Three Little Words Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Jenny Holiday

  Excerpt from One and Only copyright © 2018 by Jenny Holiday

  Cover design by Elizabeth Turner Stokes

  Cover photography by Claudio Marinesco

  Cover copyright © 2019 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Edition: January 2019

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Epilogue

  Discover More Jenny Holiday

  About the Author

  Praise for the Bridesmaids Behaving Badly series

  Also by Jenny Holiday

  This book is for Audra North. I’m so glad you didn’t sue me. But I accept that you still might. #CauldronYears

  Acknowledgments

  Lorelie Brown and Sandra Owens read an early draft of this book, and their comments helped me see what wasn’t working and where my blind spots were.

  Amber Belldane and Robyn Barnes helped me enormously when this book was in the planning stages and I was thinking of having Bennett be the minister at Wendy’s wedding. (Can you believe it? I had this “the minister + the bad girl” thing in my head, but it wasn’t going to work for a variety of reasons!) I’m so appreciative of the time they took to help me understand how that might have worked…even though it ultimately didn’t.

  I don’t think I would have finished this book without Christine D’Abo doing morning sprints with me.

  As always, Audra North kept me laughing.

  Courtney Miller-Callihan rocks. That is true in a general sense, but in this case specifically she read a partial draft when I was stuck and convinced me that I was not, in fact, writing the most boring book in the history of books.

  And last but not even remotely least, my thanks to everyone at Forever Romance. Estelle Hallick is my capital-F Forever friend but also my small-f forever friend. Elizabeth Turner Stokes has made this series beautiful with her cover artistry. Lexi Smail continues to blow me away by doing her thing where she sees what I meant instead of what I said, and making everything better for it.

  Chapter One

  SIX DAYS BEFORE THE WEDDING

  The woman throwing a hissy fit at the gate had to be Gia Gallo. She looked the part: tall, thin, and in possession of one of those huge, ugly handbags that cost more than most people’s rent.

  She was also stunning, but that wasn’t relevant.

  Helming a successful Manhattan restaurant in an increasingly hip neighborhood meant that Bennett Buchanan had encountered his share of models. The funny thing about models was that they usually weren’t that good-looking up close. They were all angles and bones and overly exaggerated features that photographed better than they came across in real life.

  Gia, though, with her shoulder-length, wavy, honey-brown hair, her heart-shaped face, and her plump pink lips, was almost unnaturally beautiful.

  Or she would have been, if she hadn’t been using that gorgeous mouth to yell at the poor beleaguered gate agent who had just announced that their flight to Tampa was canceled.

  Bennett didn’t go for entitled. He’d seen enough spoiled princesses in his old-money southern youth to last a lifetime. New York might rub him the wrong way a lot of the time, but one thing it had going for it was that debutantes were few and far between. Or at least their New York equivalent, the society ladies, didn’t make their way up to his little Cajun place in Washington Heights.

  “Listen to me,” the bad-tempered beauty said to the gate agent as she held up a garment bag. “This is a wedding dress. It needs to get to Florida now.”

  Yep, that was definitely Gia, one of the bridesmaids in his friend Noah’s wedding.

  Bennett got up from where he’d been sitting and headed over to the desk to try to run interference.

  A second agent had joined the first. He looked as if he had a lower bullshit threshold than his colleague and was rolling in to play the role of Bad Cop Gate Agent. “A bridezilla. My favorite kind of customer,” he said under his breath, but not really, because Bennett, who was still a few feet away, could hear him.

  “I am not a bridezilla,” Gia said.

  “Honey, that’s what they all say.”

  “I am not a bridezilla, because I am not the bride. I am a bridesmaid, though, so if you want to call me a bridesmaidzilla, go right ahead. I will totally own that.” She leaned over—she was taller than both the agents—and got right in the face of the one who’d called her a bridezilla. “This is my friend Wendy’s wedding dress. Actually, it’s her dead mother’s wedding dress. And Wendy? She hasn’t had the easiest time of it. So I have made it my personal mission to make sure her wedding goes off without a hitch. This dress will make it to Florida if I have to walk it there myself.” She sniffed and straightened to her full, imposing height. “And don’t call me honey.”

  “Well, you’d better start walking, honey, because they’re about to close the airport.”

  “What part of don’t call me—”

  “Gia?” Bennett interrupted, pasting on his “the customer is always right” smile. “Are you by chance Wendy’s friend Gia?”

