At Wits' End: An Enemies To Lovers Romantic Comedy Page 3

  “Fine. I need to use the restroom first. I’ll meet you in the bride’s room.” I hand her the gym bag with my wedding dress in it, and head to the bathroom.

  The bathroom is painted with murals of vineyards, and has even more swags of grapevines. As soon as I walk in, loud banging and groaning sounds inform me that someone’s getting busy in the stalls. I roll my eyes in annoyance. I know weddings inspire hookups, but come on. Couldn’t the horndogs have at least waited until after the ceremony?

  The door to the bathroom bangs open, and Carrie bustles in, followed by April, the groom’s mother.

  “So, this wedding…and the family’s reconciliation.” Carrie’s eyes are narrowed and her voice sizzles with suspicion. “The timing is certainly very convenient.”

  April glares at her, then walks over to the mirror and starts applying lipstick.

  I flash a wide, bright smile. “Sure is. Great, isn’t it?”

  “Harder! Harder!” a female voice shrieks from the stalls. Carrie flicks a glance of distaste in their direction, then returns her attention to me.

  “And I hear that you and the groom may have a little surprise on the way?”

  My smile wavers. “You heard that, did you?”

  Carrie’s eyes glitter with malice. “Your mother told me. She said it’s the reason everything’s so rushed.”

  Of course she did.

  “Well, very early days. We don’t know yet.”

  What’s the punishment for matricide in the state of Oregon? I wonder if I have time to Google that before the wedding ceremony starts.

  Aceto growls and shifts his weight. Carrie’s eyes fly open wide with astonishment, and she leans over to look. “That’s not a cat in your purse, is it?”

  I pat him protectively. “He’s considered good luck.”

  “A black cat is considered good luck?”

  The banging on the stall door gets louder. The door flies open. Jonathon and Mia tumble out and fall on the floor. April screams, a high, liquid wail of horror. Jonathon’s shorts are down around his ankles, Mia’s lacy pink dress is hiked up to her armpits, and they’re still connected.

  Jonathon looks up at us, his eyes wide with shock.

  “Dude,” he says mournfully.

  Chapter Three

  DONOVAN

  I stroll casually through the front of the Wine Knot wedding chapel, hands shoved in my pockets, following the sound of angry voices in the hallway outside the bathroom. My dad, stiffly wrapped in a navy suit, looks as if he’s about to have a stroke, and my Balenciega-clad mother’s got that “I just sucked a lemon” expression. Aunt April’s shrieking at the Ribaldis, and her husband Phillip has his fists clenched and is squaring off against Sienna’s cousin Rocco, a stocky man in his forties. Rocco’s father, Vito, who’s in his seventies, is bellowing in Italian, and his wife is making some kind of hand-gesture that will probably cause all the female members of my family to grow hair on their chests.

  The rest of the Ribaldi clan are crowded behind Rocco, with various people trying to hold them back – or, in some cases, urging them on. My sisters, Jamie and Toni, are trying to intervene.

  I glance at my watch. Twenty minutes for everything to devolve into complete disaster. That shocks me.

  I’d have given it five minutes, tops.

  I hurry down the hall.

  Mia, her face streaked with mascara and smeared with lipstick, limps out of the bathroom, wearing only one shoe. She hurries out the back door. Jonathan staggers out after her, struggling to pull up his shorts, his dick flapping in the breeze. Somewhere, a village is missing its idiot.

  “Mia, wait!” he howls.

  And hot on their heels is Carrie Hastings, that piranha in a pants-suit, snapping pictures with fiendish glee.

  My gaze lights on Sienna, who’s backed up against a wall, eyes wide with shock, clutching her purse to her chest. I hurry towards her.

  “There’s my beautiful bride!” I cry out loudly.

  Sienna’s gaze snaps in my direction.

  My mother and Aunt April turn to look at me, then back at Jonathon. “Jonathon!” April shrieks at her son. “Your pants!” Jonathon looks down, his face flushes red, and he quickly pulls them up.

  I throw my arms around Sienna and hug her. She tries to wriggle out of my embrace. I lean down and breathe in her ear. “Just go with it,” I murmur.

