Jule McBride - I Thee Bed...

“Of course.”

He didn’t look the least bit nervous, which was a good sign. “If what you did here over the last hour is indicative of how you work, we should get along famously,” she found herself saying.

“Then why don’t you check my references and call me. I’m ready to start whenever you want me to come in.”

“Deal.” Edie stuck out her hand, and when his found hers, she was hardly surprised to feel heat flood her system. Nothing more than the casual touch made her every last nerve dance. And her last thought as he shrugged into his coat and walked through the door and into the swirling snow was that she would never be able to work with him without taking him upstairs to her apartment—and to bed.

“STACY WAS DEFINITELY right about one thing,” Seth said several days later as he helped Edie sort through the sketches on the board table. “That really is a beautiful gown. You and your mother did a great job.”

Edie couldn’t help but lean closer to him, drawn by the scent of his cologne and animal magnetism she simply couldn’t resist. “Actually—” Deciding to take a break, she pulled out a chair, seated herself at the table, then looked at the picture again. “That was my own dream gown.”

Following suit, Seth rolled a chair across the gray carpet and sat next to her. “Yours?”

Nodding, she took a deep breath, relaxing. “Thank you for everything,” she inserted, instead of pursuing the conversation. It was their third day on the job together, and Seth really had turned out to be a godsend. Sexy, too. He’d done nothing to diminish the initial sense that she’d like to get into bed with him. Today, he was wearing a dark charcoal suit, blue shirt and an unlikely lime-and-red-striped tie that looked so fabulous it prompted her to say, “You do have an amazing eye for color, Seth.” She’d met few people who could mix and match color and fabric with his unique flair. “Are you sure you want to go back into art directing?”

He laughed. “Offering to make me a partner?”

“Maybe,” Edie teased. “You can go, by the way. It’s about five. I’ve got to stick around for the mailman. I’m his last stop, and he brings in the papers, which should be in the outside box by now.”

Seth made no move to leave, but merely surveyed her, an easy smile still on his lips. “You’re evading the subject.”

“Which was?”

He pointed at a sketch. “The gown.”

She shrugged, blowing out a wistful sigh. “Honestly, a lot of Julia’s wedding includes elements I used to fantasize about when I was a kid. Things I thought I’d have in my own wedding. Even the music. My sister Bridget’s fiancé, Dermott, finally agreed to arrange some pieces. And I’d always thought of asking him, myself.”

As if sensing the conversation was headed for deeper turf, Seth rose, circled around to a counter and poured them both cups of coffee, fixing hers with cream and sugar, the way she liked it, then he returned, setting hers down before reseating himself. “Why didn’t you save the ideas for your own wedding?”

She considered. “You mean, besides the fact that I don’t have over a million dollars to spend?”

“Yeah.”

“And besides the fact that I’ve just about given up on ever having a wedding?”

He stared at her. “You can’t be serious.”

She thought a moment, then flashed him a smile, deciding to come clean with the whole story. “Maybe I should tell you the real reason I opened Big Apple Brides. You see, rumor has it that a Southern belle named Miss Marissa Jennings put a curse on all the Benning women during the Civil War when her own love life didn’t work out,” Edie began, then she plunged into the wealth of family stories told since time immemorial about the wedding curse, including the fact that Joe Benning wasn’t her biological father, since her mother had previously been married to a man named Jasper Hartley.

“You don’t remember him at all?”

She shook her head. “Nope. I was too little when he died. Bridget had just been born. And Mom met Joe shortly afterward, so he’s all I’ve ever known as a father. It’s been great. Our only real legacy from Jasper Hartley is the family’s wedding curse.”

“And because of this, no Benning woman will ever marry?”

“So the stories go.”

“Not very nice of Miss Marissa,” Seth commented, clearly warming to the tale. He leaned forward as if to hear better, coming so close that their knees touched under the table. He pulled away, but not before a white-hot jolt shot through Edie’s system.

“No, it wasn’t,” she agreed. “Anyway, there are plenty of family stories about the ghost of Miss Marissa, so from an early age, I thought opening a wedding-planning business might…”

“Bring the Benning women better marriage Karma?”

She sipped her coffee, then made a show of smacking her lips, tilting the cup and toasting him since it tasted absolutely perfect. “Exactly.”

Seth squinted. “But I met your sisters. Marley and Bridget, right? They’ve both stopped in. I thought the two of them said they were engaged.”

Edie grinned. “See. My plan worked.”

“Touché.”

Her smile tempered as she glanced across the threshold and to the outer windows where twilight was waning and the snow was still falling. Her business was situated on the corner of Hudson and Perry streets and her parents, Viv and Joe, lived at the other end of the block. She had a sudden urge to call her mother, to ask if she could bring Seth Bishop home with her for dinner—assuming he’d want to come, of course. Her grandmother, fondly known as Granny Ginny, was still visiting, and she imagined Seth would enjoy the older woman’s company.

Turning her attention to him again, she startled. He’d been looking at her with…intensity, she realized. Longing. Raw sexual need. For just a second, she felt completely unbalanced, although she shared the sentiment, she was deeply attracted to him, and more than once she’d fantasized about going to bed with him. It was unwise, since they were working together, yes. Still, the more she got to know him, the more she wanted him. She also realized his knee had found hers under the table again. How long had it been brushing hers?

“Uh…” Somehow, she found her voice. “My sisters are engaged, but they’ve only became so recently.” Continuing, now speaking almost by rote, since his proximity was claiming most of her attention, she caught Seth up on how her life had spun out of control after Sparky Darden had hired her. She told him about how Celebrity Weddings had talked her into going on a reality show called Rate the Dates with a man she’d been dating at the time, named Cash Champagne, and how he’d only been using her to get close to Julia Darden, since he was Sparky Darden’s estranged biological son and Julia’s half brother.

“That’s a wild story,” Seth agreed.

“Nothing compared to what happened after that,” assured Edie, reporting that things had gone further awry since Marley, while attempting to cancel Edie’s appearance on the reality show, had wound up being a contestant, herself—something that had led to her engagement with Cash. And then Bridget, determined to put an end to Miss Marissa’s wedding curse on the Benning women for good, had talked her longtime best friend, Dermott, into traveling down South to an old family plantation in Florida, owned by their grandmother, to do some ghost-busting.

“According to Bridget, she rid the plantation of Miss Marissa, not to mention her curse, which is how Bridget wound up engaged to Dermott.”

“Again, impressive,” said Seth.

“And why I know no more adventures can come my way until after the Darden wedding,” Edie finished, chuckling softly.