Her Fake Island Wedding
Chapter One
“It’s a disaster,” Lucy declared melodramatically, sliding her lunch tray onto the table. It was lunchtime, and Sunfish Island Resort’s staff cafeteria was busy, staff members hurrying in and out to grab a bite in between tasks.
Lucy had joined a large group of friends, and several of them looked up at her words.
“What’s up, girlfriend?” Olivia, the resort’s marketing manager, asked with an amused smile. Her American accent was just one of a dozen different accents in the room; although the majority of the resort’s staff were Australian, there were plenty of other nationalities represented.
“You look as though someone stole your puppy,” Nessa, the resort’s best bartender and Lucy’s fellow Englishwoman, put in.
“Worse,” Lucy said dismally. “My mother’s coming to visit next week.”
That provoked laughter around the table. She scowled impartially at all of them.
“You’ve only been here a month,” Olivia pointed out. “And why is she coming now? Did you warn her this is the hot season?”
“I did, and she says she’s already booked her flights because she got them cheap. You don’t understand what a disaster this is, guys. She’ll spend the whole visit pestering to know whether I’ve found a man yet.” Lucy poked at her salad with a fork miserably. Her mother had always been both overprotective and demanding with her only child, and now that Lucy had turned thirty, the insistence that she needed to hurry up and find a man to father her children before it was too late had only intensified.
At the same time, her mother liked to denigrate Lucy’s judgement, always telling her that she had terrible taste in men and she mustn’t rush things or she’d pick the wrong man and be literally left holding the baby.
It took everything Lucy had to not retort “Like you were?” every time her mother trotted out that particular criticism. Escape from her mother’s constant nagging was just one of the reasons why she’d applied for the research position at Sunfish Island’s marine biology centre, and actually being awarded the post was literally a dream come true.
“Is she really that bad?” Nessa asked sympathetically, and Lucy raised her eyes to meet the bartender’s.
“You have no idea,” she said dismally. “I knew she’d come out, especially when the contract actually included four weeks’ free accommodation for visitors, but I really didn’t think it’d be so soon.”
The few blissful weeks she’d spent on Sunfish Island had been among the best of her life. From the day she arrived, she’d been warmly welcomed by her fellow marine biologists and the staff of the wider resort alike. Her job, studying the effects of coral replanting and regeneration on damaged parts of the magnificent Great Barrier Reef, was quite literally her dream and had been ever since she was a kid picking up shells and starfish on the beach near her childhood home at Dover.
“We’ll help distract her,” Olivia offered. “Won’t we, Cory?”
Her boyfriend, Sunfish’s activities director, looked up from his lunch with a nod and a smile. Cory Gillette was one of the best-looking men Lucy had ever met, tall, blond and athletic, he looked like a fourth Hemsworth brother. And he wasn’t even the only one around the table who would fit right in with that famously attractive family.
“Does she dive?” Bryce was the resort’s resident dive instructor, and had partnered with Lucy numerous times on her reef dives. “I can put her on the daily schedule, no charge… she’ll be too tired to nag you.”
Lucy smiled at him. If Bryce was only a few years older, she thought wistfully, she’d have made a serious pass at him, but he was only twenty-four and looked even younger. Blond, tanned and beautiful, she just had to appreciate him visually.
“Unfortunately, she’s terrified of open water. Convinced there are sharks in it.”
“Well, there are sharks in it,” Bryce said equably. “Mostly only the little reef sharks around here, though.”
“Somehow I don’t think that would reassure her!”
Bryce grinned cheerfully at her, and Lucy found herself smiling back. It was difficult to stay down around Bryce for long; he was too relentlessly happy.
“We’ll just have to put you on the dive schedule every day, then,” he said.
“Then I’d be accused of avoiding her. No,” she sighed. “There’s no winning with my mother, not unless I produce a fiancé out of thin air and promise to start popping out babies nine months to the day after the wedding.”
“That’s the solution, then,” Cory piped up, a wicked glint in his eyes. “We’ll find you a fake fiancé!”
Loved the sample? Look out for Her Fake Island Wedding, coming soon from Caitlyn Lynch!