Shopping for a CEO's Fiancée

Terry and I share a look. He guzzles his entire glass of wine in one long gulp.

The fastest way to make two people bond is to give them a common enemy.

He reaches for his phone and starts tapping, then puts it away, watching us intently. The man doesn’t actually use his phone. Why now?

“And then the bridesmaid fell in the water and you saved her!” she adds with glee, clapping her perfectly-manicured hands. She is golden tan, a color never found in nature. Her skin is impossibly smooth. Something seems slightly computer-generated about her. Jessica triggers the Uncanny Valley reaction in me.

“What a ridiculous spectacle,” she continues.

I bristle at the word ridiculous and tune her out as I drink my glass and Terry refills it.

“The only good to come from that wedding is the confirmation that you’re not a vampire, Andrew.”

I am in mid-swallow, and as I finish, the wine feels like an endoscopy tube doing down.

“Between the cat as a flower girl, the half-naked bridesmaid who was clearly doing it for attention, the crazy mother of the bride thinking the President of the United States had come to her pathetic daughter’s wedding, and what you had to do to rescue that frumpy oaf.”

Did she just call Amanda a frumpy oaf?

“I am so sorry your brother has dragged down the family name by marrying into that mess.” A blindly charming smile aimed directly at Terry gives her nothing but my brother doing his best imitation of an Easter Island statue. She tries to use it on me.

“Oh, no,” I answer, turning in the booth, putting space between us as I stretch one arm across the back, behind me, the other holding my very full glass of red wine. “If anyone dragged down the family name, it was me. Going back to high school.”

Terry and I exchange a look. He smiles.

Turkish food always makes McCormick men so clumsy.

As the entire contents of my glass pour into her lap like the Hoover Dam in a disaster movie, I try to savor every second. I didn’t tell Amanda the entire story about my dating Jessica Coffin when we were flying home from Vegas. Truth is important in relationships, yes.

And as Jessica leaps up, Terry tries—oh, how he tries—to grab the half-full wine bottle before it tips toward her and pours even more wine all over her lap.

But he fails.

We’re a bucketful of family fail right now, aren’t we?

“I am so sorry!” he says, jumping up, grabbing the bottle and fumbling, tipping the neck up so the wine burbles up in a parabolic stream, hitting between her breasts.

“OH MY GOD!” she screams, batting at the stains, Terry’s hands, making the mess turn into a wine Vesuvius.

The server rushes over with a towel and a look of horror. “Miss! Miss! Can I help?”

“Of course you can help, you stupid idiot! Get the manager!”

A flash from a far corner of the restaurant registers and I turn toward it.

Twenty-somethings taking pic after pic after pic.

Like Jessica at Dec and Shannon’s Boston wedding.

Terry’s eyes cut over to the flash, too, and he gives me a look, winking.

“You are having some sort of breakdown, Andrew! I’ve never known you to be clumsy!” Jessica rants.

“People change. I am so sorry.” My tone makes it clear I’m not.

“My dress is ruined!”

I look at her, softening my eyes, working on a convincingly sexy body crawl that she picks up on instantly, minus the fakery.

“It was a year out of style anyhow,” I say, her reaction a hiss. “I probably did you a favor.” Wink.

The server is mopping up the destroyed tabletop. A pool of wine on the cushion means I can’t sit. Jessica’s gawking at me, gape-mouthed, her hand curling and uncurling in the universal gesture of outraged women.

I’m about to get slapped.

I give her a one-shouldered shrug and turn away, making a call.

“Gina? Jessica Coffin will call you shortly. Take care of her dry cleaning bill and replace the dress I ruined just now.”

“You asshole,” Jessica mutters.

“Yes, sir?” Gina peeps. “Wait. The Jessica Coffin? I follow her Twitter stream? She’s the best? You ever read about #poopwatch and #hotsanta?”

“She’s the best, all right,” I say, giving her a glance. “And yes, I’m intimately familiar with those.” I tense.

“You’ll pay for this!” Jessica screeches, the worst of the wine mopped up. The manager appears, urging us to a different table, while Jessica heaps abuse after abuse on the server.

Terry meanwhile, is just trying not to laugh. He grabs the wet bottle, dries it off, and pours the rest into his glass.

He gets a half inch.

“Why would you do this?” Jessica screams.

“These things happen.”

Her eyes go wide. She looks like a Rorschach test with eyes.

Those words? These things happen.

That’s the exact phrase she used when I caught her in Declan’s lap.

I watch her watching me, and my conversation with Amanda from the other day comes back to me. She thinks Jessica has power. Influence. That she matters.

More flashes from the peanut gallery in the corner. Then a pause. Probably uploading.

A bitter, airy laugh greets me as Jessica shoulders her purse. “You’ve waited all these years to get back at me for choosing your brother over you and this is all you’ve got, Andrew?”

“The wine was an accident.”

“Like hell it was.”

I get in her face, my hand on the small of her back, pulling her in like a confidante. Her perfume is the same, made for her mother in a French perfumery, and it tickles the senses, delightful and sinister at once.