Victoria Pade - A Camden Family Wedding

“Nice to meet you,” January Camden said.

“You, too.”

“And, oh, do you have the most beautiful green eyes in the world!”

“Thank you,” Vonni answered, a bit taken aback by the compliment that was not at all businesslike.

“You’re the wedding planner. I got married on the spur of the moment in a judge’s office or I would have begged you to do a wedding for me. Maybe you could branch out into baby showers....”

Vonni merely laughed, unsure by the look of the other woman in the loose-fitting sundress if she was in the market for that.

“But, Dane, I really do need you to—”

“I know,” he said to his cousin before pivoting back to Vonni and aiming some pretty incredible blue eyes at her. “You’ll have to excuse her. Jani is pregnant and using it against us to get her way,” he said good-naturedly, obviously teasing Jani and confirming that a baby shower was likely on the horizon.

“Doctor’s orders,” Jani said with a beaming smile.

“This will just take a minute.” Dane went over to his cousin, who was still standing in the doorway, and looked over the papers with her.

The two were engrossed in whatever it was they were dealing with, which gave Vonni the perfect opportunity to study the infamous Dane Camden and try to figure out why he was sooo much better looking in person.

There was no denying that in every picture she’d seen of him he was an attractive enough man. But the real thing? Wow! So much better....

His brown hair was a tad lighter than his cousin’s—dark brown but the rich color of chocolate rather than espresso. He wore it short on the sides but a touch longer on top where it had just the right amount of wave to make him look sporty and casual but not unkempt.

She’d already noted the remarkable Camden blue eyes—and they were remarkable. It was another thing her brides and attendants swooned over when they were discussing him, and now she could see why.

Blueberry blue—that was what they were, Vonni decided. And penetrating and intelligent and warm and kind and surprisingly open for a person in his position.

But after more study, Vonni concluded it was his nose that made the difference between the way he looked in pictures and in person. He had a thin, longish nose with a bit of a bump in the bridge before it narrowed and slid down to a slightly squarish tip. It didn’t photograph well, but was somehow very sexy in real life.

Overall, his face was lean and angular and very masculine, complete with lips that weren’t at all full but were still so sensual they alone could chase fuller ones out of fashion at any moment.

He wasn’t a refined kind of handsome, Vonni decided. He was more a rugged, outdoorsy, approachable kind of handsome.

The kind that got to Vonni.

And it didn’t help that the face and hair weren’t all he had going for him. He was also tall and trim, but with enough muscle to fill out both the sleeves of his gray suit coat and the thighs of the matching pants. Plus his shoulders were wide, his back was straight and he looked strong and healthy and virile and...

And altogether terrific.

There was just no denying it, even though Vonni wished she could because she should never be looking at someone else’s groom and thinking how very, very hot he was....

“Nice to meet you, Vonni,” Jani said then as she turned to go.

Vonni jolted slightly out of staring at Dane Camden, unaware until that moment that the two had finished with their business.

“You, too,” Vonni said, as if she hadn’t been lost in the unwelcome stirrings aroused by cataloging every square inch of the woman’s cousin.

“Say hey to Gideon,” Dane Camden said to January Camden before he shut the door behind her and headed back to Vonni. “Sorry about that.”

“No problem. And congratulations, by the way—I should have said that right off.”

“For what?” he asked, his high, boxy brow wrinkling with confusion.

Vonni laughed, thinking that he must be new to his situation. “Congratulations on your engagement.”

It was his turn to laugh. “Oh, I’m not getting married. Not me. Not now. Not ever. Never!”

He seemed very determined.

“But of course you’d think I called you to talk about my own wedding,” he concluded.

“Well...people don’t usually call me about other people’s weddings....”

He laughed again—it was a deep, genuine, sexy sound that resonated through Vonni in a way it had no business doing.

Because even if he wasn’t the groom, it didn’t make any difference to her. Great looking or not, she was on hiatus from her too-long husband hunt. Plus, she’d learned the hard way not to waste time with commitment-shy men—and Dane Camden had just confirmed his reputation on that score. Quite resolutely.

“No, I’m sure they don’t,” he said then. “But this time that’s what’s happening. It’s my grandmother who’s getting married. And she wants it done in two weeks. That’s why she called me—I’m the guy around here who gets the impossible done.”

It took a moment for what he’d said to sink in.

His grandmother was getting married. Not any of the other Camdens whose engagements had recently been announced.

“You want me to do a wedding in two weeks?” Not just a Camden wedding, but one for the matriarch of the entire Camden family....

“Yep,” he confirmed. Then he grinned. It went slightly lopsided and put lines at the corners of his eyes and brackets alongside his mouth, and it just sucked her right in....

“Jani is right, you do have the most beautiful green eyes and they just got so big....” he said as if it delighted him. “They’re the color of jade. Dark jade-green....”

And he was staring into them so keenly. So closely. So thoroughly....

But just as Vonni was getting uncomfortable he went back to what they’d been talking about.

“The wedding in two weeks,” he said, more as if he was dragging himself back into the moment than as if he was reminding her. “Don’t run scared. I think between the two of us it’s doable because we aren’t talking a spectacular production. GiGi—that’s what everyone calls our grandmother—only wants a small wedding at home.”

“How small?” Vonni asked cautiously.

“Maybe a hundred guests. Including family, which... I haven’t done a recent head count and it’s growing, but I’d say we’re about a quarter of that number. And GiGi doesn’t want anything too fancy or elaborate. Low-key, tasteful. She and her fiancé are seventy-five and neither of them wants a lot of hoopla. They just want something nice. And you won’t have to worry about the ceremony—that will be in the den with only family looking on—so that cuts down on the preparations, too.”

“But it’s you I’ll be working with?” Vonni asked, unsure if she liked that idea, since the man seemed to have a strange effect on her.

“GiGi is in Montana taking care of a friend who had surgery. She can’t get back until just before the wedding but this is the date they want—it’s when they started going steady in high school. I’ll be texting her and sending her pictures of everything, but yeah, you’ll be working with me because it goes hand in hand with the other part of what I wanted to talk to you about today, which is my special project....”

“The business proposition?”

“Really slick how I got that in there, wasn’t it?” he joked, laughing at himself. “Anyway, let’s talk about that. We’ve decided that we want Camden Superstores to offer wedding packages. It’s always been our goal to be a one-stop shop and now we’d like to introduce wedding departments to each of our stores to add that—”

“Wedding departments?” Vonni parroted, unclear about what this had to do with her. Then she became alarmed—did he want to learn from what she did for his grandmother’s wedding and use it for his own special project? Camdens was notorious for undercutting and driving other companies out of business.