A Beautiful Wedding

Praise for Jamie McGuire:

‘Once you get inside Travis Maddox’ head, you won’t want to leave!’ Colleen Hoover, author of bestselling series Slammed and Hopeless

‘Makes you wish books could come true’ Katie

‘You feel like you are a part of it all’ India

‘Like a drug . . . a seriously addictive writer’ S. Young

‘Up there with Twilight!’ Ashling

‘Forget Edward and Jacob, Travis is out of this world’ Melly

‘A great antidote to my Fifty Shades of Grey withdrawal symptoms’ J. Stephenson

‘Spellbinding’ Bella

‘Buy it. Devour it. Love it’ Sabina

‘Beautiful obsession’ LB

‘Unputdownable. Intense. Powerful. Addictive and most of all, beautiful’ Cassandra

A Beautiful Wedding

ALSO BY JAMIE McGUIRE

Beautiful Disaster

Walking Disaster

Red Hill

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
A CBS COMPANY

Copyright © 2013 by Jamie McGuire

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.

The right of Jamie McGuire to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
1st Floor
Gray’s Inn Road
London WC1X 8HB

www.simonandschuster.co.uk

Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-47113-356-5
eBook ISBN: 978-1-47113-357-2

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

For Deana and Selena

If I was drowning you would part the sea

And risk your own life to rescue me . . .

—FROM JON BON JOVI, “THANK YOU FOR LOVING ME”

A Beautiful Wedding

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

CHAPTER ONE

Alibi

Abby

I could feel it coming: a growing, persistent unease that crept just beneath my skin. The more I tried to ignore it, the more unbearable it became: an itch that needed to be scratched, a scream bubbling to the surface. My father said that the urgent need to run when things were about to go wrong was a like a tic, a defense mechanism inherent in the Abernathys. I’d felt it moments before the fire, and I was feeling it now.

Sitting in Travis’s bedroom, just hours after the fire, my heart raced and my muscles twitched. My gut pulled me toward the door. Told me to leave; to get away, anywhere but here. But for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to go alone. I could barely focus on that voice I loved so much describing how afraid he was of losing me, and how he was close to escaping when he ran in the opposite direction, toward me. So many people died, some of them strangers from State but some were people I’d seen in the cafeteria, in class, at other fights.