Marry Me By Midnight

Chapter 4: The Fitting

Ivy had exactly one job today that didn’t involve Grant Ashford: get Sophie into her dress for the final fitting without either of them crying before the actual wedding day. She was failing at even that.

“Okay, but you have to admit it’s weird,” Sophie said around a mouthful of pins, arms out while the seamstress adjusted the bodice. “You’ve been weird since the toast. Weirder since rehearsal, actually, now that I’m thinking about it out loud.”

“I have wedding-planner brain. It’s a documented condition.” Ivy busied herself with the veil, fussing with a comb that didn’t need fussing with.

“Grant asked about you at breakfast.”

Ivy’s hands stilled. “What?”

“Casual. Very casual. ‘How long has Ivy been doing this’ casual.” Sophie caught her eye in the mirror, and there was nothing casual about her expression at all. “You two have met before, haven’t you.”

It would have been so easy to lie. Ivy had built a career on staying calm under pressure — vendor meltdowns, weather disasters, a groom who once fainted at the altar — and none of it compared to the effort it took to keep her face still now.

“Vegas,” she said finally. “Months ago. Before I knew who he was.”

Sophie turned around too fast, nearly losing a pin. “You slept with my future brother-in-law.”

“I didn’t know he was going to be your future brother-in-law. I didn’t know his last name. That was rather the point of it.”

“Oh my god.” Sophie sat down on the fitting stool, dress and all, ignoring the seamstress’s protest. “Oh my god, Ivy.”

“It was one night. It’s not going to be a thing.” Ivy said it firmly, the way she said things to nervous mothers-of-the-bride, like conviction alone could make something true.

“He looked at you during his toast like you were the only person in the room,” Sophie said. “I thought I imagined it. I did not imagine it.”

Before Ivy could answer, her phone buzzed against the dress rack. A text from an unknown number that wasn’t unknown at all — she’d have known that area code anywhere by now.

Need five minutes. Groomsmen tux issue. Michael’s asking for you specifically.

“I have to go handle something,” Ivy said, grateful for an excuse that was, for once, entirely true.

She found Grant in the hotel’s side hallway, not a groomsman in sight, leaning against the wall with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled to the forearm like he’d been waiting there deliberately.

“There’s no tux issue,” she said.

“There’s no tux issue,” he agreed. “I panicked. You looked like you needed rescuing back at the ballroom and I only had one tool available.”

“I didn’t need rescuing.” She crossed her arms. “Sophie knows. About Vegas.”

Something shifted in his face — not surprise, more like relief finding an exit it hadn’t expected. “How’d she take it?”

“She’s delighted, actually, which is somehow worse than if she’d been upset.” Ivy leaned against the wall opposite him, putting the width of the hallway between them like it would help. “This is exactly what I didn’t want. People finding reasons to watch us.”

“People are going to watch us regardless. I’d rather they watch us knowing the truth than watch us and wonder.” Grant pushed off the wall, closing half the distance without seeming to notice he’d done it. “For what it’s worth — I wasn’t trying to make a scene at the toast. I just couldn’t figure out how to say a normal thing about my brother’s wedding while looking at you and not saying the true thing instead.”

“That’s a very good excuse for a man who almost blew up his own family’s wedding week.”

“I’ve had six months of practice not saying it. I ran out of restraint somewhere around the champagne toast.” He was close enough now that she had to look up, and the hallway suddenly felt smaller than a hotel corridor had any right to. “Tell me to stop and I will. Tell me you haven’t thought about that night either, and I’ll believe you, and I’ll be a perfect stranger to you for the rest of this week.”

Ivy opened her mouth to say exactly that — the easy, professional, untrue thing — and nothing came out at all.

Somewhere down the hall, a door opened, voices spilling into the corridor, and the moment folded itself away as quickly as it had appeared. Grant stepped back first, jaw tight, the careful distance sliding back into place like a mask he’d practiced wearing.

“Six more days,” he said quietly, more to himself than to her, and walked back toward the ballroom before she could find her voice.

Ivy stood alone in the hallway a long moment, hand pressed flat against her own stomach in a gesture she didn’t examine too closely, and thought, not for the first time that week, that six days had never sounded so impossibly long.