Saying Yes To The Dress!: The Wedding Planner's Big Day / Married for Their Miracle Baby / The Cowboy's Convenient Bride

And she fell, with a wonderful splash, into where he was waiting to catch her.

“The water is fantastic,” Becky said, blinking up at him.

“Yes, it is.”

She knew neither of them were talking about the water. He set her, it seemed with just a bit of reluctance, on her feet. She splashed him.

“Is that any way to thank me for rescuing you?”

“That is to let you know I did not need to be rescued!”

“Oh,” he said. “You planned to fall in the water.”

She giggled. “Yes, I did.”

“Don’t take up poker.”

She splashed him again. He got a look on his face. She giggled and bolted away. He was after her in a flash. Soon the grotto was filled with the magic of their splashing and laughter. The days of playing with him—of feeling that sense of belonging—all seemed to have been leading to this. Becky had never felt so free, so wondrous, so aware as she did then.

Finally, exhausted, they hauled themselves out onto the warmth of the large, flat rock, and lay there on their stomachs, side-by-side, panting to catch their breaths.

“I’m indecent,” she decided, without a touch of remorse.

“I prefer to think of it as wanton.”

She laughed. The sun was coming through the greenery, dappled on his face. His eyelashes were tangled with water. She laid her hand—wantonly—on the firmness of his naked back. She could feel the warmth of him seeping into her hand. He closed his eyes, as if her touch had soothed something in him. His breathing slowed and deepened.

And then so did hers.

When she awoke, her hand was still on his back. He stirred and opened his eyes, looked at her and smiled.

She shivered with a longing so primal it shook her to the core. Drew’s smile disappeared, and he found his feet in one catlike motion. As she sat up and hugged herself, chilled now, he retrieved his T-shirt. He came back and slid it over her head. Then he sat behind her, pulled her between the wedge of his legs and wrapped his arms around her until she stopped shivering.

The light was changing in the grotto and the magic deepened all around them.

“What were you upset about earlier?” he asked softly.

She sighed. “I unpacked Allie’s wedding dress.”

He sucked in his breath. “And what? You wished it was yours?”

“It was mine,” she whispered. “It was the dress she drew for me one of those afternoons all those years ago.”

“What? The very same dress? Maybe you’re just remembering it wrong.”

Was there any way to tell him she had kept that picture without seeming hopelessly pathetic?

“No,” she said firmly. “It was that dress.”

“Representing all your hopes and dreams,” he said. “No wonder you were crying.”

She felt a surge of tenderness for him that there was no mockery in his tone, but instead, a lovely empathy.

“It was just a shock. I am hoping it is just a weird coincidence. But I’m worried. I didn’t know Allie that well when we were teenagers. I don’t know her at all now. What if it’s all some gigantic game? What if she’s playing with everyone?”

“Exactly the same thing I was upset about,” Drew confessed to her. “My brother was supposed to be here. He’s not. I’ve called him twice a day, every day, since I got here to find out why. He won’t return my calls. That isn’t like him.”

“Tell me what is like him,” Becky said gently.

And suddenly he just wanted to unburden himself. He felt as if he had carried it all alone for so long, and he was not sure he could go one more step with the weight of it all. It felt as if it was crushing him.

He was not sure he had ever felt this relaxed or this at ease with another person. Drew had a deep sense of being able to trust this woman in front of him. It felt as if every day before this one—all those laughter-filled days of getting to know one another, of splashing and playing, and throwing Frisbees—had been leading to this.

He needed to think about that: that this wholesome woman, with her girl-next-door look, was really a Mata Hari, a temptress who could pull secrets from an unwilling man. But he didn’t heed the warning that was flashing in the back of his brain like a red light telling of a train coming.

Drew just started to talk, and it felt as if a rock had been removed from a dam that had held back tons of water for years. Now it was all flowing toward that opening, trying to get out.

“When my parents died, I was seventeen. I wasn’t even a mature seventeen. I was a superficial surfer dude, riding a wave through life.”

Something happened to Becky’s face. A softness came to it that was so real it almost stole the breath out of his chest. It was so different than the puffy-lipped coos of sympathy that he had received from women in the past when he’d made the mistake of sharing even small parts of his story.

This felt as if he could go lay his head on Becky’s slender, naked shoulder, and rest there for a long, long time.

“I’m so sorry,” she said quietly, “about the death of your parents. Both of them died at the same time?”

“It was a car accident.” He could stop right there, but no, he just kept going. All those words he had never spoken felt as if they were now rushing to escape a building on fire, jostling with each other in their eagerness to be out.

“They had gone out to celebrate the anniversary of some friends. They never came home. A policeman arrived at the door and told me what had happened. Not their fault at all, a drunk driver...”

“Drew,” she breathed softly. Somehow her hand found his, and the dam within him was even more compromised.

