“I’ve heard another man’s proposal and accepted it since last night, Neil. You need to propose again.”
“Okay . . .” He took her hand in his. “Blair Hansen, you are perfect for me. Will you marry me?”
She smiled and took her hand from his. “I’ll see you at the wedding.” Then she turned and started for the door.
“But you don’t have your car. Don’t you want me to take you home?”
She looked back at him. “No. I have so much to do to prepare for the wedding. I want everything to be perfect.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Garrett Lowry was a desperate man. He’d spent an hour repeatedly calling and texting Blair until Megan finally answered and told him that Blair had never picked up her purse. She still didn’t have her phone.
The rest of the day was spent trying to get the contract for Neil put together, emailing documents back and forth between a law school friend who was a practicing estate law attorney in Missouri. But his heart was in his throat when he asked Nana to meet him in the hotel bar.
He sat at a table, nervously tapping his pen on the file sitting in front of him on the bistro table. As he watched her approach, hobbling toward him with her cane, he realized Neil might get his inheritance sooner than Garrett would like, and not just because he didn’t want his cousin to have possession. She was walking slower than ever. She had more wrinkles, and her eyes were deeper set than usual. She looked older than her years, and it scared him.
When she neared the table, he stood to help her with her seat, and she waved him off. “The day I can’t sit my ass in a chair is the day I’m checking into Sunnybrook Retirement Home.”
“I already told you I wouldn’t let that happen, Nana.”
She eased herself onto the chair and looked up at him as he sat across from her. “What are you going to do about it? Put me in your fancy California apartment?”
He shrugged. “I could move in with you.”
She laughed. “Claiming your inheritance before my body’s even cold.”
His eyes flew open. “No, Nana! I—”
She laughed again. “Relax, boy. I’m teasing ya. That’s not your style.” She shifted around in her chair, leaning her hand on her cane. “But from the way you look, I presume there’s still a wedding today.”
He sighed. “It’s a long story, but basically Neil tricked Blair into thinking I was about to sleep with another woman after she and I . . . had already gotten back together. She went to break things off with Neil, and he sent his girlfriend to my hotel room. She started stripping . . .”
“And Blair showed up?”
“Yeah, with Neil.”
“Aww . . . and he made sure to paint you as the devil incarnate.”
He didn’t respond. The answer was obvious.
“So did you invite me here to lick your wounds for ya? ’Cause you know that’s not my style.”
“No, Nana.” He swallowed. Jesus, this was hard. “I want to ask you for a favor.”
“Go on.”
“Neil is willing to be bought off.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“He’s agreed not to marry Blair if I’ll give him something in return.”
Sadness filled her eyes. “So you give him my land in exchange for canceling the wedding.”
He nodded, part of him dying inside.
“I thought that girl had some sense in her head. Why can’t she just tell him no?”
“She doesn’t know he’s been cheating on her.”
“Well, why not?”
“Uh . . .” he stammered. “It would hurt her. Badly. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her.”
“The girl I met at that spectacle of a wedding shower was no wilting flower. She’s made of sterner stuff. She’s not going to fall to pieces if she finds out, so what were you thinking?”
She was right. God, he was an idiot. Ever since he’d found out, he’d danced with the idea of telling her, but the time had never seemed right, and he’d never managed to force out the words. “Obviously, I wasn’t.”
“So tell her before the wedding and be done with it. If she chooses to marry the fool, let her accept the consequences.”
“That’s not all, Nana. He has something else up his sleeve.”
“What?”
He grimaced. He hated to even think about Blair having sex with Neil, so the last thing he wanted to do was talk about it.
“Out with it, boy.”
“He has photos of them . . . in bed. He says he’ll make them public.”
“Sex photos?” She shook her head and gave him a look of disgust. “You kids these days. No sense whatsoever.” She put her hand on the table. “If she chose to take dirty pictures, then she shouldn’t be ashamed of ’em. Let her accept the consequences of that too.”
“That’s just it, Nana. She didn’t approve of the photos. She doesn’t even know they exist, and they could destroy her career.”
“So Neil is threatening to release them unless you sign over your inheritance?”
“Once he realized how far I was willing to go, yeah.”
Her eyes were blazing. “I take it you need me to sign something to make this nice and legal.”
He cringed. “Yes, ma’am.”
She sighed, looking even older. “Well, where is it?”
He slid the paper out from the file. What was he doing? He was asking his grandmother to sign her life’s work away to his maniacal cousin. And this was all his fault, because he was the one who’d spilled the beans about getting it all and setting the wheels in motion. “The document says I’m going to inherit everything except the house and the barn.”
“I told you that you’re going to get it all.”
“It’s safer this way. Give it to Kelsey. Then Neil has no chance at it.”
She peered into his face for a long moment, her gaze as penetrating and sharp as ever. “You’re really willing to give up everything for this woman?”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll do anything to protect her. Even if she never forgives me.”
She picked up the paper and ripped it into two.
“Nana!”
“I raised ya right, despite your mother’s influence. We’re going to make this right, but we’re not about to reward that ferret for his bad behavior. You’re going about it all wrong, boy. Time to draw up a new set of papers.”
He looked down at his phone, and his heart started racing. It was already three o’clock, and the wedding was at five. “I don’t know if there’s time.”
“You just get the papers and show up at the church. We’ll deal with the rest there.”
“And what will these new papers say?”
She grinned. “It’s time you learned from the master.”
Blair stood in the nursery of the First Presbyterian Church, looking at her reflection in the mirror. Her wedding dress was on a hanger behind her. She’d never been like most girls, Megan and Libby included. She hadn’t thumbed through bridal magazines and picked flowers and wedding colors when she was in high school. Blair wasn’t a romantic kind of woman—at least not the capital “r” type of romantic many women went in for—yet she’d had some ideas of what her wedding would be like.