Shopping for a CEO (Shopping for a Billionaire Series Book 7) (29 page)

That’s right.

Jamie.

All right, not technically, but the man in the video screen—and the second-to-last to arrive—was a cool 6’2”, with bright green McCormick eyes and the threaded gold of a ginger-haired god.

A cousin
god
.

Turns out the Boston McCormicks still had some contact with the Edinburgh McCormicks and Declan asked Hamish to be a groomsman. In his native Scotland, Hamish is a rock star. Not because he’s a musician.

Because he plays football.

Or, as we call it here, soccer.

Which means Hamish is a nobody in Boston. He may have his face splashed all over all the major newspapers in Europe and South America, but he’s a complete unknown in the U.S.

And he doesn’t seem to realize it.

He’s headed to New York City for a
Sports Illustrated
nude athlete photo spread after this dinner, then back for the bachelor party and wedding day. Marie’s eyes comb over him and it’s very clear she’s doing her best camera imitation right now.

Andrew still hasn’t arrived as the wine’s poured, the hors d’oeurves are distributed, and Shannon tries hard to pretend she cares about McCormick tartan ribbons tied around the birdseed packets that people will throw as she and Declan leave the church.

Marie won’t shut up about them.

I’m too preoccupied by Andrew’s absence to care.

“It’s all a bit much, aye?” Hamish says to Amy, who is giving him the critical once over of a woman who knows she’s supposed to be impressed but most decidedly isn’t. His accent makes my panties melt. Maybe that’s why people in Scotland go commando when they wear kilts and skirts. 

It’s the hot accent.

“What’s a bit much?” Carol asks.
She
looks like she needs a McCormick tartan handkerchief to mop up her drool as she looks at Hamish.

“The tartan.” The word
tartan
rolls off his tongue like it’s a cocker spaniel being sprung from a cage. “By the time the wedding comes, we’ll look like Nessie ingested a bunch of highlanders and vomited everywhere.”

Carol laughs like that’s the funniest joke she’s ever heard.

“Hamish!” Marie exclaims, walking over and offering herself up to him for a hug like he’s a rock climbing wall and there’s a prize for reaching the top. “So good to meet you!” Her eyes are bright and excited as he pulls away from the embrace and she asks, “You’re a sports star in Europe, I hear. What position do you play? Shortstop?” 

Hamish’s golden eyebrows turn down. “I play football, Marie.” Jason stifles a laugh.

“Oh. Tight end, then?” She cranes her neck around behind him to check out
his
tight end.

“No—not American football. I play soccer.” His voice is filled with a frustrated resignation, as if he’s had this same conversation far too often for his liking.

“Point guard?” she tries.

Jason hands the poor Scot another shot and claps him on the back. “Just give up, man.”

“Americans,” Hamish mutters before downing the drink.

Where in the hell is Andrew?

I shouldn’t care. I know I shouldn’t care. I blew it. But he could have told me. We’re grown-ups. We each have the ability to exchange emotional truths in an honest way.

Barring that, would it kill the man to send a basic text?

While Amy sulks and Marie and Carol moon over Hamish, I try to find Shannon. She’s disappeared. I grab two glasses of wine from an increasingly-attractive male waiter who walks by with a tray of poured Pinot Grigio. I work on drinking part of my second? third? glass of wine. 

After searching everywhere, I finally find her in the bedroom, in a walk-in closet, trying not to cry.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. She’s holding a tartan garter in her hands and just standing there, staring at Declan’s shoehorn, which hangs from a hook behind his suits. 

“I’m not sure I can do this.”

There is a point in every maid of honor’s stretch of time in this role where we expect the bride to get cold feet. If you’re a woman in modern America, you’ve been steeped in the wedding articles since you were about nine or so, and could read the
Cosmopolitan
and
Glamour
magazines your mom left all over the house. You know Ten Ways To Make Her Wedding Rock and Five Mistakes Bridesmaids Make and Why Good Friends Throw Naughty Bachelorette Parties.

Cold feet are just a part of the wedding process.

“You love Declan. Being Mrs. McCormick is going to be awesome,” I assure her. I offer her the untouched wine goblet. 

