Not My... Pageant Sash

HER HUSBAND IS SECRETLY COMPETING IN A BEAUTY PAGEANT. FOR MEN. WITH HER MONEY. AND HIS COACH.

Shannon Bride has packed her husband's bags for twenty-six years, which is how she knows exactly what a "regional distributors' retreat" weighs.

It does not weigh this much.

Under the golf shirts she finds a rhinestone sash, sized for a grown man: MR. ACADIANA SILVER FOX, FIRST RUNNER-UP. A white dinner jacket with sequined lapels. A $2,400 "Crown-Track Coaching Package" on the joint card. And a note in a looping feminine hand: You were BORN for that stage, Fletch. xo, A.

Fletcher Bride has a spray tan, a practiced wave, and a platform ("Men's Confidence After 50: Reigniting the Inner Spark"). He juggles. He weeps at his own perseverance. He is six weeks from the Mr. Bayou Silver Fox pageant, and he is in love with his coach — Annabeth Howling, the pageant's own director, who has been running every crown in the parish for eleven years and skimming the children's scholarship fund the whole time.

Shannon ran the books for her daddy's sugar-and-shipping business her entire adult life. She knows a crooked ledger when she's married to one.

So she doesn't confront. She doesn't file. She volunteers as a pageant judge, discloses exactly who she is, and starts pulling the one thread nobody in eleven years has thought to pull: the money. Because a beauty pageant is a judged event with written rules, and the fraud propping up her husband's fantasy is written down in canceled checks all over the parish, and when it comes apart, Shannon intends for Fletcher Bride to be standing center stage, under the lights, reaching for a crown — the last man in town who doesn't know.

Her daddy taught her the math a long time ago.

A crown you paid for isn't a crown. It's a receipt.

A complete, laugh-out-loud Southern revenge novella with a wronged wife you'll want to elect treasurer of everything, a husband who destroys himself with his own microphone, a mistress with the best hair and the worst bookkeeping in Louisiana, and a warm closed-door romance with a courtly board chairman who finally finds his spine. No cliffhanger, no cheating heroine, closed door. Every book in the OH NO HE DIDN'T Chronicles stands completely on its own.