Once upon a road trip to Mexico…
Payton Vaughn’s trip to Puerto Vallarta for her friend’s wedding was her big escape from her ridiculously overbearing mother–oh, and that little matter with her cheating fiancé. Now, her flight’s been cancelled, and she’s crammed into a tiny car with the gorgeous-but-irritating best man.
Viva la road trip from hell…
Cruz Sorensen doesn’t have time to babysit some spoiled socialite, even if she is the future daughter-in-law of the man who could change the fortune of his family’s company. He has no business getting to know her better—not even for all the tequila in Mexico…until they wake up with grande-sized hangovers as man and wife.
Now Payton and Cruz must decide if they’ve reached the end of their journey…or the beginning of a new adventure.
Table of Contents
Dedication
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
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Discover the Sorensen Family series…
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Love You Madly
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Ashlee Mallory. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.
Entangled Publishing, LLC
2614 South Timberline Road
Suite 109
Fort Collins, CO 80525
Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.
Bliss is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC. For more information on our titles, visit http://www.entangledpublishing.com/category/bliss
Edited by Alycia Tornetta
Cover design by Heather Howland
Cover art from iStock
ISBN 978-1-63375-455-3
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition October 2015
To Grandma Patsy Christine Elaina Duarte Hartt, who wanted us all to learn to dance.
And to tequila, the mistress of all mischief.
Chapter One
W hat the heck is he doing here?
Payton Vaughn looked away from the familiar face with the chiseled jaw and lips that seemed to always be drawn into a frown—especially around her—and outside to the tarmac behind him where the plane was preparing for boarding. There was no chance that the best man boarding this particular flight from Dallas-Fort Worth to Puerto Vallarta was a coincidence. Had he been on the earlier flight from Salt Lake as well?
Undoubtedly, her best friend had something to do with this. Didn’t think her maid of honor could make it to Mexico in one piece without a designated babysitter. Good thing Payton loved Kate like a sister or she’d be dead meat by the end of the night, whether it was Kate’s wedding weekend or not.
Cruz Sorensen, of all people, as her chaperone?
The song from Psycho’s shower scene erupted from Payton’s cell phone on the seat beside her. She closed her eyes.
The possibility of letting it go to voicemail came and was quickly dismissed. If she didn’t answer, her mother would call airport security and then the National Guard to put out a world-wide alert that her daughter was missing. Emily Vaughn hadn’t taken Payton’s plan to fly off to Mexico for a weekend by herself very well, and Payton had made the mistake of giving her mother a copy of her flight itinerary to ease her mind.
So she knew boarding didn’t begin for another ten minutes.
Payton tried not to sigh as she answered her phone. “Hello, Mother.”
“I only want you to know that I just hung up with the florist as you weren’t here to take the call but, please, don’t worry yourself. I’ll take care of everything,” her mother said in the martyred voice with a slight Southern twang Payton knew well. “Even if you’ll be thousands of miles away gallivanting around Mexico because your friend didn’t have the tact and graciousness to plan her impromptu wedding after yours. Despite the fact that yours has been scheduled for months.”
Payton let the words roll over her as she watched Cruz Sorensen click away on the keyboard, engrossed in the screen. He was pretty hard to miss. Shiny raven-black hair clipped short and neat, never a hair out of place. A dark countenance adding to that mysterious, sexy allure, thanks to his half-Mexican heritage on his mother’s side, something she had learned from Kate. And those dark brown eyes that, even though they weren’t looking her way, she knew captured his intelligence and wariness.
Even in a simple black button down shirt and jeans, Cruz Sorensen emitted an aura of intelligence and passion and, most of all, ambition. From what Kate had told her, it was this same ambition that had brought his family’s construction business from obscurity to recent fame in the skyrocketing Utah construction realm.
Too bad he was a certified ass-hat.
“Thanks, Mother. But you should let Camille handle all that. After all, she is the wedding planner. That’s what we’re paying her for.”
“Please. Camille, pretty girl that she is, wouldn’t know a dessert fork from a salad fork if the fate of the free world depended on it. The finer details of this event, I’m afraid, will be left to me. We wouldn’t want to show our governor, state senators, or any of the other guests anything less than the best.”
Yes, there was that. Lord. Payton couldn’t wait for this whole event to be over with. But as the only Vaughn offspring, her mother wouldn’t let her wedding happen without a grand and high-profile ceremony. She was just relieved she’d talked her mother down from an eight hundred-person guest list to a mere four hundred.
Payton glanced over to the row of seats against the window again. Cruz had paused long enough at the keyboard to look up and…there. She met his gaze.
A-ha. He couldn’t continue to pretend he didn’t know she was there. She raised her fingers and waved to him, which only earned her a scowl before he dropped his eyes back to his keyboard.