Rockaway Bride: A Rockstar / Kidnapping / Runaway Bride Romantic Comedy Read online

  Rockaway Bride

  Pippa Grant

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Rockaway Bride

  A Rockstar Kidnaps a Runaway Bride Romantic Comedy

  Kidnapping the bride seemed like a good idea at the time.

  Her fiancé stole my fortune, so I stole his woman.

  Tit for tat. Or tat for tit. However you want to look at it.

  The one thing I didn’t expect?

  Willow Honeycutt, preschool teacher, boy band super fan, is completely crazy.

  And somehow she’s turned the tables on me.

  Now, she’s holding me hostage, and she won’t let me go until we hit every item on her sparkly new, completely insane bucket list.

  And that last item?

  That last item might cost me more than any fortune.

  It very well might cost me my heart.

  Rockaway Bride is a romping fun romance between a down-on-his-luck rock star and a boy band-loving preschool teacher, complete with a road trip, handcuffs, and fun with nuns. This romantic comedy stands alone with no cheating or cliffhangers and ends with a rockin' awesome happily ever after.

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  Books by Pippa Grant

  Mister McHottie (Chase & Ambrosia)

  Stud in the Stacks (Parker & Knox)

  The Pilot and the Puck-Up (Zeus and Joey)

  Royally Pucked (Manning and Gracie)

  Beauty and the Beefcake (Ares and Felicity)

  Rockaway Bride (Willow and Dax)

  Hot Heir (Viktor and Peach)

  The Hero and the Hacktivist (Rhett and Eloise)

  Charming as Puck (Nick and…)

  Exes and Ho Ho Hos (Jake and Kaitlyn)

  And more…

  1

  Willow Honeycutt (aka a bride on the verge of a breakdown)

  When I was little and dreaming of my wedding day, I always pictured myself with a Mohawk, a tie-dyed fluffy wedding gown cut off at the knees, biker boots, and dashing out the back of a chapel in Vegas to peel off into the sunset on a Harley.

  Mostly because I was secretly in love with Davis Remington, the youngest member of the boy band Bro Code, who had tattoos and sometimes shaved parts of his head and made headlines once when he crashed a Harley, and he was just hot, and I assumed that’s what his wedding would be like, and also that I would be his bride, because he was only a few years older than me.

  Not that I ever told my mom that. As far as she knows, I always loved Tripp Wilson—you know, the big brother of the group, who was more years older than me and therefore only a silly girl crush—because that helped her sleep at night, and I knew how much she worried.

  About everything.

  Being a single mother in the city is hard. So I kept my dreams of marrying a boy band bad boy to myself, I got good grades, I got scholarships for an early childhood education degree and then a job teaching preschool. Meanwhile, Mom married the king of a small Nordic country—yes, seriously—and I stayed in New York and joined a band where we cover our favorite boy band songs and mostly play juice bars some nights and weekends, and tomorrow I’m having the fairytale princess wedding in a palace, exactly like every girl dreams of.

  Except me.

  And tonight, while I wander the stone hallways of Skyr Castle in my mom’s adopted home country of Stölland, where I’m supposed to be getting my beauty rest after the rehearsal dinner, at which my soon-to-be mother-in-law kissed up to the king so very blatantly that even the palace mice were embarrassed for her, I’m trying really, really hard to convince myself that my regrets and doubts are a result of this wedding’s lack of Mohawk, tattoos, biker boots, and getaway Harleys.

  And that my regrets and doubts have nothing to do with Martin.

  My fiancé.

  Whom I’m marrying.

  In eighteen hours.

  Eighteen.

  Hours.

  Eighteen hours until my life and my freedom and my future are forever sealed in the bonds of marriage.

  To Martin.

  I’m going to throw up.

  I breathe through the nausea and turn a corner, passing one of those knight thingies that are in the corners of ancient stone castles everywhere, except this one is all suited up in Viking armor instead of metal armor, so it has a vicious-looking helmet with horns on top and some weird protrusion covering where a person’s nose should be, a shield portraying the Frey family coat of arms, which has a killer sheep carrying a spear and an ax and eating a whale on it—royalty is so weird—and a bearskin rug where a breastplate should be.

  Bearskin coat?

  Whatever.

  The point is, I turn the corner on knees and legs which are rapidly melting to the consistency of slime, wishing I had a paper bag, and I find myself face-to-face with three real Viking princes.

  My stepbrothers. Who, thankfully, are all in jeans and casual dress shirts instead of Viking armor, because that truly would be the end of me for the night.

  “There’s the lovely blushing bride,” Gunnar, the oldest, says.

  “Blushing?” Manning, the youngest, scans me up and down, smiling as he always does. “I believe the more appropriate adjective would be hyperventilating.”

