CHAPTER ONE
MELANIE
I heard him the first time, but I was hoping I’d hallucinated that last sentence.
As I gripped the slippery leather arms of the office chair, poised for my imminent execution, I asked, “What did you say?”
My tormentor blinked at me. “Miss Cruz, effective immediately your relationship with Desert Princess Resort and Spa is over.”
“You’re telling me I’m fired.”
“Yes, your employment has been terminated.”
Terminated.
My mind’s eye envisioned my body combusting in a cloud of white smoke, my black pumps remaining behind in some cruel, contemporary Wizard of Oz twist.
“That sounds so final.”
“Yes, I’m afraid it is final.”
“Son of a bitch.”
The human resources director’s bland, colorless eyes bulged, and his comically tiny mouth pursed into a sour, shriveled O. “Pardon?”
“My apologies,” I said, standing and trying to gather the invisible shreds of my dignity. “I didn’t mean you.”
The sour O relaxed slightly, replaced with a look of pity. “I understand.”
I cleared my throat. “I’d like to thank you for the opportunity,” I said in a firm, unwavering voice, calling upon my dormant high school theater skills. I held out my hand. “I have enjoyed working here. And I’m deeply sorry for what happened. I accept full responsibility.”
Kevin Perrin rose and cautiously accepted my hand in his limp, clammy grip. I beamed at him idiotically, even though he’d just given me a symbolic kick in the ass. There are times in life when the choices boil down to smiling or crying. This was one of those times.
Company policy dictated that a dismissed employee needed to be escorted out. When such an employee has set in motion a chain of awful events being dissected on every celebrity gossip site on the planet, the escort makes sense. It was still humiliating. As Kevin waddled beside me on the final visit to my office, I looked at everyone, only to see the backs of heads. The front desk attendants studied their blank screens. The bellhops examined the pattern in the marble floor. A deathly silence hung over the administrative wing, and I had to swallow about seventy-five times as I boxed up my belongings while Kevin looked on.
On my way out I grabbed for the embossed sign on the door.
“Melanie Cruz, Director of Finance.”
It didn’t come off easily. I couldn’t blame the poor thing for not wanting to go. I didn’t want to go either. Three tugs and a guttural grunt later, I pried the sign off, breaking it in half in the process and managing to elbow Kevin Perrin in the gut. He unleashed a yelp like a dying piglet. Instead of apologizing, I laughed out loud.
Like I said, smile or cry.
Once I reached the other side of the glass lobby doors, I was handed my box of humiliation and personal belongings. Mercifully the security guard left me alone to find my own way to my car. I trudged to the waiting silver Prius with my chin up, trying to think of myself as some ruined princess of antiquity clinging to what remained of my own indomitable pride. Last week I’d caught a History Channel special on Queen Boudica. Beaten, battered, and abused, she’d held her head high as she marched away from those smug Roman soldiers. I could be like that, like Boudica.
Cut the crap, Mel.
After all, I was not persecuted royalty. I was just a divorced, unemployed twenty-seven-year-old woman with two cats and nice shoes.
Somehow I managed to avoid crying until I was off the grounds of the Desert Princess Resort and Spa. I drove for a good ten minutes and then did what any disgraced former finance director would do. I pulled into the drive-through of the nearest Hot Beef Heaven, ordered a triple burger with onion rings, and then pigged out right there in the parking lot.
When I’d licked the last traces of grease from my manicured fingernails, I drove home to my one bedroom apartment and called my sister.
“I just got fired,” I told Lucy before I said hello.
It sounded like she was eating potato chips. She swallowed and gasped, choking slightly on the inhale.
“Fired? Shit, Mel. What happened?”
I sighed and told her the story, starting with the Gustavson family.
