2. ANDIE
I knock on the door. “Hi, Nikolai?”
I realize that my voice must already give away what a mess we’re in right now.
I am nervous, terrified of how he’s going to react to what I’m about to tell him, and I can only imagine the level of freak-out I’m about to be hit with when he discovers that the woman he was meant to marry today has taken off with no explanation.
“Come in,” he calls back, his voice unreadable.
Does he already know? I don’t have a clue.
I don’t know if I want to find out. My heart feels as though it’s going to beat right out of my chest at any moment, and I will myself to hold it together, rolling my shoulders back and running a hand through my hair before I walk in so I look at least a little put together.
I open the door, and there he is, the man who is meant to be getting married today.
I’ve hardly spent any time with him, not that it’s unusual for grooms of his money or status.
I don’t know exactly what it is he does, but I’ve visited his house a couple of times, and I can tell at a glance that he wants to keep his control over every little detail of his life.
There are guards on his door, and the place is more a mansion than a normal home, towering walls and art decorating the corridors that probably cost as much as this entire wedding.
He cuts an imposing figure all on his own.
He’s tall, a little over six foot according to the measurements I got for his suit, with broad shoulders and thick, muscular arms.
His silver hair is swept back from his face, and his sharp blue eyes cut straight through me, for a moment making me forget what it was I came here for in the first place.
“What is it?” he barks, lifting his chin and casting an expectant gaze up and down my body.
I shift where I stand, suddenly feeling as though I’m under interrogation and not entirely sure what to expect. “I…I need to tell you something.”
He crosses his arms over his chest. He can tell I’m dodging the issue at hand here. But who could blame me? I don’t want to come out with it. Don’t want to say it out loud if I can avoid it.
I glance over my shoulder, as though Natalie might come wafting through the door at any moment, asking if it’s time for her to meet Nikolai down the other end of the aisle and be done with this.
I keep hoping that my panic is nothing more than paranoia that I can put to rest, that this wedding isn’t going to fall apart right here in front of me.
“Then tell me.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, clenching my hands into fists at my sides. Come on. He deserves to know. Even if it hurts, I can’t keep the news from him much longer, and it’s better to just go ahead and come out with it than try to dodge it any further.
“Natalie is gone.”
The words hang in the air between us for a long moment, so heavy that I don’t know what to do with them. When I open my eyes again, I find him staring at me, his eyes flickering with an emotion I can’t quite put my finger on.
“What?”
“Natalie is—she’s gone,” I explain, and soon the words come tumbling out of me faster than I can stop them.
“I went to her room to find her so I could start the ceremony, but she had—she’s taken off. I went around the entire hotel, I asked the bridal party, everything, but nobody seems to know where she is.”
I take another deep breath, gulping down as much air as I can. The fury in Nikolai’s eyes as he looks at me is rendering me near-speechless.
“And I’m sorry, but I think she might have…she might have bailed on the wedding.”
For a moment, I’m not sure that he has heard me. His gaze is distant, calculating, as though putting the pieces together, making sense of what I’ve just come out with.
And then, to my surprise, he speaks—this time in a calmer tone, almost as though he’s holding back from a complete explosion. “Bailed on the fucking wedding?”
I nod warily, searching his face for some kind of explanation.
How does he feel about this? Is he going to blame it on me?
I almost want to plead with him, to tell him that there’s nothing more I could have done, that this is not my fault and I would never have let something like this happen if I’d had the chance, but I can tell he has already spun entirely beyond the point of understanding.
He takes a step toward me, and on instinct, my head jerks back nervously. I don’t like the way he’s looking at me right now, as if he holds me personally responsible for all of this.
“You let her leave?”
“I didn’t know a thing about it,” I protest, shaking my head. “I poured months into putting this wedding together, you really think I would just let her walk out on the day she’s meant to get married?”
He eyes me for a moment, then turns his back on me, a low, frustrated sound rising at the back of his throat. I watch him nervously, no idea what to do or say, wondering if I should beg for his forgiveness or tell him that he needs to make a decision, and quick.
“What do you want to do?” I begin, but he holds his hand up, pulling out his phone. He dials a number swiftly, and I assume it’s going to be Natalie—but instead, by the sounds of it, it’s her father.
“Damon,” he greets him sharply. “Your daughter, I’ve just been told, has walked out on our wedding.”
I can’t hear what the man on the other end of the line is saying, but I can hear the panic in his voice, the way he reacts to the news as though it’s the worst thing he has ever heard.
If all of this was in aid of sealing a business deal between the two men, then this might well be a nightmare for him beyond just the social hit his status will take given his daughter has fled on the day she’s meant to be getting married.
And while I don’t know what it is that Nikolai does, I get the feeling that he has more power than Natalie’s father wants to be on the wrong end of, if he can help it.
I wonder if I should be worried too—but then, I’m not the one who made this happen.
Surely, he can’t hold me responsible for her leaving, can he?
After a brief back-and-forth, during which Nikolai accuses Damon of pulling out of their deal at the last moment, he hangs up the phone, clearly sensing that he’s not going to get any further with this matter. And then he turns his attention back to me, face blank, unreadable.
“What do you want to do?” I try again.
“Get her back.”
