The Bride's Baby (5 page)

Quite what her baby’s father would make of it was another matter altogether. She’d given up hoping for any kind of a call from him when she’d received a freshly drawn cheque in the post, clipped to a compliment slip with ‘settlement in full’ typed on it, followed by someone’s indecipherable initials. Not his. Well, no, he was taking time out in the fabulous villa that Candy had chosen for their honeymoon.

He’d reinstated the twenty per cent she’d deducted and couldn’t have made his point more succinctly. He’d known exactly what he was doing. Had regained control…

She returned the twenty per cent with a brief note, reminding him that she had deducted it from her bill. Stupid, no doubt, but pride had its price and it had been essential to make the point that she did not.

A secretary replied to thank her for pointing out the error, assuring her that Mr McFarlane had been informed.

She wasn’t going to risk that this time. Or a formal letter from a lawyer demanding a paternity test. He had a right to know he was about to become a father, but she was going to make it plain that this was something he’d have to deal with himself and steeled herself to call his office.

She doubted that holidays came easily to him and fully expected that he would have returned early, but was informed that he was still away and did she want to leave a message?

She declined. A letter would be easier. That way she could keep it cool. She pulled a sheet of her personal notepaper from the rack, uncapped her pen.

An hour later she was still sitting there.

How did you tell a man you scarcely knew that he was about to become a father? Especially since Candy had shared her joy that ruining her figure to provide him with an heir had not been part of the deal.

How could she tell a man who apparently had no desire for children of his own that this was the most magical thing that had ever happened to her? Share just how amazing she felt, how happy she was? How life suddenly had real meaning?

She knew he’d hate that and, since she didn’t want him angry, she’d keep it businesslike. Strictly to the point. Give him room to look past a moment of sizzling passion and see what they’d created together so that he could, maybe, find it in his heart to reach out to his child without any burden of liability to get in the way.

Finally, she began.

Dear Tom,

No. That wouldn’t do. She blotted out the memory of crying his name out as he’d brought her body humming to life and scratched out
Tom
and, clinging instead to the memory of that twenty per cent, she wrote:

Dear Mr McFarlane
—that was businesslike.

I’m writing to let you know that as a result of our recent…

She stopped again.

What? How could she put into words what had happened. His unexpected tenderness. The soaring joy that had brought the tears pouring down her face…

He hadn’t understood the tears, how could he? She just kept saying, ‘I’m all right…’ Blissfully, brilliantly, wonderfully more than ‘all right’. And she would have told him, but then Josie had rung in a panic because Delores was out of her head on an illegal substance half an hour before everyone was due to arrive and the baker had turned up with the cake and there had been no time. And all she’d said was, ‘I have to go.’

She’d expected him to ring her. Kept hoping he would. But when she’d rung his office using the excuse of reminding him about the cheque—they’d somehow forgotten all about that—she’d been told he was away. He had, apparently, taken her at her word and caught his plane…

Come on, Sylvie. Get a grip. Keep it simple.

…as a result of our recent encounter, I am expecting a baby in July.

Businesslike. To the point. Cool. Except there was nothing cold about having a baby. When she’d seen the result of the pregnancy test there had been a rush of an emotion so powerful that she could hardly breathe…

She crossed out
without any expectation of commitment to me.
You could be too businesslike. Too cool…

What else could she say? That she would never forget him? That he had broken down the protective wall that had been in place ever since Jeremy had decided that he wasn’t up for the ‘worse’ or the unexpectedly ‘poorer’—at least not with her—leaving her with everything in place for a wedding except the groom.

That she would always be grateful to him for that. And for the precious gift of a baby.

A new family. The chance to begin again…

No. That would be laying an emotional burden on him. Any involvement must not be out of guilt, but because he wanted to be a father. If he didn’t, well, at least that way, her child would be spared the bitter disillusionment she’d suffered at the hands of her own father.

Something dropped on to the paper, puddling the ink. Stupid. There was no reason for tears, absolutely none, and she palmed them away, took out a fresh sheet of paper and wrote out her letter minus the crossings out. Then she drove across to the other side of the river and placed her letter in Tom McFarlane’s letter box so that she wasn’t tempted to write again if he didn’t reply, just in case it had been lost in the post. Could be sure that no one else would open it, read it…

Then, since there was nothing else to be done, she went home and started making plans for the changes that were about to happen in her life.

