Keeping Secret

The only thing I knew about wedding dresses was that they were all white, tight and probably impossible to kill someone in.



Unless that someone was Kimberly, in which case I’d find a way.



“I don’t know,” I admitted.



“Well, we’ll schedule a trial at Kleinfeld. You might want something totally different.” She laughed as if this were the funniest idea in the world. “And you’ll want to have your mother there, I assume.”



My ears felt hot, and I had my hand balled into a fist without meaning to. “My mother…” I let my fist fall open and dazzled her with the gleaming rock. She was like a kitten looking at a laser pointer. “My mother is dead.” This was a lie, but since she’d pretended to like my hideous sweater I figured my lie made us even. The truth about my mother was too ugly for Kimberly and her taffeta-drenched world.



It was too ugly for my world, and my full-time job was to police the goings-on of the entire vampire population of the East Coast. So…that was saying something.



“Oh…goodness.” Kimberly’s hand flew to her mouth, then her other darted out and held mine, fingers fumbling against the ring. I fought to not wince. “I’m so sorry.”



I started to say, I’m not, but that was the moment Lucas chose to waltz through the office door in his perfect Armani suit trailing a cloud of apologies behind him. Lucas was the kind of man you wanted to forgive for anything the instant you laid eyes on him. Six foot two and well muscled, he had the blond hair and blue eyes of a corn-fed, all-American, football type. His smile showed off beautiful, even teeth and made a glimmer shine in his eyes brighter than the light off my diamond.



My breath hitched.



This was the man I was going to marry.



He stooped low and planted a kiss on the crown of my head, making tingles radiate down my spine and setting off a chain reaction of tremors that ended low in my pelvis. Kimberly practically fell over me to offer him her hand. Politely, he dusted a kiss over her knuckles and gave her a puckish, panty-melting grin.



“So sorry I’m late, ladies. Business.” He shrugged one shoulder then sat next to me on my divan.



Lucas was larger than life. His personality overwhelmed everyone around him—myself included—and suddenly the seat felt too small.



This was what it was like to be dwarfed by the werewolf king of the East. Even humans like Kimberly who knew nothing about our world respected the authority he threw off in waves. She probably assumed it was the power of wealth that made him so indomitable. It wasn’t. He was royalty.



And soon I would be too.



My mouth felt dry, like I’d swallowed a shot of sand.



Lucas sensed my unease and took one of my hands in his, squeezing gently. Once upon a time being this close to him would have filled my mouth with a burst of cinnamon. Now, with our mate bond sealed, the connection was deeper, but the comforting flavor was gone. The only cinnamon in the room was the strong waft of it coming from Kimberly’s mouth as she caught Lucas up on what he’d missed.



“Well, Miss McQueen,” she said, switching to an unnatural-sounding formal address, then she caught herself doing it and giggled. “Oh goodness, I guess pretty soon you won’t be hearing that anymore.”



I wrinkled my nose and stared at her as though she were a duck who had learned to knit. “Why the hell not?”



Her attention darted back and forth between me and Lucas, and I knew she wasn’t sure where she’d made the mistake. “I just meant…with you getting married…well, your name would be—”



I waved a hand at her, trying to erase the 1950s logic she was trying to weave into sensible reasoning. Sure, I’d wear a white dress. I’d force my scant collection of girlfriends to dress up in matching gowns and fawn over me while eyeing Lucas’s groomsmen for prospects. But I would be damned if she thought I’d be changing my last name.



“Kimberly,” I cut her off. “I appreciate that Lucas’s name has a lot of heft in the financial world and in…other arenas. However, my name is ridiculous enough as it is. If I changed it to Secret Rain, people would assume I was a stripper. Or a yacht.”



I figured Lucas would chide me for my impropriety. He was a big fan of pointing out how I always chose the most inopportune times to be snarky. However, in this case, he attempted to fight off his laughter, and it ended up bubbling out as a loud snort.



Kimberly looked appalled, but her veneer restored quickly, and she was back in ass-kissing mode in no time. A true professional. The first rule of being a New York City wedding planner—do everything your client wants, and never ask them why they want it. Never ask. Never correct. Especially if your client is worth over a billion dollars and has insisted you “spare no expense” in planning his big day in less than a month.



The average bride spends over a year planning her wedding.



Well, let’s be honest, the average woman starts planning her wedding the day she learns what one is. The actual bridal planning, however, cannot begin until the ring is firmly on finger and the husband-to-be has made the big commitment.



