Page 15 of The Heartbreaker Next Door

“Eighty-nine minutes,” I counted down.

“Fine.” Her eyes twinkled with delight as if she loved this. “First, I get the bride a drink.”

My brows lifted.

“Next, I check the weather reports and establish a hard safety cutoff, quietly separate the warring parents and enlist a bridesmaid to help keep the mother of the bride distracted and heard, raid the ranch/vineyard/gardens for emergency florals, put coffee and food into the drunk groomsman, delegate the dove problem to someone who has no other useful skills, and create a covered backup ceremony that still gives the bride the romantic aesthetic she wanted without endangering her guests.” She took a breath. “The bride doesn’t need to know there were seventeen disasters. She needs to remember that she had the best day of her life. My job is making sure those are the same day.”

It was the best answer I’d ever heard in an interview, and that fact annoyed me as much as it impressed me. I held Felicity’s gaze a moment longer, waiting for her to blink or for her confidence break, but she just sat there, patient and luminous, making me feel like the more time I gave her, the more certain she became that I’d already decided to hire her. It was impossible not to respect that kind of self-possession.

For the second time in recent memory, I was at a loss for words. The first was leaving Felicity’s house the night before. So I defaulted to procedure. “If we select you, it’s a ninety-day trial. No guarantees.”

She nodded, eyes twinkling. “I’ll try to contain my excitement.”

I rose, extending my hand. “And I’ll need a full proposal by the end of the week.”

She stood at the same time, not bothering to accept my handshake. Instead, she met me at the edge of the table and, with a tilt of her head, offered a parting volley, “Just out of curiosity, do you plan on showing up at all the applicants’ homes unannounced the day before the interview, or am I special?”

Was she flirting? No. That had to be me projecting.

“For the record, charm and a quick wit do not balance a budget.”

She matched my tone perfectly as she shot back, “And spreadsheets don’t make guests fall in love with your ranch.”

I stood there like an idiot, completely put in my place, while karma laughed at my expense. Because of course this was happening. Of course, the one woman I couldn’t stop thinking about was also brilliant, funny, creative, and was now going to show up every day at the one place I’d always considered my safe haven. Not only that, I was going to be paying for the privilege of having my world turned upside down and inside out.

This was going to be a problem.

5

EMERGENCY CHICKENS MAY BE REPORTED

Felicity

Thirty minutes. That’s all I had before my life officially imploded.

I scrolled through my contacts with the desperate optimism that it would suddenly light up with a godsend of names, a hidden roster of emergency contacts I’d completely overlooked until this moment, courtesy of my fairy godmother.

Spoiler: I did not have a fairy godmother.

What I had was Nonna, who’d just called to tell me she wouldn’t be able to watch Mav today and then proceeded to spend three solid minutes describing her stomach bug in the kind of graphic detail that should be illegal before 8 a.m. “Singing to the porcelain gods” were her exact words. I’d never look at a toilet the same way again.

My eyes swept Uncle Walter’s living room like I was expecting a responsible adult to materialize from behind one of the moving boxes—a surprise babysitter, a kindly stranger, anyone. But it was just the two of us. Maverick, four years old and completely unbothered by my downward spiral, his entire being absorbed by Transformers, and me, a woman so deep in existential dread she was considering calling her dentist as a childcare solution.

Five minutes until I was supposed to drop him off. Thirty minutes until I was supposed to be at the ranch.

Something told me today was about to get spectacularly worse.

“What’s wrong?” Mav asked, his eyes not leaving the screen, just sensing panic by the radioactive waves I was giving off.

“Nothing,” I lied, the way mothers everywhere have been lying since the dawn of time.

He glanced over in time to catch me chewing on the cord of my hoodie—the same nervous tic he’d inherited, because children are nature’s way of showing us our worst habits in high-def.

I dropped the string and smiled at him, hoping to convey confidence—nothing to see here, everything’s fine. When his attention turned back to the screen, my smile fell.

Seattle-me would have scrolled through contacts until I found someone. Seattle-me had a bench so deep with backup and backup-for-the-backups that I’d once attended a Child-Free Friday wine tasting and had three different women lining up to watch him. I was child-care rich. But this was Valentine Bay, and here my entire network consisted of an eighty-two-year-old woman with a constitution of half espresso and half pure willpower, currently incapacitated by a stomach virus she’d most likely caught because, for the past five days she’d taken my son to the park filled with germs.

I’d only lived here a week, and my social circle was still more ‘awkward pleasantries in the grocery store’ than “hey, can you watch my kid for eight hours while I wrangle an influencer high-visibility wedding?”