Tom managed to get the last seat on the flight back to London. Four months. He hadn’t stopped travelling for four months. Like a man on the run, he’d been in flight from the memory, burned into his brain, of Sylvie Smith, silent tears pouring down her face.

For a moment, in that still, totally calm space, when he’d spilled his seed into her, he’d felt as if the entire world had suddenly been made over for him, that he was the hunter who’d come home with the biggest prize in the world.

Then he’d seen her tears and realised just what he’d done. That while she kept saying ‘I’ll be fine…’ she was anything but. ‘I have to go…’ when all he wanted was to keep her close.

And work, he’d discovered, was not the answer, which was why he was going back to face her. To beg her to forgive him, beg her for more…

About to go through passport control, he paused at a book shop—with a twelve hour flight ahead of him, he’d need something to read—and found himself confronted by the face that haunted his dreams, both waking and sleeping. Not crying now, but smiling serenely out at him from the latest copy of
Celebrity.

Saw the story flash—
‘Sylvie’s Happy Event!’

He didn’t need an interpreter to decipher ‘happy event’ and for a moment he felt a surge of something so powerful that he felt like a man with the world at his feet. She was wearing something soft and flowing and there was nothing to show that she was pregnant. Only the special glow of a woman who had just told the world that she was having a baby and was totally thrilled about it.

His baby…

He picked up the magazine. Opened it and came crashing back to earth as he saw that the cover photograph had been cropped. Inside, the same photograph showed that she was posed with a tall, fair-haired man and the caption read:

He read it twice, just to be sure, then he tossed the magazine in the nearest bin and went back to the desk to change his ticket.

‘Where do you want to go, Mr McFarlane?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

J
OSIE
F
OWLER
flung herself full length into the sofa that had, at considerable expense, been provided for the comfort of their clients. With her feet dangling over the arm and her arm shielding her eyes, she groaned.

‘Late night?’ Sylvie asked.

‘Late and then some. I have to tell you that you are, without doubt, a world class fantasy wedding planner.’

‘
Event
planner,’ Sylvie said, pulling a face. She was so
off
weddings. ‘We are SDS
Events,
Jo. Fantasy or otherwise, weddings are no different from any other job.’
Cue, hollow laughter…
‘I take it from your reaction that everything went according to plan yesterday?’

In other words, please tell me that the bride didn’t have second thoughts…

‘Pleease!’ Josie, in full drama queen mode—despite her eighteen-hole Doc Martens and punk hair-do, both of them purple—clutched both hands to her heart. ‘What SDS
event
would dare to deviate from “the plan”?’

‘According to my grandfather,’ she said in an effort not to think about the Harcourt/McFarlane debacle—she’d promised herself she wouldn’t think about that nightmare, or the Tom McFarlane effect, more than three times a day and she was already over budget—‘the first casualty of battle is always “the plan”.’

She laid her hand over the child growing beneath her heart—living proof of that little homily.

‘That would be your Colonel-in-Chief of the regiment grandfather, right?’

‘It certainly wasn’t my party-throwing playboy grandfather. His idea of “a plan” was to order enough champagne to float a battleship and leave everything else for someone else to worry about.’ Including the final bill. And the sweetest man on earth. ‘As you’ll learn, when emotions are involved anything can happen,’ she continued as, letter in hand, she carefully placed a tick on one of the plans that decorated every available inch of wall space.

This one was for a silver wedding celebration. She felt safe with a silver wedding. Then, hand on her back, she straightened carefully.

‘Are you okay?’ Josie asked. Then, ‘Sit down, I can do that.’

‘It’s done,’ she said, waving away her concern. ‘Don’t fuss.’ Then, ‘Tell me about the wedding.’

‘I
have
told you. It was fabulous.’ Then, ‘You’re not
still
smarting over the bride who got away, are you?’

‘No!’ Her legendary calm slipped a notch and not just because of the wedding that never was. ‘No,’ she repeated, getting a grip. ‘The one thing I can’t be held responsible for is the bride getting cold feet. Even if she chose to warm them on one of my staff.’

