Mother of the Bride (2 page)

What horse-hockey,
Cydney's little voice said, but she ignored it and shoved the half-melted ice cream into the freezer.

Gwen and Fletcher Parrish were driven and ruthless—
People
magazine said so—their stunning successes and stellar careers nothing more than overcompensation for failed personal lives. Cydney had been so incensed by
People's
Father's Day cover story—”Like Father, Like Daughter”—that she'd canceled her subscription.

She'd also sent a blistering letter to
People's
mail column. She was Fletcher Parrish's daughter, too, and she wasn't a failed anything. She owned her own home and her own business, had lots of friends and a full social life. So what if she wasn't rich and famous like her sister Gwen? What did wealth have to do with success?

“Oh, nothing much, honey,” her father said to Cydney on the phone when he'd read her letter to the magazine. “Just everything.” And then he'd laughed.

“How many times, Cydney,” Georgette said, “have I told you to look before you leap?”

“If I'd known you felt so left out,” Gwen said, “I would have insisted that you be included in the article.”

Well why wasn't If
her little voice had demanded, but not Cydney. She'd been too mortified to admit how hurt she'd felt at being left out. Bebe was included. After all, she was Gwen Parrish's daughter. So was Georgette, who was Gwen's mother and a nationally syndicated etiquette columnist ranked right up there with Miss Manners.
People
had even sent a photographer.

The thing that hurt the most, besides the photographer asking Cydney to drive him to the airport, was that her family didn't understand about the letter. Her point was that fame and money were only two tiny little inches on the ruler of success. There were lots of other inches, like self-reliance and self-respect, being a giver and not just a taker. Like being loved for your own sake, not for who or what you are.

Cydney wiped the last of the eggshells off the floor and threw the paper towel away. While she washed her hands,
she gazed out the window at the big maple tree shedding vivid red leaves over the brick patio.

“I think I'll go outside,” she said, “come back in and try that screaming thing again.”

Go ahead,
her little voice said,
but it won't change a thing.

chapter

two

And it didn't. Things were just as bad when Cydney went back into the house and found Bebe's beloved on the white wall phone in the kitchen. Long distance, naturally, which Bebe indicated by slowly drawing her arms wide apart.

She opened her mouth to try that screaming thing again, but snapped it shut when Aldo said: “C'mon, Uncle Angus. Cut me some slack.”

The bell she'd heard earlier rang again in Cydney's head. Clanged and banged and so did her heart. Uncle Angus couldn't possibly be Angus Munroe, could he? World-famous mystery author, who Cydney wanted to be when she grew up? Once Bebe was through college and she finally had time to finish the book she'd been writing for—Gosh, how long was it? Three years?

Five,
her little voice said,
but who's keeping track?

“Yes, I
am
old enough to know what I'm doing,” Aldo said hotly. “I turned twenty-one yesterday, Uncle Gus.”

Surely there had to be another Angus Munroe in the world to be this long, tall drink of water's Uncle Gus. And if Aldo was twenty-one, then Bebe was a rocket scientist. His hair was nearly as long as hers, too, a shoulder-length palomino mane. He made a face at whatever his Uncle Gus was saying, caught Cydney sizing him up and turned as red as the maple tree outside the window.

“Twelve thousand dollars is not too much to spend on an engagement ring,” he said angrily. “Just wait till you meet Bebe. She's worth her weight in diamonds.”

Aldo caught Bebe's left hand, where the rock under discussion—
big enough to make Liz Taylor drool—flashed like a laser. He gave his intended a look so overbrimming with love that Cydney felt a lump swell in her throat—and any doubts she had about Bebe marrying this boy vanish.

This was it. This was being loved for your own sake, not for who or what you are. Cydney couldn't imagine what it must feel like to be the object of such open adoration. She just hoped she'd get a chance to find out in her lifetime.

But not,
her little voice said,
with Wendell Pickering.

“Amen,” Cydney agreed, unaware that she'd said it out loud until Bebe blinked at her and said, “What?”

“I said—” Cydney thought fast, bent her left wrist and tapped the face of her watch “—ahem.”

