To Have And To Hold: The Wedding Belles Book 1 (4 page)

“If by rough you mean trying to get to Brooklyn and ending up in the Bronx and nearly freezing my face off . . .”

Nodding, Heather picked up a roll from the basket in the center of the table and pointed it in Brooke’s direction. “I hear you on the subway bit. Nobody ever really tells you that the entrance to the uptown and downtown trains are rarely on the same side of the street.”

“The guidebooks tell you. And the Internet,” Alexis said.

Heather rolled her eyes. “Ignore her.”

Brooke gave Alexis a nervous glance, curious if the other woman took issue with Heather’s informal tone—they were, after all, boss and assistant. But to her surprise, Alexis was smiling. She was not, however, touching the bread basket.

Impressive self-control on Alexis’s part, but Brooke had never met a carb she didn’t like and followed Heather’s lead, grabbing one of the crusty, still-warm rolls and spreading a bit of aioli-infused butter on it.

Before
she could dig in, though, Alexis lifted her champagne flute. “Shall we toast?”

“Hells yes,” Heather said, lifting her glass. “To the newest Belle.”

Belle
.
I like that
, Brooke thought as she picked up her champagne. For the past two years, Brooke had thrown every bit of energy into starting her
own
wedding-planning company, determined to work for herself.

And while being the boss had come with plenty of perks, it had also been . . . lonely. She wondered if this was maybe the way to do it—to belong to something.

“To the newest Belle,” Alexis said, echoing Heather. “And to new beginnings.”

Brooke met her new boss’s gaze, wondering exactly how much Alexis Morgan knew about Brooke’s past. Wondered if the other woman knew how true her words were.

She hadn’t hid what happened from Alexis during their several phone interviews, she just . . . hadn’t volunteered it. Still, it was hardly a national secret. Alexis, and Heather, for that matter, could have found out every sordid detail with a quick visit to everyone’s BFF, Google.

Looking at Alexis’s face certainly didn’t tell her one way or the other whether her boss knew. The woman was like 007 with the unreadable.

“So, Brooke,” Heather said, reaching for yet another roll. “You’ve heard that we East Coasters are known to be a bit more blunt than you West Coasters, right?”

“You’re
from Michigan,” Alexis told Heather. “That’s more Midwest than anything.”

“I became a New Yorker about five minutes after moving here,” Heather said. “We all do. Anyway, what I want to know is—and you can totally tell me to shut my trap, by the way—your, um, spicy past . . . are we talking about it, or not talking about it? I’m fine either way.”

“
Heather!
” For once Alexis’s voice was anything but calm, and Brooke sensed she’d like nothing more than to kick her assistant under the table.

“I’m sorry,” Heather said, going a little bit pale. “Was that rude? I just thought that if we’re going to be spending, like, every minute of every day together, we should know what’s off-limits and what’s fair game.”

“Yes, of course it was rude,” Alexis said.

Heather gave Brooke a contrite look. “I’m sorry. It’s just that it’s
totally
not a secret, and if I’m supposed to tiptoe, I have to know now, you know?”

“Good Lord,” Alexis murmured, taking a sip of her champagne. “Have you
ever
tiptoed?”

The women’s exchange gave Brooke a second to gather her thoughts—to recover from the shock of hearing it mentioned, only to realize that Heather was right.

They would be spending a hell of a lot of time together, and as far as Brooke was concerned, the only thing worse than talking about it was
not
talking about it.

And so, after taking a sip of champagne for courage, Brooke took a deep breath, folded her hands in
her lap, leaned forward slightly, and told her new colleagues all about the guy she’d fallen in love with. The one she’d almost married.

Right up until the moment the FBI had arrested him.

At the altar.

I
T’S NOT AS THOUGH
Brooke had
meant
to start dating a con man. She certainly didn’t intend to get engaged to one.

But that’s the thing about con men. The good ones were good at, well . . . the con.

And Clay Battaglia had been a good one. The
best
, actually, if you took the word of the FBI agent who’d debriefed Brooke and her family—while she was still in her wedding dress.

Turns out that while Brooke had been happily building her wedding-planning company, Clay had been quietly and competently getting away with every white-collar crime in the book. While she’d been planning
their
wedding, he’d apparently been knee-deep in yet another Ponzi scheme.

Brooke hadn’t even known what a Ponzi scheme
was
when the FBI had told her.

She did now.

Following Clay’s arrest, she spent weeks researching white-collar crime. Wanting to know what he’d
been up to all those times he’d quietly kissed her forehead late at night and told her he needed to make some phone calls for “work.” Wanting to know what her life would have been like if the FBI hadn’t taken him down
before
they’d exchanged vows.

Still, while Brooke would be ever grateful that she’d learned the truth before she’d become Mrs. Clay Battaglia, she’d be lying if she didn’t admit that the timing of it had stung just a little bit.

If they’d only taken him down a day before. Heck, even an hour before.

But no.

Just moments after Brooke kissed her father’s cheek and prepared to marry the man she loved at the wedding she’d poured her heart into, the FBI stormed—yes, stormed—the church.

Clay was in handcuffs before she even registered what was happening.

