Page 1 of Destined For Forever

1

There were few things in the world worse than having a category five hangover in an airport. Screaming toddlers, crackling announcements and the headache-inducing rattle of luggage carts rolling by were like individual white-hot pokers jabbing the inside of Lily Dunn’s skull.

She ground her fists into her gritty eyes and forced herself to feel human again. Which was tough. Because she actually felt like a piece of gum that had been smooshed into the bottom of someone’s shoe and traipsed all over Los Angeles.

“You probably look like it, too,” she muttered.

There was no way she could lump the blame on anyone but herself, however. This situation was entirely her own doing. Well, entirely her own doing with the help of a couple of extra-strong vodka cranberries, which she’d consumed at one a.m. while wondering if it might be possible to fake her own death to get out of this trip. She cringed as her stomach lurched. Vodka. It was like the toxic ex-boyfriend you should cut out of your life, but who always seemed like an excellent idea when you were wallowing in self-pity.

I’m never drinking again.

“Good morning.” A voice came to life on the speakers overhead, and Lily winced at the noise. “We apologise for the delay to American Airlines flight 9243 to Boston. The late inbound plane has now arrived and is currently being processed. We will commence boarding in the next twenty minutes and look forward to getting you on your way this morning. Thank you for your patience.”

About time!

Lily shifted in her seat, crossing one leg over the other and bouncing her sneaker-covered foot. Brutal hangover aside, the airport was a good place to people-watch. Being a writer, observation was in her job description. Many of her best screenplay ideas had come from overhearing a conversation in public or watching an interaction between two strangers, and she always carried a note-taking device wherever she went, in case inspiration should strike.

Unfortunately, inspiration was in short supply of late.

It was hard to write stories about love when she was freshly and painfully single. Publicly single. Ugh! That’s what she got for choosing to date a wannabe Hollywood superstar who would do anything—even humiliate her on national television—if he thought it might help to advance his career.

Slumping in her seat, Lily pulled her baseball cap further down to shield her face. The last thing she needed was anyone recognising her, something that’d happened far too often in the past month. After being dumped on morning network television—live, no less—they had dubbed her LA’s Unluckiest in Love. The irony. For someone whose job it was to help bring happily-ever-afters to movie and television screens around the country, her own life was more like crappily ever after.

Were there times where she wondered if swapping her small-town life in Australia for the bright lights of Hollywood was an epic mistake? Uh, yeah. But all she’d ever wanted to do with her life was to tell stories.

Now instead of telling stories, she was the story.

And like the sprinkles on top of her could-it-get-any-worse sundae, she was currently en route to her cousin’s dream destination wedding. Hence the brief moment last night when she’d considered faking her own death. As much as she loved her cousin Evie to bits, this really was salt in the wound.

“At least you know love isn’t dead,” she said to herself, trying to find a speck of hope in her battered heart. “It’s just on life support.”

“Is that…?”

Lily looked up to find two young women staring at her. They had their phones raised, pointing right in her direction.

Ah, crap.

She tried to turn, but the bright flash told her she was about one point two seconds away from being on Twitter. Or TikTok. Or Snapchat. Or whatever other social platform people were using to gossip about her these days. After the #breakupgate incident, it had only taken Lily twenty-four hours to set every single one of her social media accounts to private.

In the space of a day, she’d received marriage proposals, hundreds of messages telling her she was never good enough for Brock, and more—ahem—appendage photos than any one woman should be subjected to in a lifetime. Which was zero, of course, but Lily had seen a lot more than zero.

The camera flash made the sixty-something woman in the seat next to her turn in curiosity.

“Hey, you’re…” She snapped her fingers together, a collection of colourful bangles jingling on her arm. “You’re that girl who was dating Brock Silvers.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Lily replied. But then she realised her Aussie accent was probably a dead giveaway. “Uh… y’all.”

You sound about as Southern as Nicolas Cage did in Con Air.

Which was to say, not at all.

The older woman narrowed her eyes at Lily, not buying her cover even a little bit. “I saw you on that mornin’ show, so don’t you try to fool me. I loved Brock in Wave of Love. Such a brilliant film.”

“Yeah, it was,” Lily replied with a sigh.

She would know, of course, since she’d written it.

Wave of Love was where she and Brock had first met. It was almost a story worthy of its own romantic tale—handsome Hallmark star on the rise and the shy, bookish writer. After a few false starts, a streaming service picked up her script after she’d been in LA for almost a year, and it swept Lily along in the magic of her big breakout moment as a screenwriter.

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