USA Today bestselling author Helena Greer presents a swoony, sexy romcom where a no-nonsense lawyer fakes a relationship with her barista to avoid going solo to her ex-girlfriend's wedding.
No-nonsense lawyer Tara Sloane Chadwick is perfectly fine with going to her ex’s wedding—the break-up was congenial, and Tara is nothing if not well-mannered. But after one too many reminders of her dismal dating track, Tara panics when asked if she'll need a plus-one and declares she's bringing her new girlfriend. One issue: Tara is seriously single. Thankfully, Holly, the waitress she's been crushing on, happily offers to be her fake date . . .
Only Holly's offer isn't quite selfless—she's been lusting over Tara for ages, but Tara only dates women she can marry. And Holly has no interest in settling down with anyone or in any one place. A temporary arrangement is the perfect solution: Holly and Tara can enjoy a no-strings fling for the wedding and part ways after. However, between sharing kisses and hotel beds and cuddling under the mistletoe, Tara begins to dream of a life with Holly in Charleston . . . just as Holly starts wishing she could travel with Tara by her side. Soon, neither can see a future without the other, but can they find a path forward where they both can thrive?
Release date:
August 27, 2024
Publisher:
Grand Central Publishing
Print pages:
384
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The day Tara Chadwick received wedding invitations from three different ex-girlfriends, she had her first ever twinge of regret at being a lesbian.
The first invitation, for a destination wedding in Cabo from her college girlfriend, she turned down with real regret because she was set to be at trial. She made a note to send them some Le Creuset and mourned the opportunity for a beach vacation. The second, for a lavish affair at an old plantation from the second-to-last girl she’d dated, she shredded without responding. Getting married at a plantation automatically disqualified them from either gifts or attendance.
The third had a New York postmark and a return address for Carrigan’s Christmasland. She would have scowled at it, except that her mother had invited her to a Botox party last week, and as a newly minted partner in her law firm who couldn’t afford to make waves, she was expected to attend certain events. And because the wife of an influential judge had been there, she hadn’t been able to decline. So, forehead frozen, Tara just thought hard about scowling, threw the card on the table, and called Hannah Rosenstein.
“You’re coming,” Hannah said instead of hello when she answered. “It’s not optional.”
The invitation wasn’t for Hannah’s wedding (which Tara had missed because it was a surprise, something she was still annoyed about); it was for Miriam’s.
Miriam Blum, Hannah’s cousin and Tara’s ex-fiancée.
The problem was, Tara was still friends with Miriam—they’d been more friends than lovers to begin with—and she was even closer with Hannah. She wanted to go to Miriam’s wedding.
Or maybe she wanted to want to go.
She wasn’t angry about their breakup, and she’d long since gotten over being hurt, but she couldn’t seem to get over feeling embarrassed. Miriam had disappeared to the Adirondacks, fallen for a tree farmer, and not bothered to break up with Tara until she had shown up in person. She was doing a pretty good job of not dwelling on what a fool she felt like, but revisiting the scene of the crime was sure to bring up more feelings than she wanted to have.
She didn’t say, “I don’t want to be there as the loser single ex everyone feels they have to include as an amends.” Instead, she said, “It’s only three weeks from now. You can’t ask me to upend all my Christmas plans.”
Hannah made a scoffing noise. “You’ve known they were engaged since August. You probably blocked out the date in your calendar as soon as you got the text.”
She had, even though she hadn’t been sure she would get an invite.
She’d been prepared to go, had in fact already told her family that she wouldn’t be available for Christmas dinner. But now that the date was looming nearer, attending felt impossible. She would almost rather spend the holiday with her awful family than be a not-quite-insider observer to the Carrigan’s circus.
Carrigan’s Christmasland was a Jewish-owned, Christmas-themed tourist extravaganza opened by Miriam’s eccentric great-aunt in the 1960s. Both Carrigan’s the place and the Carrigans’ found family were a nonstop roller coaster of A Lot. It made Tara, who had been raised in a menacing Southern gentility, very stressed out.
Tara sighed into the phone. She had to come up with an excuse Hannah would never agree to. “I will come on one condition.”
She texted Hannah a link to the re-creation vintage wallpaper she’d found. It looked exactly like the hideous parrot wallpaper in the Christmasland Inn at Carrigan’s, and it cost a fortune.
