by Amelia Wilde
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Epilogue
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Also by Amelia Wilde
Sophie
“Clayton Herzog, will you take this woman to be your wife?”
There’s a general rustling from the direction of our assembled guests, and I do my best to gaze into my intended’s eyes. This is the first big moment of the wedding ceremony. The first I do. All the rest of the I dos will flow from this one, and at the end of it all we’ll be married.
In the pause all the moisture in my throat hightails it down to the pit of my stomach in a queasy rush. Oh, god. Is this the moment I get the stomach flu in front of everyone at my destination wedding? I hope not. I really, really hope not.
Clayton opens his mouth like one of those singing animatronic fish. If he’d just get this over with, we could move in with our lives. Maybe then I wouldn’t feel everyone’s eyes on my skin like lasers. In a way, I do want them to look at me, because I’ve never looked better in my life. That’s no joke. I look amazing. My hair spills down my back in curls that mimic the waves of Ruby Bay outside, and my flower crown doesn’t look ridiculous in the slightest.
For this one day, I am a flower goddess in an off-the-shoulder dress. I’m not knee-deep in washable paints and Clorox wipes. I’m not sweating down my back, trying to corral twenty kindergarteners in from the playground and convince them that reading is more fun than digging in the dirt. I’m not digging in the dirt.
My dress—my life—is pristine, except for the sweat-slicked palms rubbing up against mine and a deep-seated churning in my gut. Nobody said having cold feet would be like this.
Nobody said it would happen at the altar.
It’s not, technically, a literal altar—just a low table where our unity candle waits.
“Son?” The officiant prompts Clayton jovially, and a wash of laughter comes down over us. It feels like a tequila shot, warm and comforting, and for a minute I can shake off the ice buildup on my bare shoulders.
Clayton grimaces at me. It has to be a smile, right? He can’t possibly be baring his teeth like he’s experiencing his own gastric upset at the prospect of saying two little words.
I make my eyes huge and encouraging. Is my smile faltering? Now is totally not the time for my smile to falter. Cover. Cover it up. My stomach does a slow rotation that feels like the precursor to some serious upset and I swallow against the parched desert building in the back of my throat. What would happen if I called a timeout? Can you get a do-over in a wedding ceremony? If I signal to all the refs, will someone blow a whistle so we can reset this?
“Yeah,” drawls Clayton, twisting his hands in mine. I’ve been so lost in this endless embarrassment that I forgot we were holding hands, but of course we are. It’s the vows. We’re holding hands in a slippery mess that’s less romantic by the second. On instinct I try to hold his hands tighter, get him to stop twisting his wrists like that, which, why? But he resists. It’s several seconds too late by the time I let go completely, raising one hand to my hair in a wild attempt to cover the motion.
There’s no hiding it.
We’re standing in front of eighty people at a destination wedding.
Silence reins.
There’s not a single flutter of paper from the programs that took two weeks to finalize. The programs are special, too, designed in the shape of paper fans for the guests to use. I figured that people can still get hot even in an air-conditioned room, and I was right. I wish I had one of those fans right now. I’m about to be sweating buckets, beads collecting at the base of my perfect hairstyle. There’s no high neckline to catch the sweat so everybody’s going to see it run down the slope of my back if this gets any worse. God, can the officiant stop staring? A quick glance out of the corner of my eye tells me he’s grimacing too.
A camera shutter fires.
Seriously.
Seriously?
Our photographer is one of the ones on the recommended vendors list for the Bliss Resort, but all this grimacing is not something I want an eternal memory of. Even if we laugh about this later, I’m not going to want a high-res photo of everyone around me looking like I just ripped a big one at the altar.
“Clay?” I don’t know what I’m asking him, really, but his name tastes like actual clay in my mouth—thick and vaguely slimy and chalky in a way that is wholly unappetizing.
He blinks, his flat brown eyes landing on mine with a dull thud. “Yeah,” he repeats again, but nothing about this is very positive. Like, not at all positive. My teeth clench into something that I hope resembles a grin, but I’ve been struck too. The grimace has us all in its grip.
What’s the script here, when your fiancé has revealed himself to be a robot stuck in a response loop that’s a hundred percent inappropriate for the situation? Do I power him off? Oh, god, what am I thinking? If he says yeah like that again, I’m not going to have many other options. I blink once, hard, to be absolutely sure this isn’t a nightmare.
It’s not.
It’s real.
“I mean…” Clay starts, cutting a glance at the officiant as if the man can save him from this moment. Nobody can save us. We can only save ourselves. Say ‘I do,’ I want to hiss through my teeth. At least that would get us back on the right track again.
Maybe.
Maybe it wouldn’t.
“No, actually.” He raises a hand to his mouth, clears his throat, and straightens his shoulders. “I don’t. I can’t.”
For the first time, I force myself to focus on something other than his face. My gaze lands on my best friend, Mallory. Her mouth hangs open, eyes wide with shock and surprise, and I can’t even blame her for staring.
