Undercover Honeymoon, page 1
Cover image: Tropical Beach © by Konstanttin and Woman © by Dmitrii Simakov; Shutterstock, Inc.
Cover design copyright © 2019 by Covenant Communications, Inc.
Published by Covenant Communications, Inc.
American Fork, Utah
Copyright © 2019 by Kari Iroz
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any format or in any medium without the written permission of the publisher, Covenant Communications, Inc., P.O. Box 416, American Fork, UT 84003. The views expressed within this work are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Covenant Communications, Inc., or any other entity.
This is a work of fiction. The characters, names, incidents, places, and dialogue are either products of the author’s imagination, and are not to be construed as real, or are used fictitiously.
ISBN: 978-1-52440-712-4
To Ellie, our new miracle.
And to the angels, known and unknown, who have saved us time and time again.
Acknowledgments
As always, thank you to my husband, Zach, for your unfailing faith, support, and endless hours in the car talking through plot points. I love you. Come what may.
Thank you to my sweet and silly babies, Mina, Talia, and Ellie. You remind me every day that magic knows no age.
On my first two books I acknowledged my family and friends as a whole, but not individually. I was worried that if I started naming names, I’d never be able to stop. I’m lucky enough to have been loved by so many people; there’s no way for me to name them all. But it feels like you deserve to be named, so here I go. Please forgive me if I forget.
Thank you to my family (in age order-ish): Dad, Mom, Monique, Jeff, Daisy, Peaches, Chantel, Cameron, Carter, Sierra, Stephanie, Kelly, Riley, Adam, Mikal, Kendra, Madison, Mikaylee, Dallin, Koen, Dathan, Richelle, JD, Ethan, Nichole, Dave, Amara, Nyah, Derek, Aliyah, Drew, and Anika. Thank you for being my most beloved friends, my strength, and my greatest fans. I love you all eternally.
Thank you, my friends (in chronological order-ish): Shay, MaLese, Rachel, Landon, Becca, Alyssa, Hadley, Kirsten, Krystle, Ashleh, Ashley and Ashley (aka Flala and Floozy), Mike, Greg, Dan, Crow, Spen, Drew, Britney, Bryon, Jordan, Dave, Humphrey, Tanner, Jessica, Cooper, Weston, Katie, Katie, Bryn, Brian, James, Aria, Tacey, Jana, Meghan, Chantel, Mike, Sara, Mark, Ambie, Whitney, Carly, Dana, Julie, Elizabeth, Travis, Sterling, Brandon,
and Erin. Thank you for being family when I needed it. I’m sorry for so
many years of not being there for you like I should have been. I love you.
Thank you to the whole Ivins family for getting me my very first computer, loving me like your own, and taking me on my first cruise. It clearly made an impression. I love you.
Thank you to all of my theater kids. You know who you are. I miss you terribly, and I love you.
Thank you to Richelle for being so patient with me and showing me another dream I didn’t know I had. And for your team of vocalists, who help bring our music to life. (See? I told you I would give you your own note! )
Thank you to my new editor, Kami, for all of your hard work and encouragement.
Thank you to my first editor, Stacey, for getting me this far.
And a huge thank-you to the fans whose readership makes this third book possible. You are my dream come true.
Chapter 1
She is going to skin me alive.
Seriously, I’m a dead woman.
My headstone will read, Here lies Jacklyn Wyatt. She died a mere forty hours from becoming Jacklyn Wade. She never got to be Damon’s bride. She never tasted the lobster on her cruise that she dieted for six months to eat.
Okay, that’s a bit wordy for the headstone. I’ll request they include that stuff in the eulogy. I could do a draft on my phone and email it to my sister Jen real quick. It’s not like I have anything else to do, waiting in this bridal shop.
I should be mourning my life, but all I can think about is the wedding I won’t get to experience—the details I’ve been obsessing over for months. Chocolate-covered strawberries at the reception. Herb-roasted chicken at the luncheon. Buttercream frosting on the wedding cake . . .
Apparently most of my grief involves food. Which is understandable when you’ve been hungry for half a year.
I almost cried when I realized that’s how long I’ve been on this stupid, pre-wedding diet. Half a year. That sounds so much worse than six months. Or twenty-four weeks. Or one hundred and sixty-eight days.
Not that I’ve been counting.
I never wanted to be a bridezilla who exists on nothing but protein paste until the “I do” and doesn’t even taste the dessert at her own reception. All I wanted was to go down one dress size—one measly dress size. Just enough to wear a swimsuit on my honeymoon that didn’t look like a turn-of-the-century bathing onesie. I had no idea how many French fries I would have to give up. Spoiler alert: it’s all of them.
And now it’s all a waste. When I think of how many cheeseburgers I’ve missed since the engagement, I feel a surge of injustice. Had I known I would be skinned alive two days before the wedding, I would’ve eaten all of them. I’d have consumed all the cheeseburgers in the state of Utah.
They say it’s the things you’ll never do—or in this case, never eat—that haunt you at the end.
Because there’s no chance I will live through this day. Not once I’m late to my bridal shower.
Murdered by my own mother.