“I’m not setting foot in that inn again while that moldy, disgusting wallpaper is still up. Let me pay to replace it, and I’ll come.” This was perfect. Hannah was weirdly attached to the mold and would never, ever let her spend that much money (although why come from absurd amounts of ill-gotten wealth if you couldn’t spend it on your friends?). Besides, how could they change all the wallpaper in three weeks, as this was their busiest time of year?
“You know we can’t accept that kind of gift from you—” Hannah started. There was a shuffling noise, and then Hannah’s husband, Levi, came on the phone.
“We absolutely can accept it. The wallpaper is a hazard, and it’s a miracle we haven’t gotten a health code violation yet. If Hannah would let us replace it with something attractive, instead of forcing us to find a reproduction of the original wallpaper, the cost would be reasonable.”
He paused, and she could hear him add, in a muffled voice, “Besides, babe, you have to think about—”
Hannah shushed him, and Tara’s spidey sense lit up.
She squeaked in glee. “Hannah Naomi Rosenstein! You’re pregnant!”
Hannah shushed them, even louder. “I haven’t told my in-laws yet and I do not want them to find out by overhearing us.”
“Levi, tell that stubborn wife of yours to count the cost against Cole’s grocery bill,” Tara said. “I’m buying you the wallpaper whether I come or not. It’s a baby present.”
Cole Fraser was Tara and Miriam’s best friend—he’d been the one to introduce them, back when Tara was in law school and Miriam was hiding out from her shitty family. Through Miriam and Tara’s relationship, Cole had been the glue that held them all together. Currently, they were sharing custody of him, bouncing him between their houses, because he’d been disowned by his shitty family. He’d been at Carrigan’s for the past few months, moping and eating and pining for Sawyer, the hot bartender at the nearby dive bar. At 6′5″, he could put away a breakfast spread. While the inn was doing well, an unexpected guest who wasn’t paying or doing any work must be straining their budget.
“SOLD!” Levi declared. “I’ll get my dad to install it.”
Damn. Tara had forgotten that Mr. Matthews, Levi’s dad and the inn’s handyman, probably could change an entire hotel’s wallpaper in three weeks.
Hannah’s voice came back. “Should I put you down for one, then? You can call me about your meal choice later?”
“There are no meal choices,” Levi argued from somewhere farther away. “I’m not a short-order cook. There’s one meal. It’s vegetarian. People can eat it.”
“Maybe Tara has a gluten intolerance, honey.”
Levi was a famous TV chef, but he was also often an actual short-order cook because he covered shifts at the Christmasland Inn, where he oversaw the culinary part of their events business. Tara wasn’t paying attention to their argument, though. It was better to tune out Levi and Hannah when they argued, which was most of the time. They treated it as foreplay.
Instead, her brain was stuck on the idea of RSVPing for one.
A movie played out in her mind, of her showing up at Carrigan’s with all its melodramatic gauche festive cheer, trying to keep her cool while surrounded by live reindeer and sticky gingerbread frosting and the world’s creepiest animatronic cherubs. It was a nightmare scenario at best, but to also have to watch Miriam and her fiancée Noelle and Hannah and Levi and Cole and the hot bartender be adorably in love, while she sat at the singles table?
She would be alone with the parrot-covered walls closing in on her, raining tinsel in her hair. Her friends would pity her and feel obligated to worry about her and maybe even, God forbid, try to matchmake. Pretty much every person whose opinion actually mattered to her was going to that wedding, and she refused to be a bother, a burden, or pathetic.
She might have to go to her ex-fiancée’s wedding, but no way in hell was she going solo.
“No,” she interrupted, “I don’t have a gluten allergy. I am allergic to avocados, but I eat them anyway. Life’s short. I’m also not coming alone.”
“You’re not what?” Hannah asked, obviously giving Tara her full attention again, as Levi’s voice faded in the background.
“I’m bringing someone.” Tara managed to sound certain, a by-product of her time in front of juries.
“And who might that be?”
“My… girlfriend,” Tara replied brusquely. “Who I’m not ready to talk about yet.” Because she didn’t exist.
She was warmed by this statement against her better judgment. She should not want to be adopted into their little island of misfit toys, since Carrigan’s was the Hotel California of Upstate New York, but it was nice to be wanted. “I am certainly not Carrigan’s crew!”
