The Last Groom on Earth Read Free Page B

Kelly chimed in.
    “Thanks.” Angela smiled at her friends. It warmed her heart that they had such confidence in her. People had told her that it would be impossible to be partners with a friend, but time had proven those doom-sayers false. She had worked with Tim and Kelly for almost eight years, and both the business and their friendship had flourished.
    Still, today was one time when she would have wished that they were not so quick to rely on her judgment. She was open-minded enough to admit that her dislike of Bryce was not rational, but emotional, and she worried now that she had made a mistake that might hurt their business.
    Tim and Kelly returned to their offices, and Angela settled down behind her desk to work. But after several minutes of staring at her blank blue computer screen, she realized that working was impossible at the moment. Her mind was like a hamster on its wheel, circling endlessly.
    With a sigh, she planted her elbows on the desk and sank her head onto her hands; she stared down at her desk, thinking. She disliked Bryce Richards, and she did not want him here at the office, poking his nose into everything. But, on the other hand, she would never forgive herself if he could have found the key totheir financial troubles, and she had not let him just because of an old childhood antagonism.
    Finally she picked up the phone and dialed her mother’s number in Charlotte. A few minutes later, she was in her car heading toward the Radisson Hotel.

Two
    B ryce leaned back in his chair and massaged his temples wearily. He had checked into his hotel and started work on his presentation for CompCon tomorrow, just as he had planned, but he found it difficult to concentrate on the numbers strung out across the sheets in front of him. His meeting with Angela had left him irritable and dissatisfied.
    He made a noise of disgust and got to his feet. That woman! He got up and began to pace the room. Angela Hewitt was as great a pest as she had been as an adolescent. He could remember with great clarity the silly tricks she had played on him when he came to visit her mother. A slightly chubby girl with wild, curly red hair and a mouthful of braces, she had seemed to delight in making Bryce feel foolish and out of place. And, of course, he thought, remembering his own gawky, uncertain self, he had been the perfect foil forher tricks. He had already felt ill at ease just being in the Hewitts’ house. It was gracious and obviously expensive, but without a breath of ostentation, a jewel of old-money taste. Being inside their house had been a glimpse into an entirely different sort of life for him, a life that he had wanted with every fiber of his being. At the same time, he had been terrified that he might break something in his awkwardness or that he might make some gauche mistake that would reveal his ignorance.
    Angela seemed to have understood that with the instinct that children have, and she had played on it. Bryce had never been sure when he might find a whoopee cushion on his seat or a plastic bug in his drink. She was prone to tell him stories about her family, which he was never sure were true or not. He had believed the first one, that Angela’s aunt was a famous pianist, and had mentioned something about her to Marina, who had looked at him blankly, then told him that she didn’t have a sister. He had felt a fool and after that he was sure never to repeat anything Angela told him unless someone else had confirmed her story.
    A reluctant smile twitched at Bryce’s lips as he remembered her wilder concoctions. No one could ever accuse Angela of lacking imagination. Looking back on it now, he could see that her tricks were merely adolescent buffoonery. Someone with more confidence than he had at the time would have shrugged them off. But he had been a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, with nothing going for him but his brain, and he had wanted desperately to fit in.
    Of course, he was nothing like that