‘You are not responsible! For heaven’s sake, it was more than six months ago. Even the groom will have got over it by now.’

‘I couldn’t say.’ All she knew was that he hadn’t responded to her letter. ‘Can we please just concentrate on yesterday’s wedding?’ she said, jerking her mind away from that long afternoon she’d spent with Tom McFarlane. The solidity of his shoulders beneath her hands. The way his hands had felt against her skin. That raw, overwhelming need as he’d looked down at her, touched her…

The only thing on his mind had been instant gratification with the first woman to cross his path. It had been nothing more than a reaction to being dumped, she knew. A wholly masculine need to have his ego restored. With maybe a little tit-for-tat payback thrown in for good measure. Just in case she needed to feel any worse about herself.

‘Look, if you don’t trust me, Sylvie, maybe you should find someone—’

Jerked back from the danger of slipping into self-pity, she said, ‘Oh, Josie…Of course I trust you! I wouldn’t leave such a major event to anyone in whom I didn’t have the utmost faith. Besides, I knew you’d rather be coordinating a wedding in the Cotswolds than babysitting a women’s rights conference in London. Sensible woman that you are.’ Then, with determined brightness, ‘So, not a single hiccup, then? There’ll be no comebacks when I send the bride’s papa the final account?’

‘Anyone who didn’t know you better, Sylvie, would think you only cared about the money.’

‘I promise you, I don’t do this for fun,’ she replied.

‘Oh, right. As if you didn’t work yourself to a standstill to ensure that every little detail was perfect so that the bride has a day she’ll never forget.’

‘That’s just good business, Jo. I apply exactly the same standards to every event.’

‘You’re a perfectionist, no doubt about it. But you do always seem to go the extra mile for weddings.’

‘I just worry more. It’s not quite like a conference or some company event, is it? For the two people involved it’s a once in a lifetime occasion. If it goes wrong they aren’t going to say, “Oh, well, never mind. We’ll have the fireworks next time.” At least I hope not!’

‘I knew it! You’re just like the rest of us. Beneath that ice-cool exterior beats a heart of pure mush.’

‘Rubbish. Mush, let me tell you, doesn’t pay the bills,’ she said crisply. It certainly hadn’t been ‘mush’ she’d felt…

No. She was overdrawn on thinking about Tom McFarlane. Overdrawn and heading for bankruptcy.

‘So?’ she continued a touch desperately. ‘Did we do good?’

‘We did great,’ Josie said, lowering her feet to the floor and joining her at the wall plan. ‘It was perfection from the moment the bride arrived in her fairy tale coach until the last firework faded in the midnight sky.’ She sighed. ‘You were absolutely right, by the way, to resist the bride’s plea for bows on the tails of the horses.’

‘You didn’t say that when she had hysterics in the office,’ Sylvie reminded her. ‘As I recall, your exact words were, “Give the silly cow what she wants…”’

‘I just don’t have your class, Sylvie.’

‘It’s easy to get carried away.’ To lose sight of what a wedding actually meant in the pressure to indulge in every over-the-top frill. ‘When in doubt just think of it as a feathers-and-curls situation. If you have feathers in your hat, who’s going to notice the curls?’

‘You see? I would go for both every time. I guess that’s the difference between Benenden and a sink estate comprehensive school…’

‘Not necessarily.’

It certainly hadn’t stopped Candy Harcourt from going for the feathers, the curls and every other frippery known to womankind. But then she’d had a big empty gap to fill, one that had taken all the frippery she could get her hands on, and it still hadn’t been enough.

When it had been the real thing, Candy had only needed the man she loved and a couple of witnesses. Of course that might have been because his family would have done everything they could to stop it if they’d had advance warning.

They’d sent her a photograph that someone had taken of them after the ceremony, along with a note from Candy apologising for leaving her to deal with the fallout and one from Quentin tendering his resignation.

It had been plain that he was hoping that she’d beg him to come back but she’d managed to resist the temptation and, to her relief, he’d already been snapped up by one of her competitors.

‘Besides,’ she said, doing her utmost to banish Candy and Quentin and their somewhat unexpected happy ever after from her memory, ‘you have the street smarts, Jo. One look from you and everyone thinks twice about giving us the run-around.’