Normally my job didn’t require me to have much contact with the guests, but for the past month, I’d been filling in for the event planner, Ashley, who was out on maternity leave. Kevin Perrin had originally hired a temp for the six-week duration, but since that train wreck was caught snorting something powdery in the wine cellar, the event planning duties were temporarily handed to me. Although I didn’t especially enjoy stressing over things like cucumber sandwiches for the Red Hat Society’s quarterly cotillion, I’d been doing an adequate job.
Until yesterday.
The Gustavsons were not to blame. They were just a cheerful extended family visiting from Minnesota who floated down the resort’s lazy river, acquired “I Love Arizona” T-shirts from the gift shop, and photographed every single palm tree, saguaro cactus, and skittish gecko on the landscaped grounds.
The chain of events in question began yesterday afternoon when I was standing in the lobby, trying not to chew my fingernails as I observed the delicate transport of an eight-foot-tall cowboy boot ice sculpture. That was when Helen Gustavson tugged on my arm and introduced herself.
“Is it really a celebrity wedding?” the woman asked, gawking at the cameras, the lights, the entourages, and the massive red rose centerpieces that were being carried in by a line of uniformed resort staff.
“In a way,” I said, and then sneezed for the fortieth time. I’d forgotten to take my allergy meds in the morning, and the flower arrangements now erupting from every crevice of the main building created a pollinated hell. “The bride happens to be the daughter of a Hollywood actor.”
The bride in question was also a nightmare of demands, tears, and tantrums, none of which I had gotten used to dealing with. Usually my workday entailed a lot of meetings, a lot of numbers, and a lot of reports for the corporate office to glance at and disregard. After graduating from college with a bachelor of science in finance, I’d taken a job as an accounts payable specialist at a local golf club, working my way up to a managerial role. When my ex-husband was hired to head the marketing department, I felt inspired to move on. We’d been divorced for a while, and it wasn’t particularly acrimonious, but that didn’t mean I wanted to be reminded of my own poor judgment every day. When I applied for the director of finance position at the brand-new Desert Princess Resort in Scottsdale, I was shocked to even receive a call back, let alone get hired. But I was good at my job.
In fact I was so good that when management urgently needed to plug a staffing hole, they turned to me. I knew almost nothing about event planning—I could have said no. In fact I should have said no. But I was dead set on proving that I was some kind of superwoman.
It was true that when it came to soothing volatile bridezillas like Kaylie Tidewater, my talents seemed to fall a little short. Still, I was proud of my ability to wear many hats, and my event planning tenure was almost finished. Other than a ghost hunter convention the following week, the Tidewater wedding was the only major affair remaining before Ashley’s return. And I hadn’t asked for help once—hadn’t even accepted it when it was offered.
“Oh, wow,” marveled Helen Gustavson, her watery, blue eyes bugging out of her head as she gaped at the passing cowboy boot ice sculpture. While the bride was the offspring of silver screen royalty, the groom was only a moderately known country singer. Thus the wedding theme was stuck somewhere between glitzy excess and rustic barnyard.
Helen clutched my arm. “Do you think they’d mind if we just kind of stood out of the way and watched? I’m just crazy about weddings, and everything is so beautiful. The girls are dying to catch a glimpse of the bride and groom.”
I flinched when the cowboy boot sculpture nearly toppled onto a table of crystal champagne glasses, but with a few curses and grunts, its caretakers managed to set it right.
I turned my attention back to Mrs. Gustavson. “I’m so sorry, but the wedding party has requested privacy. So the patio will be closed to resort guests until the reception is over.”
Privacy seemed like a funny word to attach to the circus of sleazy paparazzi who were already swarming the perimeter, but everyone has their own ideas. The wedding wasn’t exactly an A-list gathering, but it attracted a lot more attention than the resort was used to accommodating.
Helen’s face fell, and she glanced over at her tribe of listening children and grandchildren. When she shook her head, their hopeful faces dropped, and I felt like I’d just kicked a litter of puppies.
