by Maya Rodale, Caroline Linden, Miranda Neville, Katharine Ashe
Maya Rodale, Caroline Linden, Miranda Neville & Katharine Ashe, the authors of At the Duke’s Wedding, cordially invite you to join them for more romance, mayhem, true love, and happily ever afters.
A collection of contemporary romance novellas.
The Best Laid Planner © 2014 by Miranda Neville
Will You Be my Wi-Fi? © 2014 by P. F. Belsley
The Day It Rained Books © 2014 by Katharine Brophy Dubois
Prologue, That Moment When You Fall in Love © 2014 by Maya Rodale
Cover design by The Killion Group, Inc.
eBook by Two Somalis eBooks
Brief quotes from pp. 97, 149 from THE ALCHEMIST by PAULO COELHO and TRANSLATED BY ALAN R. CLARKE. Copyright © 1988 by Paulo Coelho. English translations copyright © 1993 by Paulo Coelho and Alan R. Clarke. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portion thereof, in any form. This ebook may not be resold or uploaded for distribution to others.
This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations, and any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Prologue
The Best Laid Planner by Miranda Neville
Will You Be my Wi-Fi? by Caroline Linden
The Day It Rained Books by Katharine Ashe
That Moment When You Fall in Love by Maya Rodale
Epilogue
Authors’ Notes
Full Table of Contents
Prologue
New York City
Duke and Jane’s apartment
Six weeks before the wedding
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a romantically minded modern woman probably has her wedding planned on Pinterest. As a romance novelist engaged to a dashing billionaire, I was no exception. From the perfect venue (Kingstag Castle in Dorset, England) to the perfect dress (Monique Lhuillier), I had everything all picked out. And I had an amazing wedding planner, Arwen Kilpatrick, to make it a reality.
Now I just needed to count down the days until my dream wedding with the love of my life, Duke Austen.
“Look, our invitations have arrived!” I eagerly opened the box and lifted one out, admiring the heft of the paper.
“Better not let the gossips get ahold of one,” Duke murmured as he slid his arm around my waist and kissed my neck.
“Although now someone will have to spend hours licking envelopes.”
“If we’d just gone with Paperless Post…”
“You and your Internet-y things. I’m a traditional girl. We’re going to have a proper wedding with proper paper invitations.”
I held it up.
Jane Sparks and Duke Austen
request the honor of your company at their wedding
on August 26th at Kingstag Castle, Dorset, England
“Isn’t Kingstag Castle perfect?”
“Yes. And private. Just you, me, our closest friends, and family.”
I turned and wrapped my arms around him, standing up on my tiptoes to kiss him. I had found the perfect guy for me. We were going to have the perfect wedding for us.
I was all set to lose myself in this kiss when the phone rang. It was our wedding planner. I ignored it and Duke laughed softly and we kissed some more. Then the phone rang again. This time, I picked up.
“Hi, Arwen! Great news! The invitations arrived. You have bad news? What?”
I sat down on the couch, pressing the phone to my ear.
“Okay, I’m sitting.”
Duke, looking concerned, came and sat down next to me, and tried to eavesdrop on the terrible, horrible news Arwen was delivering.
“It burned down?! But Kingstag Castle has been standing for eight hundred years! It survived the Wars of the Roses!”
Duke let out a low whistle. What followed was a very distressing conversation in which I learned that a fire had broken out in the kitchens and spread from there. Many of the public rooms had sustained damage that would result in a year of extensive repairs and renovations. A year!
This was a disaster. I hung up and burst into tears.
No one who saw Duke Austen would assume him to be a billionaire, or one of the most influential people in the tech world. To me, “billionaire” conjured images of distinguished men in suits. But Duke was a rogue all the way. He wore, as a uniform, broken-in Levis and free T-shirts that revealed his muscled arms and chest. His hair was mussed up. And when he smiled—he had a smile that made good girls like me desperate to do bad things.
They didn’t call him the bad boy billionaire for nothing.
He might not look like a hero, but oh, he was.
As I was crying over the death of my dream wedding, he pulled me close and said, “It’s okay.”
“It’s not,” I sniffed.
“We’ll find another castle or big fancy house.” As if they were just littering the countryside. Well, they probably were. But…
“Everything will be booked.”
These things were booked out well in advance. I knew because I had reserved my castle a year ago. There was no way we’d find another place that would be beautiful, luxurious, could accommodate our guests (who had already received their “save the date” requests), and be private enough (so the media wouldn’t find out or get in and cause problems on the special day).
“I’m sure there’s something out there,” he said, proving that though he was a tech genius, he was oblivious to the ways of Bridezillas. “Let’s see what we can find. I have an Internet-y thing that might help.”
“What is it?” I asked.
Duke took my hand and led me to his computer.
The Internet-y thing was Google. He typed in “English country house weddings.”
A million results came up and Duke started visiting all the different sites and making phone calls to England. I shuddered to think of his phone bill after two hours of this.
