Harlequin Romance June 2023 Box Set by Nina Singh

Author:Nina Singh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2023-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWO

“YES!” BLOSSOM SAID, desperately, “that’s exactly who I am.”

But, of course, in the back of her mind, she wasn’t that at all. She was the girl standing in Ryan Paulson’s living room waiting to have prom pictures done by a professional photographer.

She was the girl trying not to gawk at how gorgeous his house was.

And she was the girl trying not to notice how Ryan’s mother and sister had stared at her, before disappearing, making a sense of foreboding snake across her spine.

And then she’d seen the picture on the mantel of Ryan’s floor-to-ceiling granite fireplace. His sister’s prom from last year. And she had been wearing the very same dress that Blossom now had on.

Feeling suddenly sick, she’d asked directions to the restroom.

On her way there, past a closed door, the voices drifting out of it. His mother and sister, distressed about the photos, about the same dress appearing on two different girls in the proudly displayed photos. His sister, her voice a bray of pure malice.

She’s making that dress look trashy.

Blossom stared at Joe, feeling as if he had morphed into a stranger before her very eyes, feeling as if he had morphed into Ryan Paulson.

Or, maybe more accurately, that she had morphed into her former self: just a trashy girl pretending to be a princess.

He looked back at her steadily. “I think you’re a little more than table-fired crème brûlée, or lemon chiffon cake with a blueberry reduction.”

I’m not, she cried silently, though a smug voice inside her asked her if maybe she wasn’t a little less, the girl who had grown up thinking a fancy dessert was a chocolate pudding in a packaged cup with a squirt of canned whipped cream on top.

She could feel a slow-burning fury that he—the man of her dreams—so didn’t get it. The anger shocked her. Over the course of their entire relationship, she’d never been mad at Joe.

Out loud, her voice surprisingly controlled, she said, “You’re trivializing what I do. It’s not about brulée or chiffon cake. It’s about the details. I’m extraordinary with the kind of details that move an event from mundane to magnificent. You’ve seen how I am about my work.”

He sighed. “Right. Work.”

As if she’d turned everything about their wedding into work. How could Joe not see that this wedding, her wedding—their wedding—had to be the best she had ever done, an absolute testament to her love for him?

She could feel that confident woman she had been just moments ago—or pretended to be—deflating, like a balloon with a hole in it.

The little voice was winning. Too good to be true.

“Sixteen days before our wedding, you decide you don’t like anything about it?”

There was his opening. To tell her all the things he loved about their plans. Instead, he was silent.

He didn’t even say he liked the bride.

Don’t cry, she told herself.

“Maybe we should postpone,” Blossom said. She didn’t mean it, of course. She expected him to disagree and adamantly. Instead, he looked pensive. Her heart felt as if it was going to beat right out of her chest.

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