Probably not. That doesn’t mean that there are wedding guests who have doubts about whether the marriage has traction. But what if one of those guests did the unthinkable and hired someone to derail the wedding? Would that be a good deed, not allowing two people to make a terrible mistake? Or would that interference be a step too far?
Elba Luz answers these questions in her humorous novel, How to Ruin a Wedding. Lucy Delgado needs the money. That’s her excuse for embarking on a career that requires her to prevent a couple from saying, “I do.” Fired from her last job, she’s accepted an assignment to prevent Eliza from marrying James. Her client, Jennie, believes that James is in love with Sammy. “I’ve tried to tell her, but she thinks I’m jealous,” Jennie tells Lucy. “Please I need proof. You’re my Hail Mary.”
Lucy manages to get a video of James and Sammy about to kiss, but her phone fails to record any sound. She has one more chance to get the job done, but when she finds out she’s been evicted, she seeks solace at a bar and misses an opportunity to thwart the upcoming nuptials. Her last “Hail Mary” results in catastrophe, dealing a fatal blow to her fledgling career.
Lucy’s parents died in a car accident when she was just a teenager, leaving her to take care of her younger sister Taina. Now the roles have flipped. Taina married Matthew and they live in a $3.4 million mansion in Connecticut. With Lucy now unhoused, she’s living with Taina, something Matthew makes clear he’s not happy about. Worried she may be destroying Taina’s marriage, she vows to double her efforts to get a job and move out.
Help comes in from a surprising place. Anders was the man drinking with her when she should have been doing her wedding wrecking job. He tracked her down and has a proposition. His sister, Valerie, 23, is engaged to marry John, who was Anders roommate in college. Anders tells Lucy his sister is “flighty” and not ready to get married, especially to the older John, who is nerdy, constantly broke, and unable to stand up for himself. In Anders’ opinion, it’s not a match made in heaven.
He makes Lucy a proposal she can’t turn down. He will pay her the $20,000 she needs to purchase Save a Paw, the dog rescue service where she used to volunteer and now wants to run. And he has the funds: while in college, his friend, Lucas, had launched the search engine, Lightshop. For Christmas, he gave Anders a share in the company which is now worth millions. For Anders, money is no object and what he wants to do with that fortune is to make sure Valerie and John never marry.
Lucy accepts the job, traveling to Charleston, South Carolina where she poses as Anders’ new girlfriend. Complications arise very quickly. Lucy is quickly embraced by the family, including by Anders’ Aunt Bethany, who raised him. Valerie also bonds with her brother’s girlfriend, providing Lucy with many opportunities to trash John. Playing a couple in love, Lucy has trouble deciding where her relationship with Anders is going. She does have feelings for him. How could she not? And the way he smiles at her, touches her, shows he’s beginning to care, too.
Once Lucy manages to kill the wedding, what next? A future with Anders seems unlikely since his family will learn why she was there in the first place. In wrecking a future wedding, Lucy may have also wrecked any opportunity for her own happiness.
Elba Luz has created an intriguing plot. We know that Lucy and Anders are destined to get together. How that happens makes for a fun time.
How to Ruin a Wedding
Elba Luiz
Top Bigstock photo by Mykhailo Repuzhynskyi
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