Heat trickles down my back—beads of sweat, really, and there’s no sugar-coating it—and my heart struggles against my rib cage like a crazed, shrieking bat. My face pulses with lava. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it was actual lava filling my cheeks.
“I can’t.” He says it a little louder this time, then gives the officiant a crisp nod. “I don’t. So…”
And then Clayton Herzog, my fiancé of a little over a year, extends his hand to mine.
Like he wants to shake hands.
My face is numb, but Clayton’s expression shifts, reflecting something like horror back at me. He shoves his hand in his pocket. “Okay, then.”
He turns first in one direction, toward the guests, and blanches. In the other direction, the officiant stands stock still. I’m sure the man thinks his expression is blank, but his eyes are wider than the stark white china I chose for the dinner service.
“Uh, you’ll have to—if you could just—” Clayton does a half-step to the side. The canopy over our heads is restricting his grand exist.
“Oh, sure,” says the officiant. The man steps aside and lets him through.
I watch my fiancé abandon the wedding in short, mincing strides, all the way to the back of the reception hall. The back exit opens under his hands with a high-pitched creak, followed by a whoosh as it swings shut. Several seconds later, the door—on one of those fancy no-slam hinges clicks shut.
The smile is on my face before I can stop it, and no, it’s not the smile of a happily married bride who has successfully navigated the getting married portion of the wedding. It’s the smile I wear when my kindergarten classroom is getting rowdy toward the end of
the school year and a kind of feral energy takes over the kids. I’ve held graduation ceremonies through that kind of pressure. Complete with songs. I can manage this.
I have to manage this. There’s nobody else.
Mallory takes a tentative step toward me like I might be one of those feral kindergarteners. “Sophie,” she whispers, and the echo of her voice hits the back corners of the room. We’re underneath a discreet hanging microphone. Nobody here has missed a single word. Everybody here is waiting for something to happen. If none of us move, maybe it won’t have happened.
But I can’t stand here like a statue forever. The longer this moment goes on, the more likely I am to fall over like an off-balance cake topper. The urge to lie down on the floor is strong. So strong.
Instead, I turn to my guests, seated in their neat rows, all of them wearing an identical frozen expression. “Just give us a minute, everybody. We’ll be right back.”
I leave them all standing there, pick up the hem of my dress, and chase Clayton out of the ballroom.
Ash
I’m out of my seat the instant that creaky door closes behind Sophie, my chest squeezed in a vise made from the very air in the room.
Holy shit. Holy shit.
All the time I spent stewing in the second row, hating the sight of her marrying that guy—Clayton, for god’s sake—did something to the universe. Having that sort of power feels like being dunked in ice water after spending a gritty, endless day in the desert. Shocking. Painful. Weird as hell. I didn’t want the wedding to happen, and now the ceremony has…detonated. Crumbled under its own weight.
A guy in a nice suit—not the tuxes that most of the guys here wear—steps to the front of the room with an easy smile on his face.
“Hello, everybody,” he calls, raising his hands like he’s reminding us all to stay seated.
I’m the only one standing, but I’m sure as hell not sitting down. Somebody has to go after Sophie.
“I’m Beau Bliss,” he goes on. “You might recognize me from some of the events around the hotel.” Someone in the back of the room lets out a whoop, and this guy, Beau, points toward the back like he’s the lead singer of a band. “Thank you,” he says. “Thank all of you for being here to celebrate. While we wait out this…uh, minor difficulty, I wanted to invite you all to have some light refreshments.” As if on cue, a side door opens and four uniformed waiters come out with fruit and cheese trays. Is that what the tables along the side wall are for? An early cocktail hour? I hadn’t noticed them until this moment because I, like everybody else at this wedding, have been busy staring at Sophie.
Not that I have any special reason to look at her, beyond the fact that she looks stunning today.
Just when I think it can’t possibly work—some random guy from the hotel can’t actually save this moment—everybody around me stands up.
They just stand up and shuffle slowly toward the trays at the side of the room like they didn’t just witness a miracle.
No—not a miracle. Sophie’s going to be heartbroken. Of course she is. She just got left at the altar, and I need to be there for her.
A hand on my elbow stops me halfway to the door in the back. It’s Mallory, the maid of honor. “Ash. Thank god.”
“You didn’t like him, either?” The words slip out past my frayed control. My heart is a wild man, belly crawling its way out from under the high fence I’ve kept it locked behind since I first saw Sophie three years ago.
Mallory looks up at me, grim as hell. “I need to do crowd control. Can you see if Soph is all right? Her aunts—” She nods back over my shoulder, and I turn to see the aunts in a tight cluster around the farthest cheese tray. They’re going at it with the fans. I wanted to crush my own fan in my fists the moment I saw that it was printed with an itinerary of torture, but instead I abandoned it under my seat. “Can you get this one? It should be me, but—”
“I’ve got it. I promised Gunnar.”
Mallory gives me a solemn nod. “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.” She turns and marches away with military precision in her pink bridesmaids’ dress.
