Say Yes to the Death

Dedication

To all the wonderful folks who kept asking,

“When will we see Andy and Cissy again?”

This one's for you!

Contents

Prologue

M
illicent Draper yawned and nudged her owl-­like glasses back up the bridge of her nose, leaving a smudge of ivory fondant on the tortoiseshell frames. Her plastic-­gloved fingers were smeared with the stuff. Her knuckles felt stiff, and she could barely keep her eyes open. She'd worked through the night on a wedding cake for Senator Vernon Ryan's daughter, Penny, and she hadn't slept a wink.

Olivia La Belle, the bride's wedding planner, had phoned at six o'clock the night before—­just as Millie was closing up shop—­demanding an early delivery. “Sorry, Millie, but the ceremony's been pushed up a wee bit,” Olivia had said in a honey-­sweet twang that implied softness when Olivia was anything but.

Four whole months was “a wee bit”? Millie thought with a groan.

“We must have the cake by three o'clock tomorrow sharp,” Olivia had insisted, her sugared drawl turning hard. “The ceremony's at five with a sit-­down dinner reception to follow. If you don't get this done, it will make me very unhappy. Do you understand what I'm sayin', sugar?”

Oh, yeah,
sugar,
Millie understood. Ticking off Big D's premier event planner was a big no-­no. Olivia might as well have said, “If you don't get this done, you're as good as dead in this town.”

Ever since Olivia had done weddings for an Oscar winner and the spawn of a former president, her head had blown up as big as Texas. She'd become society's go-­to girl and, not only for Dallas royalty, but honest-­to-­God foreign royalty and Hollywood's A-­List. She'd even finagled her own reality TV show on a cheesy cable network and used it to promote herself and to punish those who displeased her. Anyone who dared defy
The Wedding Belle
risked hanging a “Going Out of Business” sign on the front door.

Millie had seen it happen most recently to Jasper Pippin, a floral designer in Big D for decades. Fed up with Olivia's lies and demands, he'd finally drawn a line in the sand. “She lied her tight little ass off and said the tulips I had flown in from Amsterdam for the mayor's wife's birthday party were wilted,” Jasper had told Millie, moaning. “She threatened a drubbing on her TV show if I didn't eat the cost. I'm going to lose my shirt if she keeps pulling these dirty tricks.”

“What will you do?” Millie asked him.

Jasper had drawn in a deep breath and said, “I'm going to let her have it. I am
not
going to give in.”

So the always civil Jasper had finally squared his thin shoulders and stood up to Olivia, sure that other vendors who'd been jerked around would follow suit. Only no one dared, and Olivia had bad-­mouthed him on her reality show. His orders dried up one by one until Jasper had to shutter his doors, claiming early retirement, though Millie knew better. He'd withdrawn, refusing to return her calls. She had no clue what he was up to, but she knew he wouldn't give up so easily. Millie hoped he would rise like the phoenix and stick it to Olivia somehow.

That evil woman had her French-­manicured fingers in so many pies around Dallas that everyone who worked with her was scared to death. Even Olivia's current assistant seemed skittish, and with good reason since the job seemed to involve a revolving door. The gangly twenty-­something, Terra, followed her everywhere, taking notes. She never seemed to say anything but “Yes, Olivia” and “Of course, Olivia,” like a well-­trained parrot.

Millie wished she'd had the gumption to tell Olivia that she could take this impossible cake deadline and stuff it, but she couldn't risk losing everything she'd worked so hard for. She'd started Millie's Cakes in her own kitchen thirty-­five years ago and had built her impressive client list from scratch. She wasn't ready to give it all up because she'd ticked off the very fickle Ms. La Belle. Unlike Jasper, she had no intention of being forced into early retirement.

Millie swallowed, glancing at the clock on the wall. With a noisy
tick-­tick,
its hands crept toward seven.

She only had eight hours left and still had to attach the two hundred handmade sugar orchids she'd painted a delicate shade of purple. Her feet ached from standing, and her arthritis was acting up so badly that her fingers felt like unbendable sticks. If the shop wasn't so busy, she would have turned the whole shebang over to her staff, but they had other orders to fill, cakes that had been on the docket for months and were equally important.

No, this monkey was squarely on her back.

If she blew this job for Senator Ryan's daughter, it would be on her head, no one else's. She tried to convince herself that she couldn't blame the bumped-­up time frame entirely on Olivia. It was Penelope Ryan who was truly at fault.

