One Good Friend Deserves Another Read Free Page A

club, and I’d like to get there before her third gin and tonic. You’ll take care of Kelly, Marta?”
    “Don’t you worry. I’ll find our disillusioned friend and share a cab with her back to the city.” Marta gave her a sassy wink. “Have fun picking out wedding favors.”
    Marta headed back into the hotel as Trey slipped into the car. He flung the jacket of his Savile Row suit in the backseat.
    Wendy slipped the car into gear and said, “Next time, I’m making you take the train.”
    “What?”
    She reached over and tugged the Egyptian cotton of his Oxford shirt. “Your shirt is buttoned wrong.”
    “The dance floor was packed. I unbuttoned to cool off.”
    “You stink of sex.”
    “That’s sweat.” He gripped his collar and buried his face in the cloth.
    “Trey, I asked you to meet me here for convenience. So I wouldn’t spend two and a half hours trying to fetch you out of the bowels of Manhattan. I did not ask you here so you could cause trouble at Dhara’s engagement party.” Wendy felt her temper rising. “And just because your driver’s license is suspended doesn’t mean I have to be responsible for driving you upstate every weekend.”
    “Relax, relax!”
    “Just convince me,” she said, as she turned into traffic, “that you didn’t hook up with any of Dhara’s cousins.”
    “Hey, I don’t ‘hook up’ with your friends anymore.” He fumbled with the buttons. “Ancient friggin’ history, Wendy.”
    Wendy’s jaw tightened. He was right, of course. The thing with Kelly was a long time ago. And he’d made his apologies back then, as best he could after the emotional damage was done. But Trey’s screwups were frequent and had a very predictable cycle: he’d do something stupid and then spend an inordinate amount of time flailing about, looking for ways to patch things up.
    Problem was, a fragile woman’s heart just couldn’t be made new again.
    “So,” Trey said, settling back in the leather seat, “it’s finally getting to you.”
    “What?”
    “You know, Bitsy’s plan to make your wedding the Event of the Millennium.”
    Wendy’s grip tightened on the steering wheel. She would have closed her eyes, if she weren’t weaving through rush-hour traffic. “Mom’s heart is in the right place,” she said. “But you’d think, if you hired a Manhattan wedding planner to coordinate an event, that the wedding planner would make most of these decisions for us.”
    “As if Bitsy would let that happen.”
    “Dhara got engaged only a week ago,” she said, “yet her parents managed to throw together a party for two hundred relatives.”
    “Balloons, Wendy. There were balloons.”
    “They called a relative who manages the hotel, and they had a hall. They called another family friend who catered the food. They hired a DJ who was a member of the family. Voilà, a party.”
    “Right, I can just see Bitsy eating lamb curry with a plastic spork.”
    “No sixteen-piece band, no harpist at the cocktail party, no—”
    “My dear,” he said, imitating their mother right down to the cadence of her speech, “that’s just the way things are done. ”
    Yes, Wendy thought, that was the way things were done with the Parkers and the Wainwrights and the Livingstons of Westchester County, that’s the way it had been done for generations, and so that was the way it was going to be done now and for all generations going forward, like a succession of rogue waves battering each bewildered young couple.
    Poor little rich girl.
    Wendy cleared her throat to cover up a humorless laugh. Poor little Wendy with her rich-girl problems. What she really needed was perspective: There were much worse wedding situations than hers. Dhara, for example. Agreeing, for reasons Wendy still couldn’t fathom, to marry an utter stranger.
    Wendy wasn’t marrying a stranger. She was the luckiest woman in the world. In three months, she’d be married to Parker Pryce-Weston.
    An hour later, when she pulled up