Stuck With the Billionaire Grump

1. Chapter One Lucy

Chapter One: Lucy

“ S omething old. Something new.”

I tap the garment bag that holds Josie’s vintage 1950s wedding dress, then drum my fingernails on the box that holds the gorgeous Manolo Blahnik heels she splurged on last month.

Josie watches me quietly, knowing better than to disturb me when I’m in Maidzilla Mode—a term she coined when she determined that making me her maid of honor was akin to Dr. Frankenstein making his monster. Thankfully, I happen to think that being compared to a reanimated corpse is rather chic. Very stylishly macabre. Plus, if I must be monstrous to ensure that my cousin gets the most beautiful wedding of the century, then so be it.

“Something borrowed…” I continue.

“My mom is dropping off her veil in the morning. And, yes, Lu, she’s already mended and steamed it. You can’t even tell that Auntie Cassie accidentally punctured the hem with her stiletto during a round of ‘The Bunny Hop’ at the reception. It’s perfectly ready.”

“Good.”

I turn toward the coffee table, where a nest of tissue paper that has just been dropped off at our door by our favorite neighbor, the wise woman of the beach, rests among the partially packed moving boxes.

“Something blue,” Josie finishes for me.

In unison, we grin and lean forward to peer at Miss Maisie’s creation. When I asked her to recommend blue gemstones for a potential headpiece for Josie’s wedding ensemble, I hadn’t expected her to create something out of her own mystical supplies. Yet, now that it’s here, I can’t deny that it’s absolutely perfect. Miss Maisie has used delicate silver wire to craft a dainty headband out of tiny aquamarines and raw sapphire stones. Nestled in Josie’s wild, dark waves, it’ll look like a little crown of stars.

“It’s so dreamy.” I sigh, admiring the headband.

“I can’t believe she won’t let me pay her for it.”

“I don’t think Miss Maisie has ever accepted payment for her mysterious gemstone deliveries before, Jo.”

“Well, this is different, no?”

I snort softly. “Maybe you can flip the script on her and slip a Benjamin into her pocket when she least expects it.”

Josie giggles. As locals of Mermaid Shores, we’ve often been the target of Miss Maisie’s hidden charms and wordless spiritual guidance. Even the tourists aren’t safe. She knows everything about everything, and rumor has it that the wind tells her what ails each and every person who wanders into this town.

For example, one minute, you’re minding your business, thinking about how little sleep you got last night, and the next minute, you’ve got a chunk of howlite stone and a sachet of chamomile tea in your pocket. This exact thing happened to me just last week. Honestly, I think Miss Maisie has spent way too much of her free time trying to cure my persistent insomnia over the years. She’s not the sort of person who can accept a lost cause.

But I digress.

Officially, Miss Maisie does oracle card and palm readings from her eclectic and colorfully cushioned porch. Unofficially, she communes with the sirens who guard these shores and foretells the greatest love stories of the decade… usually between the least likely of couples.

She is, of course, invited to Josie and Elijah’s wedding.

“Anyway,” I say, turning back to Josie with my hands planted firmly on my hips. “You need to finish packing up your books.”

She smirks. “So eager to get rid of me?”

“You know I want you to stay here and be my roommate for the rest of our lives, but you’re getting married next week, so it’s inevitable that you’re leaving me. Which means that you really should finish packing your things.”

Josie sighs and turns to the built-in bookshelves that frame our television.

“You’re right,” she mutters. “I just know that Elijah is going to judge my taste in literature.”

“Elijah has always known you like reading historical romance. I’d even bet money that he’s sneaked a peak at a few of those novels.”

She waves me off and goes to the nearest shelf, where endless stacks of dollar-store paperbacks are crammed into every available space. I duck into the kitchen where we’re keeping the stack of empty boxes and grab one for her. Dropping it down onto the floor in front of the shelves, I help Josie neatly move the books from one spot to another.

Technically, the books aren’t going far. After her soon-to-be-husband Elijah officially moved back to town last summer, he bought a house just down the street from here. It’s barely a two-minute walk. Which is nice, of course, but I know I’m still going to miss having Josie here in her messy bedroom just down the hall from mine.

