Undertaking Love (20 page)

‘What an amusing man,’ Brynn ground out through gritted teeth as he made his way back to his seat.

‘Amazing,’ Cecilia corrected, too quietly for anyone but Gabe to catch.

Marla sat down on her mother’s other side and picked at her dinner for a second before placing her knife and fork down – her food was significantly messier but barely eaten. She had no appetite for anything except the mercifully large glass of Shiraz in front of her. Tonight had turned into a fiasco of unprecedented levels, and the only constructive thing she could think of to do was to get too drunk to remember it.

Gabe picked up the wine bottle to refill first Cecilia’s glass, and then Marla’s, but a big tanned hand stretched across the table and covered it.

Rupert
.

God, with all of the shenanigans, Marla had almost forgotten he was there.

He looked a little odd, actually. Fidgety and awkward. Maybe he’d spotted that she was at the end of her tether and was about to sweep her right out of there? A violent longing to be curled up at home on the sofa with Bluey pierced her, and her heart cracked afresh. Her head hurt, and she smiled gratefully as Rupert got to his feet.

Phew. They
were
leaving.

Hang on, why was he clinking his glass with his knife? There was no need to make a drama of it, much better to slink out … Jeez, he was going to make a leaving speech. Why did he always have to be so formal? She sank back down into her chair and picked up her wine glass in resignation as a hush fell around the table.

Rupert let the table settle into silenced anticipation, and then carefully placed the knife and glass back down on the table.

‘I have something important that I need to say … or should I say, I need to ask.’

He flashed a wide smile. ‘And there could be no better time than here, in the presence of our friends and family,’ he continued, in the style of a vicar about to deliver a sermon to his flock. Beside her, Marla heard a tiny gasp from her mother – and a much more audible one from Melanie.

‘Marla,’ Rupert turned to face her. She nodded encouragingly back.

Just wrap it up, Rupert. Say thanks for coming and goodnight, then let’s get the hell out of here. Please.

But it was another prayer to no one that fell on deaf ears.

‘Marla, we’ve been together now for some time, and I can honestly say that I’ve never felt so happy, and I think you feel the same way.’ He paused for dramatic effect and laid a hand over his heart. ‘You complete me.’

‘Plagiarism! Get yer own lines!’ Jonny heckled. Rupert shot Jonny a murderous look whilst he started a slow walk around the table towards Marla. She knew he was still speaking because his lips were moving, but the roar of blood in her ears made it impossible to hear his voice.

Sweet baby Jesus, No! Please don’t let him get down on one knee, or I’m done for. I take back all I said about being a non-believer, I’ll change my ways if you help me just this once.

Please, he’s coming …

Rupert picked up her limp hand and sank down on one knee.

Alone in his luxurious marble bathroom the next morning, Rupert angled his chin from side to side to better admire himself in the mirror. Last night couldn’t have gone better if he’d planned it. He threw a celebratory wink at his reflection.

Keeeer-ching! Hoist by your own petard, Melanie.

In one foul swoop he’d managed to propose to Marla and spell it out to Melanie that he wasn’t a man to mess with. Jesus, he’d only slept with the woman once out of sympathy;
well, three times,
if you wanted to split hairs. Rupert glanced ruefully down at his flaccid cock.
He couldn’t help it if his little tiger had a big stride when it was let out, could he?

And now she was trying to cling on, making unreasonable demands as if she had some right to his time. Tiresome. She probably thought she’d been terribly clever last night; he hadn’t missed the sly glint of triumph in her eyes when she’d wangled herself a place at his table. What sweet revenge it had been to watch fury twist her thin face when he’d proposed to Marla; almost as pleasurable as the tears of joy Marla had cried. Poor girl had been completely overcome, couldn’t get a coherent word out. She’d seemed jumpy of late. Probably in need of a good seeing-to; it was frustrating for them both with her mother hogging all of her time.

His little tiger stirred against his thigh at the thought of Marla
in flagrante
on her white cotton sheets, and he stepped into the shower to let the beast roar.

