The Wedding Kiss by Lucy Kevin Read Free Book Online Page A

employees and friends.
    Most of all, he wished she could see how important she was to him.
    “Why don’t you tell me your new idea for the wedding setup?”
    Rose was obviously trying to change the subject, and RJ decided to let her. He didn’t want to make things harder for her. He didn’t ever want to do that.
    “And thank you, RJ, for doing all this at such short notice.”
    “I’ll do whatever you need me to do,” he said with feeling. “Knowing how much you like roses got me thinking about the traditional rose ceremony.” The traditional version was simple: an exchange of roses between the mothers of the bride and groom during the ceremony. “Just two people exchanging roses might be nicely symbolic,” he explained, “but it feels like it isn’t big enough. So why not have everyone at the wedding exchanging roses? All the guests on your side and all the ones on Donovan’s.”
    He watched her face light up at the idea, before she too-quickly stamped out her obvious pleasure. “Thank you for the idea, RJ, but I don’t think it will work. Not when Donovan will have so many more guests than I will. His family, his colleagues, his most important clients.”
    “We can figure it out,” RJ insisted, even though it annoyed him that Donovan should have more guests than Rose at their wedding, as if Rose’s friends and family didn’t matter the same way his did. “I was thinking of rigging up a topiary runner over everyone. If I put it together as a lattice work, I can make it look like it’s raining rose petals as you walk along the aisle, and then as you walk past each pair of people in the ceremony, they can step in and exchange roses.”
    For one more short moment, RJ thought Rose might go for it. Her eyes certainly seemed eager, maybe even a little dreamy, yet he could see the instant when she reconsidered…and made her final decision.
    She shook her head. “No, we can’t do that. It’s too messy. Too showy. And the rose ceremony has been done too many times before. It has all the problems that getting married under the gazebo did.”
    Which, as far as RJ could see, mostly consisted of Donovan’s mother not thinking it was up to her standards.
    Was Rose really going to try to design her entire wedding to live up to what she thought Vanessa McIntyre would like?
    “It’s not elegant enough,” Rose continued. “I want my wedding to have style. I want it to be absolutely perfect, with nothing going wrong.”
    Rose, of all people, should have known that weddings were big, messy, fun events. Yes, there was space for style and elegance, but even then, most couples tended to let their hair down a little during one of the most important days of their lives.
    Only, to RJ’s ears it sounded like Rose wanted her big day to be like a catwalk show. Beautiful to look at, but without any actual substance.
    He felt like there were two Roses these days. There was the woman she so obviously thought she ought to be, the person Donovan wanted her to be. That was the woman who seemed to be so willing to put aside her wedding arrangements just because of what people thought.
    Then there was the real Rose. The woman who rolled up her sleeves and helped him pound in nails and dig in the garden. The woman who devoured chili fries in diners.
    The woman who had kissed him.
    Yet he knew if he said any of that, Rose would simply deny it and pull away from him.
    So instead of saying it, he needed to show her the difference. Chili-fries in the diner had been a start, but he needed to do more.
    “Are you sure you don’t want to try the rose ceremony?” he asked one more time. “It seems to me that it would be so perfect for you, Rose. For who you really are.”
    “Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do.”
    A flare of anger at just how wrong she was, had him quickly coming back with, “Well then, tomorrow we should do some research. You know, so that I can actually be a help to