Her Husband's Best Friend Sabotaged the Wedding (Can this Marriage Survive #5)

Chapter 1

Grace Samson had only been engaged for nine days when she realized there were three people in her relationship.

She noticed it over brunch, which seemed unfair.

Terrible realizations should have had the decency to arrive in dramatic places.

Dark rooms. Empty parking lots. Rain-slicked streets.

Not on the sunlit patio of Luke’s parents’ country club while waiters in white jackets poured coffee and Luke’s mother smiled across the table as if she were offering Grace a gift.

“Of course, Brooklyn will stand up with you,” Elaine Moretti said.

Grace’s fork paused halfway through cutting into a strawberry.

Luke’s hand was warm on the back of her chair.

He sat beside her in a pale blue button-down with the sleeves rolled to his forearms, handsome in the easy, unselfconscious way that had undone her from the beginning.

His dark hair needed a trim. There was a crease at the corner of his mouth from laughing at something his father had said five minutes earlier. He looked happy.

That was why Grace didn’t answer immediately.

She looked from Elaine to Luke, giving him a chance to step in.

He did not.

Across the round table, Brooklyn Shaw leaned back in her chair with her mimosa untouched in front of her.

She was beautiful in a way that looked expensive even before you noticed the labels.

Sleek chestnut hair, gold hoops, creamy linen dress, nude heels, skin that seemed to have never encountered a bad night’s sleep.

She wore effortless like other women wore perfume.

“Oh, Elaine,” Brooklyn said, pressing a hand to her chest. “Don’t put Grace on the spot.”

It was a gracious thing to say.

It sounded gracious.

Grace had already learned that Brooklyn was very good at sounding gracious.

Elaine waved the objection away. “Nonsense. You’re family.”

Brooklyn’s eyes flicked toward Luke.

Only for a second.

Grace saw it anyway.

Luke smiled, a little helplessly, the way people smiled when they were being pulled into an old family script they didn’t have the energy to resist.

“She kind of is,” he said, turning to Grace. “Brook and I grew up next door to each other. Our mothers basically raised us together.”

“I know,” Grace said.

She did know.

She knew because everyone had told her. Many times.

Luke had told her on their third date, when they’d passed a woman in the grocery store who had stopped him with both hands on his shoulders and said, “I saw Brooklyn last week. She looks wonderful.” His sister had told her at Thanksgiving.

His father had told her over Christmas cocktails.

Elaine had told her in the powder room at least twice.

Brooklyn was family.

Brooklyn had been there forever.

Brooklyn knew where the Christmas ornaments were stored, which cousin couldn’t sit next to which aunt, how Luke took his coffee when he was stressed, and why he hated buttercream frosting even though he always forgot he hated buttercream frosting until the cake was already in front of him.

Grace had come into Luke’s life three years ago, at twenty-nine, with a mortgage, a consulting business, a quiet divorce behind her, and a hard-won sense of peace.

Brooklyn had come into his life in a hospital nursery, apparently, and had never left.

“That’s very sweet,” Grace said carefully.

Luke’s thumb moved against the back of her chair. “It would mean a lot to Mom.”

Elaine’s smile widened. It was simply a pleasant, maternal smile from a woman who had raised three children, hosted charity auctions, and never seemed to ask for anything because things generally arranged themselves around her preferences before asking became necessary.

“And to Luke,” Elaine said.

That was when Grace felt it. The first tiny, cold thread pulling through the warmth of the morning.

Luke did not correct his mother.

Brooklyn lowered her lashes. “I honestly don’t want to intrude. Grace should have exactly who she wants beside her.”

It was perfect.

So perfect Grace wanted, irrationally, to reach across the table and tip the untouched mimosa into Brooklyn’s lap.

Instead she smiled.

Because she was not a jealous woman. She was not petty. She was not insecure about a woman Luke had once kissed in college and then, according to everyone involved, “realized she was more like a sister.”

She was not going to begin her engagement by looking threatened by a family friend.

“That’s kind of you,” Grace said.

Brooklyn’s mouth softened. “I mean it.”

Grace believed that Brooklyn meant something.

She just wasn’t sure it was kindness.

Luke leaned closer. “Only if you’re comfortable.”

It should have helped. The words were right.

But his voice was too gentle, and his eyes held the faintest hint of hope that she would be easy. That she would understand. That she would not make something complicated out of something his family had already decided was simple.

Grace looked at the man she loved.

