He glanced at her. “We’re both over twenty-one, financially stable and supposedly madly in love. Why would we wait?”
“I…hadn’t really thought about it,” she admitted, twisting the antique ring on her finger. “People usually stay engaged…for a while.”
“Do you think an engagement will be enough to convince Doug that you’ve really fallen in love this time?” Jared asked calmly.
She hesitated, remembering Doug’s passionate whisper as they were leaving his apartment. “No.”
“So we get married,” Jared said. “When my sister got married, it took my mother almost a year to get everything together, but I think we ought to strive for simplicity.”
“I agree,” Kelsey said, visualizing a Justice of the Peace intoning the words to the ceremony she’d watched her mother participate in so many times.
“We should be able to put something together for, say, fifty to a hundred guests, in a couple of months, don’t you think?”
“Aah…,” Kelsey cleared her throat and tried again, “Fifty to a hundred guests?”
Jared glanced over at her as he steered the luxury car around a corner. “Sure. Don’t you think we can keep the guest list down? Do you have a lot of family who’ll be attending?”
She had an instant mental image of her address book, stuffed with ex step-siblings and previous step-families. “No, not really.”
“I grew up in Long Island. There’s a nice church there—“
“Church?”
“Yes.” Jared stopped at a traffic signal. “You weren’t planning on a church wedding?”
“To be honest,” she said, conscious of the weirdness of the conversation, “I thought we’d find some Justice of the Peace over our lunch hour.”
“No,” Jared said, the car leaping forward with the stream of traffic.
Kelsey eyed him for a moment, realizing she’d never before heard that implacable note in his voice, but not really sure what it meant. “You’ve always dreamed of a church wedding?”
He grinned, responding to her teasing. “Yes, with yards and yards of silk organza.”
She couldn’t help but chuckle.
“There are lots of reasons for a church wedding,” he said, a more serious note in his voice. “We want people to believe we’re passionately, romantically in love. My family, our friends, Doug and Amy. I’ve been married before, but you haven’t. Maybe you didn’t have the usual little girl dreams of walking down the aisle, but it’s still the best plan.”
Yes, she’d had that dream, Kelsey acknowledged to herself. Of course, it had faded as she’d watched her mother traipse down the nuptial avenue over and over again in a number of various ceremonies.
Belatedly, she realized this was the first time Jared had said anything to her about his previous union . She didn’t really have a right to ask. Not at this point. How long would they have to be married before she could comfortably ask him about it? She found she had an intense curiosity about his ex-wife. Who’d filed for divorce? Had he suffered a broken heart? Had the first Mrs. Barrett been a beautiful woman?
“You’re right,” she said, dragging her attention back to the conversation at hand. “A wedding does make sense. I just hadn’t thought that far ahead. This is getting really complicated.”
They turned the corner and slid to a stop in front of her building. Jared turned off the engine.
“I’ll walk you up.”
“This is a tow-away zone,” she pointed out.
He smiled. “I’ll walk you up quickly.”
“Okay,” she said with a sudden certainty that he wouldn’t get towed. The man seemed blessed with good fortune.
She got out of the car.
“It’s too bad you have plans for this evening,” Jared said, after he’d walked around the car. “We could hammer out the arrangements for the wedding right away.”
“Yes, it is too bad. I hope you don’t mind my having dinner with someone else on the day you asked me to marry you,” she said mischievously.
Jared slipped an arm around her shoulders as he opened the door to her building. Stopping in front of the elevator, he tapped the button before replying. “Since it’ll be your last dinner with the guy, and you’re meeting him just to let him know you’re getting married, I’ll make a concession this once.”
Kelsey glanced over her shoulder at him as she stepped into the elevator. He sounded a lot more serious than she’d expected. “No other dates just to tie things up?”
Jared looked down at her, no glimmer of amusement in his face. “I don’t think so.”