Tempting Kate

by Jennifer Snow

  Everything depends on this one day

  Would anyone hire a wedding planner who was left at the altar? The answer, Kate Hartley has found out, is no. It’s been nearly a year since her fiancé abandoned her at their destination wedding, and Kate’s career is nearly toast. Unless she can pull off the wedding of the century for her new clients, a Hollywood power couple. So why is the groom’s brother, sexy-as-hell resort owner Scott Dillon, trying to stop the wedding?

  Scott wants to do the right thing—the bride-to-be is keeping a secret and Scott’s brother deserves the truth before he says “I do.” But if Scott doesn’t stop trying to stall the wedding, he’ll ruin Kate’s career, not to mention any chance he has of being with her.

  “How’s the water?” a deep voice asked.

  Opening one eye, she sighed, her relaxed muscles immediately tensing. “I was enjoying it better before you arrived.”

  “Well, I was enjoying a lot of things better before you arrived,” Scott said, his voice tight. “Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that I’ve changed my mind... You can plan the wedding here.”

  She grinned, opening both eyes and sitting a little higher. “I know. Your mother told Liz an hour ago.” That was the only reason she was trying to relax in the hot tub instead of going another twelve rounds with him in his office.

  His eyes narrowed as he approached the edge of the hot tub. “Here’s the thing, Ms. Hartley. You can go ahead and plan a wedding here, but that doesn’t mean my brother will actually be getting married.”

  “We’ll see about that.” Clearly he had no idea who he was up against. She closed her eyes again, dismissing him, but the smell of his musky cologne continued to mix with the jasmine and eucalyptus. A long minute later, she heard the splash of Scott getting into the hot tub.

  Dear Reader,

  The last time we saw wedding planner Kate Hartley, she was brokenhearted from being left at the altar at her own destination wedding. In Tempting Kate, she just may find the happiness she deserves. But not without a few...roadblocks. Very few books come to me as fast and hard as this one did, but the moment Scott and Kate met on the page (on the side of a snowy road in Big Bear), they took over. Their chemistry was instant and their back-and-forth banter when they discover that they’re on opposing sides of this Memorial Day–weekend wedding made for such an enjoyable two hundred pages to write. This one is a little hotter than I usually write, so I hope that’s okay. ;)

  I hope you enjoy reading this one as much as I enjoyed writing it.

  xo

  Jen

  Jennifer Snow

  Tempting Kate

  Jennifer Snow is an award-winning romance author living in Edmonton, Alberta, with her husband and six-year-old son. She is a member of the Writers Guild of Alberta, the Romance Writers of America, the Canadian Authors Association, shewrites.org and FAVA. She has published articles in Mslexia magazine, Westword magazine, RWR and Southern Writers Magazine. Her publishing credits include her six-book Brookhollow miniseries published through Harlequin Heartwarming and an MMA sports romance series published through Penguin Random House’s Berkley/NAL. Her new small-town hockey series will release this fall through Grand Central Publishing’s Forever imprint. More information can be found at jennifersnowauthor.com.

  Books by Jennifer Snow

  Harlequin Blaze

  Her Holiday Fling

  Harlequin Heartwarming

  A Brookhollow Story

  The Trouble with Mistletoe

  What a Girl Wants

  Falling for Leigh

  The Mistletoe Melody

  Fighting for Keeps

  Love, Lies & Mistletoe

  A Heartwarming Thanksgiving

  “Mr. Right All Along”

  Winter Wedding Bells

  “The Promise”

  To get the inside scoop on Harlequin Blaze and its talented writers, visit Facebook.com/BlazeAuthors.

  All backlist available in ebook format.

  Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.

  Join Harlequin My Rewards today and earn a FREE ebook!

  Click here to Join Harlequin My Rewards

  http://www.harlequin.com/myrewards.html?mt=loyalty&cmpid=EBOOBPBPA201602010002

  To the authors of my favorite Blaze books—Joanne Rock, Tawny Weber and Karen Rock—for giving me so many sizzling-hot love stories to get lost in!

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you as always to my agent, Stephany Evans, and my brilliant editor, Dana Grimaldi, who loved this book from the beginning. And a very special thank-you to award-winning boutique wedding planner Jennifer Bergman for a glimpse inside the world of wedding planning.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Excerpt from Beyond the Limits by Katherine Garbera

  1

  “WE ARE LIVE in twenty seconds.”

  Twenty seconds.

  Kate Hartley scanned the set of Today’s Woman, but she couldn’t locate an escape.

  The talk show’s host, Claire Jamison, nodded as she readjusted the microphone on the collar of her pale blue blouse. “Ready?” she asked her, tossing her long red hair over one shoulder.

  No. Kate forced a confident smile. “Of course.” She sat straighter and slid her palms down the length of her tan pencil skirt. She crossed and recrossed her legs as the producer counted down the seconds to airtime.

