Harlequin E New Adult Romance Box Set Volume 1: Burning Moon\Girls' Guide to Getting It Together\Rookie in Love (2 page)

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 before 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 posting about it. He couldn’t buy a pair of shoelaces without taking a picture of them, and he couldn’t scratch his head without sharing his thoughts with his followers. 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 hell was he?
Was he holed up in a sketchy pay-by-the-hour hotel with some slutty, 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
maybe
s.

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.

“No!” Sue jumped in excitedly. “Let’s burn it in a sacrificial fire. In fact, let’s burn everything of his, starting with those revolting corduroy pants he always insisted on wearing!”

I studied my ring. It was so beautiful. And I hated it.

It reminded me of him and the empty promises he’d made. In fact, everything reminded me of him. His presence was rudely painted across everything I owned. The couch I was lying on, the TV that he’d hung on the wall, the carpet he used to trip on and the happy photos of our beach vacation on the coffee table.

Oh my God, the honeymoon!

We were meant to be leaving for Thailand this afternoon! We had very expensive, paid-for-in-full reservations for the honeymoon suite at the White Sands Hotel and Spa. I cringed at the thought.

“I can’t take this anymore. I have to phone him.” I pulled my phone out and started dialing the number that felt ingrained in my DNA. But before I could finish, Val snatched it away.

“Wait. Just think about this for a second. What are you going to say to him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Won’t talking to him just make it worse?” Sue offered. “And what if he doesn’t answer? No one’s been able to get ahold of him. Or what if he tells you something you’re not strong enough to hear right now?” Sue’s tone was sensitive now.

“Like what?” I felt my stomach tighten into sickening knots. “Do you think there’s someone else?”

They both hugged me. “I don’t know, sweetie. But I do know it’s a bad idea to phone him now. Give yourself a little time to calm down. Besides, you can barely think straight, let alone hold a conversation, thanks to your brother’s magic white pills.”

I knew they were right.

“Fine. I won’t call him, but I need a drink.”

“Um…I don’t think that’s a good idea either. Remember what your brother said. No alcohol.”

“Fine. Then bring me another chocolate!”

* * *

There are moments in a person’s life that change everything. Shake things up. Steer you in a different direction and push you onto another course, toward different people, places and things. These moments don’t come around often, but when they do, they rip through the very fabric of your world.

I knew that this was one of those moments. I knew this, because I’d had one of them before when I was twelve.

Ever since that age, I’d known exactly what I wanted from life. I had planned it down to a T, to the second, to the minutest detail imaginable. The reason for this, I guess, was that I’d been shown a very good example of how
not
to live—thanks to my dramatic mother. She was a theatre actress of some fame and status, which was something she liked to remind everyone of…
constantly.
After she divorced my dad when I was five, I endured what can only be described as hell. We moved around frequently, from one play to the next, one rehearsal to the next, one man to the next. The musician, the actor, the director, her yoga teacher, her voice coach and even some magician who turned out to be a criminal. When they locked him up, he vowed to escape, as “no handcuff could hold him.” To my knowledge he’s still there.

My mother had terrible taste in men. She was drawn to bad men like a hippie was drawn to tie-dyed T-shirts and world peace. She also had some rather terrible hobbies: drunken, scantily clad parties laced with cocaine were a regular occurrence. On many occasions, while on my way to school, I’d have to navigate my way through a sea of unconscious bodies lying limp and littered across our living floor. My dad finally won the custody battle when I was twelve, and that’s when everything changed for the better.