Tara would definitely have to call Cole as soon as she fortified herself. First she needed a cup of coffee and a slice of cake. Besides, what the hell was she going to tell him? She’d never been able to lie to him.
She decided to walk down to Emma’s. The cafe wasn’t clean and minimalist or overpriced in the way her social set preferred; it just had good coffee and great pastries and waitstaff who knew her by name. It was comfortable and faded, unfashionable in the best way.
She and Miriam had come here together a thousand times over the course of their relationship, hashing things out over cups of coffee, and the last time they’d seen each other, it was where they’d put their relationship to rest. Those memories hadn’t ruined the cafe. Instead, they’d seasoned it, like a good cast-iron skillet.
Tara needed that right now—and she was a little bit (or a lot?) hoping to see Holly. Truly, having a raging, unrequited crush on your regular waitress was almost as pathetic as going to your ex’s wedding alone, but it couldn’t be helped. Today was Holly’s day off (and why did Tara even have her schedule memorized?) but sometimes she was there, anyway, baking.
Emma’s was decorated for Christmas with a pink plastic tree hung with silver garland and would have delighted Miriam. The cook shouted at her through the passthrough to sit wherever she wanted, and the cashier waved at her like an old friend.
Did she spend too much time in this cafe? It was more comfortable than her pristine, carefully curated Single House. Her house had been called cold and silent, but until recently, she’d always thought of it as calm. Everything was beautiful, and nothing was loud.
Only lately had it seemed… like a set piece she’d built for a one-woman show. Like she was method acting her personality.
Which she was, kind of, because her real personality wasn’t good for anyone.
Shirley Manson was screaming in Holly Delaney’s earbuds, the lattice crust on her apple pie had turned out impeccably, and she was getting overtime for coming in on her day off to deal with pastry. She bopped on the balls of her feet as she tightened the handkerchief knotted on top of her head, then pulled the pie out of the oven and bumped the door closed with her hip.
Garbage was right in the middle of beseeching the listener to pour their misery down when they were rudely interrupted by a text notification. She ignored the noise, focusing on trying to get a tray of croissants into the oven before the lunch rush. Her phone immediately started buzzing again. It was probably a scam bot texting about her car’s extended warranty, as if her beater had seen a warranty in… ever.
Just in case, she slid the oven door shut, brushed the flour off her hands, and fished it out.
Through the spiderweb cracks of her screen, her brother’s name flashed, and Holly groaned.
Dustin: Mom needs to talk to you.
Holly: Has she lost the ability to text? Are you the Mom whisperer now?
Dustin: She says you never take her calls.
Holly: Correct. She only calls when I’m in the middle of work and cannot answer. But she can, and should, text! I know she knows how. She texted me a chain letter last week with some pretty wild claims about essential oils!
No one could conveniently forget your work schedule like a Midwestern mom.
Dustin: She thinks you’re ignoring her, and she’s heartbroken about it.
This was, unequivocally, a falsehood.
Her baby brother had moved back home recently and appointed himself their mother’s knight in shining armor, a position for which she’d never advertised and didn’t need filled. In theory, Holly supported anyone moving in with their parents. Considering late-stage capitalism, it made perfect sense, and it was a uniquely American idea that the nuclear family only involve a single generation in a home.
In practice, she would have an easier time supporting Dustin’s life choices if he weren’t such a little shit about everything.
Dustin: You can’t be that busy if you have time to text me. I’m telling her you’ll call her in 5 minutes.
That manipulative little punk-ass bitch.
Holly: I should have left you up that tree when you were four.
Since she had five minutes before she had to call her mom or risk her mother reporting her as a missing person, she texted her sister.
Holly: What the hell does Mom want?
Caitlin: What do you think? She wants you to come home for Christmas.
Holly: Fucckkkk
Her phone rang. So much for waiting five minutes. Or for letting Holly call.
“Mom, I’m at work,” she answered, tucking the phone into her handkerchief headband so she could have her hands free.
“Your own mother doesn’t get a hello? Anyway, your brother says you’re not busy.”
Holly bit her nails into her palms, reminding herself that she loved her mom, exactly as she was.
“Hi, Mom,” Holly said, rolling her neck to relieve the beginning of the stress headache often brought on by conversations with her family. “I’m at work.”
This time, her mom didn’t even address the issue, simply bulldozing past it.
“You will never guess who I ran into at Rosenstein’s when I was picking up some chocolate babka for Leigh’s daughter’s baby shower.”