  “You two fuckers are bloody useless,” grumbles Colden, the grumpy one.

  All three have this quasi-British accent that would be intriguing if any of them were tatted up, owned motorcycles, and not my stepbrothers.

  Colden shoves a wine bottle into my hand. “Drink.”

  Stölland’s national beverage is mead, and I learned the night before my mom’s wedding to the king several years back that I don’t tolerate it well.

  I take the bottle and glug off the top without asking for a glass, because he’s right. I need a drink. And I’ve known my stepbrothers long enough to know that when one is handed a bottle, one drinks off the bottle.

  Which is awesome tonight.

  Tonight, I need all the drinks.

  “Maybe this won’t be so bad,” Gunnar says to Manning, who nods his agreement while they both watch me swig.

  The two of them are nearly the same height, both with thick brown hair tinged with red in the sunlight, both with pale blue eyes, and both fathers now, though Gunnar—the crown prince—is always clean-shaven, whereas Manning, who’s so far down the line t o inherit the crown that he’s been given permission to live in the States and play professional hockey basically until he’s too old to play anymore, almost perpetually sports a short beard around his never-ending smile.

  He’s madly in love with the perfect woman for him, and they have the most adorable baby together. Of course he’s smiling.

  Oh, god. Oh god oh god oh god.

  The possibility of having Martin’s babies is suddenly so real that my ovaries have just offered themselves as tribute to a cryogenics experiment. And possibly performed some sort of self-freeze.

  I take another fortifying gulp of honey wine and pray it stays down. “What won’t be so bad?” My voice comes out high and panicked like I’ve been sucking helium, only worse.

  Colden sighs. He’s shorter than his brothers by a couple inches, with hair much darker, almost the same shade as mine. I’m told he resembles their long-departed mother. And I know firsthand he prefers the company of sheep to the company of people.

  “The night before the wedding talk,” he answers.

  My face goes so hot my brains melt out my nose. Or so it feels. “Uh, guys, I don’t think—”

  Manning laughs. “Not that talk, dear Willow, though if you need pointers—”

  Gunnar silences him with a sneak attack headlock. “We were referring to the if you need to run, we’ll make it happen talk. Family tradition. Though I do believe this is the first time we’ll actually mean it.”

  My heart skips a beat.

  Or maybe four beats. “I can’t run,” I object. Or try to. The words get stuck, and I have to swallow them down with another healthy swig of mead before I try again, when the words once again get stuck.

  “You can, you may, and you should,” Colden replies.

  Manning twists and flails, attempting to get out of Gunnar’s headlock, which would be way more entertaining if the mead in my belly wasn’t churning like a tsunami of bad idea bubbles and overwhelming doubts.

  “We’ve bought you a ticket,” Manning says between grunts and twists.

  “A ticket to where?”

  “New York, but we can change it to anywhere,” Gunnar replies. He’s grinning now, clearly enjoying the hell out of getting the upper hand on Manning, who should be the strongest of the bunch since he plays professional hockey.

  My stepbrothers are all over-muscled Viking goobers.

  And I might possibly love them more than I love peanut butter cups right now.

  “Do you truly wish to marry Martin?” Colden asks.

  My tongue swells. I rub it over the roof of my mouth and I gag.

  “Exactly as we suspected,” Gunnar declares. He releases Manning, who springs just out of reach of the eldest Frey brother. “Come, Willow. We’ve a plan.”

  I stomp a foot and I sway. Whoa. That mead is yum. Am I supposed to be drunk this fast? I don’t remember getting drunk this fast last time. Although, I suppose not eating anything at the rehearsal dinner might’ve been part of the problem. I kept sneaking my food to the dog when my bridesmaids and mom weren’t looking.

  “I’m going to marrrrr—” I start, but I can’t finish. While my stepbrothers watch expectantly, I take another drink off the bottle, and I try again. “I want to marrrrr—”

  All three of them continue to stare at me.

  “Fudge you all!” I say.

  Gunnar and Manning smirk.

  Colden sighs again. “We can order him beheaded instead,” he offers.

  “And his mother too,” Manning agrees.

  “But not the dog,” Gunnar says. “Viggo’s rather taken with the dog. I daresay the dog may not make it back on the plane to the States.”

  “You can’t steal people’s pets!” Which is a phrase I’m capable of saying. Whereas I can’t make myself say I want to marr—marr—fudgesicles. You know. Do that thing. That ceremony.

  With Martin.

  I swallow half the remaining bottle of mead in four gulps. My eyes burn. My throat’s on fire too. But the alcohol is warming my belly and defrosting my ovaries, and I’m starting to breathe better.