I was not an average bride.



Lucas’s proposal, though it had been a grand and romantic public gesture, hadn’t been made because he was crazy in love with me. He could profess his love all he wanted, but we both knew the truth. The werewolf king had proposed because having a queen would solidify his throne. Bonus points if his new queen happened to be from royal werewolf lineage.



That’s where I came in. Southern werewolf princess, bonded soul mate, and the on-paper perfect queen. On-paper being the operative term. Lucas had come to realize over the last year I wasn’t at all the perfect-princess type, and it had started to wear on our relationship. It didn’t help that I was also soul-bonded to another werewolf, Lucas’s lieutenant Desmond Alvarez.



And it certainly didn’t help that I loved Desmond more than I loved Lucas.



Yet here we were. There was a massive diamond on my finger and a wedding planner with dollar signs in her eyes waiting to yield to my every wedding whim.



Lucas took my hand and kissed it, his lips lingering a few seconds too long as he looked up at me and winked, which sent another thrill down to my toes. Love was such a complicated bitch, more so when the supernatural got thrown into the mix. On a logical level, I knew Lucas was wrong for me. On a metaphysical level, though, a part of me needed him as much as I needed oxygen. Now that our mate bond was complete, we were connected on a level that defied explanation.



I knew he needed this from me, and I couldn’t deny him something as simple as a wedding.



“Let’s talk about bridesmaid dresses,” I said, giving Kimberly my most saccharine smile.



Chapter Three



Two hours later Lucas and I had selected our wedding colors—sunflower yellow and cobalt blue—we’d named our attendants, picked an invitation and the venue was finalized. In three weeks we would become Mr. and Mrs. in the ballroom of Lucas’s own Columbia hotel, with a dazzling reception to follow across the street in Bryant Park. Not since it had been the home of Fashion Week would the park see such a display.



My stomach hurt from spending so much time debating the difference between ivory tablecloths and snowflake white. I was eternally grateful for Lucas’s presence when the question of table runners and low versus high centerpieces came up. He’d grown up in a family who had money to burn and had watched these types of events take place his entire life. He knew what our wealthy guests would expect better than I did.



In the end there was only one point I stuck my ground on with Hurricane Kimberly. She was adamant about a white rose and lily bouquet being the way to go. I wanted yellow gerbera daisies. She claimed gerberas were out of the question. They were too pedestrian, too simple. I wouldn’t yield. It was gerberas or it was a different wedding planner.



I won that particular battle, and my pedestrian bouquet was granted.



It wasn’t until we reached the parking lot that I realized I was clutching a big Tiffany-blue binder with the words Bridal Bible embossed on the cover. Inside were swatches of fabrics, sketches of the way Kimberly envisioned the ceremony and reception sites, and brochures for photographers. I think she’d given us homework, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember anything she had said in the last twenty minutes.



Placing the binder on the hood of my yellow BMW Z4, I dug through my pockets in search of my keys, trying my best to not face Lucas.



“Go ahead and say it,” he said.



“Say what?”



“Whatever it is that’s making you so quiet. I know you’ve got a whole speech stored up about Kimmy at the very least.”



“Kimmy?” I could no longer face away. I turned so he could get the full effect of my stunned expression. “Since when are we on a nickname basis with Our Lady of Tulle and Buttercream?”



He smirked. I had to give him credit for that. In the year we’d known each other he had come a long way in accepting my little foibles. Specifically my penchant for sarcastic outbursts. He answered my question as if I’d asked it in a completely rational manner. “The Carlyle family are old friends of my parents. Kimmy…Kimberly used to babysit Kellen from time to time. She’s a few years younger than Des and me. I hired her because I knew it’s what my parents would have wanted.”



I suppressed the urge to make a face. His logic was sound, and since his parents were both dead, it was difficult for me to question what they would or wouldn’t have wanted.



“Fine.” I found my keys and unlocked the car, chucking the blue binder carelessly into the backseat. “Why are we going through all this?”



“The big wedding, you mean?”



“Yeah. Wouldn’t eloping be easier?”



“Most women can’t wait to hear the words spare no expense when it comes to planning their wedding, Secret.”



“But I don’t care. I don’t care if we serve Moët or Cristal. I don’t care if the girls have Romona Keveza dresses or if I have a frigging diamond tiara. None of this is me.”