May The Best Man Wed

“Cathedral flowers?”

“Two dozen urns filled with larkspur and white waxflower branches, fourteen feet tall, front pew to back. Candles on metal stands ringed with lemon leaves and gardenias at aisles. Confirm white candles on altar.”

She jabbed Up for the elevator connecting the underground garage to the Sweetfield corporate offices.

“Champagne?” she asked into the recorder.

“Perrier-Jouet,” she answered herself.

“Crystal?”

“Baccarat.”

The elevator ascended.

“Guests?”

“Double-check Grammy Eta is seated as far away from Auntie Luanne as possible. Have Cousin Charlene keep count of Great-Uncle Pom’s gin fizzes. Check on hotel gift bags for out-of-town guests. Remind—monogrammed gold W on bag or no go.”

The elevator stopped, the doors opened and Savannah stepped out, her staccato steps swallowed by carpet. All was silence as she walked through the reception area, past the offices on the fifteenth floor of Sweetfield’s corporate headquarters. She was the first to arrive. Always.

The click of the record button broke the silence. “Cocktail buffet?”

“Dungeness crab cocktail shooters, iced jumbo prawns, eastern oysters shucked to order, served on cracked ice.”

Her mother had suggested one of the wedding planners renowned in their circle, but Savannah had rejected flat-out the very idea of trusting a complete stranger with the needs and nuances of this event. This was more than a wedding. It was an alliance between old Southern stature and new South self-made standing; a merger between a Goliath of old-guard tradition and a Goliath of modern capitalism. And everybody who was anybody in Georgia had been scrambling for the right outfit and the perfect present since the day the engagement of Savannah Ainsling Sweetfield and McCormick Beauregarde Walker hit Atlanta’s society pages.

Even Savannah’s immediate family had been impressed enough to conceal their surprise that she would be the first of the five Sweetfield offspring to marry. She’d been born somewhere amongst three handsome brothers and a sister whose inherited beauty and charm had secured her place in the world since birth. When nothing else had developed on Savannah except her comprehension of her position in the overall scheme of things, she had realized she’d have to work harder, longer and smarter than any of her siblings just to be more than an afterthought in her family of natural wonders.

Her mother, a woman of complex and contradictory passions, had been most moved by the news of her less-endowed daughter’s engagement. Once bold enough to go by train unescorted all the way to New York City to dance on the stage, Belle Sweetfield had soon found her way back to the bosom of her birth—but not before marrying a Yankee whose canny business abilities, it was politely whispered, had been supplemented by enigmatic resources. Motherhood had swiftly followed, diverting the young beauty’s energies into more conventional channels and sterner standards which now, as she wept, seemed to have culminated in her daughter’s betrothal to a family with land and money and pale skin and blond hair and blood as blue as anyone else’s in Dixie. Savannah had even witnessed, prompted by his wife’s joy, a sheen in the eyes of her father, Jack Sweetfield, a man whose fortune had given the woman he helplessly adored everything except the social acceptance she so craved.

Such was the impact unleashed by Savannah and McCormick’s engagement announcement. That day, standing there before her parents’ highly unlikely display of emotion, Savannah had reached for her fiancé’s hand and held on tightly, suddenly humbled by the magnitude of their decision.

Not that she wasn’t certain about marrying McCormick. It was just that Savannah and her intended, both sharing and admiring the same practical nature, had arrived at this juncture in a somewhat less-than-impassioned manner. They had first met as emissaries of their family’s respective empires, a meeting generated by each other’s desire to achieve unprecedented success for their companies, their families and themselves. Small talk had swiftly been tabled in order to discuss the possibility of the two businesses forming an unshakable conglomerate in direct response to a looming overseas threat. Savannah had known right off that her future fiancé had chosen to approach her first in the family because she was a woman. Rather than being indignant, she had appreciated her opponent’s strategy—just as he’d soon learned to enjoy an equal who wasn’t a pushover in the boardroom or the bedroom.

From there, the couple’s remarkable compatibility began and continued into all other weighty areas. Savannah couldn’t even remember who first came up with the idea of marriage. It had seemed a natural and foregone conclusion to such harmony between two individuals. After marriage, they’d agreed both would continue flourishing at the new megacompany currently in the long process of being created. Without question, Savannah would keep her maiden name, no hyphen. They’d have children eventually—two or four. Certainly not one or three—odd numbers were too awkward. And although her daddy’s beginnings were farther north and a wildness had once run in her mama’s blood, Savannah suspected neither she nor McCormick would leave the South until they were planted side by side in the family plot.

She smiled as she walked down the silent hall, anticipating the jangling phones and whirring faxes and constant interruptions that would make a less-competent woman crazy. In a little under two weeks, she was going to be a wife, and like everything else she took on, she would do her job as near to perfection as possible—beginning with a perfect wedding, right down to every last petal on the thousands of sugar roses that would cover the six-foot, ten-tier vanilla buttercream cake.

