“Oh, believe me, I know that.”
“You sound like that’s irritating to you in some way.”
She sighed. “It’s not up to me who the best man is,” she told him.
“But you would have preferred it not to be me.” Theo was surprised to realize that it bothered him to learn this. There was no good reason for that. He didn’t need her approval. But even so — why wasn’t he able to shrug that comment off?
“The fact of the matter is that Max deserves to have his brother involved in the planning,” she said, and suddenly he understood. She thought she was intervening on Max’s behalf. She thought she understood what Max needed better than Theo did.
That was infuriating. “Max is fine,” he said firmly. “You’re thinking about this differently because you’re a woman. But Max is a guy. He doesn’t care about all this wedding stuff. He just wants to get married to Tara. Flowers and fussy stuff like that aren’t important to him.”
“You can’t possibly know what’s going to matter to him. Evenhecan’t really know that. Thisisthe only wedding he’s ever going to have, you know. He might not be thinking about those things now, but in a few years, looking back at the pictures, heisgoing to care about them. He might not even know why. He’ll just get this sense of satisfaction if everything looks just right.”
“If you know so much about all this,” Theo said, “I don’t know what you needmefor.”
“You just know him better than I do. That’s what I realized after I left your private box yesterday. I was being selfish. They asked us both to work on this for a reason. And you might think all this is silly, but it matters to my best friend and to your brother. So, we are going to do this together, and that’s just that.”
Harper sat back in her chair and folded her arms in emphasis.
“This is my office, Harper. You can’t just show up here.”
“Sure I can,” she said evenly. “And I will, because you’ve left me with almost no way to keep in touch with you. If you don’t want me to come here, then agree to meet me somewhere else… but you’re not going to do that, are you?”
He was silent.
“Right,” she said. “So, let’s talk about the colors.”
“The colors?” Theo had to admit, this was an aspect of wedding planning he hadn’t even thought of. And he didn’t see how he could help with it either. They needed a venue, sure, and they needed vendors for things like flowers and food, but how could he helpprovidecolors?
Harper had no such hesitation, though. She was already opening up that binder of hers. She had dropped it on his desk without so much as a by-your-leave, right on top of several expense reports.
“I have all kinds of ideas,” she said. “Honestly, that was one thing I really expected Tara to pick out herself, but she left it to me— to us, I mean. What’s Max’s favorite color?”
“I can’t do this now,” he said. “You’re going to have to leave.” Theo pulled the papers out from under the binder and made a show of tidying them.
“Come on. You can’t answer one question? About your brother’s favorite color? I’m not asking for much, you know.” She folded her arms across her chest.
“He doesn’t have a favorite color.”
“Give me a break. Everyone has a favorite color. If you just tell me what it is, I can move on. Actually, a lot of these things would go faster if you just answered the questions instead of digging your heels in about every little thing.” She raised her eyebrows. “Did you ever consider that the reason this is so annoying, and is taking so long, is that you won’t just cooperate? I thought we’d have made a ton of decisions yesterday, but we wasted all that time getting into an argument. If we stop doing that, we can make a lot more progress on all this.”
Theo thought for a moment. Little though he liked to admit it, what she was saying did make sense, and he was eager to put an end to these arguments. “Green. He likes green.”
“There,” she said, smiling. “That wasn’t so difficult, was it?”
Theo didn’t like the way she was smirking at him. He didn’t like the way it made his stomach feel as if he had missed a step goingdown. In fact, if he hadn’t known better, he would have said that he actuallydidlike that smile — that winning, witty little grin, as if she knew she had gotten away with something, as if she understood how rarely anyone got the upper hand on Theo Davenport and was particularly proud of herself for having done so. Rather than feel annoyed by it, Theo had to admit that he liked that. It felt like respect.
But he didn’t like it so much that he was going to roll over and admit conversational defeat. “Helikesgreen,” he said. “But not in afavorite colorkind of way.”
“What does that mean?”
“He just wears a lot of it, that’s all. It’s not like he’d be worked up if it wasn’t included in the wedding. You should go with whatever you think Tara is going to want. And,” he added, “you should do it somewhere else besides here, because I don’t have time to talk about colors with you right now.” He reached for the phone to drive the point home, even though he had no calls he needed to make.
She must have seen his bluff for what it was, because she didn’t budge from her seat. “What are you doing that’s so important?” she challenged him. “You’re not working. You were staring out the window when I came in here.”
“I was thinking. Can a man think?”
“Maybe a man could help me make a color decision.”
