Chapter 1
Delaney Kingston, aka a bridesmaid who will do anything for her best friend, no matter how terrible it is
Ah, smell that?
That salty, fresh breeze with a hint of passion fruit and a golden sunset layered over the ocean surf?
That’s the scent of happily ever after.
After years and years and years of my best friend waiting for her boyfriend to pop the question, then another forever of planning, we are finally here.
Their wedding week.
Emma’s getting her dream destination wedding, and I haven’t stopped smiling—no, beaming since my plane touched down in Hawaii two hours ago.
Everything is love. The gentle wind softening the humid air.
The fragrant flowers. The giant coconut trees.
The gecko watching me from the shorter tropical palm tree.
Emma’s shampoo as she hugs me outside the entrance to the Midnight Orchid Club Resort barely a minute after I texted her that my driver was pulling into the parking lot.
“Laney! You’re here!”
“Happy wedding week, you beautiful bride, you.” I hug her back like we weren’t watching the January snow fall while we had coffee together at Bean & Nugget Café back home in Snaggletooth Creek four days ago. “Are you nervous? Are you eating enough? Did you have dinner?”
She laughs as she pulls back, but it’s higher-pitched than it should be. “Hawaiian feast. You saw the schedule, right? Of course you saw it. You live by schedules.”
Her stomach grumbles like she did not, in fact, partake in the Hawaiian feast.
It’s an instinctive reaction to reach into my purse and whip out a protein bar for her. “Em? Everything okay?”
Her eyes go impossibly wider and she shake-nods her head too fast and insistently. “Of course.”
For the first time since I boarded the plane to catch up to the rest of the wedding party after having to delay a day for an unfortunate work emergency, I’m not smiling. “Talk to me. What’s up?”
She has three inches on me, so I have to look up to study her. Her blond hair is pulled back in a ponytail. Her sharp cheekbones are undeniably sharper. And I don’t think the tinge of hysteria in her brown eyes is a trick of the fading evening light.
“Wedding stress. That’s all. This is normal.
How was your flight? Are you exhausted? Here.
I have your, erm, room key. We checked in the whole wedding party yesterday.
Come on. Everyone’s at the pool. Here. Leave your luggage.
” She turns her Emma charm on the bellhop, a young man with brown skin and a bright Hawaiian shirt.
“Can you please get my friend’s luggage taken to the Plumeria Bungalow? ”
“Of course, ma’am.”
“Thank you so much!” she says too brightly as she slips him a tip.
She grabs me by the elbow and tugs me inside the lobby of the resort entrance, past the unmanned check-in desk and dying potted tropical plants and large beach landscape paintings. At the open-air atrium where three paths split off, she pauses for just a second.
“This way!” she says, even brighter still.
Emma’s a happy person.
But this is too happy. Even for her.
And there it is.
The nibble on her thumbnail as we head down the tiki-torch-lit walkway on the left.
She has the protein bar in the same hand. She’s practically shoving the wrapper up her nose to nibble on her nail.
“Em?” I say.
She jerks her hand down and once again treats me to a smile, but this one feels so fake that I have to blink to make sure travel fatigue isn’t making me see things.
“This way,” she repeats.
We’re surrounded by flowering shrubs and palm trees beyond the walkway. The light wind off the ocean rustles the bright red-and-green leaves on a shorter tree, and upbeat island music trills somewhere in the distance.
Sure, a few of the tiki torches have gone out. And there are some dead palm fronds littering the grass under a tree or two.
But this place is a tropical paradise.
My best friend shouldn’t be stressed here. Especially not a few days before she finally marries the love of her life at the resort she’s told everyone she’ll be getting married at since the day she pulled a photo of it out of a travel catalog when we were little.
I draw to a stop, grab her arms, and look up at her. “Em. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
Emma’s been one of my two best friends for over twenty years. I know when she’s lying. I know when she’s trying hard to convince me she’s not lying. And I know when she’s on the edge of a breakdown and is lying as a last resort to convince herself that nothing’s wrong.
Which is exactly where we are now.
“Okay. Let’s start with some deep breaths. Whatever it is, we’ll fix it.”
“Laney,” she whispers, a plaintive plea full of hope, “I don’t know if you can.”
“Gotta talk to me first. Tell me what’s going on. Everything okay with you and Chandler?”
She winces.
I tilt my head and wait.
“Chandler and I are fine,” she says. “The wedding is fine. Everything’s fine.”
She doesn’t sound fine.
She sounds like she’s a hair’s breadth from hopping a passing freighter and running away from her life.