Striding through her office suite, Savannah took advantage of the calm before the storm that was often her day to review her recorded checklist. She marched through the private reception area appointed by her favorite designers, ignoring the deliberately impressive sweep of the city outside the conference room’s windows as she finalized the status of each detail with every exact step. She might have been stepping in high cotton by the time she arrived at her private office. She clicked off the recorder, the decisive sound making her smile. No, not one thing would go wrong with this wedding. She pushed open her office door, thoroughly triumphant.

And stopped dead for the first time in what might have been decades.

Between her two prized Eames armchairs, behind the great black rosewood desk, in her custom chair of plush gray velvet, sat a man.

A shallow breath later, Savannah’s facilities snapped back into operating mode, summoning the determination and composure that had defeated many adversaries—predominantly male—before. She assessed her current enemy. Late twenties, early thirties, Caucasian but tan. Very tan. More than very tan—burnished, bronzed, a life-risking, severely glorious golden. Even at this ungodly hour of the morning when all was wan, this man was radiant. Hadn’t he read the AMA reports about the dangers of excessive sun exposure? This radiance was unique, unprecedented, more than a color or a cancer-causing factor. It seemed a heat, a flare, an ignited pyre. Her climate-controlled office was, as always, a moderate seventy-one degrees, but she felt a dampness beneath the curve of her underarms, between her knees, at the juncture of her thighs.

She hated to sweat.

Preferring anger to fear, she suddenly didn’t care if the brilliant male specimen before her was Ra the Sun God himself. His rear, which judging from the rest of the package was probably equally golden-brown and magnificent, was in her chair. At her desk. In her office.

She strode to the desk, grabbed the phone and dialed Security. “My office, immediately.”

“Nice man, George.” The sun god spoke, his tone languid, his voice warm and smoky as if fueled by the heat. She stared at him without expression. She was still sweating.

“The night security guard. His first name is George. Last name McCallahan.” The man’s eyes were gem-green in a face sinful in its seduction. “You didn’t know that, did you?”

Even if her excessive sense of responsibility and guilt gave her the inclination, she could never know everyone who worked for the Sweetfield Corporation. “This building employs hundreds of people.” Terrific. She was defending herself to a psychopath.

“His wife, Velma, is going in for a knee replacement on her right knee next week. Had the left one done five years ago. Went like a breeze. Still, George is a little apprehensive.”

Play nice with the nut case now. She smiled while her mind worked overtime. Security would be here in less than a minute. Her silver letter opener could gut a catfish but it was in her top desk drawer. Still smiling, she sat down as if to have a nice chat and employed the one weapon at her disposal—she crossed her legs. While her sister had received the bulk of her mother’s beauty, and Savannah had got whatever was left, her mother’s dancer genes and Savannah’s perverse need to exercise had eventually resulted in a facsimile of Belle’s former Radio City Music Hall Rockette legs. Psychotic or not, the man was, after all, a man.

She twisted to the side, turning her entwined legs to greater advantage. If she could distract him, she might be able to grab the solid brass sculpture on the nearby table before he could stop her.

She shifted again, uncrossed her legs slowly, then recrossed them several inches higher on her thigh. The man was in a trance now. She edged her fingers along the chair’s arm.

“Ms. Sweetfield?”

Savannah jumped, startled by the voice at the door. Her arm flung out, knocking the sculpture onto her exposed toes.

Pain shot from the point of impact up her limbs. Savannah howled. She’d never howled in her life. She grabbed the murderous objet d’art off her well-shod foot and waved back the security guard as he rushed toward her.

The man sitting in her custom chair eased back and propped his long, lean legs across her polished desk. She stared at his heavy boots wriggling hello at her from the desk’s corner.

“Steel toes, sweetheart. Only way to go in this big, bad world.”

She met the sun god’s calm gaze. In her mind’s eye, she jumped up and lunged toward him, her hands circling that bronzed throat. For the first time, she wished she were a woman who followed her impulses. Her hands gripped the sculpture. “When the police arrive to take this man away,” she spoke to the security guard without taking her eyes off the trespasser and his size-thirteen tootsies resting on her rosewood desk, “tell them I’ll be down before lunch to personally press charges.”

George cleared his throat. “Are you sure you want to do that, Ms. Sweetfield?”

Her head whipped to the guard. “A man breaks into my office—”

“Well, no, actually he didn’t break in, Ms. Sweetfield.”

“What’d he do—just ask for the key card at the front desk?”

“No.” The security guard glanced at the man behind her desk. “I let him in.”

“You let him in?” After the howl, she was careful to keep her voice temperate but firm. Her hands tightened on the sculpture.

“I figured, being the man is your fiancé and all—” Savannah’s head swung to the intruder.

“And since policy had been sent down to show Mr. Walker directly to your office on arrival, I escorted him here as instructed. Had a nice chat, too.”

“Well, I, for one, appreciate your rare sense of hospitality, George.” The sun god spoke. “And your even rarer, although mistaken, identification of me as worthy of this lovely lady.”

Amusement twinkled in the sun god’s emerald eyes as he flashed the whitest teeth she’d ever seen. Had he actually just winked at her? Her knuckles popped as she clutched the sculpture.