  She whirled on him, and she was pissed. Her eyes, a gorgeous amber that reminded him of his nana’s cinnamon pecan shortbread, narrowed. They were topped by long lashes and heavy eyebrows. The powerful brows contrasted sharply with pale, flawless skin marked by two blotches of angry pink in the centers of her cheeks. Jesus Christ, that kind of beauty was a shock to the system, equal parts invigorating and painful, not unlike when you burned yourself in the kitchen in the middle of a manic dinner shift.

  “And you are?”

  The question drip
ped with disdain, which was good because it reminded him that the karmic scales tended to balance beauty with sourness. She was like the abominations northerners called peaches: vibrantly pinky yellow and fragrant on the outside, hard and woody and unyielding on the inside.

  Still, he would do what he could to rescue these poor gate agents from her clutches. The monster storm bearing down on the eastern seaboard was going to make their lives unpleasant enough without the addition of an indignant model who believed that the laws of nature didn’t apply to her.

  He stuck his hand out. “Bennett Buchanan at your service, ma’am.” He let his drawl come on strong. That always charmed people.

  Gia was not charmed.

  She rolled her eyes.

  But she did step away from the counter, enough that the next customer in line took her place.

  “You’re Noah’s friend.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Don’t call me ma’am.”

  The thing was, he was pissed, too. She wasn’t the only one whose flight had been canceled. She wasn’t even the only one who had been charged with transporting an item essential to the wedding ceremony.

  Noah and Wendy had spent the last six months traveling. They had a system in which they jetted to a far-flung locale for two weeks and then spent two weeks at home in Toronto, where Wendy’s aunt was recovering from a car accident and Noah, who was moving to Canada to be with Wendy, was studying to transfer his legal credentials.

  It was like a honeymoon in reverse—the final trip would be their wedding in Florida. They’d dropped in to New York a few months ago for dress and ring fittings and had left the properly sized final products in the custody of their friends. He wasn’t really sure why they hadn’t done that stuff in Toronto, but he didn’t ask questions. He did as he was told.

  Which meant he had the rings in his pocket. He, however, was not throwing a hissy fit over this fact.

  So, yeah, he was pissed.

  And cold. So freaking cold.

  Top of that list of things about New York that rubbed him the wrong way?

  Winter.

  You can take the boy out of the South…

  Damn, he hadn’t realized how much the idea of getting on that plane and emerging in a few hours into the warm, humid air of a civilized climate had gotten its hooks into him.

  But unlike Gia, he was capable of holding his temper when things didn’t go his way. He was an adult. A fact of which he reminded himself as he checked the impulse to start calling her honey-ma’am.

  “The wedding isn’t for a week,” he said. “We’ll be able to rebook. Let’s head back to the city, and we can try again when this storm passes. We can share a cab.”

  Which was the last thing he wanted to do, but if they were closing the airport, taxis would be in short supply, and Bennett was a nice guy.

  Well, okay, he wasn’t a nice guy, but he’d grown adept at faking it. And if he could behave, so could she.

  Instead of answering him, Gia elbowed her way back to the counter and started demanding a hotel voucher.

  “We don’t give vouchers for weather delays,” the first agent said.

  “Good luck finding a hotel room anyway,” said Bad Cop Gate Agent. “Storm of the decade, they’re saying.”

  Gia puffed up her chest and opened her mouth. Bennett cringed. What did she think? That they could wave a magic wand and, like Harry Potter, repel the foot of snow that was set to be dumped down on them?

  He would just leave her to her little tantrum, then. He could only fake this nice-guy shit for so long.

  But before he turned away, something interesting happened. Something subtle that probably no one else noticed. Gia’s body, which had clearly been ramping up to escalate her fight, just sort of…deflated. Her chest sagged as her spine rounded, and her chin came to her chest. He didn’t miss her eyes on the way down. They were filling with tears.

  Shit.

  When someone needs help, you help. That’s what separates men from monsters.

  Chef Lalande’s refrain echoed through Bennett’s brain. His mentor’s mantra was a giant pain in the ass most of the time, but it was the philosophy that had saved Bennett and that Bennett had embraced. Pay it forward and all that.

  It wasn’t a philosophy that could be invoked selectively—that was the pain-in-the-ass part. When you changed the kind of person you were, you had to be all in.

  “Hey, hey, Gia. It’s going to be okay. I promise.” He moved toward her, compelled to touch her for some insane reason, but he checked the impulse.

  “How can you promise that?” The belligerent tone from before was gone, replaced by resignation. “Can you make this plane go?”

  “Look.” He pulled a small velvet pouch from his pocket. “I have the rings.” He wasn’t sure what his point was other than that he was on the hook for getting there as much as she was.

