Slightly Engaged

  CRITICAL PRAISE FOR Mike, Mike & Me

  “The inventive premise of Markham’s winning novel involves a love triangle in both the past and the present among pretty Beau, the Mike she married, and the Mike she left behind…. Markham’s latest is an appealing, wholly original yarn.”

  —Booklist

  “…hilarious…readers will be instantly catapulted back in time, into their own versions of Very Big Hair and spandex bike shorts.”

  —Romantic Times BOOKclub

  CRITICAL PRAISE FOR Slightly Settled

  “Readers who followed Tracey’s struggles in Slightly Single, and those meeting her for the first time, will sympathize with this singleton’s post-breakup attempts to move on in this fun, lighthearted romp with a lovable heroine.”

  —Booklist

  “Like many women, Tracey needs to figure out when to listen to her friends and when to listen to herself.”

  —Romantic Times BOOKclub

  CRITICAL PRAISE FOR Slightly Single

  “…an undeniably fun journey for the reader.”

  —Booklist

  “Bridget Jonesy…Tracey Spadolini smokes, drinks and eats too much, and frets about her romantic life.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  WENDY MARKHAM

  is a pseudonym for New York Times bestselling, award-winning novelist Wendy Corsi Staub, who has written more than sixty fiction and nonfiction books for adults and teenagers in various genres—among them contemporary and historical romance, suspense, mystery, television and movie tie-in and biography. She has coauthored a hardcover mystery series with former New York City mayor Ed Koch and has ghostwritten books for various well-known personalities. A small-town girl at heart, she was born and raised in western New York on the shores of Lake Erie and in the heart of the notorious snow belt. By third grade, her heart was set on becoming a published author; a few years later, a school trip to Manhattan convinced her that she had to live there someday. At twenty-one, she moved alone to New York City and worked as an office temp, freelance copywriter, advertising account coordinator and book editor before selling her first novel, which went on to win a Romance Writers of America RITA® Award. She has since received numerous positive reviews and achieved bestseller status, most notably for the psychological suspense novels she writes under her own name. Her Red Dress Ink title Slightly Single was one of Waldenbooks’ Best Books of 2002. Very happily married with two children, Wendy writes full-time and lives in a cozy old house in suburban New York, proving that childhood dreams really can come true.

  Slightly Engaged

  Wendy Markham

  In loving memory of my beautiful mom,

  Francella Corsi

  April 17, 1942–May 11, 2005

  You alone read and loved everything I ever wrote….

  And you said you liked the “funny ones” best of all. Here’s one

  more, written with laughter through tears, especially for you.

  Most of all the other beautiful things in life come by twos and threes, by dozens and hundreds. Plenty of roses, stars, sunsets, rainbows, brothers, and sisters, aunts and cousins, but only one mother in the whole wide world.

  —Kate Douglas Wiggin

  Contents

  Part I:Labor Day Weekend

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part II:Sweetest Day, Beggar’s night

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part III:Thanksgiving

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Part IV:Christmas

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part V:Anguilla

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part VI:Valentine’s Day

  Chapter 18

  Part VII:October

  Epilogue

  Part I

  Labor Day Weekend

  Chapter 1

  I love weddings!

  Doesn’t everyone?

  Um, apparently not.

  “Cripes, Tracey, I can’t believe this is how we’re spending the last Saturday of the summer.”

  That’s my live-in boyfriend, Jack, grumbling as he gazes bleakly through the windshield of our rented subcompact car at the holiday-traffic-clogged Jersey Turnpike. The midday sun is glaring overhead and heat radiates in waves off the asphalt, along with toxic black exhaust fumes.

  Thank God for air-conditioning. I adjust the full-blast passenger’s-side vent to blow in the vicinity of my navel, lest it muss my fancy upswept do.

  It took me almost an hour and a half a can of Aussie Freeze Spray to get my straight, bra-clasp-length brown hair looking this supermodelish. It’ll probably wilt the second I get out of the car, but at least Jack got to appreciate it. He was momentarily complimentary about my hair and my slinky red cocktail dress before he went back to grousing about the wedding.

  It shouldn’t bug me that he didn’t mention anything about how I was wearing a similar red dress the night we met.

  It shouldn’t, but it does.

  I can’t help it. For the first year or so that we were together, he made a point of noticing details like that. I guess he’s gotten less romantic the last few months. Or maybe I’ve gotten overly sensitive. I shouldn’t go around weighing every comment he makes—or noticing the ones he doesn’t make anymore.

  I shouldn’t, but lately, I do.

  It’s not that I think we’ve fallen out of love. If anything, we’ve become closer, our lives interwoven. His friends are my friends; his mother and his favorite sister, Rachel, sometimes call just to talk to me. My friends are his friends; my mother and sister—well, forget about them. The point is, we’re still a solid couple. We laugh all the time; we know each other’s most intimate secrets; the sex is frequent and good, if I do say so myself.

  So what’s the problem?

  I want more, dammit. I deserve more. I’m finally over the pesky feelings of unworthiness and insecurity that festered in the wake of my arrogant ex-boyfriend, Will, who callously blew me off two summers ago.

