To Have and to Hold (The Wedding Belles #1)(34)

Oh, he sees you, Brooke thought silently. He definitely sees you.

It also hadn’t escaped Brooke’s notice that Maya had yet to utter her fiancé’s name once throughout this chat. In fact, the entire day, the word Neil had not passed Maya’s lips.

And now, seeing how animated Maya got talking about a man she wasn’t going to marry, Brooke had to wonder if maybe, just maybe, Seth might be onto something about this impending wedding being bad news. But not for the reason he thought.

“Did you ever tell Grant how you felt?” Brooke asked carefully.

Maya studied her wine. “There were a couple of times where we had . . . moments, I guess you could call them. These tiny little heartbeats where I swear maybe he felt something, too, but then the moment was over, and I just . . . I don’t know. It’s cliché, but I don’t want to ruin a good thing, you know? He’s almost like family, in a way. And he means everything to Seth.” She shook her head. “If something were to go wrong between us, it could ruin their friendship, and I couldn’t live with myself if I did that to them.”

“And then you met Neil,” Brooke prompted.

“Right.” Maya smiled. “I met Neil.”

Brooke bit her lip, knowing she should use the opening to talk about wedding things, but she couldn’t get Seth’s skepticism over Neil out of her mind.

“How’d you and Neil meet?” she asked, even as she silently screamed at Seth for planting the seed of doubt in her mind.

True love did exist. It did.

She needed it to. Needed to know that what had happened with Clay was a fluke, and that there was hope for her to fall in love and get married and have happily ever after.

“Oh my gosh,” Maya started gushing. “It was totally one of those random moments where you know it’s just meant to be. I was at Starbucks, waiting for my usual triple grande two-pump vanilla, one-pump almond latte, and when the barista set it on the counter, I went to reach for it just as he went to reach for it, thinking it was his.”

Brooke blinked. “You ordered the exact same drink?”

It wasn’t that odd, she supposed, given Starbucks’s popularity, but Maya’s drink order was a unique one. Quite the coincidence.

“Yes! Weird, right? I’ve never met anyone who likes the same drink as me, and then he ends up behind me in line at Starbucks, and he’s hot.”

Apparently, Seth Tyler was officially all up in Brooke’s head, because it took all of her self-control not to point out that if Neil had been in line behind her, he very well could have heard her order and repeated it as an excuse to talk to her.

But Brooke was a wedding planner, and wedding planners sold romance just as much as they did their organizational skills, so she merely smiled and asked what happened next.

Maya lifted her shoulders. “We got to talking. He asked me out, and I said yes. And then he kept asking me out, and I kept saying yes. And then he asked me to marry him, and . . . well, I said yes to that, too.”

Brooke blinked. “That’s . . .”

“Boring?” Maya said with a smile.

“No, I was going to say that that’s very, um, efficient.”

Maya laughed. “Efficient. You remind me of my brother, only he’s not so pleased with my efficiency.”

“It’s pretty typical older-brother stuff,” Brooke said. “You can’t blame him for being a little overprotective. Especially with how quickly everything happened.”

“I just don’t know how to explain to him that he and I don’t . . . we don’t want the same things.”

“How so? What do you want?” Brooke asked, genuinely wanting to know what made this contradictory woman tick. One moment she was all bubbles and romance, and the next she was almost startlingly pragmatic.

“I want to get married,” Maya said unabashedly. “I’m tired of the socialite scene. I mean, I’m sure I’ll always do that a bit, and don’t get me wrong, I do love the nice stuff, but I’m tired of dating. I’m even more tired of the lonely nights. And I want babies, and I want to bake cookies, and I want . . .” Her voice trailed off as she circled the stem of her wineglass with her manicured fingers.

“You want something real,” Brooke said.

“Yes,” Maya said enthusiastically. “That’s exactly it. I want something real. Something that will be there even if the money and the penthouse were to disappear.”

“And that thing—that’s Neil?”

Maya’s smile was a little forced. “The way you keep mentioning Neil’s name. It’s like there’s something you want me to say that you haven’t heard yet.”

Whoops. Brooke should have known better than to go down this path. Her friends were always joking about what a bad actress she was, and Maya had clearly seen right through her plan. Well, Seth’s plan.

It was time to get honest. Really honest.

Just not about what Maya expected her to be honest about.

“I’m sorry,” Brooke said, reaching across the table and touching her fingers to Maya’s arm. “I’m letting my own issues taint your happiness, and I shouldn’t.”

“Issues?”

Brooke blew out a breath and decided to give Maya the truncated version. “So you know that I’m new to New York, but you don’t know why.”