She gave me fair warning. To her credit, Mom left most of the wedding plans to me. It’s impressive how hands-off she’s been, considering the number of years she secretly planned my wedding for me.
The nuptials of my siblings before me mellowed her out. Even so, when I sat down beside her on the plane ride home from Vegas, with the engagement ring on my finger, I expected her to put down a tray table and whip out the fabric swatches right there. But she’s never argued with my choices. Even when I chose mint green and ice blue for my colors—none of the eighteen different shades of pink she suggested—she sweetly held her tongue.
The one thing she requested was to be in charge of the bridal shower.
When she asked, I was surprised. The few bridal showers I’ve been to in my life were sleepy affairs with plastic tablecloths and candy-coated almonds. I couldn’t imagine why it would appeal to Mom, with her party-planning mania.
But I readily agreed. Why not hand it over to her? She could use all eighteen shades from “rose” to “flamingo,” and I’d have one less event to plan. It seemed like a win-win.
Until the phone calls began.
I’ve heard that phrase on crime TV shows—usually when a victim describes their experience with a stalker. They always say things like, “He seemed so harmless. And then the phone calls began.”
With Mom, it was gradual. A call every few days with a casual question like, “Do you care what kind of dessert we have at the bridal shower?” Completely rational. No red flags at all.
Slowly but steadily the calls increased, until once or twice a day Mom peppered me with more-specific queries: “Smoked turkey and Black Forest ham on the meat platter or oven-roasted turkey and pastrami?” A seed of concern began to bud at her intensity. It was just a meat platter, right?
The seed burst into full bloom when I asked her that very question—“It’s just a meat platter, right?”—and got in return a sudden outburst.
“The meat platter is the center of the culinary experience, Jack. The meat platter sets the tone for the entire meal. The meat platter is the crown on the head of a masterful meal. Of course it’s not just a meat platter!”
I was shocked to hear Mom sound frazzled. She always handles her role as hostess with a sort of absentminded calm. Even when she took the reins planning Jen’s and Delia’s weddings she never appeared rattled by the hectic process. Why in the world would a simple bridal shower send her over the edge?
“It’s because you’re the baby,” Jen insisted one day over a sisters’ lunch. She was bouncing her little son on her knee as she ate—now an expert at the parental multitask.
“That’s true,” Delia agreed, keeping one eye on her kids in the nearby play zone. “It’s the end of an era for her.”
“How?” I asked, stoically ignoring the fries on the kids’ trays. By then I’d really strengthened the mental side of the diet. At least I’d stopped hearing the lyrics to Katy Perry’s “The One That Got Away” in my head every time I saw a cupcake.
“What about Rex and the incredible unwed-able Reggie? We have two brothers who’ve yet to tie the knot. So Mom can still plan their weddings.”
“But they’re not her baby girl. You are. She wants to make it perfect.”
“Well, that just makes me feel lousy,” I pouted, picking at my salad. The only thing more depressing than a salad is a fast-food salad. It’s like they don’t even try. “I don’t want her to feel like that.”
“There’s no way around it.” Jen shrugged. “All you can do is try to validate this party for her.”
“Validate,” I mused. “I can do that.”
Validate. Validate. That’s been my mantra ever since. When she called me four times in the middle of date night to discuss the different choices of dinner mints? Validate. Validate. When she sent me twelve consecutive text messages while I was sitting in a test at
Even when she walked into my Feminism in Early American Lit class to show me options for rental chairs—two completely identical white folding chairs—and then smartly responded to the mortified professor, “Those authors have been dead for years. This is happening right now”?
Validate. Validate.
I’ve never again questioned the importance of the meat platter or the type of calligraphy on the place settings or the ratio of petunias to tulips in the centerpieces. It quickly became clear that she was putting more effort into this two-hour shower than I put into the entire wedding. I never said I didn’t care since I couldn’t eat any of the dumb dinner mints anyway. This party had become the perfect storm, and I had to ride it out.
But I developed an interesting set of side effects from the whole process. Like jerking in terror every time my phone makes the tiniest blip and waking from a nap with a shout of, “Black Forest ham!”
Damon, fascinated, likened these new ticks to a form of PTSD and even floated the idea of sending me to the FBI psychologist for a breakthrough study.
At my withering glare, he withdrew the suggestion and offered me a sugar-free fudge bar.
And now all those months of validation are for naught. Because I won’t be standing on Mom’s doorstep promptly at 5:00 p.m. (“Or 1700 hours, if you want the military equivalent,” Mom told me in the first of nine reminder emails) in a dress the exact shade of “taffy” she picked out for me, ready to gush over what a perfect job she’s done and finally ending the reign of terror.
Come five p.m. I will still be standing here in the middle of a bridal shop in my slip, high heels, and a Star Wars T-shirt, waiting for them to locate my lost wedding dress.
Maybe, I think with a growing sense of macabre, they can use the wedding flowers for my funeral. What’s that quote from Paris at Juliet’s grave? “Sweet flower, with flowers thy bridal bed I strew”?