What I should have done at that point was offer the Gustavson crew a round of free desserts at Kokopelli’s, the five-star resort restaurant, but it had been an exhausting week, and something in my irritable heart rebelled. Or maybe I just had a soft spot for anyone who still respected the idea of love.
So Mrs. Gustavson listened as I pointed to and explained about the small grotto beyond the extensive patio. The grotto contained a roomy little alcove, and vines shaded the view inside so that a dozen or more Gustavsons could easily huddle in there and observe the festivities. All they had to do was navigate the roped-off edge of the patio and sneak in through the back door right before the ceremony started. There was a ton of security surrounding the resort’s boundaries, but nobody seemed too worried about the guests who were already here. After all, this wasn’t even the busy season.
As I talked, Helen Gustavson bobbed her white head with so much gusto I was afraid she’d hurt herself. She hugged me, then scurried off to spread the news to her family. I smiled. There would be over four hundred guests plus assorted gutter-licking media types. No one would care about a sunburned, starstruck family watching from the shadows.
After that all thoughts of the Gustavsons fled my mind as one minor crisis after another exploded.
The mother of the bride demanded a last-minute change to the wine menu.
The bride’s elaborate bouquet was rejected when it was compared to those carried by the bridesmaids and determined to be insufficiently superior.
A distant cousin of the groom arrived two hours early in dirty blue jeans and a tall cowboy hat. He parked himself in the front row and refused to move even when tempted by a tray of barbecue chicken wings.
As the minutes ticked down, I tried to calm my pulse, wondering if I was all worked up because this wedding was such a big deal or whether it was more personal. After all, I’d walked down an aisle in a white dress once upon a time. I just didn’t like to be reminded of it.
I watched Kaylie Tidewater scowling as her attendants arranged her veil. The offending bridal bouquet had been hastily replaced by a more flamboyant one. It was now being used to swat away the maid of honor when she tried to fan out the satin dress train.
“You’re fucking drunk,” the bride hissed at her sister.
“Eat shit,” the maid of honor hiccuped in return.
Luckily—or not—the ceremony was about to start. The bride’s father, a perpetually yawning gray-haired fellow named Allen Tidewater, who’d headlined a handful of films two decades earlier, took his daughter’s arm. Then he looked over and winked at me, a move which was unpleasantly reminiscent of his covert grab of my ass outside the dressing room fifteen minutes earlier. Since I was already suffering from a blossoming migraine, my sinuses were exploding, my bladder was painfully full, and there was a wedding ceremony to coordinate, I chose to pretend his horny hand was just a figment of my imagination.
The orchestra began playing, and I started ushering the wedding party toward the aisle to walk its length in stiff, smiling pairs. An instrumental version of one of the groom’s country songs played overhead. I could see the groom at the other end of the aisle. He was staring expectantly our way just as the tipsy maid of honor was about to take a step on the arm of the heavily bearded best man.
Then a series of terrible things happened.
A woman screamed. From the depths of the Mediterranean-inspired grotto, Helen Gustavson emerged and pointed a shaking, wrathful finger back into the shadowy depths of the grotto.
“What kind of people are you? I have children here! Children!”
Everything came to a dead stop. The orchestra, the wedding party, perhaps even time itself.
Cameras flashed. Voices murmured. People glanced at each other and at the groom and then at the grotto. The Gustavsons, looking collectively shell-shocked, scurried out after their white-haired matriarch. They all marched through the rows of guests and exited to the lobby.
The grotto wasn’t done coughing up people, though. One was the bride’s stepmother who was stuffing her tits back into her surgical bandage of a dress. The guy who casually followed her out seemed familiar. He had the haughty look of a frat boy who’d just nailed half the cheerleading squad. They waded a couple of steps out and then came to a rather comical stop. At that point there wasn’t a pair of eyes in the house that couldn’t guess what the unsuspecting Gustavson family had wandered into.
