it brought tears to Bobbie Faye’s eyes.

Cam’s gaze narrowed on hers and he went instantly from a sort of befuddled, confused expression to razor-sharp insightful, and she tried to look away, knowing he was reading the wrong thing into those tears, but she couldn’t even begin to explain. He leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees and reached for her hand—the one not holding the beautiful roses and violets bouquet Trevor had made for her.

“Baby?” he asked, forgetting again that he wasn’t supposed to call her that, “are you okay?” If he hadn’t been leaning seriously close, she’d have never understood him above the screeching din around them. “If you don’t want to do this, you don’t have to. There’s no sin in changing your mind, you know. I can have you out of here before anyone knows what happened.”

“I told her that, too,” Nina said, and she and Cam exchanged a look that normally would have made Bobbie Faye want to throttle them both, except they were trying desperately to help and she understood that.

“I’m
fine
,” she said, trying to emphasize the words, while brushing a tear away.

“You’re not
fine
,” Cam said, quietly, getting angry as he squeezed her hand, “and it’s obvious. You
never
cry. You shoot things.”

Yeah, the good ol’ days.
She laughed a little and squeezed his hand back. How could she explain this? It was all too overwhelming, too much. Instead, she shook her head.

“Probably not a good idea for me to shoot things on my wedding day. Just let it go, Cam. Let’s get this over with and then I’ll be fine.”

He and Nina shared another look and as he started to say something, Nina stopped him.

“B—no one should ever say ‘let’s get this over with’ about their wedding and actually mean it. But clearly, you do. I think—something’s wrong here. You know it, I know it, and you can’t go through with this if this isn’t what you want.”

Just then, she looked up at the front of the Cathedral, the huge white stucco building reaching to heaven, two giant spires and cone-shaped roofs on each side of the central entrance making it look like a castle. Mobs of people had crowded into the square, fascinated by the horse-drawn carriage and the pipers trouping behind. Cameras flashed, people cheered and shouted, and a jazz quintet tried vainly to be heard. It was chaos squared, and she motioned for Cam to step to the ground and help her out.

She was going to go through with this stupid wedding if it was the last damned thing she did.

~*~

It was Bobbie Faye’s first time to set foot in this church. Her adrenaline surged in awe of its size, and chills spread through her. Massive stonework—grey green marble with black flecks on the entry, grey stone rising to soaring heights, and that was just the vestibule. There were two double door entrances into the Cathedral, and once inside, two more massive doors that entered the actual sanctuary; those were closed now so that she could make her entrance on cue.

She and Cam and Nina stood just inside the vestibule—a narrow space not exactly designed with wedding parties in mind—and Cam went through the inner doors to check to see if everyone was ready inside the sanctuary. Since there were almost none of her friends and family who even knew about the wedding, and since none of Trevor’s family had been invited, it boiled down to about ten people. Maybe fifteen. They were going to look like dust motes in this huge Cathedral, barely filling up one row, much less the massive space inside. She bit back the threatening tears and shook her head to ward off the wistfulness of what might have been.

“Ah, here you are,” a priest said as he walked through a side entrance she hadn’t noticed. A priest who looked like a reformed biker, which amused her. Only in New Orleans. “I’m Father Joshua—Josh, for short—and unfortunately, in the rush to get everything ready, we failed to get a very important signature from you. If you’ll just step this way for one moment, Ms. Sumrall, we’ll be able to get the service started as soon as we have this done.”

“Seriously?” she asked, frowning and glancing at Nina. “Trevor left something undone?”

“Ah, no, I’m pretty certain it was something on our end that we forgot to ask of him. If you would?” He indicated a small room just off the vestibule, and then, to Nina, he said, “I’ll have her back in just a moment. Has everyone else arrived?”

“I believe so,” Nina said, peeking in the door to the sanctuary. “Looks like they’re all there.”

“We’ll just be a few moments, then,” the priest said and smiled serenely. “Such a blessing, weddings are!”