Shakespeare really knew how to put things, didn’t he? Of course, he was talking about Juliet faking suicide to stay secretly married to her family’s mortal enemy, not a lost wedding dress. But really, same thing.
I just don’t understand how they could lose a whole dress. I’m notorious for losing things, but this isn’t like car keys. I doubt my dress has slipped between the cracks of couch cushions. It’s not a small dress either. This thing has got a formidable amount of fabric. If they unraveled it, that fabric could probably curtain an entire city block. So how does something like that just go missing?
I picked this little bridal boutique because the selection is unique and their sales staff personable. The French twist–haired employees were so accommodating when I came to look at gowns. They had this aura of serenity that was contagious. With the vanilla candle–scented air and soft strains of classical music in the background, the effect was a bit hallucinogenic. I left the shop with my dress purchased and total confidence my wedding was going to rock.
That confidence slipped a bit when I brought my claim ticket in today. At first they were all dreamy smiles and “Welcome back, Miss Wyatt,” which made me feel like a celebrity. Light chitchat about the coming day was punctuated, every sentence, with an, “Oh, how divine,” and, “Simply lovely!” It made me want to hire these people full time to walk around with me. They could make even my hideous algebra class positive. Graphing wouldn’t be so painful if they were there wafting vanilla scent and saying, “A line graph. How divine.”
But then the lady at the desk kept tapping and tapping on her computer, her dreamy expression fading. I started to suspect she was penning a novel or something back there and had forgotten all about me. But her eyes flicked back to me, and she said with a strained smile, “Just a moment.” Then she slipped into the back, vanilla trailing in her wake.
I didn’t think much of it yet. I’ve worked retail long enough to know computers glitch. The whole system inevitably crashes when I’m alone in the store during a Saturday rush while there’s a register line out the door and about a thousand people at the dressing rooms waiting to try on jeans.
While waiting I leaned against the counter and swiped through pictures of the reception hall. For the last few months I’ve been using these pictures to imagine how the reception will be. I even fall asleep to our song on my headphones, picturing Damon and me having our first dance.
Damon.
That part feels the most unreal. In less than forty-eight hours he’ll be my husband.
It makes me a little lightheaded.
I was still looking at pictures when the less-calm lady came back to the counter with her manager in tow. Still I suspected nothing. The manager, whose nametag declared her to be Claudia, greeted me serenely and then went to work at the computer, typing fast enough to wear out the keys.
For a few minutes she typed away while I mentally tallied what I still have to do before the bridal shower: curl my hair, get dressed, and load the lights for the reception hall into my car to drop off at my parents’ house. Pick up the boutonnieres on the way . . .
Then I realized Claudia and her employee were talking. They were keeping their voices so low it seemed impossible they could actually hear each other. But evidently they were managing to communicate because they kept at it—an unintelligible murmur I couldn’t decipher a word of.
There was a lot of headshaking and gesturing at the computer screen as if it were lying to them. Their calm evaporated, and they appeared just as harassed as I was working the register at Forever 21 when the tags on an entire shipment of jackets had been mistakenly marked to half price. A dance company shopping en masse had discovered them and, delighted at the idea of having matching jackets, brought every single one up to the counter. And I was the one behind the register who had had to break the news to a whole stampede of teenage girls with enough hairspray on hand to blind me for life.
The first lady’s voice began to rise in pitch, and she backed a few steps away from the computer.
“Um, excuse me,” I said, startled by the volume of my own voice. They were speaking so quietly I’d forgotten how loud normal voices are. “Is there”—my voice caught a little—“is there a . . . problem?”
“No! No, no, no, no, no, no,” Claudia insisted, smiling too brightly. “We’re just . . . having a little trouble with . . . location.”
“Location?” I repeated slowly. That was clearly one of those calculated words salespeople use. Like when the banker uses the word deficit to break the news that your account has dropped to negative two hundred dollars. “The location of what?” My stomach gave a great lurch. “My—my dress?”
Claudia and the other woman—Dorothy, her tag read—exchanged a look that negated all that careful whispering they’d done. Then Claudia smiled again, her teeth bared like a jackal, and said, “Just a moment,” before hurrying into the back.
They kept up the pretense for quite a while—rushing back and forth between the back room and the computer. Dorothy disappeared for several minutes at a time but always reappeared to declare, “It’ll be just a minute!” Each time she did her voice was shriller, her French twist more disheveled.
Claudia found some way to restore her calm while she was out of sight and returned to the computer, exuding ease again. I found this tranquility more grating than Dorothy’s subtle hyperventilation into a paper bag in the corner. The calmer Claudia appeared, the more I wanted to smash every candle in the place.
Finally she admitted, “The seamstress who did the alterations was supposed to hang it on the rack for pickups, but . . . there’s been an error.”
“What kind of error?” I demanded, fighting to keep my voice level.
“Well, the computer has your dress marked as Ready for Pickup, but again, the rack is . . . deficient.”
“Deficient?” I echoed. “As in empty? ”
“No, no, no, of course not.” She laughed lightly. “There are plenty of dresses on the pickup rack. Just none of them are . . .”
“Mine?” I pressed. “My dress isn’t there?”
