Quinn Taffet was a means to an end, nothing more. And when things were over—which was gonna happen sooner rather than later—I was going to walk away, leaving him with a successful (and lucrative) wedding under his belt, and leaving me with the Horn I needed to protect my client and move on with my life.
5
QUINN
They say you never know what you’re capable of until adversity stretches you to the limit, and I knew this for a fact.
But until that meeting at the Drakeses’ house, I hadn’t realized that the inverse was also true: you don’t know for sure what you will not put up with until it bribes you with donuts, addles you with sexytimes, and turns the Nashville socialite wedding of the season—the evening of glittering opulence that was going to relaunch you into the event-planning stratosphere and leave your ex and his boy toy gaping in stunned envy—into some kind of down-home, mud-splattered rodeo.
“So,” Champ said, all smug and smiley as I pulled my tiny car out of the Drakeses’ impressive gated driveway. “That went well, huh? Marissa seems pleased, I think, which is great. Makes me really understand the whole motivation behind this wedding-planning business. We can’t change the fact that her fiancé is a douchebag who was trying to kiss her wedding planner, and her mom still has the personality of wet cardboard in designer shoes, but we can give Marissa a damn good party, and that’s—”
“No,” I interrupted firmly and, I congratulated myself, with admirable calm.
Champ turned in his seat to look at me. “No? As in, no she wasn’t pleased, or no we can’t give her a damn good party? Or no, I’m misunderstanding what wedding planning is all about? Because I think—”
“No,” I interrupted again, this time a little more firmly and a little less calmly. “As in, we are not going to do this now. Just… stop talking.”
“Right. Okay,” Champ said slowly. “Is this a you thing? Needing to decompress after an op? I knew guys like you in the service. I can respect that. I guess since you and I are going to be working together, it’s probably good for me to know your— Whoa! Hey! What the fuck, Quinn? Watch the trees!”
I swung the car to the grassy verge of the wide, poplar-lined road and stopped so abruptly my tires squealed.
“What the fuck, Quinn?” I repeated. “No, the correct question is what the fuck, Champion. What happened to silent partners? What happened to just getting the lay of the land? What happened to you not screwing around with my business?”
I slapped my hand against the steering wheel hard. Too hard. “Damn it.” I shook my stinging hand, feeling tears behind my eyes. “Fucking damn it.”
Champ made a tsking noise and grabbed my wrist, smoothing his thumb over my injured palm. “I’m not messing up your business. I’m not. I know I fast-tracked the wedding, but I promise I’m going to help you. And when we pull this off, it’ll just increase your reputation as a guy who can pull off impossible shit. Plus, Tommy seemed willing to pay—”
“It’s not about the damn money!”
Champ leaned back so far his skull thunked against the window, which was how I came to realize that I was leaning over the center console, shouting my head off.
Percival Champion made it hard to retain my composure at the best of times, and this was not the best of times.
I cleared my throat and sat back in my seat, snatching my hand from his. “It’s not about the money,” I repeated more softly. “It’s about my reputation—my business’s reputation—which I’ve been building up for months, and which you’ve managed to send into a death spiral in half an hour. Lying about Brailey Driscoll? Are you out of your mind?”
“Hey,” Champ soothed. “Chill.”
“Don’t you dare tell me to chill when you are the one who has dropped me in a pit of fire.”
“Shhh.” Champ’s voice was low and calm, and he grasped my wrist again, stroking his fingers down my sore palm, forcing my fingers to uncurl. “Seriously, Quinn, calm down. Tell me what’s going on. Yell at me if you have to. But don’t hurt yourself, for fuck’s sake.”
He wanted to know what was going on? Fine, then.
“I need the Drakeses’ contract,” I ground out. “I don’t just want it, I need it. I have worked months and months to get to the place where a bona fide Nashville socialite would hire me to coordinate her wedding. Do you know how hard that is to accomplish when your business is located in the back end of nowhere? Do you? Let me tell you, it’s fucking hard. I’ve coordinated charity events for free and planned corporate events I barely made a profit on just to get my foot in the door. I’ve bent over backwards to give couples their perfect weddings. I’ve worked endless hours—late nights, early mornings, every single weekend. I don’t have hobbies. I don’t have friends anymore. I drove my last car into the ground and put thousands of miles on this one. I’ve learned how to sew beading onto a train and how to rearrange flowers when a bridesmaid accidentally sits on her bouquet. I can fix a cake and mediate family traumas better than Dr. Phil. I don’t date. The closest I’ve come is the one night back in November, after an absolute wedding from hell, when I went to the Thicket Tavern to let off some steam, and look how that turned out.” I thrust a hand in his direction. “The commitmentphobic asshole I picked up that night ended up sabotaging me for his own selfish ends, and now my second event-planning business is as ruined as the first.”