A Tylerville Jilted Bride, Book #2

• Sweet and Wholesome
• Amnesia Romance
• Secret Romance
• Christmas Romance

The only luck Abby Rose has ever known is bad luck. Plan her wedding? Get dumped at the altar and discover he took her car to take off with the new girl. Bleach her hair? Accidentally melt it all off and turn it a fabulous shade of oopsie-daisy pink. Open a Bed & Breakfast? Host only a curmudgeonly cat named Dove that will assuredly consume her body in the event of her demise.

Abby knows better than to expect happiness. The closest she ever came to finding it was the hot rebound relationship with Irish actor, Chase Falcon, on the heels of her “jilting.” Just when she thinks things are looking up, Chase disappears from her life. She’s got nothing but time now and room for a lot of bad, bad choices holed up in her Bed & Breakfast in Tylerville.

Then an ill-wind blows in the super sexy and talented Irish actor who broke her heart. Chase Falcon is carrying the scars of a terrible on-set accident … and no memory of her! Now all bets are off.

A Tylerville Jilted Bride is a contemporary romance written by USA Today bestselling author, Day Leclaire and her daughter-in-law, Dre Leclaire. This romantic tale of love, redemption, and second chances will leave you laughing and crying, and falling in love with all the amazing characters in the miraculous town of Tylerville.

Abby sat at the kitchen table staring out the bay window, the only one not shuttered against the storm, drinking a cup of honeyed herbal tea. The wind whipped through the branches of the trees just off her back porch, sending red and yellow leaves flying into the air. It was too soon for the trees to shed all their foliage, but the wind left nothing behind, stripping each branch with a relentless, invisible hand.

It was only a matter of time before the power blinked out, forcing her to fend alone in the darkness. She shivered at the thought. Without power there’d be no way to distract herself from the bad memories playing on a loop in her mind every night. She sighed, anticipating the sleepless night ahead, praying the power didn’t stay off for long.

There’d been no guests at her B&B in more than six months, and she’d all but given up on the idea of having a functional business in the home she now knew to be a mausoleum. It felt more like a memorial to the life that could-have-been, rather than the life she wanted. The only warmth came from a flickering tv that stayed on too late into the night, every night, featuring movies from bygone days. Black and white pictures and technicolor flicks from the thirties, forties, and fifties that always ended in a happily ever after. And if they didn’t, she turned them off. There was no room for more sadness in her life. No more room in her heart for pain.

However, she chided herself, the loneliness of her floundering business did afford her the chance to do some unusual things without being judged. Though, she wished her latest escapade had gone better. Too much time in isolation and the urge to change something, anything about her life, led her down a forbidden path.
Hannah’s Beauty Depot.

She’d researched, as much as anyone does in a rut anyhow, and purchased all the materials needed to bleach her beautiful, long naturally wavy red hair to a toned ash blond. She’d wanted to look like Betty Grable in How to Marry a Millionaire. After putting on the bleach, she tied a plastic grocery store bag around her head to help activate the chemicals and sat down to watch one of her favorite old movies.

She learned several lessons that day. The most important one: timing was everything when it came to bleach. It had taken her hairdresser and a whole box of tissue to overcome the shame that went with literally melting her beautiful locks of hair off her head. She cut over eighteen inches of hair length, which left a mostly normal looking bubblegum pink pixie cut, the hair too damaged to even do corrective coloring.

She’d been looking to shake up her life, and for a few short, very dramatic moments, she had. But she still found herself sitting at the well-polished table in her kitchen, alone, and facing what promised to be a surprisingly nasty storm on her own. So, it came as a huge surprise to see a very familiar man dressed in a blue painter’s tarp in her side yard hauling what appeared to be a wolf on a rope over his shoulder. The tarp flapped and rattled around the two as hail came down furiously.

That’s it. She scowled so fiercely, it hurt the corners of her mouth. With the sky crashing down around her, the hottest slice of regret in her life cut through her side yard wearing a plastic cape.

Abby’s first response was to spill her tea. Typical. She threw a towel over the top of the mess and loped to the front door to see what exactly happened to the aggravatingly handsome man and the feral animal. The sound of something solid bouncing into the sturdy front door made her hesitate just a moment before swinging it cautiously open. She barely held back a gasp when she found the man she’d thought of so often for the last year and a half, sporting a marred face, eyes closed on her doorstep. Every angry thought, every curse she’d had on the tip of her lips melted away in that moment.

She squatted down to gently shake his arm, aware of the worsening ice storm around them as the loud pings turned into even louder clanks. The trunk window of the black SUV, still open and raised in the air, cracked and splintered with each sharp smack of the hail before finally giving way in one magnificent explosion of glass. The panicked wolf barreled past her into the house.

“Hey! Are you alright? Wake up!” Fear bubbled up in her stomach. She placed a gentle hand at his throat, having the sudden paranoid fear that perhaps he’d been killed on her doorstep by one of the rogue pieces of hail. It would suit her luck. A dead ex on her porch in the middle of a storm and a wild animal loose in her house. She breathed a sigh of relief to find a strong pulse dancing under her fingertips.

