Colleen groaned. He laughed. “Hey, I’m at your service. At least I have a checkbook available to provide said wedding theme. If it’s what Natalie wants, she’s got it,” he said.
Colleen smiled and shook her head. “Well, that’s something.”
“It’s a big thing.”
“It’s a big thing,” she conceded. Liam and Eric had sat down together last night and come to a compromise about financing the wedding. Colleen hadn’t been around during what would undoubtedly become known in family history as an infamous meeting, but she’d spoken on the phone with Liam this morning. He’d sounded irritated when he talked about Eric’s insistence about footing the bill, but there’d been a grudging respect in her brother’s voice, as well.
Colleen shared in that admiration. Eric might be arrogant, but he was generous to a fault, especially when it came to his sister.
“Okay. First on the agenda—announcing the engagement.”
“Who else do we have to tell?”
“All of our relatives and friends. I’ve already contacted the Herald, the Southwestern and the Chicago Tribune about an announcement,” Colleen said as she made checks on the paper with administrative precision.
Eric set his fork down slowly. “You have? You really do work fast.”
“We have a wedding t
o plan in two months’ time. Working fast is the entire point, Reyes.”
“Huh,” he muttered thoughtfully. “At what point in the next two months are you going to start calling me by my first name?”
She looked up from her pad of paper. He was grinning. He had a very handsome mouth. Shapely, but firm. Decisive. Don’t even consider that cleft in his chin.
For a second, she recalled in graphic detail what those lips felt like moving over hers, coaxing…ravishing....
She snapped her fingers around her clutched pen. “Focus,” she muttered to herself.
“I’ll need you to contact the hospital-community newspaper and give them this announcement,” she said, sliding a typed piece of paper across the table toward him. “I’ll need a list of family members and friends you want to invite to the engagement party, and a separate one for the wedding…”
She continued briskly with her ideas and instructions, Eric occasionally nodding somberly like he wanted her to believe everything she said was sacred dogma. She wasn’t buying it for a second.
“…so we’ve decided on a date. If you have time after lunch, we ought to be able to run over to Scrivener’s to pick out some invitations for the engagement party,” Colleen concluded a few minutes later, still writing rapidly in her notebook.
She tossed down her pen and took a big bite of her salad.
“Don’t you think we ought to get Liam’s and Natalie’s opinions on the invitations?”
“No. When I spoke with them last night, they told me this engagement party is pretty much just our deal. Mari and Marc will come in to help with all the last-minute details next Thursday, and of course my mom will help out. I’m thinking of a sophisticated party, but intimate and comfortable, as well…warm fall colors, candlelight, champagne and hors d’oeuvres that really stick to your ribs versus the dainty variety. So, now that we’ve decided on the date and time, we just need to decide on the location.”
Eric blinked and sat back in the booth.
“What?” Colleen asked, pausing in the action of stabbing her fork into a piece of shrimp.
“You’re amazing.”
She laughed and pointed her shrimp at him. “That’s not what you were thinking.”
“Oh, yeah? What was I thinking?”
“That I’m a steamroller.”
His low, rough laughter caused the back of her neck to prickle in awareness.
“You’re pretty good at that,” he said.
“Steamrolling?”