Page 1 of Dear Wedding Planner
1
MILES
I've barely been home forty-eight hours, and my sister has already volunteered me to help her with planning her wedding.
“Get up,” Mackenzie says before tossing a pillow on my sleeping head.
I'd throw it back at her face if I weren't so tired.
“What do you want?” I grumble into my pillow.
“You’re coming with me to meet with a potential wedding planner.”
“No, I’m not.”
"You have to, my maid of honor lives three states away, and Mom is in London right now on her UK book tour.”
I grab the pillow she tossed at me and put it over my head. The ten-hour jet lag that I’m currently experiencing makes getting out of bed impossible at the moment. And there is nothing that she can say that will persuade me otherwise.
“Miles,” Mackenzie whines, using the same voice she did when we were kids when she wasn’t getting her way. “You have to come. I need someone to go with me.”
“Can’t you ask one of your many friends to help you? I don’t know anything about planning a wedding,” I say under the pillow.
The bed dip next to me as Mackenzie sits down. I hear her say something quietly, but I can’t hear it because the pillow is muffling the sound.
“What?” I peek my head out.
“I said that they all told me that they were too busy.” Her voice doesn’t have the same air of importance that it usually does. She actually sounds like she’s upset.
“Theyallbailed?”
“All of them.” She looks down at her hands. “I thought that planning the best day of my life would be this amazing experience, but I can’t even get one of my friends to come with me.”
Mackenzie Jameson is never one to show her vulnerable side. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen her cry—and one of those times didn’t include when she broke her arm when we were ten. As much as I would have given every dollar in my bank account to sleep a few more hours, I knew what I had to do.
“All right,” I say, pushing up from the bed. “Let’s go.”
“Really? You’ll come with me?”
“Yes, but only because you are going to buy me pancakes afterward."
“I will buy you all the pancakes you want.” Mackenzie chuckles, and I’m happy to see her smile return.
I’ve been gone for the last three years, traveling the world as a freelance photographer. It’s a job I once loved, but it kept me away from my friends and family for too long. When I came back, I half expected everything to be the same as when I left. I wanted that comfort of familiarity, but the world keeps turning when you are gone. People keep living their lives, even when you aren’t there to be a part of it all. If going with my twin sister to meet with a potential wedding planner is what she wants me to do, I can do that for her. I have a lot of time to make up for since I was gone.
VERONICA
When I startedI Do—For You, my wedding planning business, I was in love with the idea of love. I thought that helping people plan the best day of their life would be so rewarding. But after five years of dealing bridezillas, medaling family members who think they know best, and unreliable vendors, the shine of planning a wedding has lost its luster.
At the last wedding I worked, the bride and groom ended up stiffing me eight thousand dollars because they ran out of money and thought that only paying the vendors was important. When I confronted the bride about the bad check she wrote me the day of the wedding, she was unapologetic, telling me that this was her big day and I should have given my time for free. She and her family then proceeded to blast me on social media about how I was being unprofessional. After that, brides started canceling on me left and right. With no weddings to work, I burned through the money I’d managed to save just to keep the bill collectors at bay. It’s gotten so bad that I flinch whenever I hear the phone ring. If I don’t find another high-paying client real soon, I’m going to have to let go of Tabitha, the best assistant I’ve ever had.
"You said to remind you when it was quarter after two," Tabitha says, popping her head in my office.
I’m sitting at my desk, working on trying to find the money to keep the lights on.
“Remind me again who I’m meeting?” I ask, not looking up from the paperwork in front of me.
“It’s for the Jameson/Franklin wedding.”
