Playboy's Secret Wife novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Officiant

Eleanor Hargrove turned sixty-two in a ballroom with four hundred guests and a string quartet.

I stood at the edge of it in a midnight-blue gown I had bought with my own money, and I felt like a bug under glass.

Lucas had his hand at my back.

I could feel him not looking at anybody else.

"You don't have to stay by me," I said.

"I know."

"You can go and be charming."

"I'm already doing it," he said.

"I'm charming in your direction."

I almost laughed.

Almost.

All night I kept catching eyes.

Investors with their drinks, and board members with their wives.

Women in jewels who looked at me like a stain on a tablecloth.

Trent and Dee had come as Chad's guests, and sat at his table.

Dee wouldn't meet my eyes.

Trent drank steadily, and watched the stage.

At nine-thirty the quartet stopped.

Chad walked up the three steps to the microphone with a champagne flute in one hand.

"Friends," he said.

"Thank you for coming to celebrate the finest woman I know."

"Happy birthday, Aunt Eleanor."

Applause.

Eleanor, at the front table, inclined her head.

"I wish this were all I had to say tonight," Chad said.

"But as many of you have read, a cloud has come over our family."

"I've asked one gentleman to come and speak."

"He'd rather not."

"He's a man of the church, and he feels it deeply."

A man in a tan suit stepped up beside him.

He was fifty, soft around the middle, with a pink face and a small gold cross at his collar.

He had the look of someone who'd been told exactly where to stand.

I had no memory of him at all.

"My name is not important," the man said into the microphone.

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