“Hadlee’s having another baby? Didn’t she just have one?” Holly knew she shouldn’t engage. Any morsel of interest she showed in the gossip from her hometown would feed her mother’s (wildly unfounded) hopes that Holly would, eventually, return to take part in said gossip.
Her mom tsked. “No, no, Mykylee! Won’t that be wonderful? The cousins will only be six months apart.”
Holly managed to bite her tongue before pointing out that Mykylee was seventeen and it was maybe not that great. Who knew, maybe it would be. Wonderful. And not a disaster.
Her mom didn’t notice her lack of response. “You still haven’t guessed who I ran into at the store!”
Holly was not going to get out of this, and she hated guessing games. “Why don’t you tell me, Mom?”
Taking a deep breath, like an internal drumroll, her mom announced, “Ivy!”
Oof. A gut punch.
“Yay?” Holly managed with the air left in her lungs.
“She looked so great. She’s finally letting her hair go back to its natural blond. You know, I always thought you two were meant to be, and you’d get back together once you got a little older.”
It was, no question, absolutely wonderful that her Irish Midwest mom was so very supportive of her lesbian daughter, and always had been. Unfortunately, that meant Holly wasn’t exempt from her mom’s extreme matchmaking.
“Ivy’s with someone else, Mom,” she pointed out patiently. “Remember Wren?”
She did not say, “Remember how things ended with Ivy? Remember how I was so mean to her, and she blocked my calls, and I spent years avoiding getting involved with anyone else because I didn’t want to treat them the way I treated her?” Her mom wasn’t great at hearing things she didn’t want to.
“Oh, sure, but how serious can they be?” Her mom brushed this off. “They’ve been together for years, and they’re still not married?”
The stress headache was unavoidable at this point. “Maybe Ivy doesn’t want to jump into marriage.” The “again” was silent, but they both heard it loud and clear. “People don’t get back together after almost a decade, Mom. You’ve been reading too many romance novels.”
There was a hmmm noise that Holly knew well. It meant her mom was ignoring her. “Well, all I know is, she said she’d love to stop in for coffee for the holidays, and if you happened to be there…”
“Ope! I hear Matt calling from the front. He needs me to take a table!” Holly said. She should have just hung up, but if she hung up on her mother, she would still be hearing about it in the afterlife.
“You haven’t been home for Christmas in five years, Holly Siobhan.” Ah, the guilt trip was right on time.
Holly needed a distraction. “Is Dustin bringing a girlfriend to Christmas? I thought he told me he was seeing someone. You should ask him.”
This lure proved too much for her mother to ignore, and Holly finally got off the phone.
Christ on a cracker. What was her mom thinking? Trying to get her and Ivy back together? She was going to need a good excuse for not going home, immediately. “Matt, if my mom calls the cafe phone, I’m swamped with tables, okay?”
“She must have riled you up.” The manager gave a half-smile. “You sound like you just got off the bus from Fargo all of a sudden.”
This earned the middle finger it deserved. As if Iowa and North Dakota accents sounded anything alike.
“If you feel compelled to actually do some work,” Matt said, chuckling, “Tara’s out there.”
“For what it’s worth, I was working. I was saving your ass by getting all the baking done. I’m not even supposed to be here today,” Holly grumbled. “You could, I don’t know, make me a full-time baker, and then you wouldn’t have to call me in on my day off when your baker no call no shows again.”
Matt laughed at her, which was what he always did when they had this conversation. It was unbelievably frustrating. “You’re too good a waitress, Holly. No matter how delicious your coconut cake is.”
That was always the answer. “Can’t pay you to do what you love, Holly. You’re too skilled at something else that happens to pay less—oh, but we can still have you do the thing you love, at your lower salary, once in a while.”
She liked this place, but not enough to stay if she was going to be taken advantage of. Charleston was hot, and sticky, and full of rich assholes, and maybe it was about time she moved on. The only thing keeping her from picking up her last check and using it to fill up the tank in her held-together-with-zip-ties 1979 Subaru Brat was the beautiful woman currently in the dining area, waiting for a cup of coffee.
