The Rehearsal Rescue

Piper Evans has spent ten years avoiding Ethan Montgomery.He's the groom's arrogant, ridiculously charming older brother-and Piper's longtime arch-nemesis. She has perfected the art of keeping him at arm's length, hiding behind cardigans, color-coded binders, and carefully controlled routines.Then one disastrous batch of oysters changes everything.Forty-eight hours before the wedding, the bride, groom, and nearly the entire wedding party are hospitalized with severe food poisoning. The dream wedding is suddenly in ruins, the venue is an empty barn, the vendors are disappearing, and there's no one left to save the day.Except Piper and Ethan.Armed with a 500-page wedding bible, a Black Amex, and absolutely no plan that actually works, they have forty-eight hours to build a ninety-person wedding from scratch.They'll have to find wedding rings from a closing jewelry store, track down an off-the-grid florist and retired pastry chef, transport a fragile wedding cake in a rusty bait-and-tackle van, and hang thousands of feet of fairy lights before the guests arrive.Somewhere between the chaos, the banter, and the late-night exhaustion, Piper starts seeing the man beneath Ethan's polished exterior. And Ethan finally admits the truth he's hidden for years: Piper was never his enemy.She was the woman who intimidated him enough to make him fall first.But just when ten years of tension finally explodes into something neither of them can deny, Ethan receives an ultimatum that could send him back to Los Angeles and cost him everything he has worked for.Terrified of becoming the burden he has spent his life trying to avoid, Piper pushes him away.Now she must finish the wedding without him-and prove to herself that the anxious, quiet woman everyone underestimates has a spine of steel.Because sometimes love doesn't arrive according to plan.Sometimes it arrives in the middle of a disaster, covered in sawdust and tangled in fairy lights.And sometimes your worst enemy turns out to be the person who was fighting to stay by your side all along. I'm Esme Lovell, a romance author who loves writing stories filled with witty banter, irresistible chemistry, unexpected chaos, and happily-ever-afters.