The sounds of a woman choking echoed through the phone. “You? Engaged? To Matthew Baird?” Lauren said. “You? Engaged?”
“Yeah, well, under duress.”
“I can’t, in my wildest dreams, imagine a situation where you’d agree to marry. What did he do, threaten to impale you with a red-hot pitchfork? Press a razor-sharp machete against your throat?”
“He dropped to one knee last night at his grandmother’s ninetieth birthday party, in front of about a hundred of his relatives. His grandmother, who’s about to keel over at any second, looked so happy. I just, I just couldn’t refuse—stop laughing. This isn’t funny.”
“If only the other men had known, all they had to do was to pop the question over the last, feeble breaths of their family matriarch.”