Mr. Smithfield - Louise Bay Page 0,44

image.”

“Maybe not eleven, but you get the picture.”

“I do,” I replied. “But we’re not in Oregon. And—” I stopped myself before I said I didn’t want eleven kids. We couldn’t have that conversation. Because that was about the future. And we didn’t have one. We were having fun. We enjoyed each other’s company.

“Okay, so we have birth control covered,” I said.

“And I’ll just tell her that Bethany doesn’t know. We’re not hurting anyone.”

“Right,” I replied.

She exhaled what seemed like a long-held breath. “Right,” she said. “Ultimately, it’s no one’s business except ours.”

“Except that Dexter is one of my oldest friends. And I like Hollie and would hate to upset her.”

“I’ll handle her,” she said with a sigh.

“We’ll handle them both,” I said and took her hand. “And in the meantime, we’ll have fun. And enjoy each other’s company.”

She laughed. “Well that’s a guarantee coming from you, Gabriel Chase.”

I smiled despite the kernel of unease settling in my chest. I didn’t know what it was about Autumn, but despite me doing my best to stay in the here and now, when I was with her, my mind couldn’t help wandering to the future.

Nineteen

Autumn

We looked up at the ceiling of the huge ballroom and tried to count the number of lightbulbs in the ornate glass chandelier. It must have been at least three hundred. “Just the name Dorchester sounds fancy,” I said.

I’d never stepped inside a fancy hotel before I came to London, and not only had I stayed in one in Rome that was at least a thousand times bigger than the trailer I’d left behind in Oregon, I was now checking out all the best ones in London. Not to stay in, but for Hollie’s wedding venue.

“This is almost overwhelming,” Hollie said. “It’s just so big.” She sighed as if she was sizing up the prison cell she was going to call home for the next twenty-five to life, rather than her wedding venue.

“We’re just looking though, right? It’s not like anyone is going to force you to have a big wedding,” I said, trying to reassure her.

“Right. Can you do me a favor and take photographs?” she asked. “I’m bound to forget. I can barely think straight. And you have such a good eye for detail.”

“Sure,” I replied, pulling out my phone. I tipped my head back to see if I could get the entire chandelier in one shot. In the end, it took three.

The room was all huge mirrors and silk wallpaper and baby blue drapes that looked so full, they might be able to cover all of London if they were straightened out. The entire room was like being on the Bridgerton set. I took a handful of shots, trying to make sure I captured the scale of the room. “It’s beautiful,” I said, turning a full three hundred and sixty degrees to make sure I hadn’t missed anything.

“So it seats up to five hundred and ten people,” Beatrice, the woman from the hotel who had shown us in, said. She came up behind us out of nowhere, making me jump like I’d been caught stealing candy from Trader Bob’s.

“But the huge advantage is the private entrance from Park Lane.”

I recognized that name from the Monopoly board—it was smack next to Mayfair, the second-most expensive property on the board.

“You said you had smaller rooms as well,” Hollie said. “Can we see those?”

“Absolutely,” Beatrice replied. “If you follow me to the lifts, I can show you our penthouse, which can seat up to thirty-four guests.”

Hollie nodded. “Yes, that sounds like a more manageable number.” The green tinge to her face began to fade and she smiled.

“So where is Dexter?” I asked as we got into the elevator, which had walls covered in green silk. I wasn’t sure if fabric on the walls was a British thing or just a rich-person thing. But I took a picture just in case we needed to remember the elevators. “Shouldn’t he be here today rather than me?”

She sighed. “He had some crisis at the store in New York. A security incident, whatever that means. He said if I narrowed it down, we could come back together and look at the rooms I liked best. But we don’t even know how big to go. He knows far more people in London than I do. Although he’s said he’ll charter a plane to bring people over from Oregon.”

“A plane? But who would you invite from there?”

She shrugged. “Exactly. I just don’t know. Mom and