  “You are messing this up,” she loud-whispers.

  I grin. “I think you’re all doing a beautiful job of that without me.”

  Then I turn to Carrie Hastings and direct my wrath at her, my arm slung around Sienna’s shoulders. “You’re the one who made the mistake?” I demand.

  “I did what?” she says indignantly.

  She stares after Jonathon, who’s now running down the hallway in pursuit of Mia. His shorts fall down again, and he trips and falls to his knees. It’s a shame he wasn’t born in the golden age of cinema, because he’d have made an excellent fifth Marx brother. Or a Keystone Cop.

  “I’m sorry, I’m the one who made the mistake?” Carrie quickly raises her camera and snaps a few more pictures.

  “You got the name wrong in today’s paper. You said that Sienna was getting married to my cousin Jonathon. It should have been my name in there.” I turn to face my mother. “You told her that I was the one marrying Sienna, right?”

  “I…” My mother swallows as if she just tasted something sour. “Of course I did.”

  Everyone quickly joins in, chorusing their agreement. Of course it was supposed to be Donovan.

  “You most certainly did not!” Carrie yells. “You said that it was Jonathon!”

  “Sounds a lot like Donovan,” I point out mildly. “Easy mistake to make.”

  “Then why didn’t you call me this morning when the story ran?” she demands of my mother.

  “We’ve just been so busy.” My mother flaps her hand in pretend distress. “This was all so sudden.”

  Carrie glares at her. “Sudden, and faker than an Instagram influencer’s tits.”

  My mother wraps herself in her Greenvale Ladies’ League mantle of snottiness and scoffs, “Well, isn’t that a lovely way to put it.”

  “You’re marrying Sienna?” Carrie demands of me. “You two hate each other!”

  I wink at Sienna. “It’s a thin line between love and hate, right, babe?”

  “So thin.” Sienna’s big brown eyes blaze with anger, and she smiles murderously. “Razor-blade thin.”

  “Don’t you live in California?” Carrie juts her jaw out defiantly.

  “People from California can’t get married?”

  “That’s not what I… I mean…” She spins around to glare at my family. “You were all fighting just now! Because Jonathon, the groom, got caught in the act with one of the bridesmaids!”

  “They were fighting because Jonathon’s rude behavior was very disrespectful and out of place at a wedding. And, of course, emotions are running high today, as they tend to do at weddings. Everything’s good now, though, right?” I shoot a look first at my family, then at the Ribaldi family. Everybody nods, pasting pained smiles onto their faces.

  “Excuse me, everyone! I just need a quick word with my sweetheart before the ceremony starts,” Sienna says brightly. She grabs my hand and drags me down the hall and into the bridal changing room.

  She’s making a hissing sound. She must be really mad. No, wait, the noise is coming from her very large purse.

  I try to peer inside, and she swivels away from me.

  “Is that a cat in there?” I ask incredulously.

  She puts her hand over the top of the purse. “Don’t start. What the heck are you doing?”

  “Getting married to the woman of my dreams.”

  Her angry eyes blaze at me. I smile down at her and hate how hard my dick is right now. How I’m going to get through an entire summer living under the same roof as her, I have no idea. Separate bedrooms, for sure. With a lock on mine so she doesn’t smother me in m
y sleep.

  “Donovan. My family’s future depends on this.”

  I already know that.

  Ferguson Property Holdings has the hots for a huge swathe of land that spreads across both the Ribaldi and Witlocke properties. They want to build a sustainable subdivision, all solar powered and built from ethically sourced materials, and the price that they offered has a lot of zeros in it. It’s a thousand acres, and none of it overlaps the Witlocke Vineyard, or the Ribaldi Organic Dairy Farm, or Sienna’s aunt’s tiny boutique vineyard. All the businesses could stay intact, and even benefit from the business they’d get from the people moving into the subdivision right next to their land. It is a sweetheart of a deal.

  Unfortunately, Ferguson almost backed out. Something about the ninety-year-old feud between our two families, and the countless lawsuits between them, and the idea of possibly inheriting litigation that would tie them up into the 22nd century, made Patrick Ferguson a little nervous.

