2 Months 'Til Mrs. (2 'Til Series) Read online

  “There you are, Sleeping Beauty,” Fynn said, his voice chipper.

  “What the hell?” she asked, sitting up. Her elbow throbbed with the movement and she cradled it against her.

  “I diverted your fall to save you another head injury under my watch, but your elbow didn’t fare as well, Mrs. Trager.”

  “Huh?” she asked, stealing a glance at her hand, her thoughts swimming. Don’t tell me I passed out into a coma and missed my own wedding. Her ring finger was bare… it is the left hand, isn’t it? She glanced at her other hand just in case. Nothing there either. Had he really proposed? It might have been in an unorthodox Fynn-ish sort of way, but it was a proposal, right?

  “Catherine, are you all right?” he asked, concern suddenly slipping into his voice in place of his jibing humor.

  “I just thought that—”

  “You fainted before I had the chance to finish my side of the conversation,” he pointed out. “Although Magnus thought the moment was lovely, didn’t you boy?” Fynn ruffled his fur.

  Catherine blushed with embarrassment. “I don’t know what happened—”

  “Let me shed some light. I was asking you to marry me and your eyes rolled back in your head. Out like a light. It was hardly the answer I was hoping for.”

  “That’s called swooning,” she snort-giggled, overwhelmed with the fact that her moment was happening right now and she’d almost slept through it. She looked down at her feet that were covered in his slippers.

  “I figured you had cold feet.”

  “You love me,” she said, as if it was a revelation.

  “You’re saying my lines now.”

  “But you do.”

  “I know I do. You don’t have to tell me that. ”

  She looked into his eyes, a mix of concern, humor, tenderness, and definitely love there. That’s the stuff.

  “So, can you stay a little longer?”

  “I think I can carve out a few more minutes for you.”

  “Just until something else comes along?”

  “At least that long.” She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him.

  “Then I guess this old thing won’t go to waste after all.” He pulled out of her embrace far enough to reach into his pocket, bringing out a small cylinder.

  “Aw, and I thought you were just happy to see me,” she quipped.

  “Like a guy’s never heard that before.”

  “I know. It’s overdone. But come on, it had to be said,” she pled, pointing at the party cracker.

  He held one end out to her and kept the other firmly in his own clutches. “Before I give this to you… do you, Catherine Hemmings, promise to keep my life interesting as long as we both shall live?”

  A smile spread on her face. “I couldn’t help it if I tried.”

  “That’s all I needed to know.” And with that he let go.

  Catherine held the cracker for a moment, staring at the silver-wrapped tube covered in messily glued red dots and capped in sparkly tinsel on each end. “Did you make this yourself?”

  “Actually, Cara helped me,” he admitted, a dimple appearing in his cheek as he couldn’t suppress a smile.

  She looked at the tube again, wanting to hold onto this moment just a little longer.

  “Are you going to open it?”

  “This isn’t some kind of gag gift, is it?” she asked, suddenly wary.

  “I guess you just have to open it to find out.” He shrugged like it was out of his hands.

  She held her breath and cracked the tube open, unleashing a small waterfall of rice. Just rice.

  “I wanted to fill it with confetti, but I didn’t have any… and rice is wedding-like, right?”

  While he spoke she shook each half of the tube, peeking inside, wondering where the real surprise was. The ring. Where the hell was the—

  “Looking for this?” he asked, dangling a diamond ring on a red ribbon before her eyes.

  “This was just a decoy?” She tossed the cracker aside.

  “I couldn’t make it that obvious or that easy—you sure don’t.”

  She reached for it. “It’s beautiful,” she said, ignoring his jab in favor of the emerald cut diamond solitaire in a vintage-inspired, engraved filigree setting. She slipped it onto her finger, ribbon and all.

  “You don’t let me do anything in my own time,” he admonished, pulling it off her finger, untying the ribbon, and then holding her hand in his. “I had a whole plan. A New Year’s Eve proposal. But then the snow… and your little—”

  “Let’s not talk about my little anything,” she said, basking in the glittering rock poised before her.

