The Perfect Homecoming (Pine River) Read Online Free

it’d been infested. And the wives, holy shit—they were all so mad, they talked over each other. I wasn’t much help, either, because I couldn’t really concentrate, you know? I kept thinking, how do you do this? How do you pass him around? And none of them seemed to like each other, so I really didn’t get it.” She laughed and shook her head. “I like to think I’m open to different lifestyles. But that one? It confuses me.”
    “I don’t get it either,” Cooper said, walking back to where she stood. “I can’t seem to wrap my head around one wife, much less four.”
    “Exactly,” Emma said. “Our planner, Gage, kept pleading with the wives to agree and finally got them to a compromise on a sit-down barbeque. He pitched it as being an under-the-stars event. You know, out in the open to accommodate all those people.”
    “Sounds reasonable.”
    “ I thought so,” Emma said. “But then the youngest wife? The cute eighteen-year-old with the curvy figure and no kids?” she said, sketching out a woman’s figure. “She told the old lech what she wanted and that was that. He told the other wives to stuff it, they were having a dance. And they did. But with four separate cakes.”
    Cooper laughed roundly. “I’m sure that went over well.”
    “It was the most uncomfortable party we’ve ever thrown, and I’ve been to more than a few. You couldn’t have bulldozed through the tension in that grand ballroom. Oh, and our great idea for putting it under the stars went the way of the dodo bird, too. I had to scramble to get a venue.” She smiled and sat down on top of a table. “What about you?” she asked, kicking off one shoe, and then the other.
    “We’ve never done anything like a bat mitzvah, and after today, I can promise we never will,” he said. “TA does extreme sports, not this kind of thing . . .” He paused and smiled lopsidedly. “Unless Reggie Applebaum asks.”
    Emma tossed back her head with a bright laugh. “I guess we all do what Reggie Applebaum asks, right? So what is the most complicated event TA has ever staged?”
    Cooper had to think about it. “The Costa Rica gig ranks right up there,” he said with a nod. “Rigging a zip lin e just to push a bunch of out-of-shape guys down it is not my idea of a good time. But the most complicated?” He leaned up against the table where she sat, his arms folded across his chest, his hip against her thigh. “You know Marnie Banks McCain, right?”
    “We’ve met.” Marnie Banks was a wedding planner in town.
    “She planned the wedding of Olivia Dagwood and Vincent Vittorio.”
    “So she got that gig!” Emma exclaimed. Olivia and Vincent had been the hottest stars on the planet a couple of years ago. Every wedding planner in town had wanted that event. “CEM threw all that we had and then some at that one. How long did that marriage last, anyway? A hot minute?”
    “Not even,” Cooper said with a snort. “Olivia and Vincent wanted to be married where they’d filmed a movie, in the Rockies, of all places. They wanted to hike up to the place of a scene where they’d determined they had ‘fallen in love, ’ ” he said, making invisible quotes with his fingers. “That location is not exactly accessible, which is where we came in. And that was how the wedding from hell came to be,” he said with a shake of his head.
    He told Emma how a freak thunderstorm had knocked out the only bridge across a very steep ravine and had separated a group including the bride, groom, Cooper’s partner Eli McCain, and Marnie, from the rest of the wedding party.
    It sounded like an unbelievable and ludicrous weekend, complete with a bickering bride and groom and the successful rigging of snow blowers to shoot sandwiches and apples across a ravine until the stranded party could be rescued. Emma laughed with delight as Cooper entertained her with a description of shooting peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches across the ravine. “You’re lying!”