MERRILY EVER AFTER

Book 0: Bridesmaids Behaving Badly

by Jenny Holiday

Genres: Contemporary Romance; Holiday Romance; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

These newlyweds are in for a big surprise in this delightful holiday novella from the USA Today bestselling author known for her "unputdownable contemporary romances" ( Booklist). Elise Maxwell is loving her first Christmas with her husband, Jay Smith. So far, newlywed life has been filled with laughter and lots of steamy marital "bliss." But when Elise discovers she's accidentally, against-all-odds pregnant, happily-ever-after screeches to a halt. Although she sees it as a Christmas miracle, Elise knows her new husband might not agree... Jay never wanted to be a father. In fact, he's avoided it his entire life, worried he'd repeat the patterns of his own messed-up childhood. He's madly in love with Elise and, until now, he thought they were on the same page about not having children. But her surprise pregnancy changes everything. Elise is suddenly committed to parenthood, and Jay knows he can't lose her. Facing his deepest fears will be difficult, but with a little holiday magic, Jay might be able to prove to Elise that - as a family - they're destined to live merrily ever after. "Holiday writes a story full of warmth and affection... a magical amuse-bouche of a tale." -- USA Today, Happy Ever After Praise for the Bridesmaids Behaving Badly series: "Satisfying." -- New York Times Book Review on One and Only "The perfect rom-com." -- Refinery29 on One and Only "A summer read more satisfying than a poolside popsicle." -- Entertainment Weekl y on It Takes Two "Romantic comedy at its best." -- The Washington Post on It Takes Two "Witty, sexy and wonderfully entertaining." - USA Today, Happy Ever After on It Takes Two

Release date: December 4, 2018

Publisher: Forever Yours

Print pages: 103

Sample

Chapter One

Please God, please God, please God, please God.

When Elise Maxwell peed on a stick one gray Friday morning in December, she wasn’t sure what outcome she was praying for. They both seemed equally terrible.

One of them might have a teeny-tiny bit of wonderful mixed in with all that terrible, though.

Maybe. Possibly.

Super teeny-tiny.

But she refused to think about that. There was no way. It was impossible. If anything, she was in freakishly early menopause, her poor beleaguered reproductive system deciding to just hang it up early.

And even if it was, by some bizarre miracle, possible, it was still impossible. Her entire life—her lovely, hard-earned, self-made life that she loved—was based on not having kids.

Dang. She was going to throw up—and who even knew why? Morning sickness or the imminent and terrifying end of life as she knew it? Potato-potahto.

She reached for the stupid test to put herself out of her misery.

“Not yet!” Elise’s phone was propped up on the vanity in the bathroom so her best friend, Gia, could watch the proceedings from Milan. Gia was in a bathroom, too, a tiny, dingy one, but at least it was private. She was wearing a robe, her full face of makeup featured weird glued-on purple rhinestone eyebrows, and her hair was arranged in an elaborate updo. “It’s too soon! The directions said it would take a minimum of three minutes. There’s no point in doing this incorrectly. You want to be confident in the results, whatever they are. So don’t sabotage them.”

“But—”

“Elise! Do not get sloppy now! Leverage some of those perfectionist tendencies you’re so famous for, for God’s sake!”

Right. Okay. But what was she going to do for the next—she toggled over from Gia on FaceTime to check the alarm she’d set—two minutes and seven seconds?

“I just need a minute!” It was Gia, calling to someone outside her door in Milan.

Gia was working, and Elise couldn’t expect to monopolize her indefinitely. “If you need to go—”

“Are you fucking kidding me? I don’t need to go.” An insistent knock on her door suggested otherwise, but Gia just rolled her eyes and shouted, “Hold your damn horses!”

Maybe Elise’s defenses were down, but Gia’s salty language, combined with her utter dedication to seeing Elise through this whole peeing on a stick trauma, gave her an attack of the BFF warm fuzzies. One thing she could absolutely count on in this world was Gia. And Wendy and Jane, too—she felt a little bad for leaving them out of this loop, actually. Usually they faced momentous life events as a foursome. They’d all been in attendance when Jay proposed to her. And, of course, they’d all been in her wedding.

So they should probably all be here when she found out if Jay was going to divorce her.

“What’s the job today?” she asked Gia, both to distract herself and to pretend for one second that the morning’s proceedings were not only about her.

“Runway. Vionnet.”

“Never heard of them.”

“Which is probably the only reason I got a booking.”

The way she said it, with a self-deprecating tone that was not usually in her repertoire, snagged Elise’s attention and actually managed to hold it. There had been a few hints lately that Gia was…not unhappy exactly, but maybe not as enthused about her job as she used to be. “Why do you say—”

“Is there any snow there yet?”

Gia’s attempt to change the subject was painfully obvious. But Elise would roll with it, because that discussion would take more than the few minutes they needed to fill. And the best friends shared a love of winter, so snow was a welcome topic. “No. It’s gray and cold here, but not cold enough to snow.