Tara was her favorite (and hottest) customer, a perfect blond Southern ice queen. When they’d first met, Tara had been engaged. Holly liked Tara’s ex, Miriam, a great deal, and missed her now that she’d left to go live out a Hallmark movie plot. Since Tara wasn’t engaged anymore, Holly had been flirting hard. She hadn’t had any luck so far, but hope sprang eternal. And every time she thought about leaving Charleston without tasting those lips, something stopped her.
She peeked out the round port window in the swinging kitchen door, to where Tara was sitting in her normal spot. Somehow, her perfectly flat-ironed hair looked droopy, her shoulders hunched up several degrees past power pose. Most worryingly, she seemed to be in her house clothes with no eyeliner on, which meant she’d gone out in public without her full armor. It appeared they were both having difficult days.
Holly didn’t know how she would thaw Tara’s ice long enough to get her in bed, when no amount of flirting had worked, but as for how to fix a Southern girl’s terrible day?
She had that covered.
Oh, Lord,” Holly said, setting down a carafe of coffee. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. I’m bringing cake.”
Tara was, temporarily, distracted from her panic about the whole “I made up a girlfriend” thing by how hot Holly looked in ripped up jeans and a skeleton tank, her long red hair in a messy bun, a green shamrock bandanna tied at the top in a bow like an emo Rosie the Riveter. When she was working, Holly dressed in fit-and-flare dresses and rockabilly hair, but Tara had noticed that on her days off, she was more punk than pinup.
“That obvious, huh?” It shouldn’t matter that Holly was seeing her at full freak-out. Holly had seen her at her worst. Holly was one of the only people on earth Tara didn’t need to act for, and all of the rest of them were currently up in the Adirondacks in a godforsaken moldy hotel in the middle of the woods. And while she might be Tara’s favorite waitress and secret crush, she might be tall and willowy with waves of red hair and green eyes and legs for days, she was not for Tara.
So Tara didn’t need to impress her. Even if she wanted to.
There was a clunk, and a plate landed in front of her with the biggest slice of coconut cake she’d ever seen. She almost cried. God bless Holly for knowing just by looking at her that this was not only a cake emergency, but a coconut cake emergency. For a girl born and raised in South Carolina, some occasions could not be gotten through without it.
“Girl, if you’re going to cry into the cake, I’m going to put you in a corner booth where no one can see your mascara run,” Holly said, sliding in across from her. This was new. Holly never sat down, was always on the move serving tables.
Tara looked around, to find that the place was mostly empty.
“I have some time to sit,” Holly said, like she knew what Tara was thinking. She probably did—apparently, she could read Tara’s face. After a decade in front of juries, Tara wasn’t used to anyone being able to read her unless she let them. “You wanna talk about it?”
Tara almost dropped her head on the table, but her training was too strong.
“I got an invitation to Miriam’s wedding,” she began, and everything came pouring out. Her panic at having to show her face, single, at the wedding of her ex and the girl her ex left her for. Her sudden unwillingness to be the odd one out in a group of her coupled friends. (If Cole wasn’t secretly making out with the hot bartender, she would eat her best Sunday hat.)
Holly listened, the dimple in her cheek telling Tara that she was trying not to laugh. That was fine, Tara would be laughing at herself, too, if she hadn’t just told all her friends that she was bringing a date to a wedding that she categorically didn’t have a date for.
“How am I going to find a girlfriend by Christmas? It’s already December third.”
“This is easy,” Holly said, taking a bite of Tara’s cake. “I’ll go. I’d love to see Carrigan’s, I love Miriam, it’ll be great.”
“But I told them I was dating someone,” Tara reiterated.
Holly shrugged. “You can pretend to be dating me for the week. I’d be a good fake girlfriend: I look fantastic dolled up for a wedding, I smile at strangers for my job, and I have good stories.”
Tara couldn’t tell if she was serious. “Wait, what? Why would you spend your Christmas pretending to be my girlfriend?” Somehow, even though Tara had gotten herself into this, Holly actually offering to pretend to be her date made her fully process what a wild idea it was.
Truly, it was top-tier terrible.
Even leaving aside the basic premise of “maybe don’t lie to your best friends,” Miriam knew Holly and knew the two of them could never date. On the other hand, Miriam knew that Tara wanted Holly and had been pining after her for most of a year. Miri would be so excited that Tara was dating seriously, and so distracted by the wedding, that she might not ask too many questions. There was a slim possibility that Tara could go to this wedding with a beautiful woman, who would be a buffer from the overwhelming energy at . . .
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