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CHAPTER TWO

DREW REGARDED BECKY ENGLISH thoughtfully. He had expected a high-powered and sophisticated West Coast event specialist. Instead, the woman before him, with her sunburned nose and pulled-back hair, barely looked as if she was legal age.

In fact, she looked like an athletic teenager getting ready to go to practice with the high school cheer squad. Since she so obviously was not the image of the professional woman he’d expected, his first impression had been that she must be a young Hollywood hanger-on, being rewarded for loyalty to Allie Ambrosia with a job she was probably not qualified to do.

But no, the woman in front of him had nothing of slick Hollywood about her. The vocabulary threw his initial assessment. The way she talked—with the earnestness of a student preparing for the Scripps National Spelling Bee—made him think that the bookworm geeky girl had been crossed with the high school cheerleader. Who would have expected that to be such an intriguing combination?

Becky’s hair was a sandy shade of brown that looked virgin, as if it had never been touched by dye or blond highlights. It looked as if she had spent about thirty seconds on it this morning, scraping it back from her face and capturing it in an elastic band. It was a rather nondescript shade of brown, yet so glossy with good health, Drew felt a startling desire to touch it.

Her eyes were plain old brown, without a drop of makeup around them to make them appear larger, or wider, or darker, or greener. Her skin was pale, which would have been considered unfashionable in the land of endless summer that he came from. Even after only a few days in the tropics, most of which he suspected had been spent inside, the tip of her nose and her cheeks were glowing pink, and she was showing signs of freckling. There was a bit of a sunburn on her slender shoulders.

Her teeth were a touch crooked, one of the front ones ever so slightly overlapping the other one. It was oddly endearing. He couldn’t help but notice, as men do, that she was as flat as a board.

Drew Jordan’s developments were mostly in Los Angeles. People there—especially people who could afford to buy in his subdivisions—were about the furthest thing from real that he could think of.

The women he dealt with had the tiny noses and fat lips, the fake tans and the unwrinkled foreheads. They had every shade of blond hair and the astonishingly inflated breast lines. Their eyes were widened into a look of surgically induced perpetual surprise and their teeth were so white you needed sunglasses on to protect you from smiles.

Drew was not sure when he had become used to it all, but suddenly it seemed very evident to him why he had. There was something about all that fakeness that was safe to a dyed-in-the-wool bachelor such as himself.

The cheerleader bookworm girl behind the desk radiated something that was oddly threatening. In a world that seemed to celebrate phony everything, she seemed as if she was 100 percent real.

She was wearing a plain white tank top, and if he leaned forward just a little bit he could see cutoff shorts. Peeking out from under the desk was a pair of sneakers with startling pink laces in them.

“How did you get mixed up with Allie?” he asked. “You do not look the way I would expect a high-profile Hollywood event planner to look.”

“How would you expect one to look?” she countered, insulted.

“Not, um, wholesome.”

She frowned.

“Take it as a compliment,” he suggested.

She looked uncertain about that, but marshaled herself.

“I’ve run a very successful event planning company for several years,” she said with a proud toss of her head.

“In Los Angeles,” he said with flat disbelief.

“Well, no, not exactly.”

He waited.

She looked flustered, which he enjoyed way more than he should have. She glared at him. “My company serves Moose Run and the surrounding areas.”

Was she kidding? It sounded like a name Hollywood would invent to conjure visions of a quaintly rural and charming America that hardly existed anymore. But, no, she had that cute and geeky earnestness about her.

Still, he had to ask. “Moose Run? Seriously?”

“Look it up on Google,” she snapped.

“Where is it? The mountains of Appalachia?”

“I said look it up on Google.”

But when he crossed his arms over his chest and raised an eyebrow at her, she caved.

“Michigan,” she said tersely. “It’s a farm community in Michigan. It has a population of about fourteen thousand. Of course, my company serves the surrounding areas, as well.”

“Ah. Of course.”

“Don’t say ah like that!”

“Like what?” he said, genuinely baffled.

“Like that explains everything.”

“It does. It explains everything about you.”

“It does not explain everything about me!” she said. “In fact, it says very little about me.”

There were little pink spots appearing on her cheeks, above the sunburned spots.

“Okay,” he said, and put up his hands in mock surrender. Really, he should have left it there. He should keep it all business, let her know what she could and couldn’t do construction wise with severe time restraints, and that was it. His job done.

But Drew was enjoying flustering her, and the little pink spots on her cheeks.

“How old are you?” he asked.

She folded her arms over her own chest—battle stations—and squinted at him. “That is an inappropriate question. How old are you?” she snapped back.

“I’m thirty-one,” he said easily. “I only asked because you look sixteen, but not even Allie would be ridiculous enough to hire a sixteen-year-old to put together this cir—event—would she?”

“I’m twenty-three and Allie is not ridiculous!”

“She isn’t?”

