Chapter 5
THEO
He thought he’d gotten rid of her, so Theo was beyond shocked when Harper showed up in his office the very next day.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded, rising to his feet.
“I’m here to get your thoughts on some wedding things.” She had no shame at all about the fact that she’d walked into his office uninvited. She strode over to his desk and sank into the guest chair as if he had asked her to come in and sit down.
Theo sat down slowly. There wasn’t any point in summoning security to drag her out, so the only real option was to let her stay and talk about whatever she wanted to talk about. “You’re giving me whiplash, you know.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Am I?”
“Walking out on me one day and showing up the next as if nothing happened. You have to realize that’s a little… confusing.”
“Well, I thought it over,” she said in response to the question he had not asked. “And I guess it occurred to me that I would be as bad as you are if I let this whole thing get derailed by your attitude toward it.”
He raised his eyebrows. “As bad as I am? What’s that supposed to mean, exactly?”
“More focused on myself than on the wedding and how I can contribute to it,” she explained.
“I’m contributing to the wedding,” he countered. “I’m going to be the best man, you know.”
“Oh, believe me, I know that.”
“You sound like that’s irritating to you in some way.”
She sighed. “It’s not up to me who the best man is,” she told him.
“But you would have preferred it not to be me.” Theo was surprised to realize that it bothered him to learn this. There was no good reason for that. He didn’t need her approval. But even so — why wasn’t he able to shrug that comment off?
“The fact of the matter is that Max deserves to have his brother involved in the planning,” she said, and suddenly he understood. She thought she was intervening on Max’s behalf. She thought she understood what Max needed better than Theo did.
That was infuriating. “Max is fine,” he said firmly. “You’re thinking about this differently because you’re a woman. But Max is a guy. He doesn’t care about all this wedding stuff. He just wants to get married to Tara. Flowers and fussy stuff like that aren’t important to him.”
“You can’t possibly know what’s going to matter to him.
Even he can’t really know that. This is the only wedding he’s ever going to have, you know.
He might not be thinking about those things now, but in a few years, looking back at the pictures, he is going to care about them.
He might not even know why. He’ll just get this sense of satisfaction if everything looks just right. ”
“If you know so much about all this,” Theo said, “I don’t know what you need me for.”
“You just know him better than I do. That’s what I realized after I left your private box yesterday.
I was being selfish. They asked us both to work on this for a reason.
And you might think all this is silly, but it matters to my best friend and to your brother.
So, we are going to do this together, and that’s just that. ”
Harper sat back in her chair and folded her arms in emphasis.
“This is my office, Harper. You can’t just show up here.”
“Sure I can,” she said evenly. “And I will, because you’ve left me with almost no way to keep in touch with you. If you don’t want me to come here, then agree to meet me somewhere else… but you’re not going to do that, are you?”
He was silent.
“Right,” she said. “So, let’s talk about the colors.”
“The colors?” Theo had to admit, this was an aspect of wedding planning he hadn’t even thought of. And he didn’t see how he could help with it either. They needed a venue, sure, and they needed vendors for things like flowers and food, but how could he help provide colors?
Harper had no such hesitation, though. She was already opening up that binder of hers. She had dropped it on his desk without so much as a by-your-leave, right on top of several expense reports.
“I have all kinds of ideas,” she said. “Honestly, that was one thing I really expected Tara to pick out herself, but she left it to me— to us, I mean. What’s Max’s favorite color?”
“I can’t do this now,” he said. “You’re going to have to leave.” Theo pulled the papers out from under the binder and made a show of tidying them.
“Come on. You can’t answer one question? About your brother’s favorite color? I’m not asking for much, you know.” She folded her arms across her chest.
“He doesn’t have a favorite color.”
“Give me a break. Everyone has a favorite color. If you just tell me what it is, I can move on. Actually, a lot of these things would go faster if you just answered the questions instead of digging your heels in about every little thing.” She raised her eyebrows.
“Did you ever consider that the reason this is so annoying, and is taking so long, is that you won’t just cooperate?
I thought we’d have made a ton of decisions yesterday, but we wasted all that time getting into an argument.
If we stop doing that, we can make a lot more progress on all this. ”
Theo thought for a moment. Little though he liked to admit it, what she was saying did make sense, and he was eager to put an end to these arguments. “Green. He likes green.”
“There,” she said, smiling. “That wasn’t so difficult, was it?”
Theo didn’t like the way she was smirking at him.
He didn’t like the way it made his stomach feel as if he had missed a step going down.
