A Camden Family Wedding. Victoria Pade
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could not change his mind about marriage and family any more than any other woman could.
* * *
Vonni was standing outside the Cherry Cricket at eight o’clock Wednesday night when she spotted Dane rush out of the Camden Building a block down.
Neither of their schedules had allowed for an earlier meeting, and since the rough-and-tumble bar and grill was between their offices on Second Street, Dane had suggested he buy her a burger as they began the process of planning his grandmother’s wedding.
Vonni had hesitated. She’d found it unnervingly difficult not to think about this guy since she’d met him, and because of that she knew it was better to keep this strictly business. A burger at the Cricket hardly qualified as being wined and dined, but there would be dining and she didn’t want anything about her contact with him to seem date-like.
But he was very persuasive.
Plus, she knew she wouldn’t have the chance to eat before they got together and didn’t want her stomach rumbling through a business meeting.
So there she was, watching the intensely attractive Dane Camden coming toward her.
He was tieless, the collar button of his white shirt was unfastened and his suit coat was slung over one shoulder. He very much looked as if he was done with business for the day and ready to relax. Like on a burger date.
Luckily Vonni was still wearing what she’d put on this morning for work—a white cowl-necked blouse under a teal green jacket and pencil skirt with the toes of her four-inch heels pinching to remind her she was still working even if he wasn’t.
“I didn’t keep you waiting, did I?” he asked as he approached, flashing a smile that was enough to make her forget about her aching feet.
“I was a few minutes early.” Which she always tried to be when it came to business. And that was all this was, she reminded herself when he held the door for her, told the bouncer sitting on a stool in the alcove that they were two for dinner then ushered her with a hand not quite touching her back to the table when the bouncer passed them off to the hostess.
All very date-like.
He requested a table outside where it was quieter and the hostess took them beyond the noise of the bar to a café table in the patio section that ran alongside the building.
Then the hostess traded places with a waitress who asked if they would like something to drink.
Before answering, Dane said to Vonni, “I’m having an end-of-the-day beer. How about you—beer, wine, something harder...?”
Vonni shook her head and spoke to the waitress. “I’ll have a lemonade.”
Dane ordered his beer and the waitress pointed out the menus that were stashed in the handles of a caddie that held ketchup, mustard, hot sauce and liquor ads.
“I’m starving,” he said, grabbing the menus and handing one to Vonni. “Let’s decide what we’re eating so we can order when she comes back and then we can just talk.”
About his grandmother’s wedding, Vonni said to herself to neutralize the effect of his very casual attitude. And his appeal. And the feeling that this was a date.
But it wasn’t! she reminded herself yet again.
Vonni focused on the menu, and by the time the waitress returned with their drinks, Dane ordered for them both, not forgetting a single detail of how Vonni wanted her burger or what she wanted on the side, proving just how attentive he’d been even as he focused on deciding his own meal.
Attentiveness that would have gained him points if this had been a date.
“Okay,” he said when the waitress had left. He reached around to the breast pocket of the suit coat he’d draped across the back of his seat and withdrew some folded papers. “Here’s the contract—signed, sealed and now delivered.”
He handed her the Burke’s Weddings contract she’d given him to look over.
“The deposit check is there, too, to get the ball rolling.”
Vonni glanced over them both and meticulously put them in a pocket of her leather binder.
“Now let’s talk turkey instead of burgers,” he suggested.
Vonni outlined the to-do list and the pace at which it would have to be done, then opened her date book to sort through some very tight scheduling.
“It’s June—prime wedding month—and I’m booked to my eyeballs,” she warned.
“Anything that works to fit us in. I’m completely at your disposal,” he assured her, and he meant it because he agreed to everything she laid out for him—including evenings and the weekend.
“So,” he said when they’d gone through it all by the time their burgers arrived, “we’ll be seeing a lot of each other....”
“Until the wedding, yes, we will be,” Vonni qualified.
He smiled as he checked out his bacon-and-blue-cheese burger. “Is that my limit? GiGi’s wedding? If I haven’t convinced you to come on board with Camdens by then will I have lost you for good?”
Leaving Burke’s Weddings and working for Camdens—that should have been what she’d thought about since meeting him. But somehow every time it had come to mind, so had he, and she’d just ended up thinking about him.
A really good reason not to accept his offer....
“I’m happy where I am and doing what I do,” she hedged.
“Great bargaining chip!” he proclaimed, sounding undaunted.
Then, just when Vonni thought he was going to launch into more sales pitch, he instead said, “We don’t know much about the man responsible for our makeup line. Tell me about him.”
“My grandfather?”
“And how he came up with formulas for makeup.”
“Seriously?” Vonni said, doubting that he was genuinely interested.
“Seriously.”
One of Vonni’s big turnoffs on her manhunt had been men whose attention wandered when she talked. Certain that would happen with Dane Camden, she decided any kind of turnoff was a good thing. So she said, “My grandfather was a chemist. Well, he’d actually just graduated with a degree in chemistry when he was recruited into the army during World War II. He was put to work creating skin camouflage.”
“Camdens’ award-winning makeup line began as war paint?”
“That’s what I was told. When my grandfather came out of the army—”
“Abe—that was his name, right? Abe Hunter?”
“Right. When he came home he had some trouble getting a job. My grandmother had read an article about Max Factor and she actually came up with the idea that my grandfather adapt his formulas for camouflage into makeup that women could use. You didn’t know this?”
“Until recently all we knew was that once upon a time there was an obscure brand of makeup that my grandmother and my mother and my aunt all used and loved. So when my great-grandfather—H.J.—decided to add a makeup counter to Camdens stores, that was the brand he wanted to carry. And he bought the formulas for it in order to produce it, too. That’s it. That’s all that any of us knew until... Well, like I said, recently.”
“But now you know more?” Vonni asked.
“Some,” he said, taking a turn at hedging himself. “We just came across a little more information.” His eyebrows pulled together in a half frown.
But he obviously wasn’t going to tell her more than that because then he said, “So your grandfather developed the makeup and started his own company with it....”
“Actually,