He had a deep chest, a flat stomach and the narrow hips of a gunslinger. His limbs, relaxed, were sleekly muscled and hinted at easy strength.
The stranger’s face was mesmerizing. His hair, dark brown and curling, touched the collar of his shirt. His eyes were as blue as the Caribbean Sea that Becky could just glimpse out the open patio door over the incredible broadness of his shoulder.
Unlike that sea, his eyes did not look warm and inviting. In fact, there was that hint of a gunslinger, again, something cool and formidable in his uncompromising gaze. The look in his eyes did not detract, not in the least, from the fact that his features were astoundingly perfect.
“And no,” he said.
Another piece of paper drifted down onto her desk, this one landing on the keyboard of her laptop.
“And to this one?” he said. “Especially no.”
And then a final sheet glided down, hit the lip of the desk, forcing her to grab it before it slid to the floor.
Becky stared at him, rather than the paper in her hand. A bead of sweat trickled down from his temple and followed the line of his face, slowly, slowly, slowly down to the slope of a perfect jaw, where he swiped at it impatiently.
It was hot here on the small, privately owned Caribbean island of Sainte Simone. Becky resisted a temptation to swipe at her own sweaty brow with the back of her arm.
She found her voice. “Excuse me? And you are?”
He raised an arrogant eyebrow at her, which made her rush to answer for him.
“You must be one of Allie’s Hollywood friends,” Becky decided.
It seemed to her that only people in Allie’s field of work, acting on the big screen, achieved the physical beauty and perfection of the man in front of her. Only they seemed to be able to carry off that rather unsettling I-own-the-earth confidence that mere mortals had no hope of achieving. Besides, it was more than evident how the camera would love the gorgeous planes of his face, the line of his nose, the fullness of his lips...
“Are you?” she asked.
This was exactly why she had needed a guest list, but no, Allie had been adamant about that. She was looking after the guest list herself, and she did not want a single soul—up to and including her event planner, apparently—knowing the names of all the famous people who would be attending her wedding.
The man before Becky actually snorted in disgust, which was no kind of answer. Snorted. How could that possibly sound sexy?
“Of course, you are very early,” Becky told him, trying for a stern note. Why was her heart beating like that, as if she had just run a sprint? “The wedding isn’t for two weeks.”
It was probably exactly what she should be expecting. People with too much money and too much time on their hands were just going to start showing up on Sainte Simone whenever they pleased.
“I’m Drew Jordan.”
She must have looked as blank as she felt.
“The head carpenter for this circus.”
Drew. Jordan. Of course! How could she not have registered that? She was actually expecting him. He was the brother of Joe, the groom.
Well, he might be the head carpenter, but she was the ringmaster, and she was going to have to establish that fact, and fast.
“Please do not refer to Allie Ambrosia’s wedding as a circus,” the ringmaster said sternly. Becky was under strict orders word of the wedding was not to get out. She was not even sure that was possible, with two hundred guests, but if it did get out, she did not want it being referred to as a circus by the hired help. The paparazzi would pounce on that little morsel of insider information just a little too gleefully.
There was that utterly sexy snort again.
“It is,” she continued, just as sternly, “going to be the event of the century.”
She was quoting the bride-to-be, Hollywood’s latest “it” girl, Allie Ambrosia. She tried not to show that she, Becky English, small-town nobody, was just a little intimidated that she had been chosen to pull off that event of the century.
She now remembered Allie warning her about this very man who stood in front of her.
Allie had said, My future brother-in-law is going to head up construction. He’s a bit of a stick-in-the-mud. He’s a few years older than Joe, but he acts, like, seventy-five. I find him quite cranky. He’s the bear-with-the-sore-bottom type. Which explains why he isn’t married.
So, this was the future brother-in-law, standing in front of Becky, looking nothing at all like a stick-in-the-mud, or like a seventy-five-year-old. The bear-with-the-sore-bottom part was debatable.
With all those facts in hand, why was the one that stood out the fact that Drew Jordan was not married? And why would Becky care about that, at all?
Becky had learned there was an unexpected perk of being a wedding planner. She had named her company, with a touch of whimsy and a whole lot of wistfulness, Happily-Ever-After. However, her career choice had quickly killed what shreds of her romantic illusions had remained after the bitter end to her long engagement. She would be the first to admit she’d had far too many fairy-tale fantasies way back when she had been very young and hopelessly naive.
Flustered—here was a man who made a woman want to believe, all over again, in happy endings—but certainly not wanting to show it, Becky picked up the last paper Drew Jordan had cast down in front of her, the especially no one.
It was her own handiwork that had been cast so dismissively in front of her. Her careful, if somewhat rudimentary, drawing had a big black X right through the whole thing.
“But this is the pavilion!” she said. “Where are we supposed to seat two hundred guests for dinner?”
“The location is fine.”
Was she supposed to thank him for that? Somehow words, even sarcastic ones, were lost to her. She sputtered ineffectually.
“You can still have dinner at the same place, on the front lawn in front of this monstrosity. Just no pavilion.”
“This monstrosity is a castle,” Becky said firmly. Okay, she, too, had thought when she had first stepped off the private plane that had whisked her here that the medieval stone structure looked strangely out of place amidst the palms and tropical flowers. But over the past few days, it had been growing on her. The thick walls kept it deliciously cool inside and every room she had peeked in had the luxurious feel of a five-star hotel.
Besides, the monstrosity was big enough to host two hundred guests for the weeklong extravaganza that Allie wanted for her wedding, and monstrosities like that were very hard, indeed, to find.
With the exception of an on-site carpenter, the island getaway came completely staffed with people who were accustomed to hosting remarkable events. The owner was record mogul Bart Lung, and many a musical extravaganza had been held here. The very famous fund-raising documentary We Are the Globe, with its huge cast of musical royalty, had been completely filmed and recorded here.
But apparently all those people had eaten in the very expansive castle dining room, which Allie had said with a sniff would not do. She had her heart set on alfresco for her wedding feast.
“Are you saying you can’t build me a pavilion?” Becky tried for an intimidating, you-can-be-replaced tone of voice.
“Not can’t. Won’t. You have two weeks to get ready for the circus, not two years.”
He was not the least intimidated by her, and she suspected it was