by Unknown
This book is part of a new romantic-comedy series I’m writing called ‘Twisted Fate’, a series about what happens when well-made plans get messed with. When life throws you strange and unexpected curve balls, and when the universe not only works in mysterious ways, but totally F’s with you. Life never seems to go as planned, and neither does love – especially love (and that’s what’s so fun to write about).
This was also the first time working with my editor, Jenna Barlow, and it was super fun. Hopefully this is just the first of many more to come.
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Read Damien and Lilly’s story
Turn over for a preview of the Harlequin ‘So You Think You Can Write’ and Wattpad contest winning debut novel from Jo Watson, ‘Burning Moon’.
Honeymoon checklist:
Suitcase—check
Passport—check
Husband—oops
When Lilly Swanson’s fiancé jilts her in front of five hundred wedding guests, she quickly hurtles through the first three stages of grief: screaming, crying and chocolate-eating. But then she makes a decision. Happily-ever-after may be temporarily on hold, but the honeymoon is still booked. And Lilly’s going to go—alone.
Except it doesn’t quite work out like that.
Before the plane even takes off, Lilly meets Damien. Tattooed, darkly mysterious and incredibly sexy, he doesn’t plan anything beyond the next exotic trip—or the next scorching kiss. He’s impulsive and unpredictable, yet somehow sure of himself. When he asks Lilly to go with him to the only place on earth where she can see a burning moon, she knows that saying yes will change everything.
This is a story of what happens when you lose the life you thought would keep you safe—and find the courage to reach for the one you never even dreamed of.
Prologue
“I’m sorry, I can’t.”
No matter how long I stared at the scribbled note, the meaning stayed the same. I held it up hoping, praying, that the sunlight would illuminate the other words that had been written in magic invisible ink.
But nothing appeared.
Just those four tiny little words…and yet, they had the power to bring my whole world crashing down around me in an instant. Splintering, shattering and exploding into a million little pieces. Yes, it was that dramatic!
I finally managed to pry my eyes from the note and found myself staring into the terrified faces of my two best friends. They were looking at me as if I was about to shave my head and then poke someone’s eye out with an umbrella. They looked very concerned. Like I was a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.
And they were right.
I was.
Tick. Tick.
I was teetering on the brink of insanity. I could feel it trying to suck me in like an all-consuming black hole. The tug was almost too hard to fight.
Did I even want to fight it?
But what would happen if I let go? I knew I was in shock right now, drenched in a sort of numb, detached feeling. But I could feel the other hostile emotions bubbling their way to the surface and fighting to take control.
I blinked. My eyes were stinging.
I tried to open my mouth and speak.
It was dry and nothing came out.
I looked at my best friend Sue, my rock; the one person I could always rely on for help…. Nothing. Not a word. Just horror.
I shifted my gaze to Val. She was the joker, the fun-loving rebel. She had the ability to turn even the most terrible situation into a laugh. Again…nothing. Just stupefied horror plastered across her now-ashen face.
I looked down at my shaking hands; they were crunching the corners of the note. My heart felt like it was going to break through the safe confines of my rib cage, taking my stomach and lungs with it.
And then I snapped. It overwhelmed me, rising up from the most primitive part of my soul where logic, rules and intellect wielded no power. This was a place of red, raw, uninhibited emotion.
And so I screamed at the top of my lungs until my voice went hoarse and my throat was raspy.
“Get me out of this dress. Get me out of it. Get it off!”
My desperate fingers franticly ripped at my wedding dress; a dress that had taken my two friends ten minutes to get me into, thanks to the intricate crisscross ribbons of the bodice. But I was trapped.
Sue and Val sprang into action, simultaneously grabbing at the stubborn ribbons, but it was taking too long. The air around me became too thick to breathe, and I felt like I was drowning.
“I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. It’s too tight.”
Val made a move for the knife that had arrived earlier with the room service, and, without hesitation, she cut. The sound of the serrated knife eviscerating the ribbons was like fingernails down a blackboard; it made my skin crawl. But I could feel the bodice getting looser and looser, until it finally slipped down my aching body and pooled lifelessly on the floor.
I was finally free.
And then the tears came. Hot, wet, tears streaming down my cheeks and streaking my flushed skin with angry, black mascara lines. The tears turned to sobbing.
I looked at my dress, the pathetic puddle of ribbons, satin and beads lay at my feet. But I still felt trapped. My hair! The perfect updo, held together with delicate pearl clips. Suddenly, it felt like every strand of hair was tightening around my head, like a boa constrictor going in for the kill. My fingers ripped, desperately trying to free it from its pearly captives.
I wanted to get the pearl clips removed. Gone. Off. I wanted to rub every single trace of the wedding away.
I pulled out my earrings and grabbed the nearest tissue, rubbing my red lipstick off until my lips hurt. It smeared across my face like an ugly rash.
If someone were standing outside the window looking in, they would have pegged me for a crazy person. And I wouldn’t have blamed them. Because somewhere in the back of my now-estranged rational brain, I knew I looked like a lunatic escaped from a mental asylum. But I didn’t know what else to do….