  “I was going to recreate the moment—champagne and candlelight—but you had to go and rush me.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “You did. But I still want to marry you, Catherine Hemmings,” he said simply, slipping the ring on her finger where it belonged. “Your fainting move put me over the top.”

  “We never had dinner. I have low blood sugar,” she pointed out self-righteously, her eyes never leaving the ring. Of course most women remembered every second of their proposal and hers had a blank spot in the middle, but the ring made up for everything. She wanted to throw her hand up and hail cabs with that hand, pay for groceries with that hand, cover yawns demurely with that hand—she only wished that she wrote with that hand. Anything and everything to draw attention to the fact that someone wanted to be with her forever and she had the ring to prove it.

  “What’s that self-satisfied smirk about?” Fynn asked, good humor in his voice. “You look like you just laid a trap and caught something big.”

  “Didn’t I?” she asked, finally looking to him again and fluttering her eyelashes.

  “You going to rub that in my face?”

  “I want to rub you and this,” she said, fingering the diamond, “in everyone’s face. Kiss my ass Aunt Judy and Cousin Brenda and Sister Constance, while I’m at it. I salute you,” she cackled, giving the air the ring finger.

  “But I thought this was about us,” he said dejectedly.

  “Of course it’s about us,” she stressed. “But it is also about all of them and how they were wrong about me.”

  Again there was that twisted smirk on his face that said she was totally nuts, but she took it as a good sign that he didn’t try to grab her hand and yank the ring back off right then and there.

  “So… I’m guessing that you aren’t planning on making that flight?” He made a show of checking the time.

  “What flight?” she asked breathily, snuggling into his arms.

  -15-

  “Georgia, you are not going to believe what just happened,” Catherine whispered, her body hardly even cold yet from the warmth of Fynn’s clutches. She’d bided her time as long as she could, basking in the glow of the ring, but when he went to start dinner, she ran to the bathroom to get out of his earshot so she could call her best friend and share the incredible, unbelievable, delectable news.

  “He did it!” Georgia squealed in triumph.

  “Wait a second… you know?” Catherine asked, her excitement noticeably cooled.

  “Know what?” her friend pulled back quickly.

  “Spill it. Tell me what you know and why.”

  “I know nothing—” Georgia hemmed for a mere second before it gushed out anyway, “—except that he wanted help deciding on the cut of diamond you would like.” Maybe she thought that the faster it came out the less treasonous it would sound.

  “So you knew he was going to ask—”

  “But I didn’t know when,” she clarified.

  “And you didn’t tell me?” Catherine dropped ass-first onto the toilet in shock, thankful after the fact that the lid was down—he always puts the lid down.

  “Really, Cat, you wouldn’t have wanted me to spoil the surprise.”

  “That should have been for me to decide.”

  Silence greeted her on the other end as they both realized the impossibili
ty of what she’d just said. Ridiculous or not, though, her friend’s loyalty to the other side could have cost her the chance to become Mrs. Trager at all. I almost F’d the whole thing up! If I’d known it was coming, I never would have dumped him. And I wouldn’t have spent my New Year’s moping…. To think I could have ended up single forever all because my best friend doesn’t know proper etiquette about spilling the beans. It is quite clearly in the girlfriend code from the moment girls become boy crazy that anytime a friend knows of a boy who likes, plans to ask out, plans to break up with, or of course plans to propose to her friend, she is supposed to tell her. Maybe I should get her a handbook about these things.

  “I just can’t believe you would keep something like that from me,” Catherine muttered.

  “You act like I took the easy way out. God, Cat, I have been absolutely dying. And when I saw you at your parents’ the other day I almost lost it. I even called Fynn in a panic.”

  “You called him?”