Marla lay on her back and stared at the smooth white bedroom ceiling. Pointless anger surged through her as her mother and Brynn banged around in the kitchen downstairs. She craved the solitude of an empty cottage and her own counsel. The idea of going downstairs to rake over the coals of last night’s events turned her stomach. She dragged the quilt over her head and closed her eyes, but still the memories played behind her eyelids. Everyone around their table last night had fallen silent the moment that Rupert dropped down on one knee. Actually, a Mexican wave of silence had fallen over the entire restaurant. She’d even spotted the chef pop out from the kitchens to lean against the doorframe with a spatula in his hand.

No pressure, then.

Time had seemed to slow down Matrix-style as Marla glanced around at the faces of her nearest and dearest.

Her mother, fascinated.

Emily, shocked.

Tom, grinning like a drunken loon.

Melanie, outraged.
Outraged
? What
was
that woman’s problem?

Jonny, surreptitiously shaking his head from side to side and mouthing ‘say no’.

And finally Gabe, whose expression she’d been unable to read at all. Her eyes had moved from his to Rupert’s, who had sprung onto to his feet to stare expectantly at her.

Had she actually said the word yes?
Had she? Surely not.

She’d cried, certainly, which Rupert had presumed to be tears of joy and popped the cork on a celebratory champagne bottle he’d produced out of thin air.

Could
she love Rupert? She lay still and tried the idea on for size. It was too big. It swamped her. She was fond of him, but fond wasn’t the same thing at all, was it? Love was bigger than her feelings for Rupert. More painful, more blinding, more destructive. Rupert was good company. He could make her laugh and he could make her come, but that was really all she wanted from him. Up until last night she’d assumed he felt the same way.

Strictly between Marla and her coffee cup, the fact that she could never emotionally invest in him was one of his main attractions.
Poor Rupert
. He wasn’t to know that the local wedding guru had an acute case of love-phobia, was he?

Marla flipped face down into the mattress and decided to stay in bed, because, for better or worse, she had an engagement to break off when she did get up.

Gabe hit the accelerator, breaking the speed limit by a long way in an attempt to blow away his anger and frustration from the night before. What a fucking fiasco. Melanie had managed to royally screw up the arrangements for the work dinner to the extent that the rest of the staff had ended up in a completely different restaurant ten miles away. He’d been almost grateful for Marla’s pushy mother’s insistence that they gatecrash their party, right up to the point when Rupert had dropped down on one knee. Gabe stamped down hard on the accelerator and wished wholeheartedly that it was actually Rupert’s throat under his foot.

Why the hell had Marla agreed to marry that spineless excuse for a man?

The possibility that she might truly love Rupert bled into his consciousness and refused to go away, even at breakneck speed.

Marla left the cottage before her mother and Brynn had a chance to surface on Monday morning. If she’d had to stomach any more wedding talk she’d have thrown up her muesli all over the kitchen table.

She stirred sugar into her coffee in the quiet chapel kitchen and wondered why Cecilia seemed to have completely forgotten about Marla’s profession as a wedding coordinator and insisted on taking over. But then, her mother did have far more personal experience in the matter than most women, she mused uncharitably as she made her way upstairs to her office.

Marla couldn’t handle any more questions.

Dresses. Bridesmaids. Cupcake tower or traditional wedding cake?

She had ended up drinking too much red wine and lurking in her room like a teenager.

Not the most auspicious start to an engagement, she admitted to Jonny when he arrived half an hour later and listened to her grumble over tea and HobNobs.

‘Marla, darling.’ He crossed his legs gracefully and screwed up his nose. ‘Do you actually want to marry Henry?’

‘Rupert,’ Marla corrected with a frown.

‘Sorry, he’s Hooray Henry in my head.’ Jonny was completely unabashed by his mistake and fixed her with a beady glare. ‘Do you love him?’

Oh jeez, not the love question.
She felt her muesli made a break for freedom.

‘Jonny, it’s way too early for a heart to heart. We’ll talk later, okay?’

‘Why? To give you a chance to work on your evasive answers some more?’ He arched his eyebrows and smirked as headed out. ‘Pub after work. And no “buts”,’ he shouted ominously as he took the stairs two at a time.