I did promise Gunnar. I promised him that I’d witness his little sister’s wedding, since he’s been sent out on a three-month training mission and couldn’t make it to the wedding. The guy’s been broken up about it for weeks, but that’s life in the military.
Gunn wouldn’t sit in his seat after a disaster like that. No. He’d go comfort his sister. I try to breathe out the searing heat in my lungs and fail. I have to think of her as my best friend’s sister, not the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.
Doorway. Hallway. Parking lot. There’s only one reasonable path, and I take it outside. Clayton, that fucking coward, probably has a getaway car.
I brace myself for tears and push open the door that leads to the parking lot.
Sophie stands in the middle of the sidewalk, her dress falling in a white cascade to the sidewalk at her feet. Even from behind, she’s fucking gorgeous. I rake my eyes over the curve of her waist into her luscious ass and force my gaze back up, which only rewards me with the fine lines of her shoulders underneath a spill of blonde hair. My cock throbs between my legs.
I grind my teeth and think of everything unsexy. My grandmother. Apple pie filling. Sophie’s exposed shoulders. Nope—not that last one. That last one is unbearably sexy.
This door, unlike the one in the reception hall, closes silently behind me.
I listen for sobs.
I don’t…hear any sobs.
Maybe she’s in shock.
One step, then another. I don’t want to scare the shit out of her by stomping, so I strike a delicate balance between thundering footfalls and regular steps. Sophie doesn’t turn her head.
When I come up alongside her she’s still staring out at the parking lot, jaw set.
“I can’t fucking believe it,” she murmurs, and I’m too busy being entranced by the perfection of her lips to register what she’s saying. How could he have looked into that face—Sophie’s face—and mumbled some unbelievable bullshit like I don’t? How could anyone?
“Believe what?”
She looks up at me then, green eyes vivid from the summer blooms surrounding us. Green grass, green stems, bright flowers—all of them reflecting into those eyes. “That bastard.” Sophie flicks her eyes to the right.
Out across the parking lot, there he is.
Clayton Herzog.
The man who ran out of his own wedding like enemy troops were on his tail.
Now it’s clear to see that no enemy troops were on his tail. In fact, he’s been running toward something since he wriggled out from under those vows.
A redhead, wearing what looks like a sundress out of the nineteen fifties. I’d think it was a classy look, only she has her arms thrown around Clayton’s neck and her tongue down his throat.
She disconnects her face from his lips long enough to tug at his tie, and he pushes her hands away, tilting his head urgently toward one of the cars. Redhead doesn’t seem to be in any hurry. She reaches for his collar again and this time her kiss doesn’t land square on, so his mouth hangs awkwardly open to the side.
“Did you like kissing that guy?”
It’s not an appropriate question, by any stretch of the imagination, but honestly I can’t imagine anyone enjoying it.
Sophie lets out a sound that’s somewhere between a huff and a choke. “I tried my best.”
Clayton finally convinces the redhead to stop sucking on his cheek and climb into the car. He jogs around the front and slides into the driver’s seat. The rumble of the engine fills the parking lot. One screech of the tires, and they’re out of here.
The sounds of the summer drop down like a curtain around us. Birds singing. The lap of the lake on the shore, sounding closer than it is. It throws me back three summers into the past. It sounded just like this when I met Sophie for the first time at her parents’ vacation cottage on a tiny lake not far from here. The sun shone in
her hair just like it is now. If one screen door slams, I’ll believe in time travel.
But Sophie lets out a long, deep breath and raises her palms skyward. She lets them hover there for a moment and drops them to the front of her dress.
“Ash, I think I’ve got a runaway groom on my hands.” Her voice strikes me right in the center of the chest, Cupid’s arrow–style. Ten minutes ago I was dreading the moment when her voice came over the microphone promising to love and honor Clayton Herzog forever.
Was I jealous? Hell yes.
Should I have been? Hell no.
And now I’m in the odd position of almost being grateful to Clayton Herzog. After all, I’m alone with Sophie, the thing I’ve wanted most since I saw her that day in a little navy blue bikini and a smile, out on the dock in the sun.
“I’d agree with that assessment.” I watch the road like a hawk in case the car turns around and comes back. In case Clayton Herzog disgorges himself from the drivers’ seat. In case he realizes he’s made the biggest mistake of his life.
Across the parking lot, a sprinkler rises from its spot on the lawn and springs into life with a low hiss.
Sophie turns, and I’m hit with the delicate slope of her shoulders. The dress looks like I could tug it right down, exposing more of her. Exposing all of her. “Ash?”
“Yeah?”
“Now what?”
Sophie
I don’t have to ask twice for a plan
Not from Ash Montgomery, who stands on the sidewalk with his black tux accenting every inch of his gorgeous, muscled body. My mouth waters at the sight of it. Did I ever once feel this way about Clayton? No. No, I did not. I can admit that now, at least in the privacy of my own brain.
Ash takes one look around the parking lot, and then his dark eyes settle on mine. I never thought he’d look at me like this. I never thought he’d