“You have never met a person more totally unqualified for the job of raising a seven-year-old brother than the seventeen-year-old me.”

She squeezed his hand, as if she believed in the younger him, making him want to go on, to somehow dissuade this faith in him.

He cleared his throat. “It was me or foster care, so—” He rolled his shoulders.

“I think that’s the bravest thing I ever heard,” she said.

“No, it wasn’t,” he said fiercely. “Brave is when you have a choice. I didn’t have any choice.”

“You did,” she insisted, as fierce as him. “You did have a choice and you chose love.”

That word inserted into any conversation between them should have stopped it cold. But it didn’t. In fact, it felt as if more of the wall around everything he held inside crumbled, as if her words were a wrecking ball seeking the weakest point in that dam.

“I love my brother,” he said. “I just don’t know if he knows how much I do.”

“He can’t be that big a fool,” Becky said.

“I managed to finish out my year in high school and then I found a job on a construction crew. I was tired all the time. And I never seemed to be able to make enough money. Joe sure wasn’t wearing the designer clothes the rest of the kids had. I got mad if he asked. That’s why he probably doesn’t have a clue how I feel about him.”

Becky’s hand was squeezing his with unbelievable strength. It was as if her strength—who could have ever guessed this tiny woman beside him held so much strength?—was passing between them, right through the skin of her hand into his, entering his bloodstream.

“I put one foot in front of the other,” Drew told her. “I did my best to raise my brother. But I was so scared of messing up that I think I was way too strict with him. I thought if I let him know how much I cared about him he would perceive it as weakness and I would lose control. Of him. Of life.

“I’d already seen what happened when I was not in control.”

“Did you feel responsible for the death of your parents?” she asked. He could hear that she was startled by the question.

“I guess I asked myself, over and over, what I could have done. And the answer seemed to be, ‘Never let anyone you love out of your sight. Never let go.’ Most days, I felt as if I was hanging on by a thread.

“When he was a teen? I was not affectionate. I was like Genghis Khan, riding roughshod over the troops. The default answer to almost everything he wanted to do was no. When I did loosen the reins a bit, he had to check in with me. He had a curfew. I sucked, and he let me know it.”

“Sucked?” she said, indignant.

“Yeah, we both agreed on that. Not that I let him know I agreed with him in the you-suck department.”

“Then you were both wrong. What you did was noble,” she said quietly. “The fact that you think you did it imperfectly does not make it less noble.”

“Noble!” he snapped, wanting to show only annoyance and not vulnerability. “There’s nothing noble about acting on necessity.”

But she was having none of it. “It’s even noble that you saw it as a necessity, not a choice.”

“Whatever,” he said. He suddenly disliked himself. He felt as if he was a small dog yapping and yapping and yapping at the postman. He sat up. She sat up, too. He folded his arms over his chest, a shield.

“Given that early struggle, you seem to have done well for yourself.”

“A man I worked for gave me a break,” Drew admitted, even though he had ordered himself to stop talking. “He was a developer. He told me I could have a lot in one of his subdivisions and put up a house on spec. I didn’t have to pay for the lot until the house sold. It was the beginning of an amazing journey, but looking back, I think my drive to succeed also made me emotionally unavailable to my brother.”

“You feel totally responsible for him, still.”

Drew sighed, dragged a hand through his sun-dried hair. “I’m sure it’s because of how I raised him that we are in this predicament we’re in now, him marrying a girl I know nothing about, who may be using him. And you. And all of us.”

“I don’t see that as your fault.”

“If I worked my ass off, I could feed him,” he heard himself volunteering. “I could keep the roof over his head. I could get his books for school. I even managed to get him through college. But—”

“But what?”

“I could not teach him about finding a good relationship.” Drew’s voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. It felt as if every single word he had said had been circling around this essential truth.

“I missed them so much, my mom and dad. They could have showed him what he should be looking for. They were so stable. My mom was a teacher, my dad was a postal worker. Ordinary people, and yet they elevated the ordinary.

“I didn’t know what I had when I had it. I didn’t know what it was to wake up to my dad downstairs, making coffee for my mom, delivering it to her every morning. He sang a song while he delivered it. An old Irish folk song. They were always laughing and teasing each other. We were never rich but our house was full. The smell of cookies, the sound of them arguing good-naturedly about where to put the Christmas tree, my mom reading stories. I loved those stories way after I was too old for them. I used to find some excuse to hang out when she was reading to Joe at night. How could I hope to give any of that kind of love to my poor orphaned baby brother? When even thinking about all we had lost felt as if it would undermine the little bit of control that I was holding over my world? Instead, the environment I raised Joe in was so devoid of affection that he’s gotten involved with Allie out of his sheer desperation to be loved.”

“Maybe he longs for your family as much as you do.”

“It’s not that I didn’t love him,” Drew admitted gruffly. “I just didn’t know how to say that to him.”

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