I add a brow lift and wait for more.
“It’s not like that time we almost broke up three years ago,” she finally says in a rush. “We’re fine . Both thrilled to be here and finally getting married. It’s…neither one of us.”
No lies detected, but there’s still so much stress making her expression tight and her breath too shallow.
I nod and squeeze her arms. “Okay. So what is it?”
She pulls away and starts down the path again. A hint of the sunset comes into view between two bushes, and oh my god .
That’s gorgeous.
Oranges and pinks swirled together behind a row of coconut trees.
Whatever—or whoever —is ruining this for Emma is going down . She should be out on the beach with Chandler, watching this show.
But the sunset disappears behind a tall, flowered bush while I follow her along the winding, cracked sidewalk.
“Emma?”
She uses her teeth to rip open the protein bar package, then gnaws off a huge corner, chews three times, and swallows. “Oh. Cookies and cream. That’s my favorite.”
“I know. What’s wrong? How do I make the bride of the hour as happy as she can be?”
She slides a look at me before attacking the protein bar with a bite that demolishes half of what’s left.
Uh-oh.
“Ah nee a vava,” she says with a full mouth.
“You need a favor?”
She nods and doesn’t look at me while we keep walking.
“ Emma . You know I’m here for anything you need this week. Anything . Name it. Oh. My. God. ” I drop my voice to a whisper. “Are you pregnant? Do you need?—”
“No!”
“Okay. Okay.”
She visibly swallows and winces again. “I wish I was pregnant,” she grumbles. “But no. This is bad, Laney. I should’ve known, but I didn’t, so now I’ll deal with it, except I’m tired. I’m so tired. And I hate to ask this, but you’re the only one I can count on.”
“Name it. I’m here for you.”
The bushes open up, and she pauses while the music gets louder and the view of the sunset widens beyond a kidney-shaped pool where roughly a dozen people are gathered about, either in the water or on loungers or at the tables at the edge of the deck.
This time, she lets herself fully nibble on her thumb when she could be nibbling on the rest of the protein bar, and she stares at the pool. And it’s not a distant, unfocused, I’m thinking hard about something stare.
This is an I’m staring at the problem stare that’s accompanied by the deepest sigh I’ve ever heard her sigh in my life.
Emma’s closest sorority sister from college, Claire, who’s her third bridesmaid, has claimed a pool lounge.
She’s one of my favorites of Emma’s college friends.
Her hair and her bright swimsuit are wet like she’s recently gotten out of the water.
There’s not enough sun left to soak up any rays, but there’s something else clearly keeping her there.
A very distinctive something else.
She’s leaning forward at the edge of her lounger, smiling and flirting with a man in a— what ?
Why is that server wearing an inflatable ride-on flamingo costume?
It’s like one of those blow-up tyrannosaurus rex costumes, except it’s a giant blow-up flamingo, and his shirtless top half is out. The flamingo costume has inflated legs across its back to make it look like the man’s riding the flamingo, and it would be funny if it wasn’t so unexpected here.
He’s offering a tray of pineapples with drink umbrellas and straws to Claire, who is eating it all up.
Good for her.
I glance at Emma, who is definitely staring at the server.
He’s ripped . And tattooed. With surfer hair. And I can’t see his face, but I can tell Claire is charmed.
Charmed charmed.
Drooling, even.
Oh, god.
Emma also has a crush on a resort pool boy and is having second thoughts.
I mean, I get it. Chandler’s a catch in Snaggletooth Creek, but he’s not built, tatted surfer hot. Do you see those broad shoulders? And those back dimples above his, erm, flamingo butt?
I angle closer to her and slip an arm around her waist. “Um, Em? Tell me you’re not?—”
She cuts me off with a half-sob. “Uncle Owen dared him to wear the costume, and then the bar was understaffed, so he just picked up a tray and started…helping.”
I squint up at her. I’m missing something. “Your uncle dared?—”
“And I don’t know what happened while they were all deep-sea fishing this morning, but they came back and Chandler was so mad at him, and he was pretending he wasn’t even though I know he was, and I don’t get it.
I mean, I do. I know he’s a total ass sometimes, but he’s never an ass on purpose .
And really, he’s almost never an ass at all anymore.
It’s more like he sees a toy, he goes after it, and sometimes things just… happen…when that happens.”
I am so confused. “Chandler isn’t an ass, sweetie.”
Chandler can totally be an ass, but in all of the years that they’ve dated, he’s never been an ass to Emma, and on the off chance that he gets close to ass territory, he tends to make it up to her with big, ridiculous gifts.