In fact, if he hadn’t known better, he would have said that he actually did like that smile — that winning, witty little grin, as if she knew she had gotten away with something, as if she understood how rarely anyone got the upper hand on Theo Davenport and was particularly proud of herself for having done so.
Rather than feel annoyed by it, Theo had to admit that he liked that. It felt like respect.
But he didn’t like it so much that he was going to roll over and admit conversational defeat. “He likes green,” he said. “But not in a favorite color kind of way.”
“What does that mean?”
“He just wears a lot of it, that’s all. It’s not like he’d be worked up if it wasn’t included in the wedding.
You should go with whatever you think Tara is going to want.
And,” he added, “you should do it somewhere else besides here, because I don’t have time to talk about colors with you right now.
” He reached for the phone to drive the point home, even though he had no calls he needed to make.
She must have seen his bluff for what it was, because she didn’t budge from her seat. “What are you doing that’s so important?” she challenged him. “You’re not working. You were staring out the window when I came in here.”
“I was thinking. Can a man think?”
“Maybe a man could help me make a color decision.”
“Green,” he said. “I thought I already said that.”
“Like a forest green, or more of a hunter green? And we need to choose an accent color too. Ooh, maybe sage green and ivory? Hang on, I have some color samples in my bag.”
Theo got to his feet. “Harper, I really can’t do this right now.
I have a meeting with the publicity team, and after that I’m sitting down with my assistant to go over the plans for the coming week.
Why don’t you put these questions in an email?
” He pointed to the business cards on the front of his desk, which had his email address on them.
“That’s the best way for you to contact me. ”
“That’s the worst way for me to contact you,” she said. “You won’t answer emails. I’ve spent enough time with you to know that. I’ll send you a hundred emails, and you won’t answer any of them. You’ll probably set me to go straight to your trash folder.”
“Well, if you send a hundred emails, I definitely will.” He couldn’t keep the grin off his face at the idea of it.
He also didn’t know what was so funny. On paper, this was the most irritating thing she could have done — storming his office like this, demanding to speak with him in the middle of his workday.
He wouldn’t have liked to see anybody under these circumstances, much less this woman he hardly knew who seemed to think she had the right to keep making demands on his time.
But there was something about her — something about the way she never did what he was expecting her to do — that held his attention.
It was like watching a comedian. Comedians had always irked him; they were so loud and abrasive, and yet he couldn’t help laughing, and by the end of their sets, he invariably found that he’d enjoyed himself.
Harper was a thorn in his side, and yet, somehow, she kept shocking him into laughter.
“I really can’t do this right now,” he told her, doing his best to keep his face neutral instead of showing anger again. That hadn’t gotten him anywhere, after all. “I know you think I’m just trying to get rid of you.”
“Aren’t you?”
“I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t, but I’m starting to see you can’t be gotten rid of.”
“That’s right. I can’t.”
“So, can we make arrangements to do this later?”
“I don’t know why you think I’d take you seriously. You’ve been dodging me since this started.”
“Because I’m guessing if I don’t meet you halfway, you’re going to keep showing up in my office until we get this whole wedding planned to your satisfaction. Is that about right?”
“Well, yes,” she admitted.
“So how about we meet tonight at eight? I can leave work a bit early.”
“Eight is leaving early?” She held up a hand to forestall his response. “Never mind. I can meet you at eight. Where do you want to meet?”
He hesitated. “Where’s convenient for you?”
She laughed.
“Is that funny?”
“Kind of. You’re worried about what’s going to be convenient for me? You have to admit, that’s new. You had me come to a ball game to talk to you about all this, and then you basically refused to talk to me there. Then I had to come all the way to your office to speak to you.”
“Don’t pretend I made you come to my office,” he said. “I didn’t even know you were planning on showing up. And I agree, you’ve gone out of your way a lot. I’m trying to meet you halfway here. You could be more appreciative about that instead of laughing at me.”
“All right, okay,” she said. “Do you know Sue and Sam’s?”
“That’s the bar on Pleasant Street?” He’d never been inside, but he passed it some days when he was taking the scenic route to work. The sign was big and gaudy, so it had always stood out to him.
“That’s right,” she said. “I could meet there at eight.”
It wasn’t the kind of place he would have chosen, if the choice had been his. He’d have wanted to go to an upscale hotel bar. But he had told her she could choose, and he would stand by it.
“I’ll meet you there,” he said, and turned his attention back to his work. To his great relief, Harper seemed to understand her dismissal, and with a last quiet nod, she rose and left him to it.