“Oh no. A spaz? What kind of wedding stuff? Did we miss a deadline?” Gretchen, bless her heart, was a wonderful friend, but she’d been a fairly hellish client so far. She’d make a decision one day and completely change it two weeks later, which caused Greer endless amounts of work. The only saving grace so far was that Gretchen kept pushing her wedding further and further out because it “had to be perfect.” As of now, they were edging close to Christmas, which meant new themes and entirely new freak-outs for Gretchen.
Taylor waved a hand and it smacked against Loch’s menu, sending it flying. “Oops.” She grimaced as he leaned over to pick up the menu, nonplussed. “I’m sure you’ll hear about it. What about your baby appointment? Did you have it today?”
“I did.” Greer patted her slightly rounded stomach. “Everything is shipshape.”
“When do you find out if it’s a boy or a girl?”
“I . . . asked the doctor not to tell me,” Greer lied. Telling others the gender of the baby before Asher seemed like a bad idea. “As long as it’s healthy—and it is—I don’t care.”
Taylor made an impatient noise in her throat. “You’re better than I am! I’d be hitting up every fortune-teller the moment I got knocked up to see if they could tell me the gender. I hate waiting.”
“It’s fine,” Greer began, when arms wrapped around her from behind and squeezed, and Greer found herself being hugged by bridezilla herself, Gretchen. “Hello, there,” she said, awkwardly hugging her friend back.
“God, I am so freaking glad to see you,” Gretchen said, slapping a gigantic bag on the table. “Now, I have seven different cake samples that I brought for you to try. I’m not happy with any of them, but the lemon one has potential. Except I’m not sure that I should do lemon for an entire wedding cake, and if I only do it for one tier, I worry the other six tiers are going to be shit. I don’t want a shitcake! And I tried to talk to the baker about adding more eggs to the recipe but he got all huffy with me and now he won’t return my emails and I am freaking out, Greer. Freaking. OUT.” Gretchen hauled small plastic containers onto the table and shoved them in front of Greer. “So you need to eat these and tell me what you think so we can freak out together.”
“Told you,” Taylor whispered from behind her menu.
“Have a seat, Gretchen?” Loch said easily, and got up to pull the chair out next to Greer.
“Aren’t you a sweet, overfed thing.” She reached up and pinched his cheek, then sat down and opened the first container. The sickly sweet scent of sugar wafted through the air. “You need to try these before we order, Greer. I’m serious. I can’t function until I pick out a cake.”
“Which flavor was Hunter’s favorite?”
“He said he’d go with whichever made me happy. And since none of them do, that’s the problem.”
Greer dutifully picked up a plastic fork and pushed her glasses farther back on her nose. “Let’s get this taken care of, then, shall we?”
***
By the time lunch was served, all the cake samples had been tasted. Greer had agreed that lemon had the best flavor, though the others were by no means bad. Taylor liked vanilla, which earned her a scathing look from Gretchen. Poor Loch declared that he liked carrot the best, which sent Gretchen on another tirade, because she refused to have carrot cake as one of her tiers. “No vegetables,” she hissed at him, snatching his plastic fork away before he could take another bite.
“I see. I believe I shall check with the kitchen and ask for some coffee. If you ladies will excuse me.” He hastily got up from the table and raced away as Gretchen glared after him.
“I’ll go help Loch,” Taylor volunteered and got up. She stepped on her own scarf, detangled herself, then nearly careened into a nearby table as she tailed after the European man.
The moment they left, Gretchen gave Greer a calculating look. “So what do you think?”
“I do think the lemon is quite tasty, but if you’d like, I can definitely speak with the baker—”
“No, silly! Those two!” She wiggled her fingers after Taylor and Loch, who were standing at the counter and talking. Taylor was leaning in awful close to the big man. “Am I good or what?”
Ah. Matchmaking. “You planned it?”
“Well, not truly. So remember I wanted to kill Levi for being a douche-nugget and dropping out of my wedding? Hunter wanted to sub in Griffin, but Griffin actually asked us to invite Loch instead, as a favor to him. Apparently there’s some stuff going down in the home country and he needed an excuse to come to the states.” She shrugged. “I wasn’t too keen on it until I saw what a hunka-hunka-burning-love the man was and decided Taylor needed to bag herself some of that.”
Greer smiled to herself. Count on Gretchen to matchmake in the midst of her wedding plans. As if she didn’t have enough on her plate. “They seem to get along well?”
“They do, though I think she’s blown him off a few times to play her game, and I don’t know what the hell’s going through that head of hers.” Gretchen gave Greer a puzzled expression. “Here I am, practically gift wrapping the man and handing him to her, and she wants to go play games online.”
“She takes her games very seriously.”
“That man has serious buns. I mean, they’re not as good as Hunter’s, but whose are?” Gretchen got a dreamy look on her face. “You should have seen—”