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      “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 and 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