How to ruin a perfectly good marriage: become an Ideal Wife!   Married to the man she loves—sweet, sexy Max—Jessica Wild-Wainwright is blissfully happy . . . except for one tiny little problem: She never confessed to an (almost) tryst with Max’s biggest rival right before their wedding. Eaten up with guilt and facing down threats of exposure, Jessica decides to give Max what he clearly still lacks: the Ideal Wife. With the help of her friends, she will become perfect in every way: doting, devoted, domestic—everything Max deserves. However, the path to perfection is fraught with peril, from culinary chaos to a boudoir disaster that puts Max in the hospital with a broken leg and a sexy nurse (who is certainly Ideal in every way that Jessica is not). When Jessica rallies to run Max’s company—and is met with overt hostility by an obsessive co-worker and by an auditor determined to uncover everyone’s secrets, things become decidedly less than Ideal. Toss in a semiretired Russian stripper turned stay-at-home mom and strange men watching her apartment, and Jessica fears Project Ideal Wife has backfired miserably. Can a less than perfect wife save the day? Jessica Wild and her husband, Max, are back in the third installment in Townley’s Wild trilogy. As the story begins, Jessica and Max have been happily married for a year. During a discussion at dinner with his in-laws, Max makes an offhand comment about Jessica being the perfect wife, and Jessica begins to wonder if she really is or if Max is just being polite. Jessica decides to embark on Project Perfect Wife, a vigorous course of self-improvement, involving everything from learning to cook to being generous with her time, to help her become the ideal wife that Max thinks she is. But with her old nemesis skulking around, waiting for her to slip up, Jessica finds it harder than ever to be perfect, which forces her to consider that perhaps less-than-perfect is actually ideal. Jessica Wild’s fans will be happy to see her return in Townley’s sweet and cheery novel. --Hilary Hatton Gemma Townley is the author of The Importance of Being Married , The Hopeless Romantic’s Handbook, Learning Curves, Little White Lies, and When in Rome . She lives in London with her husband and son. Chapter 1     “WELL, ISN’T THIS NICE?”   I looked at my mother with what I hoped would pass for a natural smile. She was right; of course it was nice. There she was, on the other side of the table with Chester, her fiancé and my biggest client, and here I was, on this side of the table with Max, my husband. It was so nice I could scream.   I closed my eyes briefly as my hand closed sweatily over my phone. The text message had come through moments before: Thanks, honey, knew I could depend on you. I’ll be in touch. And as I’d read it, I’d felt sick suddenly, felt a layer of cold sweat leak from my pores.   The message was from Hugh Barter, and he was never going to leave me alone.   “Darling, are you all right? You look very strange.”   “Strange?” I forced another smile. “Sorry. Just … thinking about something.”   “Well, it’s very rude to think of anything other than the guests around your table,” Mum said pointedly. “And your husband is sitting right beside you, too.”   Husband.   I still wasn’t used to being married—it had been nearly a year, and I still got a slight thrill every time I introduced Max: “This is my husband.” And he would always wink at me, like it was our own private joke, the first of many such jokes that would bind us even more tightly together over the years. “My wife and I would like to thank you for taking the time to stop by,” he’d say, his eyes twinkling, even if it was just my friend Helen, and even if she hadn’t “stopped by” but had barged in during supper, flopped on the sofa, and insisted that we listen to the latest installment in her dramatic love life.   “This is nice. In fact, ‘nice’ doesn’t really go far enough,” Max said, in that voice that no one could ever quite read or be sure whether he was teasing or not. I raised an eyebrow at him and his eyes widened innocently. “What? It is nice. Especially the food.”   “You’re only saying that because you cooked it,” I said, forcing myself back into the room, forcing myself to concentrate on the here and now instead of worrying about that sniveling little rat’s request: £10,000. That’s how much Hugh Barter had asked for this time. The time before it had been £5,000. Relocation costs, he’d told me. A loan, he’d told me. His trip around the world hadn’t worked out as he’d hoped; he’d decided to come back to the UK. That was three months ago, and I thought the £5,000 would be enough, that he really did just need a bit of money to find somewhere to live, to tide him over while he looked for work. A favor, he’d said. Like the favor he was doing me by not telling Max the truth about us, by not telling Max that I’d been Hugh’s for the taking when I was engaged to Max. God, how stupid I’d been.