Page 301 of Wild Card 13

Buzz saw me and smiled. “You look prepared to either attend a wedding or negotiate a hostage release.”

“What are you doing here?”

He lifted the drink carrier in his left hand, then the one in his right. “Bridesmaid coffee delivery.”

“For all of us?”

His eyes skimmed my face, careful and bright. “Vivienne sent three separate texts with capital letters. I got concerned.”

I took the coffee he held out to me, the one with my name written across the cup in block letters that were not his handwriting. Vivienne’s, probably. Lucy Thomas, block letters that weren’t his. The order underneath was pure Vivienne: Lucy Thomas, no heroics.

Buzz looked at it and gave me a solemn nod. “No heroics today.” His laugh slipped past his lips, soft and quick.

Some of the tension loosened as his calm washed over me. I had almost forgotten how good it was to see him before the chaos.

Today was not about me. So I pushed everything down, lifted my coffee in salute, and said, “If any of those are decaf, you’re not leaving this hallway alive.”

Buzz’s gaze stayed on mine one beat too long. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

The bridal suite door flew open.

Vivienne Hart appeared in champagne silk, a headset, and the haunted expression of a woman who had already defeated three emergencies before nine in the morning. “Coffee,” she twittered, spotting Buzz. “Excellent. Do not get comfortable. There is a containment issue involving the groomsmen.”

Buzz blinked. “A what?”

“Containment,” Vivienne repeated. “Issue.”

Buzz looked toward the hallway, then back at me. “Duty calls.”

“Try not to let anyone create a penalty box out of ceremony seating.”

“No promises.”

He started to go, then paused. His eyes dropped to the coffee in my hand, then came back to my face. “You good?”

I nodded. “I’m good.”

After that, the morning became satin and steam and the delicate, hilarious disaster of women trying to get ready around one very pregnant bride who kept crying at inconvenient times and then blaming the baby.

Bea sat in the center of the room in a robe that probably cost more than my first car, her dark hair pinned halfway up, her face bare except for the kind of glow people paid stylists to fake and pregnancy had apparently handed her for free. “I’m fine,” she whimpered, while crying into a tissue.

Micah, already in her navy dress with one earring in and one earring lost somewhere near the vanity, said, “Your face is leaking.”

Freya stood behind Bea with a curling iron in hand and the calm focus of someone who routinely made injured athletes obey basic medical advice. “Do not move unless you want one side of your head to look like it survived a small electrical event.”

Lo sat near the window, watching with that still, knowingexpression she got when she was feeling too much and making it everybody else’s problem by saying almost nothing.

The getting-ready part of the day could have swallowed hours if we’d let it.

It didn’t.

In my memory, it came in flashes.

Micah finding the missing earring hooked to the lace of Bea’s robe and announcing that couture was just fabric with better hiding places.

Freya kneeling to adjust Bea’s shoe because bending at thirty-three weeks pregnant was apparently now classified as a recreational risk.

Vivienne appearing every six minutes with a new clipboard and the expression of a battlefield commander who had been personally betrayed by time.