WANT MORE RIP YOUR HEART OUT FRIENDS TOLOVERS?
Read on for a sample of my Amazon top 50 bestselling contemporary romance,
Harley & Rose
CHAPTER ONE
Rose
Weddings are a time of joy, of celebration and love. What they’re not supposed to be is miserable. I’d dreamed of this day since I was five years old, and if you’d asked mini me how I saw it going, spending my time drunk and half-naked while my best friend mourned the death of his relationship in the presidential suite of our hotel was not it.
Granted, I also wouldn’t have been dressed in canary yellow. I wouldn’t have chosen the frangipanis that currently violated the emo-sanctity of this room with their cloying scent and their happy little yellow faces, and I wouldn’t have been sitting beside my best friend as he sobbed into my cleavage after the bitch he intended to marry left him for her Krav Maga instructor five minutes before she was supposed to walk down the aisle.
Okay, so Harley wasn’t sobbing, and it wasn’t as if I just got my boobs out and said, “Here, let my funbags be your comfort in this hour of need.”Yeesh. It was all far more innocent than that. Harley was simply resting his glorious face on my boobs as I stroked his mane of tawny hair back from his face.
Completely innocent.
Still, my best friend’s wedding wasn’t supposed to go like this. I should have been the woman gliding toward him at the altar. I’d be a vision in a blush Vera Wang ball-gown with a draped bodice, a sweetheart neckline, and a tossed tulle skirt. My bouquet would be made up of blush peonies, fat white roses, and a spray of pink astilbe. But best of all, we’d say “I do” in front of our friends and family in a vintage-inspired April afternoon ceremony. There would be an ice cream van on standby for peckish guests, and a four-tieredGlass Slipper Gourmetcake with cascading roses, peonies and hydrangeas delicately drapedall over it. We would dance to our favorite Jeff Buckley song—Lilac Wine—under a sea of stars and paper lanterns at the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers.
Obviously, I’d given a lot of thought to our wedding.
Fortunately for the both of us, this canary yellow monstrosity wasn’tourwedding, and praise be to baby Jesus the Wicked Wench of the West Coast is gone. Unfortunately, Harley isn’t happy about this fact.
Somewhere in my champagne addled brain, I’m completely aware that no good can come of having Harley cry into my cleavage two hours after he was so unceremoniously dumped at the altar, but Drunk Rose doesn’t care that he’s using my boobs in place of a Kleenex.
“She left. The bitch left me at the altar,” he says for the millionth time, and I have to keep from smacking him in the head the way I used to when we were kids.Of course she left him. She’s a money-grubbing whore who has more Gucci clutches than sense.
“I know, Pan,” I soothe.
“You’re the only one, you know that, right?”
“I know.” The only one who understands him? The only one who is always there and never falters? The only one he still loves after all this time?Yeah, if wishes were horses I’d be a freaking champion rodeo rider. It doesn’t matter which “only one” he means because all of these are true but the last. I’d be his only one for the rest of my days if he’d let me. If he’d just open his damn eyes.
I trace the lines of his face, the puffiness around his eyes, the bridge of his nose, the smooth angles of his cheekbones and his sharp jaw with its coarse stubble. It’s nice to be able to touch him like this again without Bitchy Barbie shooting daggers at me. Besides, it’s not like touching is a new thing for us. Harley and I have been together since we were five years old. Well, nottogether—obviously, because he was marrying someone else—but together in the sense that we’ve been best friends since the first day of kindergarten.
The Hamiltons moved into the Edwardian row house next to ours in Noe Valley, San Francisco, two days before the school year started, and Harley’s bedroom was directly opposite mine. The day they moved in, he waved through the open window. I poked out my tongue and drew my blinds closed.
The first day back at school, Bryson Hopper pushed me over in the sandpit. Harley helped me up, and then I pushedhimover. From that day on, we’ve been pushing one another’s buttons. We’ve also played at other things that don’t involve buttons or any kind of clothing, rather a definite lack of.
He shakes his head. “Fuck. I spent a goddamned fortune on this wedding. The caterer still has to be paid for all the goddamn food that we didn’t eat, not to mention the venue, the musicians, and the flowers.”
“The flowers were a gift from me and if you so much as think about trying to give me money for them, I will hurt you, Harley.”
“They were beautiful; you know?” His head is in my lap now, causing my stomach muscles and other things farther down to tighten and ache. “Your creations always are.”
“Well, I may have caved on the bridal party frangipanis, but no way was I going to let her get away with covering every surface of the venue with them. Can you imagine looking back at those pictures in ten years’ time?” I ask, exasperated. Harley doesn’t say a thing because he knows how I get around brides with the wrong choice of flowers. You want the happiest day of your life to appear timeless and beautiful, not as if you attended some busted-ass Malibu Barbie luau. And if that is your thing, then you need a new thing ... and possibly the help of someone like Dale Tutela. That man is a god with event planning.
“If I had my way entirely it would have been gorgeous,” I say breathlessly, dreaming of the wedding I’d been planning for over half my life. I glance down at Harley, whose expression seems so hollow, his bright blue eyes haunted, it breaks my heart into a million pieces. On the flipside, some of the pieces of my shattered heart are jumping for joy. This makes me a horrible friend because I shouldn’t be happy right now. I shouldn’t be, but I am. My best friend is heartbroken, dumped at the altar, and I’m drunk and exulted. I should point out that he’s drunk too, so it’s not as if I’m popping champagne bottles and toasting to a life of him being alone, but even so, guilt worms its way through my gut because this started out as the happiest day of his life and the worst of mine, and somehow everything got turned upside-down.
“What am I supposed to do?” Harley whispers.
“There’s nothing you can do. Except open another bottle of this fine champagne that the strumpet’s parents paid for.” I hold up the booze in question and clink it heavily against the open bottle in his own hand that’s mostly gone untouched. “Then, you’re going to lick your wounds and hop a flight to Hawaii where you can spend the entire week of what was supposed to be your honeymoon sprawled out in that big beautiful bed. You can sleep all day, eat delicious food, drink cocktails, and when you decide to move there permanently you won’t even complain when your best friend comes to live in your spare room.”
“Come with me.”
I inhale sharply. “What? Oh no. No that’s a very bad idea.”
“Why? How is it any different from the two of us taking the weekend to drive down to Big Sur, or going to the cottage without the parentals?”