A few years ago, when I wrote Wedding Bell Blues, I gave my heroine the most beautiful bridesmaid dress ever, so beautiful it made the hero propose. Some of my readers, however, cried foul. Bridesmaid’s dresses, they said, were uniformly ghastly. The idea that one could be lovely was more unbelievable than any HEA ever written.

Those readers will be much happier with Bolted, my part of the Promise Harbor Wedding quartet (with Kelly Jamieson, Sydney Somers, and Erin Nicholas), to be released on April 2. My heroine in Bolted is the Matron Of Honor at a true wedding disaster, but even before the ceremony itself falls apart, she’s already been saddled with the dress she refers to repeatedly as the “most ghastly bridesmaid dress in the history of mankind.” The dress in question falls into the dreaded Gone With The Wind category: full skirt with the “crinolines from hell” and ruffles everywhere. To make things even more interesting, my bridesmaid heroine escapes from the wedding with only this hideous dress and her fierce determination to take a hike.

I’m not sure why bridesmaids’ dresses are frequently such disasters. I’m sure some brides are deliberately nasty to their attendants, but I’m sure other brides really believe they’ve come up with something just grand. Those of us with these grand dresses hanging in the back of our closets might beg to differ.

Maybe it’s just a matter of clashing tastes, with the difficulty of having one person choose a  dress for three or four others. Maybe the bride is blinded by her own vision of her wedding—she’s going back to medieval Scotland and taking the rest of us with her kicking and screaming. In the case of Bolted, the bride is distracted by some emotional problems and leaves the choice of bridesmaids dresses to her cousin, who turns out to have a serious Gone With the Wind fixation even though the wedding takes place in Promise Harbor, Massachusetts.

But my heroine, Greta Brewster, is nothing is not a survivor. She heads down the road, horrible wedding dress and all, to find her Mr. Right. Conveniently enough, Mr. Right happens to need rescuing just as she appears.

Here’s the blurb for Bolted:

Sometimes you have to get lost before you can find yourself.

The Promise Harbor Wedding, Book 2

Greta Brewster McBain in a bind. Two, if she’s really counting. First there’s the can-barely-breathe, bridesmaid’s dress from hell. Second, the stranger who just carried her “perfect” brother’s fiancée out the church door has made it impossible to tell her own mother about her own divorce.

Rather than confirm her reputation as the family screw-up, Greta takes a drive to clear her head.

Trapped in a hole and unable to reach his cell phone, Hank Mitchell is resigned to becoming a permanent part of his own archeological dig when help arrives—in the form of a woman who looks like a Gone With The Wind refugee. Behind the ruffles and lace, though, is something he appreciates: a woman who isn’t afraid of a little dirt.

Their instant connection draws Greta into the eccentric world of the Hotel Grand, where she impulsively trades her hoopskirts for an apron. Soon things are getting hot, not only in the hotel kitchen, but in Hank’s arms…

Warning: Contains hot moonlit sex, a melancholy turtle, two wisecracking seniors, and the world’s ugliest bridesmaid dress.

Order Bolted