The Wedding Date

Jasmine Guillory's The Wedding Date, published in 2018, begins with a power outage and a stuck hotel elevator. Alexa Monroe is in town for a wedding weekend when she and a stranger, Drew Nichols, are trapped together. Agreeing to attend a wedding with a man she met in a lift is not something she would normally do, but he is a groomsman with no one to bring, on the night before the wedding of his ex, and she is dressed and hungry, so by the time the doors open she has agreed to be his date for the events ahead.

Across the weekend, from the speeches to the throwing of the bouquet, the two of them have more fun than they expected. Afterwards Drew returns to Los Angeles and to work as a paediatric surgeon, while Alexa goes back to Berkeley, where her job is chief of staff to the mayor. The two of them cannot stop thinking about each other, and both of them are high-powered professionals trying to work out whether what is between them is a casual arrangement or something that would need the two of them to close the distance between their cities.

The Wedding Date was Jasmine Guillory's debut novel, and it was followed the same year by her second, The Proposal.