The Accidental Wedding

Ariel Adler has one rule: never get married, especially not to a stranger. She breaks it in one afternoon, at a mass wedding she never meant to attend.

It starts with a shortcut. Fleeing a killer she watched commit murder in the alley behind her favorite bakery, Ariel ducks into the brides' chambers of the church next door and is mistaken for a late bride. A token is pressed into her hand: number seven. Across the room, hiding from a second gunman, software billionaire Tom Rock is handed the matching number. When the priest calls for number seven, they both walk up the aisle to stay alive, and they both say "I do."

Then comes the kiss. Then the flashbulbs. By morning, the whole world knows that Tom Rock, famous bachelor and CEO of Kiwi Inc., married a nobody on the strength of a lottery token.

Neither of them wants this marriage. Tom needs the scandal to look intentional, because his company's image was built on being unattainable. Ariel needs to stay out of a gangster's sight and get back to the two things she actually loves: chocolate pastries and video games. So they strike a deal. One roof. One convincing act for the paparazzi and for her grandmother Fiona, who moves in armed with a marble chair and unstoppable opinions. And one hard line: this is a marriage on paper only.

The line does not hold.

Living with Ariel, Tom discovers, is like hosting a hurricane with a sweet tooth. She colonizes his mansion one room at a time, rivals him over every board game he owns, and talks enough for both of them. Ariel, in turn, learns that the coldest man she has ever met quietly deletes every cruel comment before she can read it, stands up to her grandmother for her, and hands her a budget to build the game she has carried in her head since the day her parents died at a game launch. Her dream has a name now: Choc Hunters.

But someone does not want that game to exist. Her office is ransacked. Her computer is wiped clean. Her first kiss with her husband on paper leaves them both insisting it meant nothing, while meaning everything.

With the launch closing in and an unseen enemy circling, Ariel and Tom must decide what their token marriage really was: an accident of luck, or the one contract neither of them wants to escape. He promised himself he would not speak of a future until her dream came true. She promised herself she would never fall for a man who hides things to protect her. Both promises are about to break, beautifully.

A laugh-out-loud contemporary romance about a wedding taken under duress, a fake marriage that refuses to stay fake, a grandmother who cannot be trusted with the truth, and two adults who said "I do" to survive and slowly learn to say it for real.

Full-length novel with a guaranteed happy ending. Say yes to number seven.