  It’s not as though I’ve come right out and asked Jack what his intentions are—maybe because I’m afraid of the answer. But lately, I’ve found myself wondering pretty frequently—all right, constantly—whether Jack is ever going to take the initiative to make our relationship permanent.

  Since he hasn’t, I tend to secretly look for evidence that he’s got the opposite plan in mind. Or, at the very least, that he’s losing interest.

  All right, maybe the ghost of unworthy, insecure Tracey has come back to haunt me. But I really should stop nitpicking—even if it’s just mental nitpicking. Really. Before I turn into one of those Bitter Shrews.

  Which Bitter Shrews, you might ask?

  Oh, you know. The Bitter Shrews who nobody wants to marry. The ones who eventually become joyless middle-aged spinsters with mouths that have those vertical wrinkles in the corners from wearing perpetually grim expressions.

  Oblivious to the horrific visions careening beneath my divine updo, Jack props his outstretched wrists on the top curve of the steering wheel in frustration as he brakes to yet another stop.

  “We should have RSVP’d no, Tracey. This is ridiculous.”

  “How could we do that? Mike’s one of your best friends. Plus he’s my boss.”

  “Soon-to-be ex-boss.”

  Right. Mike was fired a few weeks ago. Sort of. The command came down from the formidable Adrian Smedly, director of our account group, to Mike’s supervisor, Carol the Wimpy Management Rep. But she didn’t have the balls—or in her case, the heart�
��to come right out and ax a soon-to-be groom. Instead, she called him into her office and more or less told him to start looking for a new job as soon as possible.

  The thing about Mike is that he’s incessantly upbeat in a dopey, wide-eyed kind of way, like a big old happy pup. He trots nonchalantly through life wearing an open, friendly expression, heedless that his shirts are frequently rumpled and his hair is always mussed. If Mike had a tail, it would be perpetually wagging.

  So when Carol told him in so many words that he doesn’t have a future at Blair Barnett Advertising, Mike seemed pretty unfazed. In fact, from what I can tell, he hasn’t started cleaning out his office or even put together his résumé. I should know. He’s all but illiterate.

  For the past almost three years I’ve been working at Blair Barnett, my primary purpose in life is to proofread Mike’s stuff, both work related and personal. I’ve doctored his memos, his presentations, even the supposedly impromptu toast he gave at his engagement party. If he were doing a résumé, I’d definitely know about it. I’d probably be writing it.

  Never mind that what I should be writing by now—what I fully expected to be writing by now—is ad copy.

  Last year I was promoted from my original entry-level account management position, but not into the coveted Creative Department, as promised. No, I was given the title account coordinator on the McMurray-White packaged goods account, which basically means I make a few thousand dollars more per year to remain in my claustrophobic cubicle and officially do administrative stuff while unofficially assisting my incompetent boss with his own duties. Oh, and I get all the freebie product I want, which means I am pretty much stocked for life on Blossom deodorant and Abate laxatives.

  I’m supposedly still first in line for the next junior copywriting position that opens up in the Creative Department.

  The trouble is, thanks to the lousy economy, Blair Barnett has been routinely laying off employees, including junior copywriters and account coordinators, for the past eighteen months. Jack, who is a media supervisor at the agency, keeps reminding me that we’re both lucky we still have jobs.

  But I’m twenty-five years old. I don’t want a job; I want a career. And with Mike gone—which, presumably, he soon will be—who’s going to push for me to get another promotion? Certainly not wimpy Carol.

  “Aside from whether or not Mike’s my boss, you still lived with him for years,” I point out to Jack, shoving aside troubling thoughts of office politics. “You can’t just not go to his wedding.”

  “Why not? I should be protesting his wedding.”

  “Protesting?” Amused, I imagine Jack picketing the church in a sandwich board. “On what grounds?”

  “On the grounds that I loathe the bride.”

  “Yeah, well, who doesn’t?”

  Back when Jack was Mike’s roommate and Dianne was Mike’s omnipresent girlfriend, Jack referred to Dianne as a one-woman axis of evil.

  I have to say, he wasn’t necessarily exaggerating.

  It’s hard to remember that I actually kind of liked her back when she was just a voice on the other end of the phone whenever I answered Mike’s line at the office. My opinion changed rapidly when I found myself sharing girlfriend privileges with her in Mike and Jack’s tiny Brooklyn apartment.

  Miscellaneous things I hate about Dianne:

  1) She’s a catty, mean-spirited snob.

  2) She talks to Mike in this cutesy-poo baby voice whenever she isn’t bitching at him.

  3) She once called Jack an asshole behind his back and probably to his face for all I know.

  Oh, and 4) She’s getting married.

  Hell, yes, I’m jealous.

  Don’t you think it’s unfair that she’s getting married, and I’m not?

  Yeah, so do I.

  Ironically, if it weren’t for me, Dianne wouldn’t be walking down the aisle today. Or, most likely, ever. I mean, who would want a one-woman axis of evil for a wife?

  I guess Mike would.

  Except that I don’t think he really does. He’s basically getting married by default.