Because he…
Michael Edwards—fiancé of one year, perfect boyfriend of two—had left me, Lilly Swanson, just ten minutes before I was scheduled to walk down the aisle. The bottle of perfume that he’d wanted me to wear today, insisted I wear, because “it was his favorite,” mocked me from the dressing table. So I picked it up and threw it against the wall, watching it shatter into a million pieces, just like my life. I was hit by the sickly sweet smell of jasmine and felt sick to my stomach.
What was I going to tell the five-hundred guests who were sitting in the church waiting for me? Some had even flown here to South Africa all the way from Australia.
Hi everyone. Thanks for coming. Guess what? SURPRISE! No wedding!
A wedding that my father had spent a small fortune on.
A wedding that was going to be perfect.
Perfect, dammit. Perfect!
I’d made sure of that. I had painstakingly handled every single tiny detail. It had taken months and months of meticulous planning to create this day, and now what?
Things went very blurry all of a sudden. I vaguely remember my brother James bursting into the room, screaming insults and then vowing to kill him. He even punched the best man when he claimed to have no knowledge of Michael’s whereabouts. My rational lawyer father tried to find a legitimate motive for Michael’s behavior, insisting we speak to him b
efore jumping to any rash conclusions. Hundreds of phone calls followed: where was he? Who had seen him? Where did he go?
At some stage the guests were told, and the rumor mill went into full swing…
He’d had an affair.
He’d eloped with someone else.
He was a criminal on the run.
He was gay.
He’d been beamed up by aliens and was being experimented on. (Hopefully it was painful.)
People threw around bad words like bastard, asshole and liar. They also threw around words like shame, sorry and pity. They wondered whether they should take their wedding gifts back, or leave them. What was the correct protocol in a situation like this?
While the world around me was going mad, I felt a strange calm descend. Nothing seemed real anymore, and I began to feel like a voyeur looking at my life from a distance. I didn’t care that I was sitting on the floor in my bra and panties. I didn’t care that my mascara and lipstick were so smudged I looked like Batman’s Joker. I just didn’t care.
Some minutes later my other brother Adam, the doctor, burst in and insisted I drink a Coke and swallow the little white pill he was forcing down my throat. It would calm me, he said.
Shortly after that, my overly dramatic, theater-actress mother rushed in to give the performance of her life.
“Why, why, why?” She placed her hand across her heart.
“What is this, a madness most discreet? A stench most foul?” She held her head and cried out,“Whyyy?!”
“For heaven’s sake, Ida, this isn’t some Shakespearean bloody play.” I could hear the anger in my father’s voice. Even after 18 years of divorce, they still couldn’t be civil to each other.
“Lest I remind you that all the world is a stage.” My mother shouted back, the deep timbre in her voice quivering for added dramatic tension as she tilted her head upward and clenched her jaw.
“There you go again with your crap! Clearly you still haven’t learned to separate fantasy from reality!”
“Well, I managed to do that with our marriage!”
My brother jumped between them. “Stop it. This isn’t the time!”
And then all pandemonium broke out.
The priest came around to offer some kind of spiritual guidance but exited quickly, and very red-faced, when he saw my state of undress. Some inquisitive relatives stuck their heads through the door, painted with sad, sorry puppy-dog looks, but they, too, left when they saw me spread-eagled on the floor. An enormous ruckus ensued when the photographer burst in and started talking photos of me—no one had told him. The ruckus became a total freak show when the “flamboyant” dress designer, who wanted to see his “best creation” come alive, saw the state of the dress.
Then everything went very hazy and the noises around me combined into one strange drone.
I closed my eyes and everything went black.
Chapter One
I woke up with a big happy yawn, pulling the crisp white linen of my duvet down and stretching my sleepy legs. The sun was rushing into my apartment and the birds were chirping in the newly blossoming trees. I could just make out the soft, sweet smell of flowers on the warm morning breeze. Wow, this is the perfect spring morning. This is the perfect day to get married. I skipped out of bed, excited for the day ahead and then I saw it…
My wedding dress. Draped over the chair like a dead, decapitated duck.
Like a sledgehammer to my stomach, those four little words came slamming back. I scrambled for my cell phone. My frantic fingers slid across the touch screen, running through the twenty-two messages that were lighting it up. They were from my friends, family, co-workers, my pedicurist and even my mother’s psychic (who was clearly going to get fired!).
But nothing from Michael.
I logged onto Facebook, heart racing with anticipation, and went straight to his page. No new activity. I went to Twitter, also nothing. I checked to see if he was still following me, he was. I checked Instagram, but again, there was no recent sign of life. It was as if he’d dropped off the face of the social media planet, which was completely unlike him. Michael couldn’t sharpen a pencil without Tweeting about it. He couldn’t buy a pair of shoelaces without Instagramming a picture of them, and he couldn’t scratch his head without sharing his thoughts on Facebook. It had been one of the only things I disliked about him. Past tense. Now there were many.
