The Devil's in the Details

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Authors: Kimberly Raye
Tags: Fiction, General, Romance, Paranormal
this morning?”
    “Terrible,” she declared, waving her hand and sending a shower of prismatic light across the soft pink walls. “We need bridesmaids’ dresses.”
    “We already have dresses.” I sank down into my chair and set my purse in the bottom drawer. “I was at the final fittings myself on Friday.”
    “The color is all wrong.” She shook her head. “They’re orchid and I distinctly requested grape.” She held up a sales slip from a local bridal salon. “See? It says right here.
Orchid.
I was so freakedwhen I saw them yesterday that I couldn’t even sleep last night. I had to take a Valium just to calm myself down.”
    Easy. Calm. Breathe.
    I recited the silent mantra and willed Delaney to pick up my soothing I’ll-handle-everything vibe. Unfortunately, I’m a succubus, so the only vibe that anyone ever picked up from me was
Let’s get naked
. And that only worked on the opposite sex.
    Delaney’s eyebrows pinched together. “This is a disaster.”
    “I know the paperwork says orchid, but the color is really a much deeper hue.” I reached for the file sitting on the corner of my desk. “I matched the swatches myself.” I found the two scraps of fabric and set them on the tabletop. There. Exactly the same. Even in the bright light of day.
    “But I want grape dresses,” she whined, still as stubborn as ever. “I want them to
say
grape. I want them to
be
grape. Not orchid. Or amethyst. Or eggplant. Or aubergine. Or acai.”
    Or any of the dozen different purples we’d debated over for months before she’d finally settled on one.
    “The groomsmen’s vests are grape,” she went on. “And they even say grape. The dresses have to match them exactly. They just
have
to.”
    “I’m sure if we take a look—”
    “That’s all I did was look. I stared at the colors all night and I can clearly see a distinction.” She leaned forward and touched the identical swatches. “Can’t you see? It’s wrong.” She shook her head. “All wrong.”
    Forget a Valium. She’d obviously been smoking some serious crack.
    Not that I was going to point that out. I was here to make her dreams come true.
    I fantasized for a nanosecond about pulling an
Exorcist
on her (think head spinning and a pea-soup shooter) and scaring her into submission. Seriously. We were three weeks away from the big day.No way could I scrounge up a dozen new custom-dyed bridesmaids’ dresses in that short an amount of time.
    But I was determined not to mess up my good-girl-searching-for-love aura. Even more, I couldn’t really blame Delaney for being so picky. Not when I knew her heart simply wasn’t in it. Her fantasy man? Vin Diesel. Meanwhile, her groom looked like Zach Galifianakis from
The Hangover
.
    I know, right?
    Anyhow, Stuffalumpalous was a colleague of her father’s who headed a rival oil company. The marriage was more like a merging of two corporations, with Delaney a perk in the contract.
    I didn’t miss the flash of desperation in her gaze. I knew that more than worrying about the dress color, she was really freaked over the notion of spending the rest of her life with a man she didn’t love.
    My chest hitched. “If you want new dresses, we’ll get new dresses,” I heard myself say.
    I know, I know. I was such a sucker.
    “Really?” The desperation faded into hope, and I could almost hear her telling herself that everything would be okay. The dresses. The flowers. The cake. The wedding. The honeymoon. The future.
    I smiled. “Whatever you want.”
    “Great.” She beamed, and hope faded into determination. “And since we’re changing the color,” she went on, “I’d like to rethink the style too. I want something with more of a
Sex and the City
feel. You know.” She waved a hand. “Something fun and flirty and cocktailish.”
    Was
cocktailish
even a word?
    “I want short,” she announced, morphing from worried, vulnerable Delaney back into the be-yotch who had traumatized Andrew and landed her on

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