“I can’t believe I did it. I can’t believe it’s finally happened.”
After almost a year and a half of planning the nuptials of her brother, Luke Martin, to her dear friend, Harper Anderson, the day had finally come. The restored wood cabin dance hall high up in the Northern California hills surrounding the wine-and-cheese town of Hillsboro was the perfect place for a wedding reception. It was an oasis of warmth and love from the dark, cold, wooded mountains beyond its walls. The Anderson family, famous around the country now for their flowers, had filled the entire place with open, lovely blooms, which caught the light and filled the dance hall with color. The wooden beams of the ceiling captured every glinting glimmer of candlelight and flashbulb; the atmosphere—a simple and delicate blending of rustic and chic—seemed to envelop its guests, drawing them into the intimacy of the space, welcoming them onto its dance floor and giving a perfect backdrop for the bride and groom as they took their first steps together as a married couple.
Annie wished she could say that the wedding had been perfect. She wanted nothing more than to be dancing in the center of the floor, her mind blissfully clear of spreadsheets and mood boards and itemized lists that had been haunting her since she first found out about the engagement.
Instead, she stood at the fringes of the night, watching from the sidelines as everyone else enjoyed the fruits of her meticulous planning, unable to get the little details out of her head. Things no one else would have noticed, things she knew weren’t important in the grand scheme of things. A loose thread in the hem of her best-woman dress. A dangling petal on Harper’s bouquet. The slight, awkward pause when Luke couldn’t get the ring box open quickly enough during the ceremony. The champagne coming out a full minute behind schedule once the reception began in full swing.
These little details loomed impossibly large in her mind. But she knew it wasn’t the real reason she was struggling to relax into the party she had planned.
The fresh glass of champagne in her hand grew warm as she waited there, turning over the day in her head, just as Rose—the eldest and most statuesque of the three Anderson sisters who had welcomed her into their lives since she and Luke arrived in Hillsboro two years ago—swanned up beside her, the edges of her soft, purple gown brushing against the tops of her dyed-to-match shoes. Tonight, she’d traded out her usual cat-eye glasses for contacts, but even without her signature look, she was easy to spot in a crowd. Just behind her, Annie could see the youngest Anderson sister, May, fleetingly back in town for the wedding with her boyfriend, Tom Riley. Annie caught his eye and gave him a happy wave. Her own engagement to Tom was the reason she and her brother originally moved to Hillsboro, and she and Tom had remained friendly ever since their amicable parting.
They hadn’t officially become family until today, when Harper and Luke had said, “I do,” but Annie adored the Andersons as if she had known them her whole life.
“You don’t look so good,” Rose said, her words slurring slightly. Poor thing was such a lightweight when it came to alcohol.
Annie forced a laugh. “Thank you, Rose, for your brutal honesty. What do you mean?”
“You’re wrinkling your brow. I was under the impression internet stars didn’t wrinkle anything.”
It was true, as a social media influencer and brand promoter, Annie spent hours of every day cultivating her social media image—editing out flyaways, smoothing any lines at the corners of her eyes or patches of cellulite on her slender frame—so she could land brand deals and promote the hottest nail polish or clothing brand of the minute. It was exhausting, and, apparently, useless under the astute gaze of a close friend.
Finally taking a sip of her champagne, she tried not to think of the throngs of cameras stationed in the corners of the room. Reporters from as far as Europe were documenting the night not just for Luke and Harper’s sentimental value, but also because, well, with Annie’s career as an influencer and her brother’s place at the top of the tech world, the pair of them were something like celebrities. Digital Age darlings. And no one was going to miss this wedding.
If things had gone according to plan, she wouldn’t have minded the photographers. Despite the fact that Luke had serious issues with the press, Annie reveled in the spotlight. There was something nice about being looked at and admired from a comfortable distance; cameras brought people close enough to look, but not close enough to actually see. But there was a downside to internet fame and now, with the laundry list of wedding mistakes burned into her mind, she couldn’t help but think about how every photograph would be nitpicked by the faceless trolls online, about how they might turn the happiest night of her brother’s life into something to be dissected and ridiculed.