  When he signaled that they were live, Claire spoke. “Welcome back. Before the break, we saw Lario perform his hit ‘When We Were Us,’ and he will be back to perform again at the end of today’s show. Now, we are pleased to introduce our next guest—Hollywood’s own wedding planner Kate Hartley, from Belle Affairs.” Claire turned to look at her with a smile. “Kate, good to see you.”

  “Thank you for having me,” Kate said, relieved that her steady voice revealed none of the anxiety threatening to suffocate her.

  “So as if you weren’t busy enough planning the nuptials of some of Tinseltown’s most glamorous couples, you recently wrote a book.” Claire picked up the hardcover that had hit store shelves the week before and held it up to the camera. “How to Get Him Down the Aisle—great title, and I suspect a question many single women out there are dying to know the answer to. Tell us about it.”

  “Essentially, the book is an added service that my company has recently started offering our clients. We refer to it as the ‘warm the cold feet’ effort,” she said. Her chest tightened even more. Breathe and smile. “Believe it or not, men want to get married just as much as women...they just need that extra reassurance, that push to get them to the altar.”

  Didn’t she know it?

  She brushed the thought away as her smile faltered.

  Unfortunately, her interviewer capitalized on the opportunity, jumping to the question that had allowed Kate’s publicist to secure this television spot. “You have firsthand experience about what happens when there’s no one there to give them the push, isn’t that right?” Her smile was sympathetic as she reached across an
d touched Kate’s hand, but her eyes gleamed with the eagerness of digging up gossip.

  Kate had prepared for the interview to take this turn, so she nodded slowly. “It’s true. Last year, I was ditched at my destination wedding.” Pause. Give the expected heartbroken look. Then, forcing a light, I’m-over-it, confident air, continue. “And that’s why I wrote the book. To help my clients avoid a similar fate.” Thank God for the training and prep work she’d done with her publicist, Alison Dunn. Otherwise the lies coming out of her mouth would have choked her to death.

  Claire nodded. “Great way to take a heartbreaking situation and turn it into something positive,” she said. “So in your case, what went wrong? You were in Maui...family and friends were there. The day of the wedding, he disappears. What happened?”

  If she only knew, maybe it would have made the last ten months more bearable. “I’m not sure I’ll ever know...” Kate paused when she saw Alison, standing behind the cameraman on the far right, shake her head.

  Shit. Just stick to the rehearsed answers. “I’m an experienced wedding planner—” she gestured to herself, earning a smile from Alison “—and I’m confident if I’d been paying attention, I’d have seen the telltale signs of a potential runaway groom.”

  “Let’s discuss these telltale signs,” Claire said. “In the book, which I’ve read cover to cover...”

  The woman had asked for a briefing just an hour before.

  “...there are several chapters on spotting them before it’s too late. Do men really demonstrate these flight-risk traits?”

  Claire was referring to the add-on chapters that the editor had suggested after Kate’s failed wedding had threatened her credibility. Her book had taken her three years to write and had been meant as a wedding planning guide, not a self-help tool for nervous brides. “Men exhibit these traits all the time—subconsciously, of course.” Kate had been noticing them in grooms for years, but never having seen anyone actually flee before the wedding, she’d dismissed them as harmless. Now, after Cooper’s betrayal, she’d realized there might be more to these prewedding jitters than she’d initially thought. “There are many reasons grooms get cold feet—insecurity, fear of commitment, a bad stag experience, for example. But by offering the right guidance, I believe I can help get the couple’s special day back on course and lead to their...” She hesitated. “Happily-ever-after. But the book is much more than just a runaway groom preventative strategy.” She wanted to lead the discussion away from her own wedding fiasco and back to the wedding guide portion of the book.

  “Right.” Claire opened the book to the index and scanned the contents. “My personal favorite chapter is the one about the enablers. I think every woman can agree that the most dangerous threat to any relationship is the single bachelor friend.”

  “Certainly. Men may not want to admit it, but their friendships run deep. The idea of losing a friend to marriage can make a friend who has the best of intentions act out of character, resulting in a second-guessing groom.”

  “Well, I’m nowhere near the marriage phase, but if I were, this book would definitely be on my list of wedding planning guides—because what’s a wedding without the groom, right?” Claire flashed her best show-host smile at the camera.

  Across from her, Kate’s gaze dropped to her hands clenched on her lap, an image of her empty, dismantled Maui beach wedding flashing in her mind. She’d thought of every last detail to make that day perfect, special...all except one.

  How could she have prevented her fiancé from falling out of love?

  “Kate?”

  “Sorry, yes, exactly—a groom is a necessary evil,” she said with a fake laugh. One she’d perfected whenever someone asked about her failed wedding, which, unfortunately, given the nature of her business, was far too often. She’d thought by now people would have forgotten about it, but that had yet to happen.

  And worse, she’d lost clients. She’d even heard a rumor floating around Hollywood that she was bad luck. Sigh.

  “Well, thank you again for being on the show today, Kate.”

  “My pleasure.” She smiled, relieved the interview was over. Publicity like this was important for book sales as well as the future of her company. She had to rebuild her clientele, but she wasn’t sure how often she could put herself through this.