  Whatever point he was making she ignored anyway. “Can you divert this storm?” She started walking.

  He followed. “It can’t snow for a week. Worst thing that happens is we miss a few days of lying on the beach.” Which was a goddamn tragedy—he shivered thinking about heading back out into the winter—but it was what it was.

  She started walking faster. She was almost as tall as he was, yet he had to hoof it to keep up with her.

  “Can you make a hotel room magically appear in an overbooked New York City?” she snapped as she pulled out her phone. The pissiness from before was creeping back into her voice.

  “No,” he said sharply, suddenly done with her—he tried, but even on his best days, he was half the man Chef Lalande was. He wasn’t responsible for this woman. “I can do none of those things.” He stopped walking.

  It took a few seconds before she realized he wasn’t with her anymore. She stopped and turned. Looked back at him.

  Then she did that deflating thing again. She reminded him of a pizza oven. You opened it and a blast of heat escaped and the temperature inside dropped by several hundred degrees.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t even know why I’m being like this. I’m just so…”

  Mean? his mind supplied. Arrogant?

  “…hungry.”

  He barked a surprised laugh. “Well, ma’am, that I can fix.”

  * * *

  Gia wasn’t really sure why she was letting this man she’d never met before shepherd her out of the airport. Sure, he was Noah’s best friend and former neighbor—Wendy had told her they’d be on the same flight—so he probably wasn’t going to ax-murder her, but was she really going to just let him take her home without even throwing up a pro forma protest?

  It was just that she was so tired. God, it felt as if she’d been working for months nonstop. Of course, her last job had only lasted three days, but it had been miserable. It was an editorial shoot, a feature on summer dresses—for Vogue, which was great, because those kinds of jobs were becoming fewer and further between. But damn, it had been a punishing gig. Long days—they were always long, but these had bordered on abusive—and the dress they’d wanted her in was too tight on her ass and she’d had to swap with Lily Alexander, the modeling world’s seventeen-year-old wunderkind. Which had thrown a huge wrench into the proceedings because it had been one of those stupid “dress for your age” features that showed a woman in every decade. So Gia, who’d been cast as the “thirties” model, had to swap with Lily, which meant the “twenties” dress ended up being tea length and the “thirties” dress ended up being strapless, God forbid.

  Throw in an extra-bitchy art director and an extra-dickish photographer, and you had a perfect storm of toxicity.

  But when you were twenty-nine years old and your job was to be a human coat hanger, you didn’t complain. Not when there were any number of younger, skinnier human coat hangers—witness Lily Alexander and her small-enough ass—nipping at your heels. Many of them would take the laxatives offered by bitchy art directors and the sexual harassment dished out by dickish photographers, too
.

  Gia had gone right from that horrible job back to her hotel to retrieve Wendy’s wedding dress, which the hotel had been storing for her, and then on to the airport. If only she’d been smart enough to hold on to the room for one more night, just in case.

  But she hadn’t been smart enough. So here she was. Instead of on a plane bound to join her best friends at the wedding site, she was on a shuttle to the Newark Airport train station—there were no taxis to be had—with the best man.

  She was so hungry.

  The other thing she should have been smart enough to do was grab something to eat on their way out of the airport. She could let up on herself a little bit. The job was over, and she’d booked a month off after the wedding. Though maybe she shouldn’t have. It wasn’t as if it were raining high-quality jobs these days.

  Regardless, she needed this little problem of hers to stay little. To not become a thing.

  While they waited on the platform for a city-bound train, she called last night’s hotel and pleaded her case up to and including the grossest kind of name-dropping, but they were resolute about being full. Several more places said the same thing.

  She had options. She could call her agent. He would figure something out. Or she could call any number of models—or bitchy art directors, or dickish photographers—she knew who lived in the city and find somewhere to bunk for the night. But the logistics of it suddenly seemed so incredibly, bone-crushingly daunting.

  So instead she was apparently going home with Mr. Mint Juleps and Moonshine here, at least for now.

  Bennett Buchanan, though? Seriously? Who named their kid that? Gia was Canadian, so admittedly, her impression of southern American culture was based on Duck Dynasty and the William Faulkner novels she’d read in her one year as a literature major, but this dude, with his drawl and his falsely pretty manners, sounded like he belonged in a rom-com romancing Reese Witherspoon.

  He kind of looked like it, too.

  He had a ridiculous smile, to begin with. Smug, slightly arrogant, and studded with perfectly straight, sparkly white teeth, it was the kind of smile people in her industry paid big money for. He had short black hair, too, and deep-blue eyes that looked at everything, including her, several seconds longer than seemed necessary.