“No, ma’am – I mean, Evangeline. We want the wedding to be here.”

“Well, that’s a relief. I’ll call St. Paul’s right away. Oh, I hope they have at least one weekend open in June. I’ll settle for May but July will be out of the question. They’ve got to have something. The Rutledges have been married there for generations, you know.”

“After we eat, Mama,” Grant said. “Let’s just get through brunch first.”

“Excuse me,” the maid said, reappearing. “Mr. Grant, you have a visitor, waiting for you in the sitting room.”

Tina raised an eyebrow and looked at Grant. “Who could that be?”

A small frown passed over Grant’s face before it seemed to drop. He recovered himself and smiled, looking around the table. “I haven’t a clue. If you’ll all excuse me, I’ll go and see what this is about.”

Tina exchanged a glance with Evangeline who patted Tina’s hand. “Probably nothing, dear. An old friend from the neighborhood. Something or other. Grant will be right back.” Tina looked at Beau, who didn’t seem to have noticed anything was amiss, and was busily cleaning his plate.

Tina let herself be drawn into more wedding conversation, but her answers were vague as she was barely listening to her future mother in law. Instead Tina was nagged by a feeling that she had better get up and go see what was happening with Grant. The minutes slid by and Beau, who was finished eating, started to tell Tina a funny story about Grant when he was a teenager, at the age when he would get in and out of scrapes with his smooth-talking. Tina knew all about how smooth Grant could be – that was how he had convinced her to go on a date with him in the first place. Tina hadn’t been willing, but he showed up every day at the bookstore where Tina worked with a different book request and an invitation to dinner until on the fourth day he asked about a book that Tina loved. She had found out later that he hadn’t read any of those books. He figured that if he could show her they had something in common, Tina would say yes to a date. It had worked; Tina had let her guard down and agreed to go out with him.