“Silly girl got herself knocked up,” Millie muttered, having heard the gossip that the bride's belly had begun to pop and that the senator—­a button-­down conservative if ever there was one—­wanted his daughter legally wed ASAP. He couldn't afford to have the nineteen-­year-­old college sophomore he'd painted as pure as the driven snow during his campaign get photographed walking down the aisle in a maternity gown.

“You can put her in a big white dress and marry her off but that doesn't change anything,” Millie murmured, and she pushed at her glasses again.

Was the senator going to pull one of those “the baby came prematurely” routines when his grandchild popped out in another five months or so? People didn't seem to have a whole lot of sense these days, but most of them could count, so long as they had enough fingers and toes.

Ah, well, Millie mused, there would always be brides who got knocked up before their vows. There would always be disappointed fathers who wanted to pretend their darling daughters stayed virginal until their honeymoons. And there would always be bitches like Olivia La Belle behind the scenes, wielding a phone in one hand and cracking a whip with the other, either telling everyone off or telling them what to do.

Millie sighed.

“Enjoy your moment while it lasts, Queen Olivia, because it won't be forever,” she whispered, thinking of Marie Antoinette and her date with the guillotine. “As for me, I will let them eat cake,” she added, knowing that Olivia would get her comeuppance one of these days. Women like her always did. She just hoped she'd be around when it happened. Heck, she'd pay good money for a front row seat.

But for now Millie blinked her bleary eyes and tried to keep her hand from shaking as she delicately affixed the edible orchids to the seven-­layered concoction she'd created overnight.

She would get this damned cake done or die trying.

Chapter 1

“I
f we're too late, we'll get stuck in back and we won't be able to see a thing,” Cissy complained as she drove with one manicured hand on the wheel and the other madly gesticulating. “For heaven's sake, Andrea, how long does it take to brush your hair and put on a dress?”

“Longer than the five minutes you gave me,” I replied, wondering how I'd gotten roped into this cockamamie date with my mother when she had a perfectly good fiancé who could have escorted her to the bumped-­up wedding of a Texas senator's spoiled daughter. I had a perfectly good fiancé of my own who was sitting back at my condo, a bottle of Shiner Bock in his hand, watching the Stars take on the Blues in the Stanley Cup playoffs, which sounded a whole lot better than what I was doing at the moment.

“No, Stephen couldn't come,” my mother said as though reading my mind—­something she did far too often, and it freaked me out every time. “He's flown off to Augusta for a golf outing with some old IRS cronies.”

“You mean he didn't dump his plans for you even though he'd rather be in his yoga pants watching a hockey game with Brian?” I threw out for good measure.

“His yoga pants,” my mother sputtered, “watching a hockey game with Mr. Malone?” Her brow tried hard to wrinkle. Then she blinked and gave me a sideways glance. “You're talking about yourself, aren't you?”

“Of course I'm talking about myself,” I growled, tempted to ask if Botox killed brain cells, but I refrained.

My mother sighed and did a very odd thing.

“You're right, I'm sorry, sweetie. I shouldn't have gotten huffy. I really am glad you could come to my rescue at the last minute. You are the most considerate child on God's green earth,” she drawled, reaching over to pat my thigh, “and I appreciate that you're tagging along with your old mom.”

I opened my mouth but nothing emerged. Yes, I, Andrea Blevins Kendricks—­smart-­ass extraordinaire—­found myself speechless. My mother didn't often offer apologies, unsolicited or otherwise.

“Truly, I didn't intend to drag you out on such short notice, but I only got the call from Shelby Ryan just before I went to bed last night. I had no idea they were moving up Penny's wedding to today,” my mother explained. “It was too late for Stephen to back out of his golf weekend, and I didn't want to pressure him.”

No, I thought. No use making Stephen feel bad when it was all too easy to guilt me into going instead.

“What about Sandy?” I asked, referring to my mother's Girl Friday. Sandy Beck had been Cissy's personal assistant for as long as I could remember. She'd had as much a hand in raising me as my mother and couldn't have been more a part of our family if she'd been blood. “Why isn't she your date?”

“She's visiting her sister in Magnolia, Arkansas, and won't be back till next Sunday,” Mother told me with a sigh. “Honestly, I tried.”

“It's all right,” I murmured, and added, “I can survive a few hours away from my yoga pants and Malone.”
Two hours tops,
I told myself. That was all. Then my dress would turn into rags, my coach into a pumpkin, and I'd be all the happier for it.

