A Catered Wedding Read Online Free Page B

younger brother, Ditas, who’d hit on her two minutes after he’d met her. Okay. Maybe she was exaggerating. Maybe it had been ten. Bernie made a face as she remembered how Ditas had shaken her hand and then pressed his thumb into her palm and wiggled it around while he told her how good she looked. I mean how skeevy can you get?
    In any other circumstance she would have smacked the guy really hard, but given how Libby felt about confrontation she’d managed to keep her hands down by her sides and not punch him out. She would have probably split his lip with her silver and onyx ring anyway, and he looked like the kind of guy who would have had her arrested and brought up on assault charges.
    Unlike Jura, who she couldn’t imagine hitting anyone, let alone hitting on them. As she watched him continue to fumble around in his pocket she wondered if he’d ever even been out on a date. Probably not. So when someone like Leeza came along it must have been all over for him. Of course, if the story in the Times was to be believed it was a mutual thing.
    Yeah. Right, Bernie thought. Mutual my ass. It was mutual once Leeza realized how much money Jura was worth. No. As her dad had said, Leeza getting Jura had been as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, which Bernie agreed with even though she didn’t agree with her dad’s phraseology. When she’d pointed out the fundamental illogic of the expression he’d used her father had groaned and reached for the remote. But it was true.
    â€œThink about it,” she’d told Libby. “You can’t shoot fish in a barrel. You’d have to net them instead. If you shot into a barrel you’d have bullet holes and all the water would run out onto the ground and the barrel would be useless and barrels are expensive.”
    Libby hadn’t looked up from the scones she was making, let alone answered. Even her boyfriend Rob, whom she could usually count on when it came to things of this nature, had told her to get a life. Oh well. It wasn’t her fault that no one else she knew was interested in things like this.
    But even Libby had agreed with her about Jura being ill at ease around women. How could she not? The two times Jura had met with her and Libby he’d been uncomfortable around them to the point of not being able to look either one of them in the eye. At first Bernie had thought it was them but Jura had been like that with his administrative assistant too. In fact, the only female Bernie had seen him relaxed with was Leeza, who’d cooed and batted her eyelashes at him like she was in some fifties movies.
    It was weird. Jura was a big guy and big guys usually own the room. But this guy’s posture was stooped which emphasized his narrow shoulders and big ass. Couple that with his pale complexion, and grayish, blond hair and he looked totally ineffectual.
    But he couldn’t be that ineffectual, Bernie reasoned. Ineffectual men don’t run caviar empires that are worth millions of dollars. But maybe he was one of those guys who are better with numbers and figures than with people. Maybe his brothers handled that end of the business while he stayed in the office and emailed instructions to everyone.
    Looking at Jura, Bernie wondered if all Estonian people were big and blond with prominent cheekbones and slightly slanted eyes. Somehow, she had thought they were short and dark and Jura was some sort of an anomaly, but his two younger brothers, Ditas and Joe looked exactly like him, except they were much better looking.
    When Libby had announced that they’d gotten this job, Bernie had dragged out her old atlas and, ignoring Libby’s eye rolling, looked at a map of the Baltics. It seemed that Estonia was quite close to Finland. For some reason, she’d pictured the country as being near Russia—maybe because it had been occupied by Russia until recently.
    Bernie was trying to remember exactly what she’d read