All Chapters of NOT THE BRIDE HE WANTED : Chapter 1 - Chapter 7

The rooftop garden at the Peregrine Hotel looked like something out of a magazine spread, the kind Temi Callahan used to flip past in waiting rooms and think, someone actually gets to live like this. String lights crisscrossed overhead even though the sun hadn't dropped yet. White roses spilled out of urns tall enough to hide a child behind. Somewhere below the parapet wall, forty stories of Manhattan hummed along like none of this mattered to it at all.Temi stood near the makeshift altar in a borrowed pair of heels that were already eating into her feet, holding a clipboard she didn't need because the wedding planner, a terrifyingly efficient woman named Sable, had everything memorized down to the second. Temi's job tonight wasn't logistics. It was moral support. It was standing three feet to the left of her best friend and making sure Camille Whitfield didn't fall apart before Saturday."You look like you're about to throw up," Temi murmured, leaning close.Camille laughed, too bri

Temi almost said no.She stood in the hallway outside the Peregrine's rooftop bar for a full minute, phone in hand, thumb hovering over the reply button, running through every reasonable version of herself that would tell Adrian Voss she was going home to sleep off the worst night of her best friend's life instead of meeting a near stranger for a private conversation at eleven o'clock at night.But Camille's text was still sitting in her inbox, unanswered. Please tell his family whatever you need to. And someone had to be in that room representing the version of events that wasn't a scandal, wasn't a headline, wasn't whatever the tabloids were about to make of a runaway bride and a jilted billionaire. Temi told herself that was the reason she typed back yes and headed for the elevator.She mostly believed it.The bar Adrian had chosen was a private one, tucked behind an unmarked door two floors below the rooftop, the kind of place that didn't have a name on the outside because the peo

Voss Tower took up an entire block of Sixth Avenue, fifty two floors of glass and steel that Temi had walked past a hundred times without ever once imagining she'd be riding an elevator to the fortieth to discuss the terms of her own marriage.The receptionist who greeted her knew her name before Temi said it, which told her more about how carefully this morning had been arranged than anything else could have. She was led down a hallway lined with framed black and white photos of buildings the company had developed, into a conference room with floor to ceiling windows and a view of the park that made the whole city look small and manageable, the way money always seemed to make things look from high enough up.Adrian was already there, standing at the window with his back to the door, and beside him sat two people Temi didn't recognize. A woman in a sharp navy suit who introduced herself as Naomi Chen, Adrian's chief operating officer, and an older man with silver hair and a folder thi

The story broke before Reyes even had a statement drafted.Temi found out the way most of the city did, mid morning, mid coffee, phone buzzing itself off the edge of her desk while she was three hours deep into revising a facade elevation for the Whitmore contract. She'd almost missed the first buzz entirely, absorbed in a stubborn measurement that refused to line up on the drafting software, and only glanced down when the phone buzzed a second time, then a third, insistent in a way that finally pulled her attention away from the screen. Pri's voice came through before Temi had even finished unlocking the screen."Please tell me you have context for what I'm currently looking at.""What are you looking at?""Page Six. Billionaire's Bridesmaid Bride. There's a photo of you leaving Voss Tower yesterday holding a folder against your chest like it's a baby. The caption calls you, and I'm quoting directly, the convenient replacement."Temi's stomach dropped through the floor of her studio.