His proposal had been quiet and perfect. No audience. No restaurant. No ring hidden in champagne. Just Luke in her kitchen after dinner, nervous in a way she had never seen him, holding a velvet box while Grace stood barefoot by the sink with her hands still damp from rinsing plates.

She had cried before he even opened the box.

For nine days, she had lived inside that memory.

Now, on day ten, there was Brooklyn.

“Of course,” Grace said, because every person at the table was watching her. “I’d be happy to have Brooklyn as a bridesmaid.”

Elaine clasped her hands. “Wonderful.”

Brooklyn reached across the table and touched Grace’s wrist. Her fingers were cool. “Thank you,” she said warmly. “I promise I’ll make everything easier.”

Grace kept smiling. That, she would think later, was the first warning.

Not the pressure. Not Elaine’s assumption. Not Luke’s silence.

The promise.

Brooklyn promised to make everything easier.

And somehow, in a bright yellow pool of Sunday sunlight, Grace felt the first true shadow fall across her wedding.

By the time they left brunch, Luke was relaxed again.

He drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting loosely over Grace’s knee, his thumb tracing slow circles against the thin cotton of her dress.

Outside the window, late spring had turned the edges of the city lush and green.

Grace watched dogwoods blur past, the white blossoms heavy on their branches.

“You got quiet,” Luke said.

“I was thinking.”

“About?”

Grace turned her head.

He glanced at her, then back at the road. “Come on. I know that face.”

“What face?”

“The one you make when you’re deciding whether something is worth saying.”

Despite herself, Grace smiled. “I have a face for that?”

“You have several faces. That one’s my favorite.”

“Why?”

“Because it means you’re probably about to tell me the truth.”

His answer softened her.

That was the thing about Luke. He was not careless.

He listened when she spoke. He noticed when she went quiet.

He brought her coffee exactly the way she liked it, texted before important meetings, remembered the anniversary of her father’s death after she mentioned it once.

He had spent three years making her feel chosen in a way her first marriage never had.

So she told herself to be fair.

“I didn’t realize your mother expected Brooklyn to be in the wedding.”

Luke exhaled, not irritated, exactly. More like he had been expecting this and had hoped not to. “She shouldn’t have put you on the spot.”

“No,” Grace said. “She shouldn’t have.”

“I’m sorry.” The apology was immediate.

Grace put her hand over his. “Thank you.”

He turned his palm up and laced their fingers together. “Brooklyn really will help, though. She’s organized. She knows everyone. Mom trusts her.”

Grace heard the part he did not say. His mother did not fully trust Grace yet.

Not in a cruel way. Not even in a personal way. Grace was new, and Brooklyn was old. Brooklyn had history on her side. Brooklyn had childhood photographs and inside jokes and stories that began with remember when. Grace had a ring.

Apparently, the ring was not enough to make her the woman at the center of her own wedding.

“I have people too,” Grace said.

“I know that.”

“My sister is my maid of honor. Paige will help me.”

“Of course.”

“And I don’t want this to turn into your family’s event with me standing on the sidelines of it wearing white.”

Luke’s hand tightened around hers. “Hey. It won’t.”

She believed that he wanted that to be true.

“It’s our wedding,” he said. “Yours and mine.”

“Then why did I feel like I couldn’t say no?”

His jaw flexed. For several seconds, the only sound was the soft rush of tires over asphalt. “You could have,” he said finally.

Grace looked at his profile.

The words landed badly, though she knew he did not intend them to.

They placed the burden neatly back into her lap.

She could have refused in front of his parents, his sister, his brother-in-law, his childhood best friend, and two cousins who had dropped by the table to kiss Elaine hello.

She could have smiled and said, Actually, no, I don’t want your family’s beloved Brooklyn standing beside me at the altar.

Technically, yes.

She could have.

Practically, no.

“Luke.”

He sighed. “I know. I’m sorry. That came out wrong.”

Grace looked away before resentment had somewhere to root.

He lifted her hand and kissed her knuckles. “I’ll talk to Mom.”

“And say what?”

“That she needs to back off.”

“And Brooklyn?”

His silence was half a second too long.

Grace felt it more than heard it.

“What about Brooklyn?” he asked.

It was such an innocent question that it almost worked.

Almost.

“Nothing,” Grace said.

Luke pulled into her driveway ten minutes later, parking behind her practical gray SUV.

Her bungalow sat at the end of a quiet street lined with maples, small and pretty, with white trim and hydrangeas she had planted herself.

She had bought it after the divorce, when she was twenty-six and tired of feeling like her life had been something she’d rented from someone else.