Although I wasn't sure I would survive wearing Spanx. I could already feel them strangling my intestines. Unfortunately for me, my mother didn't consider jeans and T-­shirt proper attire for a swanky wedding; unfortunately for Cissy, my closet was full of jeans and T-­shirts and little else. I did have one little black dress that I'd kept around for a decade in case of emergencies, but Cissy had nixed it the moment I'd offered. “Who wears black to a wedding?” she'd remarked with a sniff. “Morticia Addams?”

Instead my mother had deemed herself my fairy god stylist, bringing over a new pair of Spanx along with a fresh-­off-­the-­rack-­at-­Saks Carolina Herrera springy floral dress that was made for a skinny woman who survived on lettuce and water and/or had the meat sucked off her bones in seasonal liposuction sessions. It would have probably involved amputation or a bottle of Wesson oil to get me into the thing without the gut-­strangling Lycra underpants. So for my mother's sake—­and, boy, was she gonna owe me big-­time—­I wriggled into the killer girdle and the very fitted dress though I could barely breathe, let alone eat a piece of wedding cake without rupturing an organ.

“Why was the wedding moved up?” I dared to ask, something Mother hadn't yet explained, although I had a pretty good idea. When I'd last heard Cissy mention the invitation to Penny Ryan's knot-­tying, it was set for late summer. It was currently the middle of April. There was only one reason I could fathom for such last minute maneuvering. I muttered, “The word ‘shotgun' comes to mind.”

Cissy sighed. “Well, I'm not one to gossip.”

I laughed and replied, “Since when?”

My mother's Rouge Coco lips settled into a disappointed moue. She tossed her coiffed blond head and drawled, “Well, that was hardly very nice. I'm sure they taught you better in your Little Miss Manners classes all those years ago, or I should ask for a refund.”

“Oh, for crud's sake,” I said under my breath and rolled my eyes. There wasn't a Highland Park matron who loved to gossip more than Cissy Blevins Kendricks, the Doyenne of Beverly Drive, and every socialite within a fifty-­mile radius knew it.

“So how far along is the bride?” I asked point-­blank.

“About four months as near as anyone can tell,” Cissy blurted out, and a spark lit her eyes. “Shelby said Penny's starting to show, which is why they had to do the wedding stat. In another month she wouldn't fit in her dress.”

Ha! I thought with a smirk, so much for detesting gossip.

“Shelby also said the latest scan showed that the baby's a boy,” my mother rattled on, hardly able to stop herself. “They're all pleased as punch since Penny's an only child. She promised to name the boy after the senator.” Cissy took her eyes off the road long enough to turn her head and give me a wicked smile. “Vernon Ignatius Ryan Tripplehorn,” she said, adding, “Quite a mouthful isn't it? They want to call him Iggy.”

“Oh, my God, the poor kid,” I muttered. “That'll virtually guarantee a regular ass-­whooping by junior high if not sooner.”

And I should know. Being nicknamed “Andy” by my father early on—­though my mother had always insisted on calling me Andrea—­meant I'd heard plenty of playground cracks about being a girl with a boy's name.

“Well, Penny might not have gone about things the proper way but at least she's giving Shelby a grandchild before Shelby's too old and creaky to enjoy it,” my mother went on, and I saw her squint behind her oversized sunglasses, peering at the signage overhead as she drove south toward Preston Hollow. “Some of us are still waiting,” she said with a sideways glance before gliding toward the toll road exit.

Oh, joy
, I thought,
here we go again
.

At least my mother was progressing in a forward direction when it came to guilt trips. Ever since Malone and I had gotten engaged the year before, she'd begun dropping less than subtle hints about wanting to become a grandmother. “Don't wait too long,” she'd said most recently, “or that womb with a view will start looking like Miss Havisham's cobweb-­filled abode.” Somehow, the digs about my ticking clock were easier to take than the jibes that had come before Malone put a ring on my finger.

For years my mother had laid it on thick, reminding me of how I'd broken her heart by refusing to debut when I was eighteen, right after my dad's sudden death from a heart attack. As a reminder of her deep disappointment, Cissy kept my fancy white deb dress hanging in my old bedroom closet, and it surely would have had cobwebs on it by now save for the fact that she had a regular housekeeper tasked with banishing cobwebs.