“You’re booked?” he asked. Again. “Bummer,” he said. Again.
I sighed and wondered about Vegas…
“No availability? Just curious—how much money would make you have availability?” Even Duke, who was perpetually good-natured, finally started to get frustrated at having the same conversation over and over.
“I think you have called every ancestral house in England that hosts weddings,” I said wearily. Then, adding sarcastically, “Surprisingly, they are all booked for every Saturday in August. Now we have to cancel our wedding.”
Duke took my hands in his and gazed into my eyes.
“Nothing is going to stop us from getting married,” he said. “Nothing is going to stop me from giving you the wedding of your dreams, okay?”
See: hero. My hero. I decided to have faith that this would somehow work out.
Duke seemed to be looking at something on the computer screen behind me.
“What’s that one?”
I glanced back. “Brampton House. I actually really like it, but it’s not even open yet.”
“Like hell it isn’t,” he growled, reaching for his phone. “What’s the number?”
I told him, he dialed. A conversation ensued. Duke paced. There was talk of renovations, the number of rooms, our need for privacy, and a huge check if it was all done in time. Duke hung up, turned to me, and said, “We’re having our wedding at Brampton House.”
“What?!”
“It’s a beautiful old ancestral house that’s being converted to a hotel that we can have exclusively for the week for all our friends and family. Best of all, since it’s not open yet, it’s unlikely the media will think that our wedding might be there. I know you were worried about keeping everything on the DL.”
“But we haven’t even seen the place yet! You can’t spend a fortune on a place you’ve never seen.”
“Do you want to go now?”
He wasn’t joking.
“I have a book due and you have a new product launch. We don’t have time to see it and from what I overheard, it sounds like he’ll need every minute to get it ready in time.”
“We’ll send Arwen,” Duke said. “She’s sharp as a tack. If she thinks it’s a suitable location, our wedding will go ahead as planned. And let’s not tell anyone where it’s going to be.”
“It’s perfectly dreamy,” I said, throwing my arms around Duke. “Nothing can go wrong now. Absolutely nothing.”
Duke Austen and Jane Sparks
request the honor of your company at their wedding.
Please join the happy couple for a week of festivities and celebration.
Chapter One
Arwen Kilpatrick steered the world’s smallest car along the world’s narrowest road, peering through the swishing windshield wipers and praying she wouldn’t meet another vehicle. Not daring to use her phone while driving on the wrong side of the road—especially a road so narrow it possessed only one side—she made a mental note: helicopters. Duke and Jane’s wedding guests couldn’t be expected to arrive in cars smaller than the smallest Chevy ever. A nonstop helicopter shuttle would add cachet and each passenger would be presented with a miniature picnic basket: a split of Dom Perignon, Brazilian brigadeiro chocolates, and maybe little pots of caviar. Too messy: tiny caviar-stuffed blinis. Did they make blinis in England? If not, she’d fly someone in from New York to do it. Or Moscow.
Drunk with the power of an event planner with an unlimited budget, she barely jammed on the brakes in time to avoid a head-on collision and promptly stalled the engine. When the airport car rental place had only a stick shift available, she had dealt. She’d driven a tractor on her parents’ farm until she’d run over a pig at the age of fifteen and they took away the keys. She knew gears and clutches. Sort of.
A man in a mud-caked Jeepy-looking vehicle waved his hands. From his gesticulations she gathered she was supposed to back up to let him pass. She messed up the clutch and stalled again, twice. Assaulted by waves of jet lag she leaned her forehead on the steering wheel, then jerked backward when the horn blasted.
The other driver had left his vehicle and banged on the side window, his temper no doubt exacerbated by the rain dripping off the brim of an ancient rain hat. She let the window down six inches.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, reeking exasperation.
“I’m having trouble shifting with my left hand,” she said, refusing to admit it was the clutch—and her four-inch heels—giving her grief.
“American,” he replied as though it explained everything and not in a good way. “Look here, you’d better get out and I’ll back your car to the passing place.”
Not wishing to arrive at Brampton House looking like a drowned rat, she scootched over to the passenger seat, getting her pencil skirt caught in the gear stick. “Get in,” she said sharply when he appeared mesmerized by the sight of her thighs. Dirty old man.
Okay, not old. And wet rather than dirty. While he folded a long body into the tiny car, started the engine, and traveled a hundred feet backward with effortless competence, she observed that he was in his early thirties and handsome in a hunky, James McAvoy kind of way.
“You were driving too fast in the lane,” he said. “You should slow down and look out.”
“I was doing twenty.” Arwen crossed her fingers. She hadn’t been watching the speedometer, neither was she sure if they used miles or kilometers in England. “It shouldn’t be legal to have roads this narrow.”
“Try talking to the County Council about it,” he said.
“I suppose it’s why your cars are so tiny.”
“They get the job done and don’t waste petrol.”
She owned a hybrid herself, but if he wanted to make stereotypical assumptions about gas-guzzling Americans she wasn’t going to contradict him. Plus he looked comical with denim-clad legs almost hitting the dashboard, and kind of cute.