“Bart?” wailed the distressed maid of honor. And that was when I remembered where I’d seen Frat Boy before. We’d met during yesterday’s rehearsal. He was a groomsman and the girl’s fiancé.
“Karen!” yelled Allen Tidewater. And his wife—she of the rearranged cleavage—had the grace to look slightly sheepish as she bit her lip and backed into the stone face of the grotto.
That was the moment Kaylie Tidewater decided to lose her mind.
“Bitch!” she screeched as she dropped her father’s arm and flung her bouquet to the ground. “I knew you’d find a way to fuck this day up!”
Strangely, Kaylie’s wrath was not directed at her stepmother, or at Bart, or even at me. She stalked over to her sister, snatched the weeping maid of honor’s rose bouquet, and stuffed it right down the middle of the poor girl’s cleavage.
“Dammit, Kaylie,” hissed Allen Tidewater before he stepped into the catfight and earned a fingernail in his left eye. He howled like a banshee and dropped to his knees.
There were tons of gasping, a few muffled screams, and paparazzi swooping in for their payday. For a few terrible seconds, I was just a motionless bystander watching it all unfold before I jumped into action. Realizing I had already lost all control, I made a desperate grab for the bride so she would stop trying to suffocate her sister with long-stem roses. Unfortunately my chunky Coach watch got caught on the delicate fabric of the bridal train, and I lost my balance, going down in a cloud of lace and limbs and instant infamy.
Eventually the ceremony did proceed, although of course the prewedding highlights were instant fodder for every celebrity gossip site on the planet.
And naturally I was fired the very next day.
Lucy listened to the entire story. “Wow. That’s crazy. How the hell can you be blamed for the fact that the bride’s stepmother was getting porked in a closet by, ah, who was it again?”
“The maid of honor’s fiancé.”
My sister snickered. “Sounds positively incestuous.”
“And it wasn’t a closet,” I argued. “It was an ornamental grotto.”
She snorted. “Well, I guess that makes the situation classier.”
“It doesn’t matter. I screwed up by encouraging uninvited guests to sneak in, and then I failed to defuse the situation.”
“Bull. It wasn’t even your job.”
I chuckled madly. “Well, now it’s really not.”
“Mel.”
“Luce.”
My sister sighed. I missed that sigh. I wished it wasn’t coming from so far away. Lucy was living in San Francisco these days. Eighteen months apart in age, we’d been more rivals than friends growing up, but something vital had shifted when our parents were killed in a motorcycle accident four years ago. That tragedy became the demarcation line of my life. I was still reeling when I uttered an ill-advised “I do” to my college boyfriend, though our relationship had long been on shaky ground. We divorced barely a year later. I hadn’t even changed my name. But I did learn the hard way that I didn’t have as many friends as I thought I did. My sister was always my unwavering ally, possibly my only one.
“In any case,” she said gently, “that’s a damn sucky chain of events.”
“Totally sucky. James-level sucky.”
Lucy gagged at the mention of my ex. “Oh god, it’s not that bad, is it?”
“I guess not. He had a baby, you know.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. The happy family keeps popping up in unwanted places on my Facebook feed.”
“You can always block him, Melanie.”
“I know. I must have a masochistic side.”
“Hey, I have an idea. How about I fly down to Phoenix next weekend?”
I loved her for the offer, but she had her own life, her own career. “Thanks, Luce, but I’ll be all right. Save your frequent flier miles for the next tragedy.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“So what are you going to do now?”
“I’m going to do what any girl would do when she loses her job in stunning, newsworthy fashion.”
“Eat six tubs of Rocky Road ice cream and then go get dirty with a piece of muscled distraction? That’s what I’d do.”
“Yes to the ice cream. No to the dirty hookup.”
“You underestimate the allure of dirty hookups. So then what?”
“Then I’ll start pounding the pavement until I find a job that doesn’t require references.”
“Sounds like a tall order in this crappy job market,” Lucy said.
Now it was my turn to sigh.