She made a mental note to turn off notifications on her social media apps before going to bed tonight. The last thing she needed was to be hungover and have to deal with internet mobs making fun of her mistakes.
“Seriously. What’s going on with you? You’re in the middle of the most beautiful wedding this county’s ever seen and you look like someone put mud in your shoes.”
Annie sighed and tossed her blond hair over her shoulder with one manicured hand.
“The most beautiful wedding? I can name about fifty things that went wrong today. That’s my brother and Harper up there. I wanted everything to be perfect.”
“Oh, Annie, I don’t think perfect matters much, at least not tonight. I mean, look at them. Have you ever seen two people looking happier?”
Annie dragged her gaze to the couple twirling in the center of the room—her brother and her new sister. They held each other as though letting go would mean the end of the world, and they laughed as though they wouldn’t care if it did, not so long as they had each other. For so long, she’d rooted for the two of them to get together, fought for it, even. But now, as she looked at them, her joy couldn’t seem to make the journey from her mind to her heart.
Luke was married now, and for the first time in her entire life, she and her brother would be apart. He’d been her entire family for most of her life, her best friend and the person she counted on above everyone else. Now, she would be alone.
Alone. That word echoed, bouncing back to her again and again and again. Alone. Alone. Alone.
Rose had the kindness not to mention Annie’s mental distance, and to change the subject.
“So, what are you going to do with all of your newfound freedom? No more wedding to plan, no more brother to look after? I have decided I’ll be turning Harper’s bedroom into a crafting room.”
“I’m finishing up moving into my new house first thing in the morning. And after that… uh…”
Her own blood chilled as she realized she didn’t have an ending to that sentence. For the first time in her entire life, Annie Martin didn’t have a full calendar ahead of her. Not a single thing to look forward to. Not a single thing to distract her from that word. Alone.
Suddenly, it all made sense. Her inability to shake off the wedding’s small mishaps. Her sudden distaste for the cameras all around her. Those mistakes felt like her mistakes. She worried that the cameras were going to capture just how empty she suddenly felt.
In one big gulp, she threw back all of the champagne settling in the bottom of her flute. It did nothing to calm her nerves, but it did give her enough bubbly strength to muster up one of her blindingly fake smiles.
That was what she always did in moments like this. Fake it until she made it.
“You know, I’m sure something will come up. It always does.”
Tomorrow, she would worry about the towering question mark that was her new life. Tonight, she would do literally anything to avoid it. Scanning the room, she found the perfect distraction on the dance floor. As couples twirled and laughed, cuddled and swayed, Annie turned her attention to the woman standing next to her.
She was going to make Rose Anderson her new project.
“What about you, hmm? Is all of this wedding stuff helping you catch the love bug?”
Rose laughed, clearly relieved to see the smile on Annie’s face and her seeming return to her usual bright and chipper persona. “With all due respect, Annie, I’m pretty sure my high school health class warned me against catching love bugs.”
It was the closest sweet, demure Rose—with her gentle smile and soft tone—would ever get to an innuendo, and Annie couldn’t help the giggle that escaped her. Just like she couldn’t help the certainty that the sweet, demure, beautiful woman standing next to her deserved all of the love in the world.
“You know what I mean! Come on. I think there are some pretty eligible bachelors out here tonight who’d be lucky to get even a dance with you.”
Without waiting for any kind of verbal agreement to this sudden turn of events, Annie started off across the reception hall, making a beeline for the small bunch of groomsmen lingering at the farthest end of the room, closest to the bar. If there was one thing Annie knew about people, it was that very few could stand an unfinished conversation. Want to guarantee someone will follow you? Start walking away in the middle of an exchange.
Just as she suspected, Rose followed close on her heels, using her long-legged strides to somehow pass through the crowd like a serene swan gliding on a pond instead of a slightly panicked woman trying to keep up with a matchmaking friend.
“Annie,” Rose said, her voice taking on the distinct lower register of a disappointed teacher—the closest she ever got to sounding truly upset. “We’ve talked about this.”
