“And that’s a bad thing?”
“Honestly? It’s my dream,” Heather said, deciding to go for broke. “It probably sounds dorky to you, but I’ve been dreaming of being a wedding planner for most of my life, and with that dream comes fame. I’m not ashamed of it.”
“Of course not,” Danica murmured.
“But the thing is, I always imagined that when I finally made it . . . when I finally got to plan that big, gorgeous wedding that everyone looked at, that every other bride pointed at and said, ‘That one, I want that one’ . . . I imagined that my success would be because I planned the bride’s dream wedding. Not my own.”
“Based on what I’ve seen so far, you’re representing me just fine,” Danica said with a wave of her hand.
“I want to do better than fine. I’d also like to ask you point-blank if there’s something I need to know. A specific reason that you’re disinterested in your own wedding.”
“I’m not disinterested.”
Heather merely leveled the other woman with a stare.
To her surprise, Danica’s face crumbled for a second before she lifted both hands and plunged her fingers into her perfect hair. “Crap. Okay, fine. This has to stay between us.”
“Of course,” Heather said with calm she didn’t feel. She was right. There was something weird going on here.
Danica looked up, her eyes miserable, and not at all the confident woman who usually stared back at Heather from the glossy magazine pages.
“Of course I have a dream wedding,” Danica said quietly. “Like most little girls, I thought about it constantly. The details would change, of course, considering my favorite color changed about every other week. But I thought about it. Every time I’ve gone to a friend’s wedding, I’ve made mental notes. I want this, but not that. Oh, I love the cake, but not the flowers . . .”
She broke off and Heather stayed silent. Waiting.
“Once Troy proposed, I went a little . . . crazy. In fact, I found the ring before he proposed and put the announcement in the paper before he’d popped the question.”
Heather’s eyes widened slightly, and Danica gave a grim smile. “I know. Trust me, I know. I was just so excited, you know? And I apologized, and it was fine, and he proposed the way he wanted to with the champagne and all that. But I got a little . . . crazy. Totally crazy. It was all I could talk about, and I started bringing wedding magazines to the dinner table and demanding he pick his wedding party.”
Danica sighed and dropped her hands to the table, staring blindly at her manicure.
“The truth was, I went full-on bridezilla before I even came to you guys. I wasn’t even sure I wanted a wedding planner, because I wanted to do it all myself. My way. And it drove a rift between me and Troy. He’s older. All he’s wanted is a quiet wedding, and fast, hence the January date. But I wanted . . .”
“The big white wedding,” Heather supplied.
“Yes. That. So . . . I quit cold turkey. Almost. I found you guys, and promised Troy that I wouldn’t so much as talk about the wedding except for what was needed logistically. He’s happy. I’m happy—”
“Are you?” Heather asked quietly.
Danica bit her lip. “I’m trying really hard not to care about the details, and for the most part I’m succeeding. There’s just one part of the dream that I can’t quite let go of. The one part of my wedding fantasy that’s never faded.”
“The Plaza,” Heather said slowly.
Danica nodded.
Well . . . crap.
“It was our compromise,” Danica said with a sad little smile. “He got to have the wedding in three months if I got to have it at the Plaza.”
Heather sat back, overwhelmed at the unexpected information dump. Truth be told, she was feeling a little guilty about assuming the worst about Danica. Yes, the woman was a bit self-absorbed and oblivious, but Heather had been assuming the Plaza obsession was about competing for Page Six dominance.
Apparently, it was more than that, and Heather could understand. Every bride she’d ever talked to had that one thing. The piece of jewelry, the type of flowers, the cake flavor, the favorite song that was nonnegotiable.