This is my childhood home, but it’s just been me and Josie living in it since my dad moved up to Maine with his third wife a few years ago. And ever since Josie and Elijah officially became Josieandelijah again, they have been spending most of their time together. In that sense, I probably should’ve gotten used to the relative emptiness by now.

If I’m being totally melodramatic and pessimistic about it, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it. I don’t like being alone. I’m a textbook extrovert. I love having people around as often as possible.

Still, I’m definitely being ridiculous. Josie and Elijah are only down the street. They can visit all the time, and I can visit them. After the honeymoon, that is. The day after the wedding, they’re setting off on a lovely, month-long trip to the Mediterranean. All organized and booked by me, of course. I’ll be able to handle Montgomery Events in her absence thanks to the few part-time staff members we’ve hired recently. Luckily, Elijah doesn’t have to worry about missing work, since his position as the high school’s data science teacher doesn’t require him to be around until September.

Not that he really needs to work. Elijah, who is kind of a genius, designed and sold some extremely important software in his early twenties, and now he’s a billionaire. You wouldn’t know it by looking at him, or even by interacting with him. He’s humble and thoughtful and incredibly frugal.

All I know is that Josie and Elijah’s future children are going to have basically bottomless trust funds. Lucky little things.

“I think this one is yours,” Josie muses, holding up a battered novel with a shirtless man on the cover. He’s wearing breeches and a cowboy hat and is embracing a beautiful redhead wearing a dress that’s flowing in some fictitious prairie breeze.

“Definitely not,” I insist.

“No, I seem to remember you reading this one and telling me you thoroughly enjoyed it.”

“Even if that were true, it’s still yours . You’re definitely the one who dug it out of the bottom of a dusty box at a random yard sale.”

“Suit yourself.” Josie giggles, dropping it into the box.

Josie loves old stuff. Historical fiction, vintage clothes, nostalgic memorabilia. Memories are very important to her, and I can hardly blame her for it. If I spent the majority of my life madly in love with my soulmate, I’d have pleasant feelings about the past, too.

My memories aren’t quite that rosy, but that’s alright. I’m not a fan of dwelling on the dark stuff. It’s much more interesting to focus on the good things in life. Like the fact that my cousin, best friend, and business partner is getting married to the love of her life in a matter of days.

I’ve never been in love, but it seems like quite the roller-coaster. Even though Josie and Elijah have been thick as thieves since birth—because they were literally born less than a day apart—it wasn’t always rainbows and sunshine for them. They broke up after high school when Elijah decided to go to Caltech and Josie wanted to stay closer to home for college. For years, Elijah had practically disappeared off the face of the earth.

Then, last summer, he reappeared for their ten-year high school reunion. Nobody expected him to show up, but there he was. And despite the fact that Elijah had been married and widowed in the time that he spent away from our hometown, it was obvious that he never stopped caring for Josie.

In the end, it took less than a month for them to fall back in love with each other.

Blah, blah, blah. True love. Kindred spirits. Destiny and fate.

All that stuff.

They probably would’ve gotten married as early as last autumn, but Elijah insisted that he wanted to give Josie the wedding of her dreams. Which means that we needed to wait for a chance to reserve Blakeley Manor, the most beautiful historic mansion on the Cape, for the event. The waiting list is months long even for something as routine as a charity gala or luncheon.

Of course, it helps that Mr. Linden, the custodian of the estate, has a soft spot for Elijah.

“I’m going to have to think of something to put on these shelves,” I murmur as I start filling up a second box with more books. “They’ll look weird if they’re empty.”

“Maybe you can start collecting knick-knacks.”

“Like the old maid I’m destined to become?”

Josie sighs. “Lu! That’s not what I meant at all.”

I nudge her with my elbow to let her know that I’m just kidding. Except we both know that the joke is halfway true.

I might be a social butterfly, but I don’t date much. My defense is that I just don’t have the patience for it. All those endless, shallow, getting-to-know-you questions, the tedious back-and-forth, and the unspoken rules you’re supposed to know how to follow… only for it to simply not work out a month later and you’re forced to start the cycle all over again…

I’m just not interested in it.

