Whose Wedding Is It Anyway?

by Melissa Senate

Overview

Eloise Manfred just sold her soul to the wedding devil.

In exchange for a free $100,000 dream wedding, she’ll be featured in a trendy magazine as “Today’s Modern Bride.” So what if the advertisers dictate what she wears, eats and registers for? From the gown (it has yellow feathers) to the reception hall (vampire chic) to the rings (what metal is that?) to the prime rib (tofu!), Eloise knows that what really matters is the groom (cold feet?). All she has to do is keep a wedding-planning diary (heavily edited) and have her friends and family ooh and aah over her leather veil in photo shoots.

Friends, Eloise has: bridesmaids Jane, Natasha, Amanda and oddball co-worker Philippa, the magazine’s “Traditional (ha!) Bride.” Family, she doesn’t have. Eloise’s mother passed away, her father took off years ago, her too-cool-for-words brother is either climbing Mount Everest or scamming a rich older woman in Beverly Hills and her fiancé’s family is certifiable. So between choosing rubber bridesmaid dresses and worrying about the photo shoots, Eloise finally asks the question: Hey—whose wedding is it anyway?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781459246539
Publisher:	Red Dress Ink
Publication date:	06/15/2012
Sold by:	HARLEQUIN
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	717 KB

About the Author

Melissa Senate has written many novels for Harlequin and other publishers, including her debut, SEE JANE DATE, which was made into a TV movie. She also wrote seven books for Harlequin's Special Edition line under the pen name Meg Maxwell. Melissa's novels have been published in over twenty-five countries. She lives on the southern coast of Maine with her family, which includes a sweet shepherd mix named Flash, and Cleo, a comical lap cat. Visit her website MelissaSenate.com.

Read an Excerpt

Whose Wedding Is It Anyway?

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By Melissa Senate

Harlequin Enterprises, Ltd.

Copyright © 2004 Harlequin Enterprises, Ltd.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-373-25077-0

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Chapter One

If there were a Top Ten list for Most Embarrassing Bridesmaid Dress, say on Late Show with David Letter-man, the two hanging in the back of my closet would take spots. It wasn't that my two closest friends (one engaged, one married) had bad taste. It was that they had handed over control of their weddings to bossy relatives.

For example, let's say that your best friend Jane's aunt Ina was paying for her July Fourth wedding and insisted on an Independence Day theme (yet failed to see the irony in that). You might find yourself spending two hundred and sixty bucks on a red, white and blue striped dress with stars on the straps. The bridesmaid dress equivalent of the American flag.

"I could either live a good life, a sane life for the next six months," Jane had said in self-defense, "or I could spend the next six months arguing with Aunt Ina, who reminds me every day that she's paying for my wedding. I choose my sanity."

And so Jane spent her weekend afternoons pricing tri-dyed (guess which colors?) peau de soie shoes with a two-inch kitten heel.

Embarrassing dress number two was an iridescent purple taffeta, the stiffest ever made. It was your standard-issue hideous bridesmaid dress, with tiny polka-dot bows along theneckline and a huge polka-dot bow on the butt. Amanda's very intimidating mother-in-law had paid for her huge Southern wedding - enough said there.

Despite the flag dress and the polka-dot bows, Jane and Amanda were now staring at the bridesmaid dress they would wear at my wedding as though it were worse.

Okay, it was.

Much, much worse.

My bridal party, a co-worker's bridal party and half the staff of Wow Weddings magazine were squeezed inside It's Your Day bridal salon, staring at a mannequin wearing ... was that a dress, actually?

"This dress would be perfect for your bridesmaids, Eloise!" raved Astrid O'Connor, editor in chief of Wow Weddings. She stood next to the mannequin she had moments ago unveiled with the flourish and megawatt smile of a game-show hostess.

Uh, isn't there a door number two?

"This is payback, right?" Jane and Amanda whispered to me in unison.

"No payback," I whispered back. "That's the point."