She looks at me like I just ate a Madagascar hissing cockroach in front of her. “I know that! I’m not talking about the wedding. I’m talking about this stupid dinner party!” She ignores the wine I’m offering.  

That’s how I really know she’s upset.

“Oh.”

“And where’s Andrew?” she snaps.

I finish my third glass (definitely third) and start in on her reject.

“No clue,” I say. 

Bzzz.

I pull my phone out of my pocket and gently guide Shannon back into the living room. She pivots at the doorway and tosses the garter onto her bed.

I haven’t seen Andrew since the night he stole Mr. Wiffles and we fought nearly a month ago. He texted a half-hearted apology and I texted back a lame half-acceptance. After that, his assistant has asked me a few wedding-related questions regarding schedules. No other contact. 

And Declan won’t reveal what Andrew told him that night they worked out. He’s been in New York on business, then in Paris, and finally he’s back—for this party. Andrew and Declan made it clear that he has to leave early and board the helicopter to go back to New York again.

I look at my phone and bark out a weird laugh.

“Is that him?” Shannon asks.

“Oh, my God!” I hold up my phone so she can read this. 

She gives me a knowing look. “I know he’s traveling so much these days, and he’s only in town for a few hours, but you guys have to talk this out—”

Chug. Hmm. That fourth glass went down well.

“Does that text say what I think it says?” Shannon looks gut-punched. “Did he seriously just text you with,
Only here for the party. Not even time for a quickie
.” 

“Yep.”

Andrew walks in the living room at that precise moment. The force of our glares should have propelled him right through the wall, but instead he lurches slightly to the right, one hand in his pocket, the other on the wood counter near the kitchen.

He gives me a wave.

“A wave?” she hisses. “You get a wave? That’s it?”

“Yep. A fight, a month of mostly silence, a bizarre text and a wave.”

We contemplate that one by stewing in the silence of the outraged. It has a very bitter taste. 

“What man doesn’t make time for a quickie?” she huffs. 

“A gay man?”

Her eyes go wide. “He’s
gay
?”

That question makes me remember the last time we made love. “No. Definitely not gay. Just sayin’. There are two kinds of men who aren’t interested in quickies: gay men and dead men.”

Her eyes narrow.

“Gay men like quickies.” 

“Not with Vulvatron.” I gesture vaguely at my crotch and realize my wine glass is empty. Hmm. Have to remedy that.

“Vulva-
what
?” 

“Never mind.”

“Declan would rappel down from a helicopter with his pants off in a hurricane if we went weeks without sex and he was in town for a few hours and it were the only way to fit in a quickie.” 

I throw my hands up in the air and brush lightly against that fine, fine waiter who is carrying my sweet love juice. Ah, Pinot Grigio. How have I never cozied up to a bottle of you between my breasts? I grab another glass of wine.

“That is because you’re marrying Superbillionaire.” 

Shannon eyes my wine. “Time to slow down?”

I take a gulp. “I’m just getting started.”

Andrew’s walking toward me with a determined look in his eye and oh, sweet mercy, I go loose and wet and fuzzy inside as he reaches for me, planting a kiss on either cheek. He just flew back from Paris, so maybe that’s the drill.

As I go in for a kiss on the lips, though, he grazes my cheek again.

My blood stops pumping.

What

Fresh

Hell

Is

This?

Mixed signals is one thing. Andrew’s confusing set of clues is more like a computer system short circuiting.

I look around, my hands out in a gesture of
WTF?
and I scan the crowd as if I’ll catch someone’s eye and we can share in our disbelief that my boyfriend just dodged a kiss from me after a month of nothing. Nada. I actually resorted to my nightstand collection for the first time in months and let me tell you, they need to put little speakers on vibrators with audio recordings of men sighing and groaning at appropriate intervals, because
bzzz bzzz bzzz
is not sexy.
 

It just isn’t.

The first sex toy company who designs a vibrator that says, “I love when you just let go like that,” or “Your O face is so hot,” or groans, “Have you lost weight? Because I need more to grab” will dominate the industry and blow up the stock market.

