Love Bytes

By Melanie Jacobson

Jessica Riley would do anything for her best friend Addison, including be her maid of honor and meet all her increasingly crazy wedding demands. But that's because Jessica has Dallen, the best man, helping her navigate the trouble their respective best friends keep stirring up. Even though she and Dallen have only spoken online or in texts, their friendship forms fast and easy, and Jessica is beginning to hope that the wedding in Hawaii will become the start of something special for her and Dallen too. Except...Dallen dates braniac supermodels. And while Jessica is a brainiac, she has a bad feeling she won't be his type. Will their connection survive in real life?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melanie Jacobson
• Release date: Oct 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386595939

Book preview

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To: [e-mail]

From: [e-mail]

Re: Wedding drama

Can you put your friend in check?

-Dallen

To: [e-mail]

From: [e-mail]

RE: Wedding drama

Can you put a force of nature in check? Is that a thing? Because if it is, tell me how to do it and consider it DONE-- kind of like I almost am. (She’s making me crazy. Puce flowers? PUCE?! I’ve been a good best friend. What did I do to deserve this?)

~Jessica

To: [e-mail]

From: [e-mail]

Re: Wedding drama

No being done. You don’t get to be done. DON’T YOU LEAVE ME WITH THESE CRAZY PEOPLE BY MYSELF. I’m counting on you to help me talk them down from ledges. I went to dinner with her and Slade last night. All she talked about was changing her flowers. Because they’re not just flowers . . . (You want to finish the sentence here?)

-Dallen

To: [e-mail]

From: [e-mail]

RE: Wedding drama

They’re not just flowers...they’re a symbol. Everything is a symbol.

Just remember back to the Addison you knew before they decided to get married. She’s still in there somewhere. That’s how I don’t kill her. Also, not living in Chicago with you guys helps.

~Jessica

To: [e-mail]

From: [e-mail]

RE: Wedding drama

Stop trying to make me jealous of not living in LA.

Don’t know how you’re surviving the maid-of-honor gig. I’m only the best man, and I still feel like the first target in the line of fire. I almost punched Slade in the face four different times this week. Only the knowledge that Addison would kill me if I broke his nose held me back.

Remember last week when the biggest problem we had was thinking of a plan to keep Slade’s drunk uncle away from all the single ladies? HA! Now that Puce-pocalypse is upon us, gropey wedding guests seem like a cake walk.

-Dallen

P.S. Don’t mention cake walks to Addison. It will become a thing.

Chapter One

Dallen hit send and smiled. It was true: he was counting on Jessica, almost a total stranger, to help him manage the most stressful non-work project of his life. And it felt good. Her jokes and sense of calm had made everything more manageable from the moment they’d traded their first emails a few weeks before.

When his best friend Slade first asked Dallen to be his best man, he’d been flattered. Now he wondered if he’d just been Tom Sawyered because Slade’s other friends were too smart to say yes. If Dallen had realized exactly how smitten Slade was with tiny, bewitching Addison, he might have found something else—anything else—more pressing to do that weekend. They’d seemed so normal for the year they’d dated, but the engagement had turned Addison into a crazy woman, and Slade refused to say no to anything.

Dallen sighed. They were exhausting, but the truth was there wasn’t anywhere he’d rather be than standing by his best friend’s side when he said his vows to the love of his life. It helped that standing there meant digging his own toes into the white sandy beaches of Maui.

He glared at the rain pelting his office window. His view of Lake Michigan was pointless half the year. Chicago’s late spring rains sucked, simple as that.

He growled and leaned over the architectural blueprints. He picked up his pencil and erased a cornice, the high-maintenance bride and groom fading to white noise as he worked on perfecting the exterior of a new high rise. Changing the Chicago skyline was infinitely less stressful than being best man.

Chapter Two

Poor Dallen. Jessica had to smile at his frustration. Addison was normally the most level-headed girl, but, she was a demanding bride. It was bad enough for Jessica sitting in her LA office two thousand miles away; Dallen had to listen to Addison’s obsessive attention to wedding detail in person. She’d always loved the symbolism of weddings, and as crazy in love as she was with Slade, she wanted every last detail to perfectly reflect their feelings.

There had been discussions of live animals, exotic flowers, outdoor canopies, and horse drawn carriages. When they finally settled on a Hawaiian wedding, Jessica breathed a sigh of relief. The location would limit Addison’s insane plans; horse-drawn carriages didn’t work on sand. It had still taken some fast talking to convince Addison to not enter on a white stallion. When Jessica had exhausted every argument she could think of, she won on manure.

"What if the horse poops? Is that the symbolism you’re going for?"

After she emailed Dallen with her victory, he’d sent her a GIF of an old man laughing until he cried.

If it weren’t for his emails cracking her up several times a week, she’d be pulling her hair out trying to keep up with Addison’s quicksilver moods and plan changes. Dallen, in exaggerating the crazy, made reality a little easier to deal with.

Her phone buzzed with a text.

Dallen: Wait. I don’t even know what puce is. Help me.

Jessica: Did Google fail you?

Dallen: I could ask it, but it lacks your sense of humor.

Jessica: The second you say I’m funny, my sense of humor locks up. Quit it. It screws with my mojo.

Dallen: Did I imply you’re funny? Massive typo. Don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you need help. Study these . . .

He