Bebe whispered in Aldo's ear. In mid okay-okay nod, his jaw clenched and his face flamed again.

“No, Uncle Gus. I will not listen to the benefit of your experience. Why not? Because you don't have any! You've never been married and you haven't stuck your nose out of Crooked Possum in ten years except to—” Aldo broke off and rolled his eyes. “Oh, pardon me. Eight years.”

Oh God. It
was
him. Angus Munroe. The man nearly as famous for being a recluse as he was for his string of best-selling mysteries. Eleven and counting. Not to mention his drop-dead-gorgeous looks. Cydney should know. She had a wall full of Angus Munroe pinups in the locked room over her garage where she spent her weekends writing.

Most of the photos were years old and clipped from magazines, shots of Angus Munroe's back and angry, over-the-shoulder, go-away glares. The prize of her collection, cut from the jacket of his latest book—the first publicity photo he'd posed for in ten years—showed him leaning against a rangy pine tree on his retreat in Crooked Possum, Missouri, deep in the heart of the Ozark Mountains. In hiking boots and tight, faded jeans, arms folded across his plaid-flanneled chest. A day's growth of beard on his jaw, a lock of dark hair drooping over his forehead. A pulse-pounding Heathcliff scowl on his face.

“Pretty boy,” Fletcher Parrish sniffed on the phone when
Cydney asked him if he'd read Munroe's new book. “Can't write his way out of a sentence.”

A slow smile spread across Cydney's face. Well. Maybe this wasn't such a rotten day after all.

“I'm hanging up now,” Aldo said loudly into the phone. “Bebe's Uncle Cyd wants to talk to me.”

He took the receiver away from his ear, but Angus Munroe kept talking. Make that haranguing, his voice raised and angry enough that Cydney could hear him. Aldo shot her a helpless look; she gave him a that's-okay shrug. He sighed and put the phone back to his ear. Cydney grabbed Bebe and towed her into the living room.

“Redhead,” she said, keeping her voice low. “Did you tell Grampa Fletch who Aldo's Uncle Gus is?”

“Sure.” Bebe blinked at her. “He's Aldo's guardian. At least he was until yesterday, when Aldo turned twenty-one. That's why we couldn't get engaged until today, 'cause his Uncle Gus is real protective—like you, Uncle Cyd—and Aldo knew he'd throw a fit.”

“Is that why you didn't bring Aldo home before now? Why I didn't even know you were dating someone seriously?”

“Don't be mad, Uncle Cyd. It wasn't because of you. It was because of Aldo's Uncle Gus. Aldo was afraid he'd do something.”

“I'm not mad, Bebe. Did you tell Grampa Fletch that Aldo's Uncle Gus is the same Angus Munroe who wrote
Paid in Pull
?”

Bebe's eyes flew wide open. “He z's?” she squealed.

Cydney nodded. Slowly, so Bebe wouldn't miss it.

“Wow, Uncle Cyd!” Her niece's voice throbbed with admiration. “How do you know all this stuff?”

“I'm psychic,” Cydney said simply. “What did you tell your mother?”

“Just what I told Gramps. That Aldo's Uncle Gus is his guardian.”

Y-e-e-s-s!
Cydney exulted. One up at last on the Dynamic Duo. She figured she deserved one after the letter to
People.

She could see it now. Gwen, stunned and speechless that
her “dear little dimwit”—her sister's pet name for Bebe—had bagged the nephew of someone even more famous than she was. And Fletcher Parrish, fuming that his granddaughter was marrying into the family of the “Pretty Boy” who'd knocked him out of first place on
The New York Times
List. And in the middle of it all, there she'd be, little Cydney the Nobody, smiling and saying serenely, “Well of course
I
knew.”

Personally,
her little voice said,
I like “nab-nab-nab-nab-nab.”

So did Cydney. Too bad it was s-o-o-o childish.

Almost as childlike as the wide-eyed wonder on Bebe's face as she raised her hand and watched the diamond in her engagement ring flash in the sunlight slanting through the open miniblinds on the living room windows. Where, Cydney thought, did a twenty-one-year-old kid get twelve thousand bucks for a rock the size of Gibraltar?

