Total pages in book: 121
Estimated words: 119548 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 598(@200wpm)___ 478(@250wpm)___ 398(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 119548 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 598(@200wpm)___ 478(@250wpm)___ 398(@300wpm)
From New York Times bestselling author, Emma Hart, comes a brand-new romantic comedy about how no good deed goes unpunished… AKA, the perils of marrying your best friend and accidentally falling stupidly in love with them.
When I find out my grandma only has weeks to live, the last thing I expect her to say is that her dying wish is to see me married.
The only problem is that I am the furthest thing from getting married a girl can be.
Broken-hearted I can’t fulfil her dreams, I seek comfort in my best friend, Fred… Who proposes to me on the spot.
The agreement is we’ll get married quickly and quietly, I’ll temporarily move into the estate he inherited as the Earl of Coventry, and we’ll get an annulment when the time comes.
Nana will never know.
Nothing between us will change.
In the end, it’ll be like our marriage never happened, and we’ll go right back to being best friends.
Until I realise that Fred is a man. A hot-blooded, hard-muscled, big di—ahem—man.
Nana always said that the best laid plans are the most fun to rip up, and maybe we should do just that
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
PROLOGUE
* * *
FRED
Would you marry your best friend to fulfil her dying grandmother’s last wish?
I did.
And, somehow, at some point, I fell in love with her.
My best friend—not her grandma, just to be clear. Although I’d loved her as if she were my own grandmother for my entire life.
I didn’t know how it happened. It felt almost as if everything had changed overnight, and I couldn’t even pinpoint the very moment I fell in love with Delilah Elizabeth Peters.
I just did.
I was wholly, helplessly, obsessively, unquestionably in love with my best friend, and it scared the life out of me.
Falling in love wasn’t in my plans. Not again. Not after the disaster that was my last relationship. I’d asked Deli to marry me purely to make her grandmother happy, and at the time, I’d figured that there were worse things in life than temporarily marrying your best friend.
I was right.
There were.
Falling in love with her was one of those things.
And so was sitting in front of the divorce papers to wipe away our marriage and pretend the ten months had never happened.
And, spoiler alert, darling reader, but I couldn’t do it.
More to the point, I wouldn’t do it.
I know what you’re wondering.
How did I reach this point of sitting in my office at one a.m., nursing a glass of the strong stuff, thinking about ripping up the divorce papers that would reset my life to a time before Deli was mine?
Well.
Get ready.
You’re about to find out exactly how I fell in love with my best friend.
1
* * *
DELILAH
“Your ugly crying face reminds me of that Kim Kardashian, but it’s somehow worse,” Nana said, idly stirring her margarita. “So, stop crying, Delilah.”
“That’s a bit below the belt, Mother,” Mum said, glancing between us. “Not entirely untrue but mean all the same.”
I wiped my fingers furiously across my cheeks. “Why are you ganging up on me? I’m upset!”
Nana sighed. “I’m the one who’s dying, dear.”
“That’s why I’m upset!”
“I’m not that upset about it.”
“Of course not. You’re not the one who has to live without you,” I pointed out, taking the tissue Mum offered me and dabbing it below my eyes.
There was no use trying to save my makeup.
I didn’t need a mirror to know there was no hope for my mascara now.
“I suppose that’s a very good point,” Nana said as she looked over her shoulder. “Where are my tacos?”
That’s right.
The woman who, not even an hour ago, heard her doctor tell her that she likely barely had months to live without more treatment, was more concerned about how long this restaurant was taking to bring out her tacos than her impending death.
While I, her youngest granddaughter, had been crying ever since.
No wonder my crying face was like Kim Kardashian’s. I couldn’t stop the bloody tears, no matter how hard I tried.
Not even tortilla chips and queso were doing the trick, so this was a deadly situation.
“Why don’t you go and wash your face?” Mum said softly, handing me a small packet of face wipes.
I knew what that meant.
It was her universal sign for, ‘Go and sort yourself out, Delilah.’
“Good idea,” I muttered, taking them from her. “Excuse me.”
I got up from the table with my bag and the face wipes in hand and made my way into the ladies’ restrooms. A quick glance in the mirror showed me exactly why my mother had sent me here.
I looked like I’d been dumped ten times over and smothered my face in stinging nettles.
“Good God,” I whispered, yanking two wipes out of the packet.
It was no wonder my cheeks were black from my mascara, though. My eyes were just watering at this point, even as I scrubbed aimlessly at the remaining makeup left coating my skin.
I was in a daze.
Like I was in a parallel universe, one where nothing would be okay, where my life would never be the same again. The words of Dr Anthony echoed in my mind, endlessly spiralling around my brain.
His apologies.
His assurance that Nana’s body could handle another go of radiation and chemo to give her another couple of years.
His regretful verdict that she likely only had three months left if she refused… if she was lucky.
His solemnity that she should go away and think about it.
I didn’t want to believe it.
I didn’t want to believe what he was telling us. Until today, there was always a chance that her cancer was curable. At one point, that had been reality, until it came back almost overnight, much more aggressively than before.
And now…
My heart was sliced cleanly in two with both sides warring. One side said there was no way Dr Anthony was right, that he was mistaken, that all the tests were wrong. They had to be wrong.
The other said it was inevitable, we knew it was coming after the last round of tests, that he’d warned us, that I shouldn’t be surprised.