“I hope we get some snow before Christmas. It can hold off until my flight lands and then really dump down.”

“Don’t hold your breath. They’re saying it’s the warmest winter on record so far, and—”

The alarm on Elise’s phone was only a gentle tinkling sound. She had picked it specifically because she and her husband, Jay, were proponents of morning sex, and being woken gently rather than jarringly was better for setting the mood. But right now it might as well have been an air raid siren. She jumped so violently, she knocked Gia into the sink.

“Sorry!” She righted the phone.

“The moment of truth!” Gia made an exaggerated funny face and performed a jazz hands gesture. She was trying to put Elise at ease.

It wasn’t working. Nothing would work.

Except a negative result.

Gia’s jazz hands morphed into drumming hands, and she added a theatrical drum roll noise. Elise’s heart felt like a drum, a snare drum in a demented orchestra gone rogue.

She closed her eyes, picked up the test, took a deep breath, and in a reverse squint of sorts, half opened one eye.

And when she saw the thing that was simultaneously her worst fear and the thing she had grown to secretly want more than anything else in the world, her eyes flew open so fast and so violently she felt like she might have sprained her forehead.

“Oh my God.”

“What? What? What?” Gia’s voice got higher with every “What?” Adding to the cacophony, someone had started pounding on Gia’s door again. Or maybe that was just Elise’s heart, which had left snare drum territory in favor of booming, galumphing kettle drums.

“It’s positive,” she whispered.

Which was supposed to be have been impossible. Thanks to a lifetime of endometriosis, she was supposed to be incapable of getting pregnant. Which had made her Jay’s dream woman. They had joked about it, but Jay had spent his entire romantic life, up to and including her, with no kids as his main principle.

“Are you sure? Those things can be confusing. Are you looking for one line or two lines? Is that a really faint line or are you hallucinating it, you know?”

Elise did not know, never having had occasion to take a pregnancy test before.

Because this was impossible.

But she’d purchased the test that looked the most foolproof. It had a digital display, so there were no lines. Just a single word written in English. Tiny block letters that carried a message massively out of proportion to their size: PREGNANT. And underneath that: 3+.

Which meant she was more than three weeks pregnant.

Which was impossible.

She picked up the phone, reversed the image, and showed Gia the results.

“Well, fuck me.”

Elise was frozen. She felt like it had snowed, and she’d been outside in it overnight. She was chilled to her core. Unable to transmit messages from her brain to her limbs.

“Turn me around,” Gia commanded from the phone. Elise did as she was told, but it took her leaden finger three tries to hit the button. Gia was leaning way into her phone, clearly trying to get a read on Elise’s mood. Join the club. Elise would like to know how she felt, too, but that was impossible because she was frozen.

Gia tried out a laugh. Elise could tell it was experimental because it sounded nothing like Gia’s normal, genuine laugh. “Well, who needs snow when unto us a child is born.”

Unto us a child is born.

Elise wasn’t religious, and neither was Gia despite her Italian-Catholic background. So she knew Gia was making a joke.

But it wasn’t funny.

It did, however, unfreeze her. She would have called it a thawing, but thaw brought to mind a gentle warming process. That was not what was happening to Elise. Her face felt like she had walked inside from that long night in the cold, and too much heat had hit her frostbitten flesh too soon. It hurt.

She burst into tears. A few barking, mortifying sobs she couldn’t contain. Gia made soothing noises, and Elise calmed herself enough to voice the question that had whooshed into her unfrozen mind, expanding to take up all the available space and frightening her with its hugeness.

“How I am going to tell him?”

*  *  *

“Don’t tell him if you don’t want to.”

“Are you crazy? She has to tell him!”

Wendy and Jane were facing off in Elise’s living room while Elise alternated between panicking and trying to figure out where she could cram a nursery into this house. She and Jay had bought it shortly after getting engaged a little over a year ago. It had been a fixer-upper, and Elise had renovated it to their precise specifications—their “we only need one bedroom, so let’s make the others into offices” specifications. They had created a home with one big bedroom and two small offices—one for each of them—on the second floor, and had converted what was meant to be a first-floor den into a studio space for her, where she could meet with clients and keep samples.

But, of course, if Jay left, she could use his office as the nursery.

She tried to smile. Dark humor was better than the river of tears she’d cried earlier. As an interior designer, her brain automatically went to the décor challenges associated with her predicament.

“She doesn’t have to do anything.” Wendy paced back and forth in front of the Christmas tree like she was addressing a jury—an occupational hazard, Elise supposed, even though Wendy was on a six-month leave from her job and was currently flitting all over the world with her fiancé, Noah.

Thank goodness she wasn’t flitting right at this moment, though—they’d come home to Toronto for the holidays—because Elise needed a quorum, and with Gia away, that meant she needed both Wendy and Jane. The girls had dropped everything when they’d gotten Gia’s emergency text and had appeared on Elise’s. . .