Rae
An hour and half later, Rae glanced over at the dance floor as the lilting music from the string quartet in the corner quieted, and the musicians set aside their instruments with a wooden clatter.
She tucked her purse under the elaborate head table and prepared to stand up because if the pretty stuff wasn’t playing, then maybe the DJ would put the good music back on for some more dancing and she and Lizzy could corral Georgie so they could dance again, even though she was getting pretty tired. She still could not believe everything that Wulf had done, or had had done, or something, for this wedding. She couldn’t imagine the tons of lush red and purple hydrangeas and roses anywhere back home, even in the Marsden Hotel, the grandest venue in Pirtleville. The silver chairs upholstered with royal blue satin looked like they belonged in Mrs. Harding’s front parlor because only the mayor’s wife could afford such high style, and there were hundreds of them grouped around the tables. Back home, this would be beyond lavish, outlandish in its scope and extravagance, and despised as flaunting money. They wouldn’t see it as the kind gift from Wulf that it was.
Oddly, there was still no music. Rae scanned the crowd of men in suits and ladies in silk and lace, looking for what was going on. Maybe it was over and they could rest for a while before dinner. The deep, soft bed in the Empire Suite called to her.
Lizzy flopped into a chair beside her, watching Theo walk back to the bar. Lizzy asked Rae, “What’s going on?”
Rae shrugged with both her palms turned up to Heaven. “I honestly have no idea what Wulf has planned next.”
The small DJ booth was empty, too, so Rae leaned back in her chair and looked around. The crowd rustled as everyone swiveled, and everyone’s attention oriented on two people by a grand piano in the corner.
Georgie sat on the bench, adjusting the distance to the keyboard, and the guy she had been sitting next to at Flicka’s table stood beside the curve of the piano’s body, leaning on the top. Rae had briefly met him last night at Flicka’s wedding, one of Pierre’s cousins.
Alexandre smoothed his long hair, pulling back so it lay behind his shoulders.
“I didn’t know Georgie played the piano,” Rae mused.
“Oh, yeah. She practices piano every day for a couple hours over in the practice rooms of the music department, plus a long stretch on weekends. She practices like she’s an Olympic pianist.”
“Has she ever performed?”
“Not that I know of,” Lizzy said. “Not even once.”
Georgie’s shoulders lifted as she settled her hands on the keyboard.
The guy opened his mouth and hit the first three notes, and Lizzy choked on her champagne. She backhanded Rae on the arm.
“Ow!” Rae rubbed her triceps.
“Oh my God! I didn’t even recognize him!” Lizzy whispered.
“You slap people around a lot.” Rae considered punching Lizzy in the arm in retaliation because she had been raised with brothers and you cannot let that kind of thing slide, but she looked over at the piano instead.
No one else in the whole room was talking, their full attention focused like stage lights on Georgie and the singer.
Rae whispered, “Why’d you hit me?”
“Oh my God! Do you know who that is?”
“Alexandre de Valentinois. He’s Pierre’s cousin. He’s probably related to Wulf somehow, too.” All the hundreds of people at Flicka’s wedding last night seemed to be Wulf’s cousins, somehow, by some branch or removal. His family was a fertile bunch. “Seriously, you know I’m from the Southwest Border region. My family tree don’t branch. I’m related to my cousin Frank Tyra through three different lines, but the generations of inbreeding around here shock the heck out me. I’m surprised they don’t all have babies with three heads.”
Lizzy spun to Rae, her pale blue eyes wide. “You don’t know who he is, do you?”
Rae looked again, but the guy was still Pierre’s cousin Alexandre. His golden brown hair hung past his shoulders, shining in waves, and was sun-bleached at the ends. His dark blue suit suggested that he was slim, maybe athletic. He looked like all Pierre’s cousins did though, gorgeous and glamorous, as if Grace Kelly’s Hollywood genes had moved horizontally through the generations of Grimaldis.
Rae blinked. She knew that she had that stupid-blank, down-home look on her face again, but she was in Paris and the object of a high-society wedding, so that was to be expected. “He’s Pierre’s cousin. I assume that he’s somebody. Everyone around here is somebody except us.”
Lizzy pointed. “Look at Georgie. She doesn’t know either!” She pulled her phone out of her purse and frantically tapped the screen, then held it up. “At least this useless thing still has a camera.”
“You didn’t get a French SIM card from the security guys?”
“Is that why this damn thing doesn’t work?” She tapped the video button.
At the piano, Georgie played dreamy, lovely music while Alexandre sang, and Georgie smiled at him over the top of the shining, black piano. His tenor voice echoed rich and full, hitting the higher notes with an open throat that rang through the room and falling through the runs with a supple grace. The song was about love, as was befitting a wedding, Rae thought, and he sang the lines with his voice blazing with hope like he had handed a woman his still-beating heart. Even Rae could tell that he was really good.
Everyone else was silent, listening. Cell phones stuck out of the crowd like periscopes.
Of course Georgie was smiling at Alexandre. Georgie always smiled that way at gorgeous men and, considering who everyone was around here, he was probably loaded, too. Surely Georgie wouldn’t hold that against him.
Rae said to Lizzy, “Maybe she knows and doesn’t care.”
“Oh, she would care. Georgie’s such a music snob. If she knew who he was, she’d be making tsk sounds right now instead of fucking him with her eyeballs. If she screws him before she figures it out, she’s going to shit bears in tutus. And shhh! I’m trying to video this.”
“We’ll have to tell her,” Rae said, thinking that she should ask Wulf if Alexandre was the Duke of The Boondocks or the Comte d’Wherever.
“No,” Lizzy said, and evil took shape in her eyes. “She’s the fucking mastermind. Let her figure it out. Twenty bucks says she scrogs him before she puts it together.”
Rae glanced at her phone. “You know the plane for home leaves in six hours, right?”
“That long?” Lizzy asked. “Make it fifty.”