Among The Roses

Chapter 48: Ellie Comes Clean

AN: Mara and Luke's wedding in Italy, at Lake Como, will be in late May, about a month and a half after Chiara and Drew break up, okay?This will be one of those timeline things I'm talking about. At first, I had their wedding pegged for August or something, but I went back and checked, and I couldn't find any mention of a date, so I think I'm okay. At any rate, everything you're reading is happening in May, and all of this is wrapping up soon. I'm not responding to comments, but I'm reading all of them, and I can see that you're all so very upset, and I'm really sorry! It's ending really soon, though, promise, promise! I'll have to have some info dumps, just to get everything explained, so I hope you'll forgive me for the Agatha Christie ambience, but there's really no other way, unless the story's to be much, much longer, and that just can't happen, because I'm on such a tight deadline with the sequel to The PA...Just five or six chapters left, and only a couple are bad...

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"Drew? Hey, mate?"

Drew sat up from where he was drowsing in the rose garden. He liked to sit out among the newly leafing bushes, even though there were no blooms yet. He felt comforted by their presence, their waxy canes and glossy leaves, the feel of Chiara's love and closeness in her tender care of them.

"Yeah? Luke? Out here."

Luke stuck his head out the French doors.

"There are a bunch of people out by the front gate," he told Drew. "Looks like fans? I thought no one knew where you lived."

"No one did," Drew said. He ran inside and upstairs, followed by everyone else. He went to the second floor landing with the huge front facing window and pulled out his phone, using the zoom feature on his camera for a close up look at the people who were gathered by the gate. There were about ten or fifteen of them, and he could tell, even at this distance, that they were young and female.

Fans.

How had they been found?

"What's going on?" LeeAnne came out of her room to see what all the noise was.

"Nothing, we've just finally been discovered, that's all," Mara told her, gesturing at the cluster of girls down at the gate. "We just can't figure out how."

Luke and Mara's wedding was little more than a week away, and Mara was packing in her room for the momentous event.

"Oh." LeeAnne bit her lip. "It might be from the wedding announcement."

Wedding announcement?

"I put an announcement in a few newspapers, you know, so people would know where to send congratulations and gifts and stuff."

"What?" Gary was staring at her. "We don't do that shit, we leave it to management, and the people who handle publicity."

"What papers?" Drew asked, cold with dread.

"The Times?"

"Which one?"

"Uh, LA, New York, and London?" Now LeeAnne sounded unsure of what she'd done. "And the Chicago Tribune and Sun Times."

"Are you fucking joking?"

"Dear Jesus."

"What? I didn't do anything wrong. All big society weddings do that," LeeAnne defended herself.

"Except that all society weddings don't have every girl in England under the age of twenty wanting to know where the groom lives so she can go and spy on him, do they?" Ned asked rhetorically. "By sundown there are going to be about a thousand girls out there, plus a few news crews, all wanting to catch a glimpse of Drew in his pants. And once they find out all four of us are here, that's when the real fun will begin."