Wedding Duress (Events By Design Cozy Mystery Series Book 2) by Ally Gray

Chapter 1
    D ealing with dead people was just not on Stacy’s to-do list. She had four appointments with clients to handle before lunch, she was behind on two fittings and approval of a photo array, and she still had to get to the cleaners to pick up a mink coat that someone insisted be featured in an upcoming wedding. She simply had no time for dead people.
    Of course that didn’t stop her from thinking murderous thoughts about the man sitting across from her, leaning his elbows casually on her wide antique desk as he gazed at her with eyes as big as moon pies. He’d been there for the better part of half an hour, somehow duping himself into believing that bringing her a large double-caff skinny latte with extra hazelnut flavoring—her favorite, and he knew it—gave him carte blanche to linger in her office and make flowery proclamations of love.
    “Nathan, I’ve already told you a hundred times. I’m willing to keep an open mind about us going on a date, but I’m not ready to jump into a relationship. We’re coming up on the busiest wedding season this firm has ever seen. If we take on any more events, we’ll have to hire day laborers from the prison just to fill in the gaps, and I don’t think anyone wants to attend a wedding where all of the workers are wearing black and white striped jumpsuits.”
    “I’m just asking for dinner! One dinner is not an event! It’s not like I expect you to come home with me and jump into bed!” he cried, but Stacy swore she heard him mumble the word “yet” under his breath.
    There had been a time that “yet” between Nathan and Stacy had been incredible, everything she could have hoped for. They’d dated for several months and enjoyed those many wonderful moments of “yet,” but then the bottom fell out on the relationship: Nathan was her boss’s nephew, and that was a huge no-no in her book. Then her boss had to up and die, leaving the event planning business to said nephew, which technically transformed Nathan into her boss. At least he was still in the sad puppy dog eyes stage, and not the overbearing ‘ordering her to have dinner with him’ stage. She was sure that was coming soon.
    “And I told you I’d think about it. But this just isn’t a good time. I’ve got so much going on, and the last thing I need is more complications,” she said, letting the words slip out before she realized how they sounded.
    “Oh, thanks. So now I’m just a complication. That didn’t hurt at all.”
    “Nathan, that’s not what I meant. You’re twisting my words! I just meant…”
    “No, it’s fine. I know you weren’t trying to purposely stab me in the heart and twist the knife until my internal organs fell out of the ever widening hole. It was just an accidental stabbing, a drive by stabbing, a…”
    “Okay, I get it! I’m sorry! Fine, we’ll go to dinner. Just let me get through the next few events. We’ve got four weddings, a sorority ball, the governor’s charity fundraiser—I think that’s it.”
    “Oh. Great. So we’ll have dinner in a month or two?”
    “Nathan, that’s just in the next two weeks , not two months. Get it? We’re really busy! You’d think that as owner of this firm you’d be excited to have so much going on.”
    “I’m only excited about one thing, Stacy, and that’s the chance to be with you again.” Nathan’s usually boisterous personality turned serious as he sat down across from Stacy once more. “I mean it. I’ve missed you. We had a great thing going, and you took it away from me because you were afraid of how it would look.”
    “It wasn’t just a matter of how it looked,” she hedged. “I did it for you, too. You didn’t deserve to be put in a position of keeping me on salary just because we were dating.” She left out the part about sleeping with her new boss, deciding no one needed to speak those words ever. “If you weren’t happy with my performance and wanted to fire me, or if you were thrilled with