His brother’s future wife had managed to arrange her very busy schedule—she was shooting a movie in Spain—to grant Drew an audience, once, on a brief return to LA, shortly after Joe had phoned and told him with shy and breathless excitement he was getting married.

Drew had not been happy about the announcement. His brother was twenty-one. To date, Joe hadn’t made many major decisions without consulting Drew, though Drew had been opposed to the movie-set building and Joe had gone ahead anyway.

And look where that had led. Because, in a hushed tone of complete reverence, Joe had told Drew who he was marrying.

Drew’s unhappiness had deepened. He had shared it with Joe. His normally easygoing, amenable brother had yelled at him.

Quit trying to control me. Can’t you just be happy for me?

And then Joe, who was usually happy-go-lucky and sunny in nature, had hung up on him. Their conversations since then had been brief and clipped.

Drew had agreed to meet Joe here and help with a few construction projects for the wedding, but he had a secret agenda. He needed to spend time with his brother. Face-to-face time. If he managed to talk some sense into him, all the better.

“I don’t suppose Joe is here yet?” he asked Becky with elaborate casualness.

“No.” She consulted a thick agenda book. “I have him arriving tomorrow morning, first thing. And Allie arriving the day of the wedding.”

Perfect. If he could get Joe away from Allie’s influence, his mission—to stop the wedding, or at least reschedule it until cooler heads prevailed—seemed to have a better chance of succeeding.

Drew liked to think he could read people—the woman in front of him being a case in point. But he had come away from his meeting with Allie Ambrosia feeling a disconcerting sense of not being able to read her at all.

Where’s my brother? Drew had demanded.

Allie Ambrosia had blinked at him. No need to make it sound like a kidnapping.

Which, of course, was exactly what Drew had been feeling it was, and that Allie Ambrosia was solely responsible for the new Joe, who could hang up on his brother and then ignore all his attempts to get in touch with him.

“Allie Ambrosia is sensitive and brilliant and sweet.”

Drew watched Becky with interest as the blaze of color deepened over her sunburn. She was going to rise to defend someone she perceived as the underdog, and that told him almost as much about her as the fact that she hailed from Moose Run, Michigan.

Drew was just not sure who would think of Allie Ambrosia as the underdog. He may have been frustrated about his inability to read his future sister-in-law, but neither sensitive nor sweet would have made his short list of descriptive adjectives. Though they probably would have for Becky, even after such a short acquaintance.

Allie? Brilliant, maybe. Though if she was it had not shown in her vocabulary. Still, he’d been aware of the possibility of great cunning. She had seemed to Drew to be able to play whatever role she wanted, the real person, whoever and whatever that was, hidden behind eyes so astonishingly emerald he’d wondered if she enhanced the color with contact lenses.

He’d come away from Allie frustrated. He had agreed to build some things for the damn wedding, hoping, he supposed, that this seeming capitulation to his brother’s plans would open the door to communication between them and he could talk some sense into Joe.

He’d have his chance tomorrow. Today, he could unabashedly probe the secrets of the woman his brother had decided to marry.

“And you would know Allie is sensitive and brilliant and sweet, why?” he asked Becky, trying not to let on just how pleased he was to have found someone who actually seemed to know Allie.

“We went to school together.”

Better still. Someone who knew Allie before she’d caught her big break playing Peggy in a sleeper of a movie called Apple Mountain.

“Allie Ambrosia grew up in Moose Run, Michigan?” He prodded her along. “That is not in the official biography.”

He thought Becky was going to clam up, careful about saying anything about her boss and old school chum, but her need to defend won out.

“Her Moose Run memories may not be her fondest ones,” Becky offered, a bit reluctantly.

“I must say Allie has come a long way from Moose Run,” he said.

“How do you know? How well do you know Allie?”

“I admit I’m assuming, since I hardly know her at all,” Drew said. “This is what I know. She’s had a whirlwind relationship with my little brother, who is building a set on one of her movies. They’ve known each other weeks, not months. And suddenly they are getting married. It can’t last, and this is an awful lot of money and time and trouble to go to for something that can’t last.”

“You’re cynical,” she said, as if that was a bad thing.

“We can’t all come from Moose Run, Michigan.”

She squinted at him, not rising to defend herself, but staying focused on him, which made him very uncomfortable. “You are really upset that they are getting married.”

He wasn’t sure he liked that amount of perception. He didn’t say anything.

“Actually, I think you don’t like weddings, period.”

“What is this, a party trick? You can read my mind?” He intended it to sound funny, but he could hear a certain amount of defensiveness in his tone.

“So, it’s true then.”

“Big deal. Lots of men don’t like weddings.”

“Why is that?”

He frowned at her. He wanted to ferret out some facts about Allie, or talk about construction. He was comfortable talking about construction, even on an ill-conceived project like this. He was a problem solver. He was not comfortable discussing feelings, which an aversion to weddings came dangerously close to.