Reaching a spot where the road was slightly wider, he stopped and got out of the car. After a step or two toward his own vehicle, he came back. “Do you want me to turn it round for you?” he asked, leaning in through the open door. “This road only leads to Brampton and the house isn’t open to the public at the moment.”
“Thanks but no thanks.” Arwen resisted the urge to tell him to mind his own business and stop dripping water in her car. The guy had the nerve to stand in the rain, an eyebrow raised, probably waiting for her to return to her seat. No way was she giving him a flash of her panties.
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure.”
“Pity,” he said. For a moment stormy eyes glinted with something more than annoyance.
“What?”
“Never mind. There’s a wider road back to the village. Turn right at the Brampton gate.” He closed the door and stomped away. Seconds later he revved up his disreputable vehicle, which needed a new muffler, sending up a shower of mud as he passed. More than twenty miles an hour she’d bet. Or kilometers. Arwen’s first encounter with the Brampton natives was not encouraging. Still, even scolding sounded better from a deep voice with a British accent. Of course they all had lovely accents and some of them were villains: Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan; Richard Armitage as the Sheriff of Nottingham; Alan Rickman in almost anything. His voice was up to that standard.
Resisting the distraction of British vowels and cheekbones, she slowed to a crawl for the last half mile. A set of impressive stone pillars and a discreet sign marked the entrance to Brampton House, Country House Hotel. It had rained on and off most of the way from the airport, but as she drove through the open gates a beam of sunlight opened a crack in the clouds and illuminated a vision in honey-colored stone and glass. Arwen, who had organized weddings in every available mansion within easy reach of New York City, had never seen a more beautiful house. Seventeenth-century with later additions, she remembered from the history on the hotel’s rudimentary website. Things had looked desperate when Jane’s first choice of wedding location fell through at the eleventh hour. But even in the short time available, Arwen could do something spectacular here, a celebration that would be talked about in every magazine on the country. Her name would be in Brides, Town and Country, People…
First she had to make sure that Brampton House, newly converted to a hotel, was up to the standards required of a wedding venue for America’s newest tech billionaire and his bride. Going to her high-school reunion in Pennsylvania and reconnecting with Jane Sparks was the biggest piece of luck of Arwen’s career in the competitive world of event planning. Luxe Events was not going to blow the opportunity. At the gate she stopped to take a photo and texted it to her partner Valerie, then called her, ready to babble about how gorgeous the place was and rub Val’s nose in it, just a little bit, for having to stay in New York to complete the arrangements for a routine wedding at Tavern on the Green.
Nothing. Her phone showed one dot, which faded before her eyes into No Service. The photo hadn’t gone either. She hoped this was merely a dead spot. If not, the hotel had better have damn good Wi-Fi.
Clouds parted further as she drove down a tree-lined avenue bisecting impossibly green fields to the crunchy gravel approach to the house. An epic flight of stone stairs, wide enough to photograph the wedding party and all the guests, led to a huge front door. Not a single vehicle spoiled the dazzling historic panorama and Arwen had been told to proceed to the east wing. Glancing at the sun, she turned left and drove around the side of the h
ouse to discover a more utilitarian elegance. Several cars and vans were parked in another graveled area. On one side was the main house, at right angles to a separate building entered by an archway with a picturesque clock tower. The look was spoiled by a huge pile of dirt sitting forlornly next to an abandoned backhoe. Whatever excavation Lord Melbury had going would have to be finished and cleaned up in time.
Following the instructions in Duke’s assistant’s e-mail, she knocked on an already open door into the house. “Hi there!” she called, peering down a long broad corridor, hung with hunting prints opposite a long row of hooks holding coats, hats, etc. Shoes and boots, several dozen pairs, were lined up on the floor, punctuated by occasional tennis rackets and fishing rods. Not very hotel-like, but this was the family’s residential quarters. Since no one responded to her calls, she stole gingerly up the corridor feeling lame at every “hello” and so rattled she almost tripped on a tall black leather boot that had broken ranks and fallen into her path. She’d entered a freakin’ Lord’s stately home without permission and felt like they might put her in the Tower of London or something.
Come on, Arwen. You’re a tough American professional woman and this is nothing but a glorified mudroom.
She took a deep breath. “Anyone here?”
“This way.” She followed the soft female voice into the biggest kitchen she’d ever seen. At the far end an elderly woman stirred something in a pot resting on a massive black stove, possibly as old as the house.
“Hello, dear,” she said. “What are you looking for?”
Nothing could be less alarming than this sweet little old lady with perfect short gray curls and a pink floral apron covering her white blouse and gray skirt. “Are you Mrs. Thompson?”
“Call me Nanny.”
“I am Arwen Kilpatrick. Call me Arwen,” she said, relieved at this evidence of informality. “I’m here about the wedding,” she added when Nanny looked puzzled. Was it possible that Duke Austen’s secretary had failed to call and announce her arrival?