Marla shook her head.

She had plenty of buts.

But I don’t want a big meringue dress.

But I don’t care whether the napkins match the seat covers.

But I’ve always hated red roses.

But I don’t want to get married
.

Not to Rupert, nor to anyone else.

Jonny would regret dragging her to the pub when she got started on that little lot.

She placed her empty mug down and spotted the corner of a little envelope hidden beneath her mouse mat. A little tug and a quick rack of her brains, and it came back to her. It was the note she’d taken from the funeral parlour the night that Bluey died, the one with her own name scrawled across the front. She’d stashed it beneath her mouse mat, unsure if it was right to open it or not, but as she turned it over in her fingers, she reached a decision.

It was her name written across the front of it. It was intended for her.

What harm could it do, really? It was just a scrap of paper that would probably be nothing. She ripped the envelope across the top and eased the little card out.

Dear Marla,

Something to help make your July 4
^th
go with a bang, and to say I hope we can enjoy a less explosive friendship from here on in.

Yours,

Gabe

X

She frowned and read it twice over, still none the wiser. What did he mean, July 4
^th
? Bang? She gasped out loud and clamped her fingers over her mouth as the tinkling penny stopped spinning in the air and began to drop, flipping over several times in slow motion before it landed with a dull thud of realisation.

The fireworks.

But how could they have been from Gabe? Rupert had brought them over; she’d seen him with her own eyes. She tapped her nose as she mentally rewound back to when Rupert walked into the chapel on July 4
^th
. It was a day she’d prefer never to think of again.

Yes. She was one hundred per cent certain that Rupert had expressly said that the fireworks were his gift to her.

Hadn’t he?

And if he hadn’t
said
it, he’d definitely encouraged her to
think
it.

How could she ever know for sure?

She could hardly come right out and ask Rupert, because the mere mention of Gabe’s name was enough to give him a coronary. And she couldn’t ask Gabe either because a) they weren’t on speaking terms, and b) even if they were, she’d sound a deranged fool.

‘Hey, Gabe. I stole this note from your desk, and now I need to know if my boyfriend passed your gift off as his own.’

It sounded absurd and she knew it, but what else could ‘something to help make your July 4
^th
go with a bang’ possibly mean? Unless he’d sent a bomb, which would be more in keeping given the general state of affairs between them.

She frowned out of the window at the funeral parlour. The constant ‘push me, pull me’ nature of her relationship with Gabe was draining. Their basic chemical reaction to each other made everything more complicated than it needed to be. If only he were pig ugly, it would make it so much easier to hate him.

‘A bottle of red and three glasses, please, whenever you’re ready, Bill.’

Jonny winked at the landlord before gesturing Marla and Emily to a quiet table in the pub.

‘Make that two glasses. I’ll stick to OJ,’ Emily added as she stood on tiptoes to lift her growing bump over the back of a chair.

They flopped down on the low sofas with a collective groan. It’d been a hectic day of preparations for a mid-week Las Vegas style wedding, and the Elvis impersonator had dropped out at the eleventh hour, causing pandemonium. It was all sorted now, thanks to a desperate runner up from
Stars in their Eyes
who still craved his five minutes in the spotlight. He was prepared to make the two-hundred-mile round trip in order to don his star-spangled spandex again.

‘Emily, do you think Marla should marry Henry?’ Jonny poured the wine and got stuck straight into his intended topic of conversation.

Marla spluttered as she unwound her Missoni scarf. ‘Excuse me?’

Emily shifted cagily in her seat and turned anxious eyes on Marla. ‘Do you want to?’

‘I …’ Marla flailed around for the right words. Her sense of loyalty insisted that Rupert really ought to be first to hear that there wasn’t going to be a wedding.

‘See? Told you! She didn’t jump straight in there with a big fat “yes”, did she?’

Jonny wagged his finger, clearly something else he’d learned from his many hours dedicated to watching Oprah. He stopped just short of adding ‘girrlfreeend’ on the end of his sentence, but then he
was
still warming up.