  Ten months and still the thought of her wedding day made her chest tighten. She’d learned to perfect casual dismissal of that terrible experience, but the betrayal had broken her heart and had affected her business—two reasons she could never bring herself to forgive Cooper Jennings.

  * * *

  “KATE, LIZ SHEFFIELD is here,” her assistant, Janet, announced, poking her head into Kate’s office later that afternoon.

  She wasn’t sure which emotion was stronger—relief that the woman had returned or anxiety over a possible client from hell. Kate had never put so much effort into securing a contract before. Clearly, Liz had liked the proposal she’d emailed.

  Liz Sheffield owned HighRes Media, a multimedia company in Beverly Hills. Her company designed movie trailers for some of Hollywood’s biggest movie studios, plus digital marketing presentations and multimedia websites for big businesses all over California. She had a lot of contacts and a lot of friends. Rich friends who could afford glamorous, if expensive weddings. Her word-of-mouth referral was exactly what Kate needed to restore her business’s name. “Okay, give me three minutes, then send her in, please.”

  Kate kicked her feet free of her flip-flops, stashing them in the bottom drawer of her mahogany desk. Crossing the room, she slid back into the designer stilettos that forced her toes to overlap and her arches to ache. At five foot nine, she hardly needed the extra height, but the heels made her feel stronger, more powerful. Lately, her ego needed all the help it could get. She buttoned her charcoal suit jacket and smoothed a hand over her dark hair, hanging loose around her shoulders.

  Reaching into the box of books from her publisher, she positioned a copy of How to Get Him Down the Aisle in plain view and ran a hand over the dust settling on the corners of her desk. When business slowed the year before, they’d canceled the office’s weekly cleaning service—a necessary cutback, since she was three months behind on the lease payments for the lavish office in the downtown high-rise. Without three or four new wedding deposits...soon...she’d be packing up shop.

  The idea of working out of her home, the way she had at the beginning of her career, felt like a huge step backward. One she wasn’t willing to take.

  She sat again and turned her attention to her computer, pasting on what she hoped was her busiest-looking expression as the door opened and Janet ushered Liz inside. Immediately, she stood and came around the desk to greet her. “Liz, hi. Great to see you again.”

  “Thank you for meeting me on short notice,” the petite blonde said, readjusting her oversize purse on her shoulder. A new Prada bag, from their spring collection—the one Kate had eyed with longing the week before. “Janet mentioned your schedule was full this week, but I just had to see you today.”

  Janet hadn’t lied. Her assistant actually believed that Kate was still as busy as ever. She often left the office for “off-site meetings”—which were actually just stress-induced shoe-shopping trips—but she couldn’t afford to lose Janet’s confidence in her. Her assistant was one of the best client recruiters she could have hoped for. But the truth was, her schedule hadn’t been full in far too long, and spring was well underway. Her dearth of new clients was quickly becoming a problem. One she hoped to resolve by landing the Sheffield-Dillon wedding.

  “It’s no problem. I’m glad Janet was able to fit you in,” she said, gesturing to the overstuffed tan leather chair across from her desk, but she checked her watch for effect. “I have a few moments before my next appointment.” A few moments, a few weeks...a few months—who knew, really? “So you liked the proposal?
”

  “Loved it.”

  Thank God. Her professionalism worked to hide the delight she felt as she said, “That’s fantastic news. I’d hate to think your big day would be left in the hands of a less dedicated planner.” Her dedication was full-on. Other than this wedding, the only other event claiming her focus and time was her own brother’s wedding, and that one was stirring mixed emotions in her. She was thrilled for her commitment-phobe brother Chase and his fiancée, but it killed her to remember that he and Hayley had met and fallen in love in the midst of her own disastrous event.

  “We’ve made some changes...” Liz said, snapping her back to attention.

  They always did. Brides never fully knew what they wanted until she showed them why they’d hired her. “Okay, let’s figure this out.” She reached for the file, stacked beneath several prop ones on her desk, overflowing with dress sample fabrics and pictures of cakes for effect.

  “We want to get married next month.”

  Next month? “When next month?” she asked, her voice steady, as if she could actually pull off an extravagant wedding that fast.

  “Memorial Day weekend...in Big Bear.”

  What was with people and holiday weddings these days? Kate wasn’t a fan. Nothing ever went well for a holiday wedding. Guests hated to give up their long weekends. And had Liz forgotten how cold, wet and miserable that particular weekend always seemed to be? She suspected it would be even worse in Big Bear Lake, California. “But I thought you had your heart set on a July wedding in the Napa Valley?” Even four months had been short timing to plan the elaborate ceremony that Liz Sheffield wanted. Six weeks was impossible.

  And she’d already prepared so many of the details for the beautiful vineyard wedding to present to the bride-to-be. Wineries were the perfect backdrop for summer weddings and were sure to be a hit with guests...and her future potential clients. Big Bear—not so much.

  “Derek is making a new film in Greece starting in June, and he’s needed on set over there the week following the long weekend.”