Yes, I knew I'd wounded Mother deeply for being a debutante dropout, considering how much her world revolved around traditions. She had been a debutante, after all, as had all the Blevins women before her dating back to pre–­Civil War. But how long did I have to pay for it? Sure, I understood that since my conception, she'd envisioned my following in her footsteps: coming out to society, pledging Pi Phi at SMU, marrying a bona fide blue blood, and settling down in Highland Park. But I hadn't done any of those things. I wasn't Cissy. Wearing a white dress and kidskin gloves at cotillion had been
her
dream for me, not mine. Losing my father had made me realize that life was too short to live someone else's dream for them. So despite how hard my mother had tried to draw me back to the dark side, I'd fought just as hard to become my own person, whether she liked it or not.

Heck, I was still fighting.

“. . . and they had to throw off the media, so he's letting them use the place since it's been sitting on the market for months anyway,” I heard Cissy saying as I shook off my thoughts and realized we'd somehow gotten from the Tollway to Northwest Highway and exited, ultimately landing on Alva Court with its ginormous mansions tucked safely behind guard houses and privacy fences.

“What?” I said, since I'd obviously missed the most important part of her monologue. “Who let them borrow their place for the wedding?”

“Lester Dickens,” Cissy announced and gave me a for-­goodness'-­sakes look when I appeared genuinely puzzled. “The oilman,” she told me, as if that explained everything. “He's had the house on the market since he divorced his last wife. I think her name's Phoebe.” My mother shook her blond head. “I don't even recall how many wives he's gone through since he was married to Adelaide. She was such a lovely woman. She used to play bridge with us at the Junior League before she died not a year after the divorce. He truly broke her heart.”

“That's sad,” I said, because it was, and not the kind of thing one usually discussed en route to a wedding.

“Les and Adelaide were high school sweethearts,” Cissy blathered on, “and she gave him three sons before he traded her in for a younger model.” She clicked tongue against teeth. “It's like his wives got younger as he got richer.”

“Isn't that how it works?”

“Les told Vern and Shelby they could use the place for Penny's big day since no one's livin' in it at the moment,” Mother informed me. “Lester's latest ex got the house in Vail, and he's been staying in a suite at The Mansion.”

The Mansion being The Mansion on Turtle Creek, of course, one of Dallas's swankier hotels. It was a go-­to spot for the very rich when they wanted to run away from home but not
too
far.

Click!
A lightbulb went on in my brain, and I put two and two together. Lester Dickens wasn't just your run-­of-­the-­mill rich-­as-­Croesus chauvinist cum oil baron: he was Senator Ryan's biggest supporter. He had put together a PAC and bought TV ads out the wazoo to help Vernon get elected in the first place. Word was that Dickens aimed to put Vernon Ryan in the White House come the next presidential election. It was no wonder he'd loaned the senator his mansion for a day. He was probably even more anxious than the Ryans to get the pregnant Penny married off.

“You know, it's a good thing you came with me, sweet pea,” my mother said, changing the subject, “it'll give us some ideas for
your
wedding.” She smiled as she pulled the Lexus up to a pair of gates and rolled down her window to give her name to a security guard. “Your old classmate from Hockaday, Olivia La Belle, will be here. She's Penny's wedding planner,” Cissy informed me as the guard stepped back and the gates parted, revealing a sprawling Mediterranean villa sitting at the end of a very long driveway beyond palm trees and cascading fountains.

“Did you say Olivia La Belle?” I repeated, because I hadn't heard anything else my mother had said after the name. And all of a sudden I was flashing back to prep school and the athletic blonde who used to taunt me during Phys Ed.
You must be a boy, Andy Kendricks, 'cause you have no boobs at all! Andy's a boy, Andy's a boy!

I flinched as though I'd been hit hard with one of Olivia's carefully aimed dodge balls, and I rubbed my arms. I could still feel the bruises.

“Yes, Olivia La Belle,” mother repeated and wrinkled her nose. “Do you have wax in your ears, sugar plum?”

My mouth was too dry to tell her my ears weren't the problem. “I thought we'd chat her up and see if she's available any time soon,” Cissy said, clearly ignoring the stricken look on my face. She steered the Lexus past a long line of shiny Caddies, Mercedes, Range Rovers, and Beemers that took up one side of the driveway and some of the expansive front yard. She finally turned into the circle around the fountain and pulled up to the valet. “You and Brian really need to firm up the date. Wouldn't it be the bee's knees, havin' your old schoolmate in charge of your wedding?”

Was Cissy insane?

La Belle from Hell planning my wedding?

I shuddered at the thought.

“Absolutely not,” I said, plain and simple, and gave my mother the evil eye as we got out of the car; but she ignored me, smiling at the valet as she handed over her keys.

Hiring Olivia wouldn't be the bee's knees at all. It'd be more like being swarmed by an entire, very angry beehive.