  This bullshit wedding was designed to fool them into thinking that the families have reconciled. And then Jonathon screwed it up. Who could possibly have seen that coming?

  “I am well aware, thanks,” I inform her.

  I reach down to stroke a lock of hair from her face.

  “Remove your hand before I chew it off,” she says sweetly.

  I drop my hand – and place it on her hip, caressing her with my thumb. She stifles a low groan. No matter how much her brain hates me, there are parts of her that feel otherwise. It was true in high school, it’s true now. She sucks in her breath and sinks her teeth into her lower lip, which just about undoes me. Then she leans in, her pelvis pressed up against mine for just a moment before she takes a big step back. Now I’m diamond-hard. I hate it when my own tactics are used against me.

  I suck in a breath and take a moment to compose myself.

  “I’m here to help make sure the land deal goes through,” I say.

  “Why? You don’t care. This is all a big joke to you,” she says scornfully.

  “You mean the idea of you being married to Dumb and Dumber there?” I glance at the hallway that my cousin just fled down. “Come on, you’ve got to admit it’s at least a little funny.”

  “This deal means nothing to you. We actually need the money, but you could bail your family out, pay off their debt, and buy them new equipment without even blinking.”

  I sigh. Aging machinery, increased competition, a couple of bad harvest years in a row, and some questionable business decisions are threatening to drag my family’s business under.

  “I could, but it doesn’t matter. My dad would never accept money from me.” That is the truth. Our relationship is shaky at the best of times.

  “Try again. I have ‘Never trust a Witlocke’ laser-tattooed on my inner eyelids to ensure I don’t forget.”

  “Doubtful. But just in case that’s actually possible, can you text me the name of your guy? I want to get ‘Sienna Ribaldi has a great ass’ tattooed on the inside of my eyelids.”

  “Be serious.”

  “You’re right, I don’t need a tattooed reminder. Like I said, I have an excellent memory.”

  I smirk down at her. Yes, I’m referring to the time that the entire junior high class got busted skinny-dipping in the reservoir. I wasn’t the one who called the cops, but you can for damn sure bet that my cousins and I were watching from the bushes.

  “I know you’re up to something,” she huffs. “And I’m not going for it.”

  “What, you think I want to steal your aunt’s wine formulas or something?”

  “Maybe.” She glares up at me.

  That actually makes me kind of angry. Yes, I’ve been drawn into the stupid feud between our families more times than there are stars in the sky, but I do not indulge in industrial espionage. I don’t have to. I’m that good.

  “Sienna, be realistic. My family has no interest in your aunt’s vineyard or her wine-making process. It’s hardly a threat.” Her eyes blaze in anger. I hold up a conciliatory hand. “That’s not an insult. We do things on a completely different scale and we have completely different goals.”

  Sienna’s aunt has her little organic hippie vineyard which sells maybe a couple of thousand cases in a good year, and Witlocke Wines are sold in every supermarket and liquor store across the country.

  “I am not marrying you,” she huffs. “You’ve been a thorn in my side and a pain in my ass my entire life, and there’s no way I’m living in the same house as you.” The fire in her eyes lights her from within. She glares up at me, angry and so very beautiful.

  I favor her with a benevolent smile. It’s easy when you hold all the cards. “You are, in fact, marrying me. You are moving into my family’s guest house with me and staying married to me until this land deal is signed, sealed and delivered in September.”

  “Please. What’s in it for you?”

  “Well, for one thing, this stupid feud will be over once and for all and I’ll never have to leave a vitally important business meeting with a multinational conglomerate to come home and testify about an incident involving attack geese, which I may or may not have witnessed.” Oh, there were attack geese, all right. There’s no limit to the depths to which the Ribaldi family will sink.

  Those geese were trained. And they pooped all over my sister Toni’s wedding.

  “And for another thing?” She jabs me in the chest with her finger.

  Words rush to my lips, then wither and die.

  Tell her.

  I can’t. There’s too much history between us. Too many fights and lies.

