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.
“They just don’t like them,” he said stubbornly. “Okay, I don’t like them.”
“I’m curious about who made you your brother’s keeper,” she said. “Shouldn’t your parents be talking to him about this?”
“Our parents are dead.”
When something softened in her face, he deliberately hardened himself against it.
“Oh,” Becky said quietly, “I’m so sorry. So you, as older brother, are concerned, and at the same time have volunteered to help out. That’s very sweet.”
“Let’s get something straight right now. There is nothing sweet about me.”
“So why did you agree to help at all?”
He shrugged. “Brothers help each other.”
Joe’s really upset by your reaction to our wedding, Allie had told him. If you agreed to head up the construction, he would see it was just an initial reaction of surprise and that of course you want what is best for your own brother.
Oh, he wanted what was best for Joe, all right. Something must have flashed across Drew’s face, because Becky’s brow lowered.
“Are you going to try to stop the wedding?” she asked suspiciously.
Had he telegraphed his intention to Allie, as well? “Joe’s all grown up, and capable of making up his own mind. But so am I. And it seems like a crazy, impulsive decision he’s made.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“You’d think he would have asked me what I thought,” Drew offered grimly.
A certain measure of pain escaped in that statement, and so he frowned at Becky, daring her to give him sympathy.
Thankfully, she did not even try. “Is this why I can’t have the pavilion? Are you trying to sabotage the whole thing?”
“No,” he said curtly. “I’ll do what I can to give my brother and his beloved a perfect day. If he comes to his senses before then—” He lifted a shoulder.
“If he changes his mind, that would be a great deal of time and money down the tubes,” Becky said.
Drew lifted his shoulder again. “I’m sure you would