New Year's Wedding

They were in a sort of foyer. Cassie looked worriedly at Grady.

“You’re not, are you?” his mother asked Cassie. She stepped a little closer, staring at her, closed her eyes and then opened them again.

Cassie wasn’t as used to this kind of reaction as someone might think. In most situations, she was surrounded by other celebrities, famous—or notorious. She refused to shrink away.

“You are!” Grady’s mother answered her own question.

Grady kissed his mother’s cheek. “Mom, this is Cassidy Chapman. Her sister, Corie, is marrying Ben on New Year’s Day, so she’s come to the wedding. Cassie, this is my mother, Diane Nelson.” Then he took Cassie’s arm and led her through a doorway into a bright kitchen decorated in blue and white.

Grady’s mother followed. “Thank God you made coffee, Mom,” Grady said as he went to the coffeepot on the counter. Cassie turned to face his mother, guessing by her grim expression that something bad was coming. She braced herself.

“You’ve recovered quickly from your nervous breakdown,” Diane said. As Cassie stared at her in disbelief, she added, “The screaming scene you made at that Irish mansion was on SAN—Stars at Night—just a few hours ago. Somebody took a cell phone video.”

CHAPTER TWO (#u08c90eed-de1e-57c4-867e-98187cd384ab)

“MOM!” GRADY CAME back to Cassie as she struggled to find a sense of equilibrium.

Come on, she told herself. You do it for the camera all the time. What’s happened to you personally is hidden behind whatever the camera needs from you. And you had to know this was coming. Just not so soon.

“I...I had a bad moment there,” she said, simplifying an explanation. “It’s a long story.”

“The reporter speculated that you were upset because Fabiana Capri got the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition and you didn’t. She thought maybe it was just a temper tantrum.”

Cassie was speechless.

“I’m a celebrity news junkie,” Diane said a little smugly. “SAN had the whole story.”

Sure. Entertainment news paid a lot of money for the inside skinny about celebrities. There’d been enough technical people and assistants at the shoot that one of them was bound to find the money appealing.

Unused to being so disliked so quickly, Cassie fought for composure. She met Diane’s condemning brown eyes calmly. “They may have had the story, but it wasn’t accurate. I guess that comes from speculating instead of getting the facts.”

“What are the facts?”

Grady came to stand between them and handed Cassie the cup of coffee. He frowned at his mother. “Cassie is a guest here for a few days, and I’d appreciate it if you would be polite. You know, like you taught me to be?” He added that last with emphasis.

“It’s all right,” Cassie insisted, transferring the cup to her left hand and offering her right to Diane. The woman did look like a grassroots sort of mother, the kind who would see that you ate from the food pyramid, got your eight hours of sleep and were polite to your elders. And would kill any predators that came near you. Cassie had dreamed her entire life of having such a mother.

“If she saw me acting like a crazy woman on television, she probably fears for your safety.” She sent Grady a wry grin then smiled at his mother, who looked a little surprised but still suspicious. “I assure you I’m a very sane, ordinary woman who’s been working too hard for too long. I snapped.” Everything inside her shuddered as she remembered that moment, but she struggled to look like the normal woman she insisted she was. “I had just learned my brother and sister, whom I hadn’t seen since I was a toddler, were in Texas, and I sort of lost it while trying to finish the shoot before I could join them.”

His mother shook her head. “Shouldn’t you have gone to be with them instead of agreeing to work?”

“I agreed to work just hours before my father called me with the news. That shoot was expensive, and all those people were away from their families during the holidays to get it done. It would have been selfish of me to leave them all there and ask them to come back again later. To incur all that expense a second time.”

Diane granted her that with a reluctant “True.”

“So I was anxious to get it done quickly while still doing a good job, but the designer had insisted on false eyelashes and the makeup artist was having trouble with them and I was tired and antsy and sort of lost it.”

“Sort of?”

Cassie ignored that and went on. She was glad she’d missed Stars at Night’s report on her behavior. “We were having a wonderful time in Texas until the press descended. I had to get away or ruin the holiday for everyone. Grady helped me get away out the back, drove to the airport and...” She spread her arms as she looked around her at the comfortable kitchen. “Here we are. You have a lovely son.”

From behind her, Grady questioned, “Lovely?”

His mother studied her as though she were a lab rat. She answered grudgingly, “He is a nice boy.”

“Boy?” Grady again.

* * *

CASSIE HAD HAD a nervous breakdown? That surprised Grady. Or maybe that information was just wrong, considering it was Hollywood gossip. Except for the occasional moody withdrawal, Cassie seemed very together. Though she had appeared a little tense on the plane.

Grady frowned at his mother, though he understood her bad manners. She loved him. She wanted what was best for him. She just had trouble understanding what that was or that it was up to him and not her.

“We’ve had a long day, Mom. Thanks for coming to welcome me home.” He wanted to add, “You can go now,” but was hoping she’d take the hint.

Instead she pointed toward the living room. “Your aunts and I had a lucky streak in Reno, so I bought you a little something to thank you for driving us down. It was delivered this afternoon.”

“You did? What’s that?”

“An armoire for your television.”

Cassie spotted it through the open door into the living room and took off to investigate, probably anxious to escape the tension in the kitchen. He didn’t blame her. He tried to follow her but his mother caught his arm.

“What are you thinking?” she demanded.

He struggled for patience. “About what?”

“About that girl!”

“She’s not a girl. She’s a woman. A very nice woman.”

“A nice crazy woman. And what do you think she’s doing with you?”

He growled. “I explained all that. She’s here for Ben’s wedding to her sister.”

“Oh, Grady.” His mother put a hand to her head as though it throbbed. “She’s using you to escape reality. Apparently she freaked out because she can’t deal with her life.” She lowered her hand and rolled her eyes. “Has to be hard, right? Millions of dollars in income, on the cover of magazines, dating super jocks and movie stars, and when she doesn’t get what she wants—like the cover of Sports Illustrated—she has a tantrum. Do you really need that? I mean, given what happened with your last—?”

“Mom,” he interrupted firmly. “Her sister is Ben’s fiancée. Jack’s been trying so hard to put his family back together since he came home from Afghanistan. Now they’re all going to be together for the wedding on New Year’s Day and Cassie is staying with me until she goes back to work. It’s going to be a happy family time for all of them, and no one is going to spoil it. Got it?”

“Sort of. What I don’t get is what a supermodel is going to find to do in Beggar’s Bay. With you.”

He tipped his head back in exasperation. “I wish you’d stop saying that as though I have no right to be in the same world as her.”

She blinked, maternal concern alight in her eyes. “I meant that she doesn’t have the right to be in the same world as you.”

He was still annoyed with her but put his arm around her. That was mother-love. A supermodel who made millions and was known the world over wasn’t good enough for Diane Nelson’s son. “I’m a trained police officer, Mom. If she decides to run off with my savings or try to kill me in my sleep, I can take care of myself.”

“Don’t be smart. You know how you are.”