“Mmmhmm,” he moaned. “I’m fine, just give me a second.” He opened his eyes briefly and pressed a hand to the back of his head before squeezing them together tightly again. He scrubbed his tan hand along the back of his head, massaging the bruise that must surely be forming. “You’ve got a very solid door, Missus. I’m glad I’ve got a hard head.”

“It came with the house. Can you walk? We need to get inside now before the ice gets worse.” Missus? Really? We’re playing that game? Her day became more interesting by the moment, even if she didn’t know how she felt about him showing up at her now defunct B&B. But in the name of charity, the man most certainly needed shelter. She hoped his injury wasn’t any more serious than a sore head. No way would an ambulance get to them any time soon.

“Aye. I can walk. Where’s Juniper?” His accent came out thickly, his speech slow and deliberate. He cautiously sat up with Abby’s hand pressed firmly on his back, pulling his legs in away from the edge of the porch out of the line of the sharp ice.

“If Juniper is your wolf, it just ran into my house. Come on in now. We need to get away from this falling ice. I’ll try to get your trunk closed before it takes any more damage. You sit here.” Each new gust of wind brought large swirls of stark white snowflakes onto the porch along with bouncing hail at a slant. Abby’s voice waivered as she watched the precipitation change. She loved the snow, but the chunks of ice, careening through the sky had her contemplating putting on a bicycle helmet. Chase’s hand wrapped around hers before she could take a step further.

“I’ve got it, Missus.”

Of course, Mr. Fancy Movie Star would have a button to close his trunk.

Chase pulled himself up, steadying himself against the stone masonry, and fished his key fob out of his pocket. One button press later and the trunk smoothly closed, the hail still beat down angrily. His car might have started the day looking shiny and new, but Abby suspected it would look like every other car at the end of the storm. Beat up beyond recognition.

He looked up and studied the dark sky before shoving his two suitcases just inside the front door and passing half the boxes from Fancy Norm’s to Abby before grabbing the last half himself. Half staggering, he followed her inside.

Abby pulled the door closed behind him, aware of the icicles forming from the overhanging doorframe and the ceiling of her porch. She’d never seen anything like it. Even the door handle and hinges resisted movement, frozen in place by the major shift in weather. She leaned back against the closed door, getting her bearings straight.

“Please tell me you didn’t drive here in a freak ice storm to deliver baked goods to the wrong house?” Smooth, Abby. The super sexy Irishman that managed to break her already shattered heart stood in her foyer, while she rambled on about his lack of direction. Idiot. And just how did he manage to get those angry scars?

“Not exactly. A man who looked vaguely like Saint Nicholas suggested I bring you some pastries, apparently iced in your favorite color.” His gaze flickered to her hair and away. “This is some weather we’re having, eh?”

A hint of mockery played on his voice, a bit of payback for her sarcastic tone? Perhaps he still used humor to hide his emotions too? He continued to scrub at the spot on the top of his head, the hat he’d been wearing now on the floor. She wondered if he realized it had fallen off.

“Uh-huh. I haven’t eaten a carb in almost three years, as Norm well knows. But today’s the day that’s going to change?” To be precise, it had been two years, nine months, and sixteen days. She’d given them up to fit into a wedding dress that Trevor picked after his proposal. But, Chase would know that. He seemed to enjoy taking it off her. Ugh, don’t think about it. Trevor and Chase, a one-two punch of painful reality had taken everything from her. She cleared her throat. “So, you’re here because…?” She was going to make him say it after the crack about her hair.

“I pulled into Taylorsville for shelter against the storm.”

“Tylerville.”

“Right, Tylerville. The baker said you were the closest place to stay.”

“Norm.”

“Right, Norm. But he also said you were retired?”

His teasing voice, accent on full display, made her heart flutter, a feeling not even Trifling Trevor had inspired on his best days. She’d experienced it for the first time ever in her life, two years ago, when she’d met the Chase in the bar at the airport. She’d been dressed in her white wedding dress, sheared off angrily around her knees, sitting at the bar nursing one of several cocktails, while waiting for a flight that would take her on her very own honeymoon, solo. An escape to a secluded cabin on a tropical beach sounded like heaven. But of course, like everything else that went wrong that day, her flight was cancelled. One thing led to another, and she found herself involved in the only one-night stand of her life with the hottest man she’d ever met. And then it evolved.

She had no right to be excited about this man staying with her during the storm. She knew exactly what he was. A playboy. A heartbreaker. Worse yet, uninterested. And yet, the idea of him waiting out the storm with her both thrilled and terrified her. If he planned to play dumb, pretend they hadn’t shared one of the most passionate nights of her life together, a night that had then rolled into a burning hot romance lasting almost four months, she’d join in with him. Because even though they shared a messy history, she’d loved him with all her heart for that brief, incredible time.

Maybe longer.

She refused to be honest about how she felt now. Play the game, Abby.

“Retired?” She exhaled noisily. “Remind me to talk to Norm. My name’s Abby Rose. Welcome to my bed and breakfast.” She stuck out a slightly sticky hand, remnants of her spilled tea still evident.

He paused before accepting her hand. “Chase Payne.”

Liar.