  When Jack and I moved in together a year and a half ago, Mike was left without a roommate. He halfheartedly tried to find a new one for a while, then told Dianne maybe they should live together. She said no way. Not without an engagement ring on her finger and a wedding date on her calendar.

  Mike swore to me and Jack that there was no way he was getting married. Not to Dianne, not yet, maybe not ever. He supposedly looked for an affordable studio apartment for a couple of weeks to no avail.

  The next thing we knew, he had gone over to the dark side and was shopping for diamond rings.

  Rather, he was arranging a five-year payment plan with sky-high interest for the rock Dianne had already picked out.

  Wuss.

  “Are we almost at the exit?” Jack asks, lifting his foot off the brake and creeping the tiny car forward a whopping two or three feet before stopping again with a colorful curse. It isn’t the first time he’s said that—or worse—since we left Manhattan this morning.

  The day started off on the wrong foot at the rental-car place down First Avenue from our apartment on the Upper East Side.

  Our Apartment.

  Funny how even after seventeen months of living with somebody, you still get a little thrill over the mundane daily reminders of domestic coupledom. At least, I still do.

  Anyway, we had reserved a midsize sedan, but for some reason the counter agent couldn’t quite express—either because she didn’t speak English or because she simply didn’t have a logical explanation why—we got stuck with a car that’s roughly the size of a toilet bowl, give or take.

  At least it doesn’t smell like a toilet bowl, like the rental car Jack and I had when we went to my friend Kate’s wedding in sweltering Alabama last summer.

  Then again, the lemon-shaped air-freshener thingy hanging from the rearview mirror in this car isn’t much better. It kind of reminds me of that bathroom spray that doesn’t really eliminate odors, merely infuses them with a fruity aroma. My parents’ bathroom frequently reeks of country-apple-scented poop.

  Jack and I keep good old-fashioned Lysol in our bathroom.

  Our Bathroom.

  In Our Apartment.

  See? Little thrill.

  After said thrill subsides, I consult the contents of the engraved ivory-linen envelope in my lap: an invitation with a tag line that reads Grow old along with me…the best is yet to be…a reception card and a little annotated road map of this particular corner of hell.

  Er, Jersey.

  “I think we’re about five miles away from the exit,” I tell Jack.

  “That means at least another hour. Maybe we’ll miss the ceremony,” he adds hopefully.

  But we don’t. We eventually find ourselves driving along a strip mall–dotted highway with fifteen minutes to spare. Unless we’re lost. Which, come to think of it, we just might be. I think I might have missed a turn a mile or so back, when I was trying to dislodge my numb feet from the cramped space between my purse and the glove compartment.

  Jack’s getting crankier by the second, I have to pee, and we’re both scanning the sides of the road as if any second now we might see a picturesque white steeple poking up amidst the concrete-block-and-plate-glass suburban landscape.

  “What’s the name of the church again, Tracey?” he asks, apparently thinking we might have somehow overlooked a place of worship nestled in the shadow of Chuck E. Cheese.

  Without checking the invitation again, I quip, to break the tension, “Our Lady of Everlasting Misery.”

  Jack laughs. “Really? I thought it was Our Lady of Eternal Damnation.”

  I giggle. “Or Our Lady of Imminent Sorrow.” Then, the nice Catholic girl in me adds, “We probably shouldn’t be making jokes like that.”

  “Sure we should. If Mike’s asinine enough to get married, we can make jokes about it.”

  Okay, here I go again.

  But the thing is… />
  Jack didn’t say, If Mike’s asinine enough to get married to Dianne.

  He said, If Mike’s asinine enough to get married.

  Period.

  Which makes me wonder if he thinks only the Asinine exchange vows.

  It’s not as if he’s ever said anything to the contrary.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks, looking over at me.

  “I have to pee.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I squirm and struggle to cross my legs beneath the skirt of the slinky red cocktail dress he earlier admired but callously didn’t remember to relate to the slinky red cocktail dress I was wearing the magical night we met at the office Christmas party, lo, twenty months ago.

  “Am I sure I have to pee?” I echo, irritated. “Of course I’m sure.”

  “I mean, is that all that’s wrong?”

  No. I have to pee and there’s no room in this car for leg-crossing and I’m doomed to bitter spinsterdom, thanks to him.

  My mother and sister were right. I should never have moved in with Jack so quickly.

  Mental note: Next time you are cordially invited to live with someone, request ring and wedding date prior to signing of lease.

  Dianne might be a bitch, but she’s a brilliantly strategic bitch. Here I am wedged into a citrus-scented Kia, sans ring or any hope of one, while she’s lounging in a stretch limo in a tiara with a glass of champagne in one hand and a prayer book in the other, serenely contemplating happily-ever-after with the man she loves.

  Yes. Or, more likely, she has her ever-present cell phone wedged under her illusion-layered headpiece as she curses out some hapless florist who dared to put one too many sprigs of baby’s breath into the bridal bouquet.

  Regardless, what matters—at least to me, and, undoubtedly, to her—is that she’s the one who’s getting married today.

  “Hey, is that it?” Jack asks suddenly, pointing out the window at, you guessed it, a steeple looming above not Chuck E. Cheese, but T.J. Maxx.