No paying at all. Not one penny. This shopping trip at It's Your Day was my first foray into the "free dream wedding" I'd been promised in exchange for being featured as Today's Modern Bride in Wow Weddings. I, Eloise Manfred, was going to plan my wedding, every single iota of it, in the pages of Wow Weddings. I'd be photographed choosing my wedding gown, the shoes, the flowers, the caterer, the reception site, the invitations - the everything. Tens of thousands of Wow readers would see me checking out the posh Hudson Hotel and the Waldorf-Astoria for reception sites. I'd be photographed at Tiffany's on Fifth Avenue, snootily rejecting ten-thousand-dollar wedding bands that just weren't The One.

All expenses paid! All I had to do was point at what I wanted and smile for the camera for my picture spread in America's least favorite bridal magazine. Wow was no Modern Bride. The not-so-famous Astrid O'Connor had been promoted or demoted, depending on how you looked at it, from the much better performing Wow Woman magazine, to turn Wow Weddings's numbers around (circulation was at an all-time low). One of her brilliant ideas to increase advertising revenue was to feature two real-life engaged women as Today's Modern Bride and Today's Classic Bride, who would wear, eat and register for whatever the advertisers wanted to feature and sell millions of. That little nugget of information would be kept from the readers, of course.

Look, readers - our Modern Bride, Eloise Manfred, has "chosen" Overpriced-and-Not-Worth-It Brand's Wedding Gown, Same As Any Other Photographer and Super Rubber Chicken Caterers for her dream wedding - and so should you, brides-to-be-of-America!

According to Astrid, I would become a major trendsetter, like Sarah Jessica Parker and the Hilton sisters.

But if the bridesmaid dress that Astrid had chosen for me was an indication of what was in store for modern brides of America, I could pretty much count on making Blackwell's Worst- Dressed List. I could forget about Tiffany's too.

Talk about handing over control. I was beginning to have the sneaking suspicion that I'd sold my soul to the wedding devil.

Four days ago, the free dream wedding had seemed like an unturndownable offer. Astrid had overheard me and Philippa Wills, recently engaged departmental editorial assistant, oohing and aahing over my diamond ring in Wow's tiny kitchenette. Astrid (who I'd dubbed Acid after my last performance review) ordered us both inside her office. I'd expected to get the Eloise, as you're still quite green at magazines, you should spend your spare moments learning the business instead of chatting routine. I'd been working at Wow for almost two years, but was still considered "quite green" because the bulk of my work experience had been designing book covers for a publishing house and not glossy magazine layouts.

As Philippa quaked next to me, I waited for the "Here At Wow" speech, but instead, Astrid ordered the intern to bring in coffee for three, then explained to Philippa and me that our engagement rings had given her a major brainstorm. The sight of Philippa and me standing next to each other (a rare occurrence) had apparently stopped her in her tracks. There was Philippa, with her sleek white-blond hair, pale green shirtwaist dress (Ralph Lauren, of course) and Ferragamo penny loafers. And there was I, with the "crazily cut auburn hair" (I wouldn't say crazily), weird shoes and Le Chateau ensemble. According to Astrid, Philippa and I represented two opposite ends of the bridal spectrum: the Classic Bride and her traditional taste (Philippa) versus the Modern Bride and her edgy taste (that would be me).

If we would allow Wow Weddings to feature us as real-life bride-to-be models in the June issue as we made our wedding plans and "chose" our gowns and caterers and invitations and kept cute wedding-plans diaries detailing our every hot pick, Wow and its advertisers would pay for our weddings, which she estimated at a hundred thousand dollars apiece -"to do it right, of course."

"Of course," Philippa and I had repeated in shocked unison.

"You do understand that we'll have to hustle," Astrid said. "We're almost ready to put the May issue to bed. That means we'll only have about six weeks to plan your entire weddings."

Fine with us! We shouted our yeses like shampooees in a Clairol Herbal Essences commercial. Two hours later, we signed long contracts that we didn't bother reading. Hey, we had whirlwind weddings to plan!

When I told Noah about the deal I'd made with Astrid, he kissed me on the lips and said, "Whatever makes you happy is fine with me." Then he added, "But you do know there's no such thing as a free wedding, right?"

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? by Melissa Senate Copyright © 2004 by Harlequin Enterprises, Ltd.. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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