Sure, they’d talked about it plenty of times. No matter how often Annie assured Rose that she could find her the perfect man, one who would simply worship and adore her, the eldest Anderson sister always rebuffed her. I’m not interested in a relationship right now, she’d always say, I like being single.
Annie had heard every excuse in the book. Most people she knew found matchmaking and cupid-ing secretly insulting, as if Annie wanting to help them find the loves of their life somehow implied they weren’t capable of doing it on their own. But the truth was… she liked being useful. She liked helping. And tonight, she was going to start by finally helping Rose.
Carefully maneuvering her way through the crowd of tipsy wedding-goers, Annie spotted her target across the room—Rishan, the tall, lanky senior developer at AppeX, her brother’s tech company. From everything she knew about him, he was kind and respectful, easygoing and reserved. Just the kind of person who’d be the perfect test subject for Rose.
That was the thing most people didn’t know about helping people find love—test subjects were almost always necessary. Rishan would show Annie just what kind of man Rose actually liked and responded to, which would only make the task of actually finding the man of her dreams easier.
“One of Luke’s groomsmen is over there. He’s a little shy, but he’s an absolute genius when it comes to tech stuff and he’s very sweet. Let me introduce you.”
“Wait—”
But Rose’s protestations fell on deaf ears. Even if Annie had bothered to listen, she was already tapping Rishan on the shoulder, drawing his attention away from his phone and back to the land of non-digital interaction.
“Rishan!”
“… Yes?”
The poor guy couldn’t have looked more confused if she’d just asked him to pick colors for a Spring Lookbook. His bearded jaw dropped slightly when Annie stepped aside to introduce her friend, who hung back an awkward step behind her.
“This is Rose. Rose, this is Rishan.”
“Nice to meet you,” Rishan said, though his tone hinted at some hidden terror at the realization that a beautiful woman seemed to be talking to him.
“Yeah, you too.”
For a moment, Annie waited for conversation to spark naturally, for the two to hit it off like she’d secretly hoped they would. No such luck.
“Rose here was just telling me how much she wanted to dance.”
“I wasn’t—” Rose turned her wide, apologetic eyes on Rishan. Annie didn’t exactly see sparks when their eyes met for the first time, but it was early still. Anything could change on the dance floor. “I really wasn’t—”
But Annie slapped a hand on Rishan’s shoulder, drawing his bewildered gaze her way. Annie answered that look with a pointed one of her own. In her experience, guys who worked with computers all day weren’t so good at taking hints without a wink and nudge—sometimes, literally.
“And I’m sure you wouldn’t want her to dance alone.”
“Of course not—” Rishan stammered.
“Great,” Annie said, before anyone could object or change their mind. Stubborn people always needed a little push in the direction of love, didn’t they? “Have fun, you two!”
Perfect. Now time to find a table, find a waiter with canapés and watch from the sidelines to see how this one goes. Maybe I could even—
“But what about you?”
Rose’s voice practically grabbed Annie by the shoulders and spun her around. Even her most composed, amused smile couldn’t hide her confusion. “Me?”
One of Rose’s eyebrows quirked upwards, the smallest hint that this was not, in fact, a friendly question asked out of curiosity, but a challenge.
“You’re not going to dance alone, are you?”
“No,” Annie choked out, knowing she couldn’t back down now. “Obviously not. As it happens, I already have a dance partner.”
“Is that so?”
It would have been very easy to just tell Rose that she was going to sit this one out and rest her feet or something, but Annie’s pride bristled at the prospect. Think of something. Think of someone. Come on, Annie. You can do this. Desperately, she searched the faces of the room for someone without a partner, someone who wouldn’t possibly turn her down.
Then, she spotted him. Sitting down in the dining section of the hall, squeezed between two happily drunken couples, sat a man in an obviously borrowed tuxedo, looking more handsome—and more miserable, given the set of his shoulders—than any man had a right to. She could just barely make out his profile, but dark, curly hair crowned his head, with its sharp, scruffy jawline, and he stared out absently at the dance floor. His tie had been undone and his shirt—slightly rumpled, was unbuttoned at the top. Though his suspenders were still in place, giving him the appearance of a man who’d stepped out of a time machine or a black-and-white movie, he was eminently disheveled… and definitely the most intriguing man in the room.
