Skinny Bitch Gets Hitched Read Online Free Page A

the owner about taking down the dead-steer head; it had been bad enough he’d stolen my dream location for Clementine’s No Crap Café. That owner: Zach Jeffries, thirty-two-year-old entrepreneur millionaire who mysteriously morphed into my boyfriend.
    Soon-to-be fiancé.
    As Charlie and I sat on the beach, him happily digging, me watching the sun rise over the Santa Monica Pier, I couldn’t help but smile as I thought about our early days—a vegan and a carnivore falling in love and trying so hard not to.
    â€œDo you believe this craziness, Charlie?” I asked, scratching behind his floppy ears. He rested his chin on my knee. “Zach is going to ask me to marry him. What do you think of that?”
    Charlie snuggled up against me, and for a moment it was so stinking cozy that I put my arm around his furry, little body, thinking that he’d be mine, that Zach would be mine. That Zach, whom I loved, wanted to spend the rest of his life with me.
    Wait—now I was about to get all sentimental?
    â€œCharlie, what the hell is happening to me? Now I want to get married?”
    Because you can have it all, I realized. Who said we couldn’t get engaged, not plan a wedding or talk about it at all, and just elope one day when it felt right to Paris or Barcelona or even Vegas? My restaurant didn’t have to suffer. Surely Zach wouldn’t be interested in discussing lame cummerbunds and boring centerpieces.
    I just wanted to sit there and bask in the amazement of it all, that this would really work, but after the sixth jogger stopped to pet Charlie and remark on his cuteness, we headed back to Zach’s house. I had a big-ass wedding cake to bake—for my soon to be sister-in-law.

    The five tiers, gradating in size, were cooling on the island counter when Zach came into the kitchen just after nine o’clock. Bare-chested and wearing his Stanford sweatpants, he hugged me from behind, kissing my neck.
    â€œThe delicious smell of the cake woke me up,” he said.
    You’re going to propose was all I could think. God, it was mind-blowing.
    In four seconds, ocean-blue fondant and the hundreds of tiny, intricate seashells I had to make had been forgotten in the unexpected reality of Zach Jeffries asking me to marry him. An hour ago, I didn’t give a gorilla’s butt about where my relationship with Zach was headed.
    I’d promised myself to focus on the restaurant, on wowing the New York Times reporter, reviewers, critics, my customers—even the health inspector. Having my own restaurant had always been my dream—not walking down the aisle in some poufy, white gown.
    Seriously, I’d been fantasizing about having my own kitchen since I was five years old, since my dad had handed me a cupof flour and water and taught me how to make pasta from scratch, how to add fresh vegetables from the organic farm he and my mother ran to make a pasta primavera that would rival a five-star Italian restaurant’s.
    I’d known then, since I was three feet tall, that I would be a chef someday, that I would rule over my own kitchen, but turning that dream into reality had been a long time coming. I’d graduated from the Vegan Culinary Institute and worked at a slew of top vegan restaurants in LA, busting my tush on the way up from trainee to line cook to sauté chef to sous chef. Just weeks before I’d met Zach, a jealous coworker at Fresh had sabotaged me the night a Los Angeles Times restaurant critic had come to dine. I’d been blackballed all over the city. So I’d started my own business—and it slowly took off. Personal chef, cooking classes, baked goods. But when I got the money together to open my own restaurant—without a penny from my millionaire boyfriend—and saw my first customers walk through the door on opening night, it was as if fireworks shot off inside me. My fantasy had become hard-won reality.
    Wait a minute. Breathe deeply,