  “When you’re king, you can do anything,” Gunnar tells me with a shrug.

  “You’re not the king.”

  “But I will be one day. And then my son will be someday after that. Which isn’t the immediate issue, my lady. The immediate issue is canceling your wedding.”

  “I know none of you are Martin’s biggest fan,” I say, pointing the bottle at each of them, “but he—he—we’ve been together for seven years. That’s like…like…a llama caw wedging.”

  I get two matching squints and another sigh.

  “A common law wedding?” Colden translates.

  I point the bottle at him. “Seventeen points for House Coldendorf!”

  The three of them share a look.

  Or maybe the five of them share a look. Why are there two Mannings and two Gunnars and only one Colden?

  I should’ve eaten something for dinner.

  And not used that secret passageway Manning showed me in my chambers—palaces don’t have bedrooms—to slip away from my bridesmaids tonight.

  My bridesmaids wouldn’t be getting me drunk and trying to talk me out of doing…the thing…tomorrow.

  Or maybe they would. They’re not Martin’s biggest fans either, and I’m almost positive last month’s book club topic was runaway bride books for a reason.

  I squeak as a thought hits me.

  “Did my friends tell you to do this?” I demand.

  They share another look. “The throne room,” they say together.

  “Oh, no, are the sheep in there?” I whisper. “They can’t be. Not yet. The sheep don’t invade the palace for washings until the washing day.”

  “For weddings until the wedding day,” Manning helpfully corrects.

  I point at him. The one of him on the left, I mean. “You told me so when I helped you herd them inside before Mom married King Tor.”

  “Bloody bastard, I knew that was you.” Colden catches Manning with a punch to the arm.

  Gunnar leaps between them. “Later,” he says.

  “Fight! Fight! Fight!” I chant. And then I giggle. Because I’d way rather watch Vikings fight than get marr—marr—marrrrr—fudgebuckets.

  “We possibly should’ve skipped the mead,” Manning says cheerfully.

  “The mead’s tradition,” Gunnar replies.

  “For the men in the family,” Colden points out.

  “For everyone,” Gunnar argues. “Merely because there hasn’t been a royal female born in the palace in two hundred years doesn’t mean the females should be excluded.”

  “She’s not technically royal,” Manning observes.

  “She helped you herd sheep. She’s family.”

  Colden twitches his fingers at me. “Hand over the bottle, Willow.”

  I pull it to my chest. “No trucking way.”

  Am I drunk?

  Maybe.

  But I’m also seeing something very, very clearly.

  I’ve been with Martin for seven years. I know all of his eighteen cats. I know his birthday, his family’s birthdays, the gate code for his family’s Long Island estate house, that he’s allergic to soy and works too much, that the diamonds his mother wears in public are replicas of family heirlooms because she’s terrified the plebian masses will breathe wrong or steal the real pieces, and that he has some insecurities that come from not being loved enough as a child, which is why it took him six years and an anti-anxiety pill to propose.

  But I don’t know that I love him.

  I mean, I love him. But I don’t think I’m in love with him.

  He’s the outward physical manifestation of the perfect husband—successful financial blah blah something, animal lover, upper-crust family, respectful of my boundaries—and he’s also boring as h-e-double hockey sticks.

  And he never comes to my band’s performances, whereas my bandmates’ boyfriends are always there.

  Over dinner one night last week, I told him about Beatrix Clara Clementine trying to prove she could fly by leaping off the top of the slide on the playground at the preschool where I teach, and he had no idea who I was talking about.

  Beatrix Clara Clementine joined my class last August, and on her first day, she tried to practice being a submarine in the bathroom sink, which was the first of no fewer than ten instances this school year where we had to call an ambulance for the child. It’s June now. She’s been in my class an entire school year, and he still doesn’t know who she is.

  I don’t even know what Martin does for work anymore. We used to talk about stuff like this, but he switched companies to work for his uncle a while back, and now it’s all I don’t want to talk about work.

  And we haven’t had sex in four months.

  “We’ve a secret stash of mead in the throne room,” Manning tells me. “No sheep, I promise.”

  “Better fucking not be,” Colden mutters.

  “If there are, it was the Berger twins,” Manning replies. With a smile. Of course.

  I hug my mead tighter to my chest. “I’m taking this to bed,” I tell my stepbrothers.

  All three—five?—of them study me closely.

  They might be Viking goobers, and they might’ve gotten stuck with a stepsister who has no interest in any of this royal business, but underneath it all, they’re good guys.

  They’ve been good to my mom. They’ve been good to me.

  And it’s sweet that they care.

  But me getting marr—marr—dang it.

  It is none of their business.

  They can’t tell me what to do. They can’t tell me how to do it.