Task Force Bride. Julie Miller

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      Prologue

      Today was a bad day to be a bride.

      “Hello?” Hope Lockhart pressed her phone to her ear and inched her way toward the door, quietly seeking an escape as her perfectly executed plan for her client’s wedding blew up in an explosion of harsh words and wailing tears. “Hello?”

      Click.

      Hope cringed as the mysterious caller hung up without saying a word. She didn’t need this today. She tucked her phone into the hip pocket of the gray suit she wore and hurried her steps.

      “Cold feet is not an option, young lady,” Dale Barrister lectured his daughter over the chamber music drifting down from the sanctuary upstairs while the mother of the bride wept right alongside her daughter. He pointed his white-gloved finger to the ceiling. “Everyone who’s anyone in Kansas City is in that church right now, waiting for us.”

      “Daddy!” Deanna Barrister wailed, pushing her veil away from the mascara running down her cheeks. “I don’t think I can do this. Not today.”

      “Well, we’re not doing it tomorrow or any other day.” The skin above his starched white collar turned red with anger. “I spent more money on this shindig than you’re worth, and this is how you repay me?”

      Hope curled her fingers around the doorknob behind her and paused at the cruel words. Raised voices always twisted her stomach into knots. Tension like this usually suffocated the breath from her chest and scattered coherent thoughts right out of her head. The anger, pain and frustration filling the room reminded her of things she’d worked long and hard to forget.

      “You stupid cow! When I tell you to do a thing, I expect—”

      Uh-uh. Hope slammed the door on that particular memory and forced herself to take a deep breath and intervene. “Mr. Barrister, perhaps if we give Deanna a few minutes—”

      “Miss Lockhart!”

      It wasn’t a great day to be a wedding planner, either.

      Hope flattened her back against the door as the father of the bride whirled around and stalked across the dressing room toward her. “I’m paying you a boatload of money.”

      She turned her head from the finger jabbing near her face.

      “You make today happen.”

      As much as every frayed nerve inside her longed to bolt to a place of silence and solitude, she’d also worked long and hard to learn how to cope with volatile emotions and uncomfortable situations like this. She was stronger than her past. She could do this. Her client needed her. And if someone needed her, she had to help. That had always been her Achilles’ heel. Hope released the door, keeping her voice calm and her smile serene.

      “Of course.” She gestured to the woman wiping at the tears that dripped on her taupe lace gown. “Perhaps you could take your wife to the restroom to freshen her face,” she suggested, needing to clear some of the emotions from the room if she was to have any chance of saving the big day. Ignoring both the father’s impatient curse and the doubt in the reluctant bride’s red-rimmed eyes, Hope pulled out her phone and texted her assistant upstairs. Tell organist to play another 15 min.