Chapter One
“You know, my nephew’s gay. Maybe if you hire him to do some work in the garden, they could… run into each other?”
THE GRANSHIREHotel brooded elegantly over some of Ceremony Island’s most stunning vistas. At the back the cliffs dropped down to the deep, white-sand crescent of the bay, where brightly colored boats rocked at anchor a few miles out. At the front the moorland rolled down, all heather and wildflowers, until it reached the straight, stone-built walls that fenced off the farmland. A small herd of deer sometimes roamed across the land.
TheTatlerhad named it one of the top ten destination-wedding locations in the UK. Wedding parties arrived from around the world. It wasn’t cheap, and it wasn’t easy to reach. Even UK couples had a long drive over rutted coastal roads and had to take a ferry over the stretch of Irish sea. But couples in search of the perfect wedding seemed to think it was worth it.
It wasn’t just the aged stone hall or posing on the elegant stairway with its black oak railings carved to look like twisted briars. They wanted the trip down to the fairy caves on the beach, the congratulatory pint of Guinness in the traditional country pub with the brasses behind the bar, and the “something old” picked out of the trinket shop in the hollowed-out fisherman’s cottage on the beach—or any number of the other Instagrammable moments the island could provide.
Couples who came to Ceremony wanted a well-chronicled fairy tale or a rom-com, and as the Granshire’s wedding planner, it was Nate Moffatt’s job to make sure they got it—even on days when the last thing he wanted to think about was anybody’s happily ever after.
“Shoes?” he asked as he leaned in through the doors to the Granshire’s bar.
The bar was an expanse of sea-bleached wood and polished metal surfaces that usually looked like it was ready for a magazine spread. It was covered in the detritus of the previous evening’s wedding party, with crumpled confetti swept into multicolored drifts in the corners and glasses sticky with the dregs of fruity cocktails on every flat surface.
A skeleton staff of the bar crew were already making inroads on the cleanup, yawning as they dragged bags of rubbish behind them. They paused long enough to shrug their “no ideas” Nate’s way. He made a mental note to up the usual “thanks for a good job” gratuity he’d send down.
Technically he didn’t need to. Some couples wanted to hire a marquee or get married in the old distillery, which meant hiring on extra staff, but the newly minted Sanders had just gone with the hotel package. So the staff were included. Still, in Nate’s experience it was always better to have a reputation as a good person to work for—for that one event when you had to ask them to dress up like the Mad Hatter and serve Long Island iced teas into the a.m.
Nate left the staff to get on with clearing the glasses and picked his way through the tables to the bar. He leaned over the bar and whistled sharply between his teeth to catch the bar manager’s attention.
“Bride’s shoes?” he asked. “One of a kind. Designer. Look like every other pair of sparkly silver Cinderella slippers you’ve ever seen?”
Max tossed two empty bottles of prosecco into the recycling and raised his eyebrows at Nate. “Somebody woke up pissy,” he said. The short, stylishly scruffy man was the son of the hotel’s owner and Nate’s best friend since they were two awkward gay kids trying to work out why more girls seemed to like them than boys did. It turned out that if you were best mates with the other queer kid in your small, islander class of twenty… that could be your gay quota until you graduated. “I haven’t seen any shoes. I found one of the bridesmaids sleeping it off in the toilet, though, if that helps.”
It was hard to resist Max’s smirk. Despite his sour mood, Nate caught the corners of his mouth twitching up in a return grin.
No matter how Grimm’s-fairy-tale pretty the weddings looked, the aftermaths were always a bit more like something out of the original stories—full of regrets, secrets to keep, and sometimes blood on the floor. Mostly vomit, but sometimes blood.
“As of midnight yesterday, the bridesmaids were back on their own time and not my problem,” Nate said.
“You could check the gardens,” Max suggested as he lifted the pot of coffee from the machine and poured Nate a cup. He didn’t need to ask if Nate wanted it. The answer was always yes. “I saw some of the wedding party dancing out there.”
Nate lifted the cup and took a scalding sip. There were bottles of syrup lined up on the wall, everything from basic bitch vanilla to cheesecake, but those were for people who drank coffee to enjoy it. This was maintenance coffee—hot, strong, and thick enough to stand a spoon upright in.
When he looked up, Max had taken a break from clearing the bar and was leaning on it instead. His arms were crossed, and he raised his eyebrows expectantly. “So? Long night why you’re such a cranky git this morning?”
It had been, but Nate didn’t think Max was wasting a suggestive leer on a 3:00 a.m. escort to her suite for the groom’s tiddly and depressed mother. That left….
Nate hissed out a sigh through clenched teeth. The morning seemed determined to just get on his last nerve. “I take it you’re the one who gave the groom’s brother my number?”
Max’s leer deepened. “Yeah, you owe me one. He still back at yours?”
“No.”
The leer collapsed. “Didn’t he call you?” Max asked. He sounded genuinely surprised. “I can’t believe it. He seemed really into you, said you were a silver fox.”
Nate glanced past Max into the mirror behind the bar and self-consciously brushed gray-streaked brown curls back from his forehead. He was thirty-seven. That was too young to be a silver fox, even if he had been going gray since before he was twenty.
“He called.”
Texted actually. Nate wondered dryly if his mild offense at that meant he should accept that he was older than he felt.
Max looked at him quizzically. “And? He thought you were hot. He called. You hooked up—”
“I didn’t answer him,” Nate said flatly. “I was in the middle of running a wedding. I didn’t have time to hook up with a random stranger.”
Instead of picking up on the prickle of irritation underlying Nate’s voice and backing off, Max made a rude noise. “It never stopped you before. I remember back in Durham, when you were volunteering at the book festival. One night you hooked up with three different blokes between talks and readings, including one of the authors. Still got everyone to fill in your satisfaction survey at the end.”
