Michelle Celmer - Caroselli's Accidental Heir

She waited, but still no answer.

She was already off to a rip-roaring start. Could the individual who sent her the email have been wrong about the date of the party? Or the time? Or even the location?

And what woman in her right mind would take the word of a typed letter from an anonymous “friend”?

This one would. And it was too late to turn back now.

She tried the knob and found it unlocked. Why not add breaking and entering to her list of transgressions?

She eased the front door open, peering inside. There was no one in sight, so she stepped in, snapping the door quietly closed behind her. The foyer and adjacent living room were elegantly decorated and showplace-perfect. And too quiet. Where the heck was everyone? Maybe it really was the wrong day, and the cars outside were for another house, and a different party.

She was about to turn around and slip back out the door when she heard faint music from the rear of the house. String instruments. Maybe a quartet? She couldn’t make out the melody.

Thinking she might actually have a chance to slip into the party unnoticed, she followed the sound of the music, passing a spectacular dining room decorated in deep hues of red and gold with a table long enough to accommodate a small army.

The music stopped abruptly and she turned. Across from the dining room was an enormous family room with a stone fireplace that kissed the peak of a cathedral ceiling. Rows of chairs lined either side of a silk runner....

Oh. My. God.

This was no engagement party. It was a wedding!

What struck her immediately was the normalcy of it all. The tradition. The handful of wedding guests perched on satin-covered folding chairs. The bride with her long, elegant neck and blade-like cheekbones. Her dress, an off-white shift, was as simple as it was stylish, while showing off a pair of legs so slender and long, they brought her nearly to eye level with Tony, who at six feet two inches was in no way lacking height.

Speaking of Tony...

Lucy’s heart lifted the instant she laid eyes on him, then slammed to the pit of her stomach. In a tailored suit, his jet-black hair combed back off his forehead, he looked as if he’d stepped off the cover of GQ, but in a mussed, I’m-too-sexy-for-my-shirt way. Very much the way he looked the first time she saw him in the bar where she’d worked. And until that very second she hadn’t realized just how much she had missed him. How much she needed him. Until he came along last year, she never needed anyone.

So what now? Should she slide into one of the empty seats and pretend to belong there, then talk to him after the service? Or should she turn and run back out the door and phone him later, as her mom had suggested.

“Lucy?” Tony said.

She blinked out of her stupor and realized Tony was looking right back at her. And so was the bride. In fact, everyone in the room had turned and all eyes were fixed on her.

Oh, boy.

She stood there frozen, wondering what she should do. She’d come here to talk to Tony, not crash his wedding mid-ceremony. But she was already here, and the wedding was already disrupted, and running and hiding wasn’t an option. Why not do what she came to do?

“I am so sorry,” she said, as if an apology would mean diddly-squat at this point. After this, if he ever spoke to her again, it would be a miracle. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Yet here you are,” Tony said, his tone flat. He once had told her that he admired her spunk, and the fact that she had the courage to speak her mind, to stand up for what she believed in, but she doubted this was what he’d had in mind. “What do you want?”

“I need to speak to you,” Lucy said. “Privately.”

“Now? If you hadn’t noticed, I’m getting married.”

Oh, she noticed.

The bride looked back and forth between the two of them, her face pale, as if she might faint. Or maybe she always looked that way. Come to think of it, she bore an uncanny resemblance to Morticia Adams. “Tony? Who is this?” she asked, her brow wrinkled in distaste as she looked down her nose at Lucy.

“No one of any consequence,” he said, and did that ever sting. On the bright side, he would be eating those words very soon. Though that would hardly help to improve her situation.

“It’s important,” she told him.

“Anything you have to say to me, you can say right here,” Tony told Lucy. “In front of my family.”

Not a good idea. “Tony—”

“Right here,” he insisted, pointing to the floor to make his point.

She recognized that rigid stance, the look of unwavering resolve. He wasn’t going to back down.

If that was really what he wanted...

Head held high, shoulders squared, she unzipped her jacket, exposing the basketball-sized bump under her snug-fitting T-shirt, cringing inwardly as a collective gasp cut through the silence, reverberating off the velvet-covered walls. She would never be able to forget that sound, or the look on everyone’s faces for the rest of her life. If Tony had been aiming to embarrass Lucy or humiliate her, it had backfired. The bride was the one who looked mortified.

“Is it yours?” she asked Tony, and he looked to Lucy questioningly. She shot him a look that said, What do you think?

He turned back to his fiancée and said, “Alice, I’m sorry, but I need a minute with my...with Lucy.”

“I suspect it will take considerably longer than a minute,” Alice said, her voice tight. She slipped the diamond engagement ring from a long, slender, claw-like finger and held it out to him. “And something tells me that I won’t be needing this any longer.”

“Alice—”

She stopped him. “When I agreed to marry you, a pregnant lover wasn’t part of the deal. Let’s just cut our losses, shall we? Keep it dignified.”

Was that all their marriage was to Alice? A deal? She looked humiliated, and seriously annoyed, but heartbroken? Not so much. And maybe her fingers weren’t so clawlike, Lucy thought as she watched Alice fiddling with the ring. Good thing, too, because she looked as if she’d like to gouge out Lucy’s eyes.

Tony didn’t try to change her mind. He obviously knew a lost cause when he saw one. Or maybe he didn’t love her as much as he thought. Lucy couldn’t help feeling that she had just done him a favor, though she doubted he would see it that way. He would probably never forgive her.

Alice tried to hand the ring to him, but he shook his head.

“Keep it,” he said. “Think of it as my way of saying I’m sorry.”

Considering the size of the rock, that had to be at least a five-figure apology. As consolation prizes went, Alice could have done a lot worse.

Alice palmed the ring, accepting her defeat with the utmost grace, and Lucy actually felt sorry for her. “I’ll go get my things.”

A woman in the front row whom Lucy recognized from pictures as Tony’s mom, shot to her feet. Which, even in three-inch heels barely brought her to shoulder height with her ex-future-daughter-in-law.

“Alice, let me help you,” she said, slipping an arm around hers and leading her from the room, shooting Lucy a look that said, Just wait until I get my hands on you. Despite being in her sixties, and no larger than Lucy—sans the baby weight, of course—if she was anything like her son she would be a formidable adversary. And after what Lucy had done today, she couldn’t imagine they would ever be anything but enemies.

One more stupid act to regret. Her relationship with her child’s grandmother forever scarred before it even began. In Lucy’s world this sort of thing happened all the time, but the Carosellis were cultured and sophisticated, and she knew now, way out of her league. How could she have ever believed that she and Tony could have a future together? Her mom was right. Men like him didn’t marry women like her.