  “Well, you were acting so weird. I was sure that something had backfired. I was going to give him a piece of my mind, but he still hasn’t returned my call. Tell him to check his voice mail in the future. Except for that last call—I guess he isn’t actually dead to me, considering—”

  “You didn’t say that!” Catherine breathed, unwilling even now to admit what actually happened over the weekend.

  “Of course! I had your back. But now you’re there and everything is fine and—tell me everything!” Georgia gushed, onto the more important things like the what, when, where of the proposal.

  Catherine froze, realizing there wasn’t much that she wanted to share when it came to the nitty-gritty of the event. Hissy fit about missing her flight? No. Fainting? No. This went nothing like Georgia’s perfect engagement story—on one knee at The Met because, as Thomas said, Georgia is a work of art that surpasses anything on display in a museum. Corny but exquisite.

  “Well?” Georgia prodded impatiently.

  “I was getting ready to leave and he asked me to stay—forever,” she paraphrased.

  “Oh my God, how beautiful!”

  It really is… when you put it that way.

  “And the ring?”

  “It’s gorgeous!”

  “Isn’t it?” Georgia agreed.

  “Wait a minute, you’ve seen it already?” Catherine challenged, seething. Part of this whole engagement thrill was unveiling the ring.

  “I told you, he asked me what kind you would like. Remember a few years ago when we stopped at that café and you saw that woman with the amazing engagement ring? You said that was something you could wear for the rest of your life.”

  Catherine looked at her hand, realizing that this was indeed just like the one she’d seen.

  “He wanted it to be something you would love forever and he—”

  “Doesn’t know me well enough to know what that is,” Catherine finished for her, feeling squeamish.

  “No guy knows his woman well enough to know that.”

  “Thomas did.”

  “Only because we talked about marriage until we were blue in the face even before we got engaged. He’s a planner, remember? We shopped for a ring together…. You got the real fairytale surprise,” Georgia said, a touch of envy in her words.

  Catherine was silent, unsure what to say to that. Sure every girl loves a good fairytale, but marriage was real. Georgia and Thomas had dated for two years. You could know volumes about someone in two years, and you certainly couldn’t hide much in that amount of time. She was capping out an eight-month relationship that whittled down to less than eighty actual days with the guy.

  “So when is this fine event going to happen?”

  “I don’t know.” Catherine was hardly paying attention, trying to calm her sudden onset jitters by focusing on the ring as she wiggled her fingers in the glow of the vanity light. The glory of diamonds! She had never owned or even worn them before in her life. She’d been saving herself for marriage.

  “Well, let me remind you that I need time to get into bridesmaid shape, so fair warning would be appreciated.”

  “Maid of honor shape,” Catherine corrected, suitably dazzled out of her nerves.

  “Really?” Georgia shrieked. “But what about Tara, isn’t she going to be pissed?”

  “Seniority rules. You’ve been putting up with me for way longer. Besides, we made that pact well before I even met Tara.”

  “Penn State Homecoming, junior year,” Georgia squealed.

  “When we were so sure Chad Beaumont was going to be the one and you were going to carry his Beaumont babies!”

  “Thank God for birth control… and for that skank who didn’t know how to lock a door,” Georgia said of the girl she caught screwing Chad in his Presidential Suite in the Phi Gamm house during a toga party. It was a crushing cliché. The maid-of-honor pact was all that had survived that relationship. “You know, I heard he’s on his second marriage already.”

  “I’m sure number two is just lovely,” Catherine snorted.

  “Oh, sure.”

  She could hear the eye roll in Georgia’s words. “And speaking of seconds, Tara can have my next wedding.”

  “I’m sure she’ll be thrilled.”

  “She’ll probably think she actually has a chance,” Catherine chuckled derisively.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Georgia admitted before seamlessly slipping into her latest role like it was made for her. “So when are you going to be back in town so we can start getting to work on this thing?”

  Catherine heard the knock at the bathroom door like it was a gunshot to the head and she literally ducked down, taking cover.