My mind went into overdrive as a series of disgusting thoughts battered their way in.
Where the flaming fuck was he? Was he holed up in a sketchy pay-by-the-hour hotel with some slutty, Perspex-shoe-wearing stripper with tassels and an STD ? Was he partying up a storm, celebrating the fact that he’d missed the wedding and dodged a bullet?
I was grateful when the rich smell of coffee and fatty sausages being cooked yanked me back to reality and gave me something physical to focus on. Because I suddenly realized that I was starving. More hungry than I’d ever been in my entire life. I followed my growling stomach into the kitchen, where I found my friends and family keeping vigil around the table. A chorus of caring hellos rang out. The only response I could muster was a half-hearted nod.
But it wasn’t long before they flocked. They’d always been overprotective that way. Adam rushed to my side with a glass of orange juice, a capsule for my headache and a prescription for those little white pills. I’m sure he would’ve taken my temperature, blood pressure and set up an IV if I’d let him. Val and Sue ushered me to a seat and even Buttons, my cat, rubbed herself at my ankles.
The loud click-clack of expensive heels marched past me. “I swear, don’t push me on this. I might just advise my client to seek damages on the grounds of emotional injury. Not to mention damages for the money spent on the wedding.” My sister-in-law, feisty lawyer and wearer of impossibly high heels, was shouting threats down her phone. She’d been trying to track him down all morning, speaking to every single one of his relatives, no matter how distant and thrice removed. But no luck. Michael was nowhere to be found and now she was threatening to sue everyone.
My stomach growled again, angry that I’d ignored it, and I pulled the plate of sausages toward me. I’d been dieting for months, trying to squeeze my naturally voluptuous figure into that dress, especially after Michael had pointed out a few extra creeping kilos. I hadn’t eaten saturated fat, or been in the same room as a carbohydrate, for at least three months, and now…I was going to make up for it.
I grabbed the sausage and shoveled it into my gaping mouth, washing it down with the glass of orange juice and a butter-laden bagel. Everyone stared at me, but no one dared to speak.
“Val.” The sausage almost fell out of my mouth as I tried to talk. “Val, I need you to go down to the shops and buy me two, no, five Mars Bar chocolates, six bags of jelly beans and bread—I need bread.” Right now, I needed bread like a junkie needed their early morning fix. Before I’d even finished giving Val these instructions, I’d already started killing a crumpet, dripping it into syrup and practically inhaling it down. No one ventured to argue, or suggest that I shouldn’t mainline with pure sugar. Val jumped into action.
But the food could only push the emotions away for so long. I looked up at the clock. The minute hand seemed to be ticking in slow motion and I felt like I was trapped in a surreal dream, where the landscape was tilting and the clock face was melting down the kitchen wall like a Salvador Dali painting. It was hard to walk; my brain was struggling to send messages to my sluggish legs, which were now encased in psychosomatic concrete.
I crawled to the lounge and poured myself onto the couch, clutching a bag of newly arrived jelly beans. I needed a distraction. Badly. I flipped to a reality show, confident that I would find solace there. Someone always had it worse—like the guy with four arms and wayward warts, or the person trapped in their house under the piles of magazines and toothbrushes that they’d been hoarding since 1966 or,
better still, the woman who went into labor while trapped on a steep cliff face in The Himalayas, or something equally as morbidly fascinating. But the current show was about a guy who baked cakes, and unless his arm got trapped in the electric mixer and he was forced to gnaw it free with his teeth, I wasn’t interested.
I was happy when my family finally left and Sue and Val joined me.
“So now what?” The tears welled up again. “What do I do next?”
“I don’t know, sweetie.” Sue took me by the hand. “But we’re here for you, whatever you need.”
“Whatever!” Val echoed the sentiment and took my other hand. I felt mildly better knowing that they were there for me. I thought back to the time that Val and I had rallied around Sue when she’d found her boyfriend in bed, literally, with another woman. At the time she didn’t think she would survive the pain and humiliation, but she’d come through it fine. More than fine, actually, she’d recently landed a job as an intern at a glamorous magazine where she got copious amounts of free face cream. And she’d just started dating a med student.
Maybe I would be okay, too? One day.
But right now, the future looked pretty damn bleak.
What the hell had happened?
Maybe he was having an affair? But how? We practically lived together. Maybe it was something more benign; perhaps he was just scared? Or maybe he was worried about marrying a woman he’d never taken out for a test drive. I wasn’t exactly the most sexual person, and I had also liked the idea of losing my virginity on my wedding night. Twenty-three and still a virgin! It all seemed so stupid and pathetic now in the face of so many maybes.
I dismembered another jelly bean and that’s when I noticed my engagement ring. The perfect, two-carat, heart-shaped diamond made my stomach churn, and I ripped it off my finger, leaving a red mark behind. We all stared at it for a moment in absolute silence, and then Val spoke.
“Pawn it. Sell it and buy yourself something awesome. Like a Porsche sports car.” Michael was pretty flashy with money, and my ring was no exception.
