Keeping Secret: Secret McQueen, Book 4 (2 page)

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
.”

He crossed the distance between us, and given his height advantage, I had to look up to see his eyes. With one hand on each of my shoulders, he bent down and gave me a gentle, sweet kiss on the lips. I licked the lower curve of his mouth, hoping for a lingering taste of cinnamon, but tasted nothing there other than the faint salt of his skin. I kissed him back anyway, wrapping my hands around his wrists and letting my tongue explore the bumpy ridges on the roof of his mouth before capturing his lip between my teeth and giving it a playful nip.

“I know you don’t want the big show.” He kissed my nose, then my forehead, and last but not least, each of my closed eyelids. “I know you’re being incredibly patient about this. Or as patient as you can be.” I didn’t miss his little jab. “And if there was any other way to do this, I promise you we would be doing it, but there isn’t any other way.”

“No courthouse steps? A quickie trip to Vegas?” I smiled hopefully.

“It needs to be big. Nothing can be overlooked. News of it has to spread to all the other kingdoms, and they need to see that we are really, truly united. Once that happens, I think we can finally be at peace.”

He was dreaming. For the past several months some of the Alphas of the smaller packs in Lucas’s territory were showing signs of unrest. There were rumors circulating of packs attempting to leave the protection of the East and seek the leadership of the South. My uncle, Callum McQueen, King of the Southern packs, swore he had no part in it, but it was hard to imagine small packs making such a bold move on their own.

And if my uncle was cut from the same cloth as my mother, his sister, then he wouldn’t rest until he had
all
of Lucas’s territory. We’d made slight headway when Lucas proposed, and I understood why he thought the big wedding would help more, but I didn’t think it would be enough to shut Callum down.

It
might
be enough to reaffirm our own pack’s opinion of our leadership though. Making a pack protector the queen certainly gave the impression of a powerful team at the helm.

A team that took two players working together to function properly.

“Okay,” I said, kissing his cheek and once again mourning the missing taste. “We’ll go big or go home.”

“Thank you.” Lucas’s smile this time was hesitant.

“What? You’ve got one of those looks you get when you know I’m going to be mad about something.”

“I want you to remember what you just said,” he suggested, then handed me a stiff envelope. For a moment I trembled. When I was still an assassin for the council, I used to receive the names of my targets in envelopes identical to this one.

My hands shook slightly as I opened the unsealed back flap and pulled out the card inside. Just like with my hits, the card had a name on it. Two names actually. One was mine and the other was Lucas’s.

“What is…?” But I was already reading the rest of the text. This slip of paper was cordially inviting me to my own engagement party.

Tomorrow.

My gut reaction was to crumple the invitation and throw it at him. We’d had more discussions than I cared to remember about him springing things on me or doing things that involved me without talking to me about them first. My cheeks felt warm, and I took a few short breaths to steady my temper.

“Surprise?” he offered, a boyish smile creeping over his mouth. “Admit it. If I’d asked ahead, you would have said no outright.”

“I—”

“Admit it.”

He was right. Never in a million years would I have agreed to an engagement party. I slid the invitation back into the envelope and threw them both inside the car beside the binder.

“Well,” I sighed. “I guess I had better go buy a new dress.”

Chapter Four

Time is meaningless to vampires, which makes them a pain in the ass to carpool with.

“
Brigit
,” I bellowed, stomping around her sparsely decorated living room in my five-inch Christian Louboutin heels. The shoes were amethyst purple and looked extra gemlike when paired with my butter-yellow, long-sleeved, scoop-necked party dress. Normally the only fashion sense I have is picking out pretty shoes, but I thought the dress was sophisticated and downright regal.