“Well, I look forward to your plan.”
Mel walked the woman out while Lizanne stood and gazed after her. She was confident. Or at least she knew how to pretend to appear confident. And she was easy on the eyes; that was a plus too.
Lizanne shook her head. She shouldn’t be thinking things like this. Not about the potential wedding planner. And yet, that lipstick, those slightly out-of-fashion red tips… There was something about Rose Delaney that had gotten her interested. She was a character, that was for sure. And the fact that she was getting married herself had gone a long way to sealing the deal for Lizanne.
Given how uninterested Trina had been in their wedding preparations, it would be nice to have someone who was just as into planning weddings at her side.
She took a deep breath, realizing that this wasn’t exactly how she should be feeling or thinking, a few weeks out from her own wedding. She pulled her phone out, her heart skipping a beat as she waited for the screen to come on.
Then she saw it. A text from Trina.
Hope it goes well with the planner. On my way, will be there to meet the second one.
Lizanne exhaled. Good. This was good. This was, in fact, exactly what she had needed.
Chapter 3
Rose
The second the massive iron gates of the Connors estate clicked shut behind her, Rose slammed the car into park. The sudden silence of the canyon was deafening. She dropped her forehead onto the steering wheel with a dull thud, the plastic cold against her skin.
“Derek?” she groaned into the leather, her voice muffled and thick with self-loathing. “An attorney? URGH!”
She squeezed her eyes shut, but the darkness didn’t help. The image of Lizanne’s sharp, discerning blue eyes was burned into her eyelids like a solar flare. Lizanne hadn’t just looked at her; she had dissected her.
“A wedding? Really, Rose?” She smacked the wheel once, hard. The sting in her palms helped ground her, pulling her back from the ledge of a full-blown anxiety attack. She took a ragged breath. It was done. The lie was out there, vibrating in the universe. She now had a fiancé named Derek, and he was supposedly marrying her on the fourteenth of December.
She looked at her digital calendar, her finger trembling as she scrolled to the date.
It was a Wednesday.
“Of course, a Wednesday,” she hissed. Only the worst possible day of the week for a wedding. A Monday, Thursday, or Friday meant you could bridge into a long weekend. But Tuesdays and Wednesdays? Those were the days you booked when you were desperate—when you wanted to save thirtypercent on the venue fee or when you were scraping the bottom of the barrel for catering leftovers. It screamed “budget.” It screamed “struggling.” It was exactly the kind of detail a high-end planner would never choose for themselves unless they were in a rush.
Lizanne didn’t seem like the type to consult a calendar for someone else’s life, but Rose couldn’t bet her future on a “maybe.” If Lizanne was as meticulous as she seemed, she might do a quick search. She might look for a wedding registry to see Rose’s taste. She might GoogleRose Delaney + Derek + Wedding.
And she would find nothing but a digital void.
“Shit. Shit. Shit.”
Rose shifted back into drive and pulled onto the winding road. The adrenaline was still humming under her skin, a frantic, vibrating chord that made her foot heavy on the gas.
The 101 South was, predictably, backed up. The stop-and-go traffic gave her forty-five minutes to cycle through the full emotional spectrum: blistering embarrassment, a strange flick of pride for her ability to lie under pressure, the cold logic of research, and then back to embarrassment again. By the time she hit her exit, she’d landed on a kind of resigned determination.
She’d come up with a kick-ass proposal for Lizanne and Trina’s wedding. That was the easy part. Then, she’d have to build a digital ghost for her own wedding. She’d have to set up a wedding register, a Pinterest board, and a backstory for her lucky, imaginary groom.
Her phone rang through the car speakers, startling her.
“Well?” Her mother didn’t bother with a greeting. She never did when there was news to be had.
“I’ll tell you when I get home, Mom.”
“That means something happened. Good or bad?”
“It means I’m driving and I can’t think while you’re vibrating through the Bluetooth.”
“Rose Ellen Delaney.”
“Twenty minutes. I’m almost at the apartment.”
