Sex and the City meets The Wedding Planner in The Wedding Belles!
To Have and to Hold
The Wedding Belles #1
Lauren Layne
Releasing July 26th, 2016
Pocket Books
Sex and the City meets The Wedding Planner in The Wedding Belles, her sizzling brand new contemporary romance series about three ambitious wedding planners who can make any bride’s dream come true…but their own.
Discovering her fiancé is an international conman just moments before they exchange vows devastates celebrity wedding planner Brooke Burke’s business—and breaks her heart. Now a pariah in Los Angeles, she seeks a fresh start in New York City and thinks she’s found it with her first bridal client, a sweet, if slightly spoiled, hotel heiress. Then she meets the uptight businessman who’s holding the purse springs.
Seth Tyler wishes he could write a blank check and be done with his sister’s fancy-pants wedding. Unfortunately, micromanaging the event is his only chance at proving Maya’s fiancé is a liar. Standing directly in his way is the stunning blonde wedding planner whose practiced smiles and sassy comebacks both irritate and arouse him. He needs Brooke’s help. But can he persuade a wedding planner on a comeback mission to unplan a wedding? And more importantly, how will he convince her that the wedding she should be planning…is theirs?
It’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 mans. 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 been 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, naive, 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 deck 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 with 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.
Lauren lives in New York City with her husband (who was her high school sweetheart--cute, right?!) and plus-sized Pomeranian.
Five years ago, she ditched her corporate career in Seattle to pursue a full-time writing career in Manhattan.
She writes smart romantic comedies with just enough sexy-times to make your mother blush, and in her ideal world, every stiletto-wearing, Kate Spade wielding woman would carry a Kindle stocked with Lauren Layne books.
When not bringing The Sexy, she likes to blog about her Instagram addiction, and why mean girls are the worst.
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