“I'm sorry, Miss Parrish.” Aldo appeared in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. “Uncle Gus gets wound up sometimes. I'll pay for the call.”

“Never mind, Aldo.” Cydney pointed at Bebe's ring. “So long as you can pay for that, I'll be happy.”

“Oh no problem, Miss Parrish. I've got a trust fund.”

“So do I!” Bebe squealed, clapping her hands delightedly under her chin. “Isn't it amazing how much we have in common?”

“It isn't amazing.” Aldo stepped out of the doorway and opened his arms to Bebe. “It's kismet.”

“Oh Aldo,” she sighed, drifting toward him starry-eyed.

“Oh no.” Cydney caught her niece's elbow and swung her around. She'd seen enough of unbridled passion and Aldo's backside for one day. “You sit over there, Aldo.”

Cydney parked Bebe on the pillow-backed mauve sofa and Aldo on the matching love seat. And herself, for good measure, between them on the corner of the square oak coffee table.

“Start at the beginning,” she said. “Where did you meet?”

At UMKC, the University of Missouri at Kansas City, at the
end of the spring semester. They'd been dating for six months, on the Q.T. because of Aldo's overprotective Uncle Gus.

“He's got this thing about my money,” Aldo explained. “He thinks I'm gonna piss it all off, though I keep telling him I couldn't possibly. Do you know how fast interest compounds on fifteen million dollars, Miss Parrish?”

“Um—no,” Cydney said, and gulped.

“My parents were killed in a plane crash when I was four. That's where the principal came from, their life insurance and the settlement from the airline. I don't have to work, but I've always wanted to go to college, 'cause I want to be an architect. I'm gonna build this really cool house for me and Bebe.”

“When exactly,” Cydney asked, “do you plan to get married?”

“I thought tomorrow at City Hall, so Uncle Gus can't try to stop us. But Bebe wants to wait until her mother gets back from Russia.”

Gwen was due home in a week. That was awful damn quick.

“What's the rush?” Cydney asked Bebe.

“Just once,” she said, “I'd like my mother to be here for something special, and you know how she is, Uncle Cyd.”

Her niece's chin quavered and her eyes filled with tears. So did Cydney's, sympathetically, remembering Bebe's first prom, the day she made cheerleader, her first C in English, her high school graduation. Cydney had been there to pin on corsages, take pictures and give hugs, but not Gwen.

“I want to pick Mother up at the airport and take her straight to the church,” Bebe said. “If I don't, some magazine editor will call and she'll be gone again.”

“Oh, fine then,” Cydney said facetiously. “For a second there I thought you wanted to get married on the runway.”

“I don't think they'd let us, do you?”

“No, Bebe,” Cydney said gently. “The FAA has rules against weddings on runways.”

“Oh,” she said disappointedly.

Sadly, Bebe wasn't kidding. About getting married on a
runway or about how quick Gwen could—and probably would—be gone again.

“Call Gramma George,” Cydney told Bebe. “Don't tell her anything, just invite her to supper.”

“You said you'd call her.”

“I want to talk to Aldo alone, Bebe.”

“Oh. Okay,” she said happily, and headed for the kitchen.

“Your Uncle Gus,” Cydney said to Aldo, “is Angus Munroe the mystery writer, isn't he?”

“Yes, Miss Parrish. Have you read any of his books?”

“One or two,” Cydney lied.

She owned them all in hardcover, kept them in a glass-fronted bookcase in her room over the garage. She kept several copies of the paperback editions in the house for reading. Over and over, studying his style, soaking up his voice. She'd memorized whole passages of
Dead Soup,
his first book and his first best-seller.

“Read them all, Miss Parrish. He writes about this private detective named Max Stone. If you know Max Stone, you know my Uncle Gus. Max doesn't trust people, especially women, and neither does my Uncle Gus. He's a really good-looking guy, see, and women crawl all over him. He thinks it's because he's a famous writer and has lots of money. I tell him it's because of his face but he doesn't believe me. I'm just a kid and I don't know squat.”