It was nearly two o’clock in the morning when I finally returned home from catering the Steinbrenner-Moskowitzes’ four-hundred-person wedding reception in Laurel Canyon. I dragged myself to the bathroom to brush my teeth. You could say I was bone tired; but that would be an understatement. I was bone, skin, muscle, organ, and blood cell tired. Even my hair was tired.
It was all I could do to lift the toothbrush to my mouth to give my teeth a half-hearted two minutes of brushing. The muscles in my right arm burned from the effort. Flossing was out of the question. My only thought was of my bed. I couldn’t wait to flop my head on my soft, fluffy pillow and burrow under my comforter to settle in for a dreamless sleep.
I turned to trudge from the bathroom to the bedroom and bumped into the wall of muscle that was my boyfriend Dave’s chest.
“Hey,” I managed in a monotone.
“Hey, yourself.” He planted a kiss on the top of my head. “It looked like the reception went off without a hitch,” he observed as he trailed me into the bedroom.
I smiled weakly. He was right. The wedding reception had been, well, perfect.
Every detail—from the pearls woven into the bride’s bouquet to the sugar globes and gold leaf studding the four-tier wedding cake—had been fine-tuned and fussed over, thanks in no small part to the mother of the bride’s obsessive attention to every imaginable detail. The florist and the bandleader had found Mrs. Steinbrenner to be irritating at worst and distracting at best, but I thought her behavior was sort of endearing. She just wanted to make sure her daughter’s big day was perfect, after all. It was hardly a war crime.
Dave had caught the very end of the reception, as the guests had waved goodbye to the happy couple under a canopy of fairy lights and gardenias. Then, he’d helped me schlep all my stuff to my car and his pickup truck and had caravanned down the canyon hills with me.
“It was a beautiful wedding. It nearly killed me, but it was glorious. I never want to think about another wedding again. Ever.”
Dave gave a short nod of his head. “Right.”
I loved owning my own catering company. Feeding people filled my soul. But I felt this way—flattened and drained—after every wedding, so Dave could be forgiven for ignoring my hyperbole.
“I mean it this time. No more weddings,” I insisted, stifling a yawn.
Instead of challenging my empty statement, he just took me by the hand, led me to the edge of the bed, and gently pushed me into a seated position.
“Rosemary, before you go to sleep tonight, there’s one more thing I want to do.”
I stared up at him for a long, bleary moment. I mean, don’t get me wrong—I’m very into my boyfriend, but he had to be kidding. I was exhausted.
“Not tonight, pal. I’m dead on my feet.” I tried to soften the blow with a smile and gentle pat on his forearm. “I’d love a rain check for tomorrow, though,” I said in my best sexy voice, which given the hour and my state was pretty ragged.
He fixed me with an expression of mild disdain and shook his head. “Not that.”
I looked at him blankly with heavy-lidded, sleepy eyes. If not that, then what? What did he want to do in the middle of the night after I’d worked an eighteen-hour day on the heels of back-to-back fifteen-hour workdays? Play Scrabble? Give the dog a bath? As I was formulating my witty retort, he dropped to one knee on the bedroom floor.
I cocked my head and stared at him in confusion. From her spot on the foot of the bed, our dog, Mona Lisa, gave him an equally quizzical head tilt. I yawned, wide-mouthed, and tried to make sense of the whole scene but my fuzzy brain wouldn’t cooperate.
He reached into his pocket and produced a tiny, square box tied with a white satin bow.
My eyes popped all the way open. My pulse fluttered. I took a quick sniff of my fingers to see if I caught a whiff of the two dozen heads of garlic I’d roasted for my silky garlic and herb dip. Luckily, my trick of rubbing my hands with a lemon after handling garlic seemed to have worked. I didn’t smell like vampire repellant, as far as I could tell.
Dave intertwined his fingers between mine. Then he smiled, and his warm brown eyes crinkled adorably.
“I love you, Rosemary. I love every ludicrous thing about you. I love your gross fast food habit, your stubbornness, the way you drool in your sleep.”
“I don’t drool,” I protested, even though we both knew my pillow was damp every morning.
He ignored me and plowed ahead with his speech. “I want to spend every day for the rest of my life watching you drool. Will you marry me, Rosemary?”
He returned my hand to my lap and opened the box. A slender band with a sparkling stone that caught the light like water sat nestled on a white silk pillow.
I was definitely wide awake now. In fact, I was bouncing on the edge of the bed like a kid. Pure joy shot through me. I forgot all about my tired, achy, exhausted self and was struck by three immediate, phenomenal ideas.
One, of course I would marry him. I loved Dave Drummond beyond all reason. We’d woven our lives together so seamlessly that I couldn’t imagine my world without him in it.
Two, I couldn’t wait to bake my own wedding cake. I already knew exactly what flavors I’d use—honeysuckle lemon cake with lavender cream, topped with crystallized wildflowers.
And three, we would have the wedding at Tranquility, the Resort by the Sea, the struggling vacation retreat I co-owned with my sisters Sage and Thyme.
In hindsight, one of three would actually turn out to be a good idea. The other two? Disastrous, calamitous, catastrophic. Plain old bad.
Oblivious to the storm to come, I flung my arms around his neck and squeaked out an excited ‘yes.’