Especially if the voices are programmable, like GPS systems. Male, female, British, Irish, Spanish, French, Shrek—imagine the possibilities. Mr. Darcy could be your vibrator’s voice. You could have tie-ins with major video game characters.

Thor.

Thor could utter phrases from down below, like, “This mortal form requires orgasms.”

You could even have your significant other record special messages to be played at intervals of their choosing (or yours). If your partner dies, you’d cherish the memory of them forever.

I may be on to something here. I come up with some amazing ideas sometimes. Man, this Pinot Grigio is some good stuff.

While I contemplate these philosophical questions about the meaning of life and finish my fifth (I’m not counting) glass of wine, Marie calls everyone to attention.

“Dinner is served!” she announces.

Declan hands Andrew and Hamish a shot of something amber. The two clink glasses and down the alcohol. Then Hamish pours another. By the time we’re all assembled at the table, I count three rounds.

Fine, then. I pluck a sixth glass of wine from the hot waiter and take my seat.

Next to Andrew.

Before my ass is even in the chair Marie is banging on her wine glass with a salad fork like it’s a dinner bell at a dude ranch and we’re all cows out to pasture who need to come home. 

Get along little dogie.

“Kiss! Kiss!” she calls out, smiling at Declan and Shannon. 

In response, Jason bends over Marie and gives her one hell of a hot, probing scorcher that she starts to fight off, then melts into. After a while, we all start to shift in our seats as it goes on and on... 

“I don’t think that’s quite what Marie was going for,” James says dryly.

“You don’t know my mom and dad,” Amy replies.

“A typical kiss contains more than two hundred strains of bacteria,” my mom announces.  

Jason pulls away.

“Research,” my mom says awkwardly.

“What do you do for a living? Work on a porn set?” Marie jokes.

“Actuary.”

“Oh.” Marie frowns. “That’s like the opposite of porn.” 

“I compute premium rates for various high-risk pools. Just did a kissing evaluation last year for some Hollywood projects.” Mom shudders. “You wouldn’t believe how much herpes there is in that population.”

And with a single sentence, my mother silences even Marie.

“You are just a wealth of interesting facts,” James says. I do a double-take as I realize James is holding Spritzy in his lap, rubbing his little head with affection. He’s smiling at my mother with a look that makes me understand why people call him The Grey Wolf, though lately they’re calling him The Silver Wolf. Not sure what the difference is.  

Andrew’s hand lands on my knee.

Oh.

It’s The Asshole Wolf.

I turn to face him. He is, basically, James. Only three and a half decades younger and a little lighter. 

“Would you help me get Hamish’s attention?” Andrew asks, the hand withdrawing quickly.

I pick up a bread roll and pull my arm back to throw it across the table, but Andrew’s faster.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Getting Hamish’s attention.”

“Are you drunk?” 

“No,” I lie. I take the opportunity to really look at him. He has five o’clock shadow, a genetic trait that runs through the McCormick men even at noon, and his tie is loose. His eyes are floating in his head and he’s staring at my boobs like they talk.

“Are
you
?” 

He ignores my question.

I put down the dinner roll and reach down, pressing my breasts together to form the Grand Canyon.

“Why Andrew, well fiddle-dee-dee,” I say in my best Scarlett O'Hara imitation. “How nice of you to drop by.”

Hamish is watching us from across the table and nudges Amy, pointing. “Is this a party trick in the U.S.? Do women actually make their breasts talk?”

She gives him a hard look. “No. Most of us just double knot a cherry stem with our tongues.”

Hamish sprays a fine mist of what I now realize is Glenfiddich scotch whisky all over his arm.

“I need to spend more time with my American cousins,” he mutters, eyeing Amy with renewed interest as she reaches for the Maraschino cherry in her amaretto sour.

And promptly bites down, hard, on the fruit’s flesh, tearing it in half with her teeth.

Hamish flinches.

“Or not,” he declares.

“Why are you making your boobs sound like one of the women in Duck Dynasty?” Andrew says with a sad little look. “I’ve lost respect for them.” 

“You apologize to my boobs,” I demand. Maybe a little too loudly, because suddenly everyone is looking at me.

Shannon’s face ripples with horror. Her eyes skip to my wine. She makes a throat-cutting gesture with her finger.