  I shake my head. “Nope, that’s it.”

  She shakes her head slowly from side to side. “It’s not happening, Donovan.”

  I look down into her eyes. “Actually, it is. This is your family’s last chance. It’s no secret that Rocco’s dairy farm and your aunt’s vineyard are both on their last legs. Selling off the excess land that you’re not using is an absolute no-brainer, and it will save the family farm for generations to come. You don’t have a choice.”

  A growling sound distracts me. I look into the depths of her purse, and angry yellow eyes glare up at me. A scarred black cat flattens his ears against his skull, hissing pure hatred at me.

  “That isn’t the cat that your aunt claims is the reincarnation of her dead husband, is it?” He’s a legend around town. Something about him showing up right after Nuccio Ribaldi died. Nobody has dared to openly question Fernanda about it. Before she had her stroke a couple of weeks ago, she was a formidable woman, even at the age of sixty-nine.

  “I said don’t start. And how do you know he isn’t?”

  “Well, for one thing, he hasn’t scratched my entire face off yet.”

  Sienna smiles, eyes alight with malice. “The day is young.”

  Down the hallway, Carrie’s yelling at April about something, and Rocco just shoved my father.

  “Come on,” I say, grabbing my reluctant bride by the arm. “The pastor’s not going to hang around all day.”

  And we run right into my mother, and my sister Jamie, who are blocking the hallway.

  “You are not marrying her,” my mother says in a low, icy voice. “You’re supposed to go back to Los Angeles next week! You’ve got that huge deal with that Greek fellow, don’t you?”

  Yes, we have the deal of a lifetime coming up. If we land it, we will be manufacturing and selling equipment to a Greek shipping company that operates in every port in the world. It’s owned by a friend of mine, Constantine Galatos, whom I met on vacation a few years ago.

  I can’t wait to explain this fun new development to my business partner and best friend, Graham.

  “I can work from here over the summer. And I don’t need your permission to marry her. The entire deal rides on this, mother. You need this deal as much as they do.”

  My mother’s shoulders sag in defeat, and she steps aside.

  Jamie stays put. “Hello, beeyotch,” she says to Sienna.

  “Goodbye,
skank.” Sienna smiles sweetly.

  “Take a long walk off a short pier, fatass.” Jamie tucks her hair behind her ear.

  “I love my fat ass, you ratchet bitch.” Sienna blinks and her smile turns a little menacing. Aceto snarls in support. “What else ya got? I could keep going all day.”

  “And all night, if what they write on the men’s room stall is true. Ho-bag.”

  I shake my head at her. “Jamie!”

  Her gaze snaps over to me. “Asshole.” She shakes her head. “Oops. Sorry! Once I get started, it’s hard to stop.”

  “You’re not wrong, though,” Sienna says. “And much as I’d like to lob insults at your busted face all day – or grenades – I’ve got places to be and dweebs to marry. Byeee.” She sings the word out cheerfully and stalks off past Jamie, making sure to hip-check her as she does so. I dive between the two of them before things get physical, and steer Sienna towards the wedding chapel. I glance over my shoulder and see that my mother and Jamie are trailing along behind us.

  I sigh. “Sorry about my sister.”

  “Me too. Sorry she’s such an amateur,” Sienna scoffs.

  We walk into the chapel, where our families are glaring daggers at each other.

  Sienna’s shoulders sag in defeat. “I guess I have to put on my wedding dress and veil.”

  I press my lips together to suppress a smirk. No need to rub it in; I’ve won, after all. “I just have one question.”

  She stares at the mutinous mob, then looks up at me. “Only one?” Her mouth quirks up in a wry smile.

  I jerk my thumb in the direction of her purse. “You’re not taking him down the aisle with us, are you?”

  Chapter Four

  SIENNA

  You’d think after all these years, Donovan would know better than to test me. I do carry Aceto down the aisle with me in my purse. If he is, in fact, the reincarnated spirit of my late uncle, then it’s only fitting. My father, who skipped out on me when I was a toddler and died when I was ten, was never in my life. Uncle Nuccio would have been the one to walk me down the aisle on my wedding day.