“I would just feel better if you were there.”
I took her hand and smiled. “I would be honored to.”
So I need to make a dress for a pregnant woman whose body is changing on a daily basis. And to make matters worse, her baby daddy is a giant and probably also made a giant baby, so by the time this wedding rolls around, Liz is going to be the size of a hippo. And I have to help her throw the wedding of her dreams in less than three months and not ruin our company’s reputation in the process. You got this, right?!
At the very least, I wouldn’t have to deal with Mark freaking Holbrook. I knew he was going to stay as far away from this wedding as possible.
4
Mark
You should have said no, I scolded myself as I helped my family take the rest of the food back to Wes’s penthouse after the engagement-slash-baby announcement party was over.
It was late. I had a routine. I liked to be up before sunrise, and that required a moderate bedtime. My family, though, were night owls and did not seem to have any intention of turning in.
You should move, I thought as the elevator carried us up to Wes’s apartment. We all lived in the same building. My uncle had bought several condos and doled them out. When I had left the military, it had seemed convenient to simply accept one. However, now that my family saw my proximity as an excuse to harass me, I was reconsidering the idea.
“Drink?” Allie, my brother Carter’s girlfriend, offered when we had laid out the food on the counter.
At least it was just us cousins. My parents had already returned to Connecticut. I had mostly been able to avoid my mother. She had fallen into the annoying habit of trying to set me up with her friends’ daughters.
“I actually am leaving. I have some work to do,” I told her.
“Dude, you work too much,” my brother insisted. “You know what you need?”
I blew out a breath.
“A therapist,” Carter continued. “Mine is great. She has cucumber water and snacks. She’s really helped me get in touch with my inner child.”
“I don’t need help.”
Carter slung his arm around my neck.
“We never see you,” Carter said in a poor imitation of an Italian noni. “You don’t call, you don’t write, you don’t answer the door.”
“You come down and harass me at all hours of the night!”
“What is family for?” Carter retorted. He took a piece of steak from one of the platters and tossed it to his one-eyed, three-legged dog, Margot.
“Mark needs a dog,” Grant joked, his own chubby corgi, Gus, salivating at his feet.
“I don’t have time for a dog.”
“Right, you’re too busy harassing those Weddings in the City girls. Finn told me all about that.”
“You can’t harass my wedding planners!” Liz cried.
Wes was making her another snack and trying to coax her to drink water.
“I need to get married in three months. I can’t have you running Brea and her friends out of town!”
“Mark has completely forgotten how to act in normal society. It’s because he’s all alone downstairs in his apartment,” Carter said dramatically, “slowly going crazy as he stares at numbers on a screen.”
“One of us has to work,” I retorted.
Wes gave me a worried smile. “You should get a dog though. Kal is great.” Wes’s large American Akita wagged his tail and went back to begging Liz for food. Wes set a chair in front of her and put her feet up.
“You need to stop treating me like I’m fragile,” Liz complained.