“I can’t do that,” I tell him, shaking my head. “She’s nowhere to be found. And even if she was, I couldn’t force her to walk down that aisle, not if she doesn’t want to?—”
He closes the distance between us, not laying hands on me, but not needing to. His gaze blazes into mine, jaw tight, face written with fury that casts me into silence in an instant.
“Listen to me,” he tells me, voice low. “I am not going to walk out there in front of hundreds of the most powerful people in my—in my industry, and tell them that the woman who agreed to marry me has changed her damn mind. You hear me?”
I stare up at him helplessly. “I don’t know what you want me to do,” I reply. “I’ve looked for her everywhere. If she wanted to marry you, then she would be here, I’m sure of it, but she’s clearly gotten cold feet?—”
“You’re the wedding planner, aren’t you?” he shoots back. “So, find a way to make this wedding work.”
I toss my hands in the air incredulously. “Look, I don’t know what else I can do,” I protest. “I can’t force her to marry you. I know this sucks, but?—”
“No, you don’t,” he replies, voice steady. “You have no idea what I’ll lose if I go out there and don’t get married.”
“You make it sound like you don’t even care that it’s her,” I retort sharply, my voice taking on a little more edge than I intend it to. “I mean, seriously. Aren’t you guys in love? You proposed to her, didn’t you?”
He glances away from me, and I can tell I’ve hit a nerve. He might not want to admit it, but this shit makes a mockery of what the institution of marriage is supposed to be, at least to so many of these old-fashioned types.
“Look, unless I put on the damn dress and meet you at the altar, I don’t think this wedding is going to happen,” I tell him bluntly. “You understand me?”
And then his gaze turns back to me. My stomach tightens as I realize that I might have just skirted a little too close to an answer to his problem.
“Then put it on.”
My jaw drops, and I laugh before I can stop myself. Because he has to be joking. Right? There’s no way he can actually mean that. We barely know each other—I think this is the longest conversation we’ve had since we met.
But his gaze doesn’t move from mine, and the words feel more like a challenge than anything else as I stand before him, waiting for him to admit that it’s the craziest idea he’s ever had.
“I’m not going to marry you,” I protest. “I—you must be crazy. I’m not?—”
“You’re the wedding planner,” he tells me calmly, his voice taking on an almost eerie tone, as if he has already made his mind up about this. “So, make this wedding work.”
“I can’t, I told you, she’s gone?—”
“Listen to me,” he tells me, eyes narrowing.
“Half the people out there, they don’t know her, and even if they did, they wouldn’t recognize her at a glance. They just want to see some girl in a pretty white dress come down the aisle and marry me today. And if that doesn’t happen, my reputation is going to take a serious hit. But—” He leans in.
“So is yours.”
A cold shiver runs down my spine. I know, on some level, he’s right.
If this wedding fails, in front of all of these people, there are those who are going to look at me as the reason why.
Even though there’s clearly so much more going on here than I could have predicted—even if I’m certain that I couldn’t have seen something like this coming, and that I am not the reason this girl has decided to bail on the wedding at the last moment.
Hell, if this is the man she was meant to marry, I can’t say I blame her. He sounds crazy. Scary. Terrifying, even. And I don’t know that I have any choice but to go along with what he’s insisting on.
“You don’t know anything about me,” I warn him. “I’m not—I’m not the marrying type, I?—”
“A wedding planner who’s not the marrying type?”
He lets out a bark of laughter, though it has no real mirth to it, before he continues.
“Listen to me, I don’t care what kind of person you see yourself as. I care about putting a ring on someone’s fucking finger today. So, you better find a way to make that happen. Or I’m going to ruin your business just like you’re about to ruin mine if you fail me on this.”
My chest clenches, and I struggle to heave a full breath as I attempt to make sense of it. This doesn’t feel real. Doesn’t feel right. Like all of this must be happening to someone else.
My mind races as I search for a way out of it. I could try and ask one of the bridal party if they would be willing to step in, but if I remember correctly, all of them are engaged or married themselves.
Maybe I could just start going through the guests, see if any of them want to marry him?
But then, that would expose the mess that I’ve made of this already, and I can’t let that happen.
In a business like this, reputation is everything, and I know this will damage it beyond the point that I can string everything together again.
I squeeze my eyes shut. I don’t see any other way out of this. If he really goes after my business, then I’m done for. A guy with his kind of power could ruin me for good. If I let this all fall to pieces around me, then I’m as good as finished in this world.
I can feel Nikolai’s eyes on me as he waits for me to respond, and I know I have no other choice, as much as I wish it could be different, as much as I long for something, anything else.
“I’ll do it,” I whisper. “I—there’s a dress in her room, a backup in case something happened to the one she was supposed to be wearing. I think I can get into it. And I can tell the officiant to change the names. I?—”
“I don’t care how you pull it off,” he tells me sharply. “Just make it happen. Okay?”
I nod, feeling the ground crumble out from under my feet. This is not how I expected this wedding day to go. I was meant to plan this wedding, not be the one taking this man as my husband.
But if this is what it takes to protect my business, then so be it.
I know this is insane, but I can figure out how I’m going to handle it later. Right now, all I care about is keeping the business I have poured my entire adult life into from vanishing down the drain in front of me.
No matter what it takes to make that happen.