Looking at him was like catching sight of lightning striking an electrical grid. All sparks.
Annie’s heart stammered. Or maybe that was just the drums from the wedding band suddenly starting a new song. She wasn’t sure.
No, she was sure. It hadn’t been her. Annie Martin wasn’t the kind of woman who got all moony-eyed over any guy, much less a stranger.
And certainly not this stranger. Because in the split second after those sparks had extinguished, the man turned his face towards her, giving her a better view of his strong jaw, rich chocolate eyes and curving lips, and she realized that this wasn’t the first time she’d seen him. Oh, no. This was George Barnett. George Barnett, the snoop who worked for the Hillsboro Gazette, the one who Annie had once had to chase—in her bathrobe, no less—away from her house with nothing but a croquet mallet when she’d caught him trying to spy on the place with a telescopic lens.
The sparks she’d felt a moment ago fell to the wire-ends of her brain and caught fire. What was he doing here? She certainly hadn’t put him on any guest list she’d written.
“Annie?” Rose prompted, a small smirk on her lips. “Who’re you going to dance with?”
But before the question had even been asked, Annie was already walking across the dance floor, her fake smile firmly in place. She was going to dance with George Barnett. And then, she was going to kick him out.
Under normal circumstances, George Barnett wouldn’t have been caught dead working the Hillsboro Gazette’s society beat, much less asking for it and then trading a free month of coffee to Shannon Park, the Society Editor, for it. He was into gumshoe reporting and scandal, the kind of hard-boiled detective work that won people Pulitzers, not the kind of carefully crafted PR wizardry that appeared on the newspaper’s sixth page.
But these weren’t normal circumstances, which was how he ended up with an invitation to Hillsboro’s most exclusive wedding of the century and a slightly uncomfortable rented tuxedo. Tonight wasn’t just any nighttime wedding in the swankiest venue in the county. This was the wedding of Hillsboro royalty—Harper Anderson, future owner and operator of her family’s flower farm, if the rumors were to be believed—to Luke Martin, one of the nation’s youngest tech moguls.
But he wasn’t here to celebrate. The thing about George Barnett was that he believed in finding and exposing the truth, no matter the consequences. And men like Luke Martin, men with deep pockets and tight-knit social circles that rarely ever leaked, were the worst kind of trouble. A man like that—and his family—could get away with a whole lot and bring a whole mess of trouble upon people without the resources to fight them.
Ever since the Martins had descended on Hillsboro two years ago with their L.A. cars and oversized sunglasses, George was convinced that there was something fishy going on. And he was going to expose it no matter what. And if it meant getting his big career break and a chance at the nationals, well that would be a win-win scenario as far as he was concerned.
Even if it meant being here. In the middle of this wedding. The last place he wanted to be.
His idea of a good Saturday night was hanging out with a few beers and his faded VHS copy of All the President’s Men. Dancing and drinking with Californian society elite wasn’t his idea of a perfect night. Still, he’d always believed that a good reporter was something like a good spy—ready to go undercover and slip into even the most dire of situations at a moment’s notice—so, he put on a brave face and tried to collect any intel he could from his safe place at the far end of the room. He might have been a good soldier-for-the-truth, but he wasn’t going to go so far as to dance at this thing.
“So,” he said, trying to cut into the conversation to his left, where a graying man and a slender woman in their fifties chatted animatedly. “Do you know the bride or the groom?”
A leading question, considering he’d grown up in Hillsboro and knew for a fact that this man probably knew neither of them well, but a necessary one. Gathering background information like this always required a soft touch; no one wanted to feel like they were being interviewed.
“Groom,” the man responded, his voice a jovial grumble, like one might expect out of Santa Claus. George made a mental note of that, in case he ever wanted to use it in a story someday. “I’ve known Luke Martin since he came to work at… Darling, have you had some of this wine? It’s very good.”
His wife nodded, pla. . .
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