  “Are you okay in there?” Fynn asked from the other side.

  “Yeah!” she choked out. “I was just… caught up…” Oh my God, it sounds like I’m constipated! “… in this article…” she corrected. And now he thinks I’m reading on the toilet! She cringed. In all these weekends she had been careful to avoid bathroom-related talk at all, basically living as if her body didn’t evacuate waste. She flushed the toilet and whispered into the phone, “I’ve got to go.”

  “Are you going to the bathroom?” Georgia asked, the eew in her voice unmistakable.

  “I’m in the bathroom—for privacy,” she whispered.

  “Dinner’s ready!” Fynn hollered. “Why don’t you tell Georgia you’ll call her in the morning?” And then his footsteps retreated to the kitchen.

  “I gotta go,” Catherine said guiltily.

  *****

  She watched Fynn washing dishes at the sink, a dishtowel slung over his shoulder, when suddenly it hit her, “What am I going to tell my parents?” she blurted out, almost dropping the basket of leftover dinner rolls on the floor at her feet where Magnus would have vacuumed them up in one swallow. He had come to learn she was an awful klutz, the weakest of the humanoids in his midst, so he shadowed her every move when food was about.

  “Excuse me?” Fynn asked, shutting off the faucet and turning to her.

  “My parents….”

  “What about good old William and Elizabeth Hemmings?” he sighed lightly, leaning back against the counter in expectation of a tirade or a meltdown or some such Catherine-esque reaction.

  “What am I going to tell them? They’re going to think that I’m nuts—that we’re nuts,” she said, complete with flighty hand motions that had Magnus’s head spinning as he watched the basket like a hawk.

  “Tell them that you’ve decided to stop giving the milk away for free. I think they’ll appreciate that,” he said playfully.

  “Fynn!” she exclaimed.

  “Then tell them that you are totally nuts and so am I and together we plan to live happily ever after… in our own little nuthouse.”

  “Can you ever be serious?”

  “I guess I just don’t see the problem here…. Mom, Dad, I’m getting married—seems pretty simple and straightforward to me.”

  “But—” She looked at him, a deer in the
headlights. “—the last they heard we’d broken up.”

  “You told them?” he asked, genuinely surprised.

  “My mom pried it out of me. She’s like that,” Catherine said, absolving herself of any blame in the matter.

  “Regardless, I think that Elizabeth and William Hemmings can handle the turn of events.”

  “My parents are very… traditional people. Very slow and plodding and careful.”

  “Did you ever wonder if you were switched at birth?” Fynn joked.

  She looked at him tightly, seeing as how that very thing had poked at the back of her mind her entire life. She didn’t seem to have any of the steadiness that the Hemmings clan had. But regardless of any hospital mishaps, these people were her parents as far as her birth certificate was concerned… so nothing was going to get her out of sharing the news with them.

  “I think you’re underestimating them,” he assured her when he couldn’t coax her out with a smile.

  “I—I just kind of figured that my husband-to-be would ask my dad—”

  “For a goat… a heifer… perhaps some land?”

  “For my hand,” she admitted firmly.

  “You aren’t eighteen anymore, you know… or twenty-two… or twenty-five, or even twenty-nine.”

  “No need to grotesquely overstate your point,” she groused. “And don’t forget, neither are you.”

  “I’m just saying that I think that the choice is yours at this stage of the game—at least that’s what he said.”

  “It’s a symbolic—” But she stopped as his words registered. “He who? Did Connor give you his advice on this? You know, Connor might be smart, but he is also a total idiot—common-sensically challenged.”

  “I don’t think that’s a word.” He scratched his head in exaggerated befuddlement.

  “Oh, you know what I mean.” She waved him off, semantics a nuisance when she was making a point.

  He shook his head slowly, piteously. “Well, I was talking about your father anyway.”

  “When did my father say that?”

  “When I asked him for your hand, milady,” he said, literally bowing before her.