I’d much rather focus on planning Josie’s wedding, growing Montgomery Events, and keeping up with friendships—not romances.

“Knock, knock!” calls a voice from the entryway. A moment later, the thud of the screen door echoes throughout the room and Josie lets out a happy sigh as she goes running toward the entryway.

I don’t have to look to know that Elijah has stopped by.

“You don’t have to knock,” Josie reprimands him adoringly.

“Well, I have to announce my presence somehow,” he murmurs back, just as adoringly.

I wrinkle my nose at the sound of their lips smacking together and then reach for another book.

“Hey, Lucy,” Elijah says when he enters the room. “Don’t tell me Josie coerced you into packing all her books for her!”

“I was helping!” Josie protests before I can answer. She lets go of her fiancé, albeit reluctantly, and returns to the shelves to continue packing.

With Josie occupied with her task, my hands go back to my hips as I round on Elijah.

“You,” I begin.

He freezes, his dark eyes growing wide with innocence. “Me?”

Josie whispers something that sounds a lot like Maidzilla in warning.

“You have the wedding bands?” I ask him.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And your tuxedo? You picked it up from the tailor?”

“Indeed.”

“And your best man? Harry? He’s landing in Boston on Wednesday?”

“At three o’clock in the afternoon, yes.”

“And he knows what to do? He understands what’s expected of him?”

Elijah quirks a smile. “He’s been my assistant for years. I think he can handle escorting the maid of honor down the aisle and making a halfway decent toast at the reception dinner.”

I scoff. “It needs to be better than halfway decent. It needs to be perfect.”

“I’ll send him your way for a literary critique as soon as he arrives, then.”

In the background, Josie giggles. I cross my arms, unimpressed with the lighthearted sarcasm. Elijah smiles sheepishly at me.

To his credit, Elijah is a lot more receptive to my Maidzilla behavior than Josie. She obviously wants to have a lovely wedding, but Elijah is obsessed with making sure the entire event is literally her dream come true. He came to me weeks before proposing to her just to make sure that I was on board with helping him make it happen.

“Fine.” I sigh.

Elijah lets out a not-so-subtle sigh of relief that I’m done with the interrogation for now. He makes his way over to the shelves and takes my place helping Josie pack the books away. One thing that Josie doesn’t know is that Elijah has converted a room in their house into a library for her, so all of these books will have an even better home soon enough. Plus room for more. How Elijah has managed to keep the library a secret from Josie is beyond me, but I’m sure the entire town will hear her squeals of delight when it’s finally revealed.

I decide to give the happy couple a moment to themselves and go into the kitchen. It’s a mess in here, littered with tablecloth samples, cardboard color palettes, tangled streamers, and random bits of confetti. Not just because of Josie’s wedding, but because the headquarters of Montgomery Events is always a treasure trove of random party necessities.

Despite all the things on my to-do list, I’m not really sure what to do with myself. It’s too late in the evening to pester any of the wedding vendors, and Josie and Elijah now have the packing under control without me.

For the moment, I’m a little bit useless.

I fiddle with a bit of lavender silk ribbon, which I’ll need for Addie Parker’s baby shower in a couple weeks, and stare out the window past the front lawn. My gaze skates over the bright purple fence that serves as the telltale landmark signaling Miss Maisie’s house and lands on a distant point over the treetops. Very few of the locals are lucky enough to have beachfront access, but on especially clear days, I can see a hint of the Atlantic on the horizon at just the right angle from this specific window.

Million-dollar view , my stepmother used to joke with me.

Former stepmother, that is. Still, given that my birth mother passed away when I was only five and my current stepmother has only been in my life for less than four years, Tracy is more of a mother to me than anyone else. She doesn’t live in Mermaid Shores anymore, but we keep in touch. In fact, she’s coming to the wedding.

The whole town is coming to the wedding, honestly. The people of Mermaid Shores have been yearning for the chance to celebrate the town’s most precious love story.

For locals, it’s probably the most highly anticipated event of the past decade.

And I am not going to let anything—or anyone—stand in my way of making sure it is utterly flawless.