Numbly she watched as he listened to his Miranda rights at the precise moment he should have been listening to the vows she’d spent months writing.

And as reality slowly sunk in, Brooke waited. Waited for him to look at her. To look at her and say that it was all a lie. All one big misunderstanding, and that they’d be on their way to Bermuda as planned by tomorrow.

He didn’t.

He didn’t even apologize.

No, the man she’d loved for two years with every fiber of her being merely smiled at her and then shrugged.

There’d been plenty of photos taken that day, but
that was the one that made it onto the front page of every major newspaper on the West Coast.

“The Greatest Con of All.” “Arrested by Love.” And her personal favorite, courtesy of her very own
LA Times
: “White-Collar Bride.”

The stories all read pretty much like you’d expect. About Clay, mostly, and the litany of accusations against him, but also about
Brooke
.

The papers had stopped short of defamation, but the implications were there. She was clueless and ditzy at best, a potentially overlooked accomplice at worst. Completely oblivious to the fact that she’d been sharing a roof with the most nefarious white-collar criminal in a generation—or pretending to be.

None of that had bothered her. What had bothered her was that she’d been a fool. Self-absorbed, naïve, and downright blind.

Brooke had been dodging dumb-blonde jokes for most of her life, but the debacle with Clay was the first time she thought she might really, truly be deserving of the title.

She hadn’t been surprised when new clients had stopped calling. Hadn’t been surprised when current clients canceled. Nobody wanted to hire
that
wedding planner.

Brooke had even been relieved, at first. In those first weeks after Clay’s arrest, she hadn’t been able to handle any talk of weddings. Not her own, and not other people’s.

But the worst part of all of this, the part that kept her up long into the lonely nights, wasn’t the negative effect on her career. No, the worst part was that
sometimes, in the very darkest corner of her soul, she feared that she might still love Clay, at least a little. Sure, her
brain
knew that all the things she’d loved about Clay had been a lie. Her
brain
understood that his name wasn’t even Clay.

But her heart? Her heart was having a harder time forgetting the way he always let her be the little spoon and tuck her cold feet against his warm calves. Or the way he’d brought her coffee in bed every morning. Or the way she’d come home after a long day with the worst sort of bridezilla and Clay would make them cocktails and sit on the patio with her, and watch the sunset and laugh.

She’d imagined that all their nights would be like that. All the nights for the rest of her life, with maybe a couple of kids thrown into the mix eventually.

Brooke swallowed.

There wouldn’t be any more nights on the patio watching the sunset with Clay. Wouldn’t be any patio at all, because Brooke’s real estate broker had made it quite clear that she should be counting herself lucky to get a dishwasher in New York—a patio was out of the question.

So no patio. No Clay, or whatever his real name was.

No man at
all
, really.

No falling in love.

Not ever again.

A
FTER LUNCH,
B
ROOKE WAS
feeling the lightest she had in months, although she wasn’t quite sure whether it was because of the champagne or the fact that she’d just spilled her guts to two practical strangers.

She hadn’t gotten all personal and weepy or anything, but she’d filled them in on the facts—the
actual
facts, not the tabloid facts—and getting it all out in the open went a long way to making her feel as though she was working with a clean slate.

But the unexpected girl talk, while important for her fresh start, had nothing on the euphoria of the moment she first saw the Wedding Belles headquarters. Other than a delicate silver plaque inscribed with
The Wedding Belles
above the doorbell, it looked exactly like every other house on Seventy-Third Street, which made it all the more charming in its discreetness.

After lunch, Heather and Alexis had headed down to SoHo for a small evening wedding, but Brooke had
wanted to get settled at the main office. Her breath whooshed out in a happy sigh as she tentatively opened the front door and poked her head in. If the outside was charming, the inside was perfect—absolutely perfect.

The main reception area had plenty of white, of course. Smart branding, given that the entirety of their clientele was of the bride-to-be variety. But whereas most wedding-related vendors tended toward frilly and formal, Alexis Morgan had taken the opposite direction, opting for clean lines and bright, unabashed pops of color.

The black-and-white-striped wallpaper gave the place an Old Hollywood vibe, and the sleek furniture was made approachable by fun Tiffany-blue throw pillows. Michael Bublé’s swoony voice was crooning away from some unseen speaker, the perfect choice for what the Wedding Belles were best known for: a tantalizing blend of the classic and the modern.

It was this sterling reputation that had caused Brooke to consider Alexis Morgan’s job offer when she’d brushed off everyone else’s. There were hundreds of wedding planners out there and thousands more that
wanted
to be wedding planners.

But for as many women who imagined it to be their dream job, the truth was that getting wedding planning right was hard. Really hard. The key was finding that nearly impossible balance between ensuring the details were taken care of and not being so rigid that you zapped all the romance out of the event. What brides were really after, but never knew how to ask for, was organized magic. The best weddings
were the ones that went off without a hitch but also had room for spontaneity.

Not only did Alexis
get
it, she’d figured out how to turn it into a formula. There wasn’t a single blight on the Wedding Belles’ resume.

Not something Brooke could say about her own now-defunct company.

She swallowed, pushing aside the dark thoughts, which was relatively easy. She’d had plenty of practice over the past four months, after all.