Tom McFarlane wouldn’t have given Josie a moment’s trouble, she thought.

‘And no one is better at keeping everything running behind the scenes on the big day,’ she continued. ‘Taking you on was the best day’s work I ever did.’

Which was, despite the many warnings she’d received to the contrary, absolutely true.

Josie looked at her, swallowed and muttered, ‘Thanks.’ And, in an attempt to cover her confusion, bent to see what she’d been doing. ‘Hey, you’ve found another piper!’

‘Let’s hope this one doesn’t take a notion to do a spot of mountaineering and break something vital before the big day.’ She stood back. ‘Now all I need is for the happy couple to finalise the menu and, since the Rolling Stones are a little out of the budget for this affair, an RS tribute band so that the guests can revisit their ill-spent youth in a night of rock and roll.’ Then, ‘Did those new caterers do the business?’

‘For goodness’ sake, Sylvie! I told you it was perfect!’

‘There’s no such thing as perfect,’ she said, but with a smile. ‘Just find me some little thing and I’ll stop worrying.’

‘Idiot.’ Then, ‘Okay, the horses pooped in front of the church, hence my change of heart about the ribbons. Will that do?’

‘That is perfect,’ she said. Sylvie knew it was stupid, but there was always
something;
it was like waiting for the other shoe to drop. ‘You made sure it was cleaned up?’

Josie grinned. ‘I got lucky. The church warden was hoping for a donation for his roses and he was all ready with a bucket and shovel.’

‘You both got lucky, then.’

‘Too right. And, to put your mind totally at rest, the flowers were out of this world,’ Josie said, holding up her hand and ticking the items off one by one. ‘The choir were angelic. The food was amazing, those caterers are definitely a find. The string quartet, as far as I could tell—that is
soooo
not my kind of music—played in tune. Even the sun shone.’ Having run out of fingers, she shrugged. ‘What else is there?’

‘You want a list?’ Sylvie held up her own hand, ready to tick off the five legendary worst ever wedding disasters that every planner dreaded. Apart from the bride changing her mind days before the wedding.

Or the wedding planner losing it with the forsaken groom, she thought, forgetting the list as she placed her hand on the growing bulk of the baby she was carrying.

That was an item of gossip that would have made the
story
into a
STORY
and she came out in a cold sweat just thinking about what a meal
Celebrity
would make of it if they ever found out whose baby she was carrying.

Not that they hadn’t tried. Jeremy had been less than amused to be lined up as a possibility and had called her demanding she deny the rumours.

It was cruel not to, and maybe if he hadn’t behaved like such a pompous ass she’d have done it. Not that he’d actually changed, she realised. She was the one who’d done that, but only after wasting ten years…

‘The list?’ Josie prompted, looking at her a little oddly. She might not have believed the official version, that the single mother pregnancy had been planned using a ‘donor’. She hadn’t elaborated and Josie hadn’t pushed it. And, rising thirty with no partner and a ticking biological clock, even her closest friends had let it go without more than a slightly raised eyebrow.

‘Oh, right, the list…’

Before she could begin, the phone rang.

She reached back, glanced at the caller ID and, picking it up, said, ‘Hi, Laura. How are you?’

‘Pretty good, thanks, Sylvie, but, as always, I’m in need of a favour.’

‘Let me guess. You want an “SDS Event” for the silent auction at this year’s Pink Ribbon Club lunch?’

‘No…’ Then, ‘Well, yes, obviously, if you’re offering. We raised a bundle on that last year.’

‘Then it’s yours.’

‘That’s very generous. Thank you. I’ll just write that in…’ She paused, presumably to make a note of it.

‘So?’ Sylvie prompted. ‘What’s the favour?’

‘Oh, yes! It is a big one, although on this occasion I’m in a position to offer you something in return for your efforts.’

‘Oh?’ Laura sounded really excited but not missing the fact that she would be making an ‘effort’, Sylvie sat down and, pulling her notebook towards her, said, ‘Okay, let’s hear it.’

‘You’re not going to believe this, but I’ve just had a phone call from
Celebrity
magazine. They want to do a feature on the charity and they’re using the Spring Wedding Fayre we’re holding as a backdrop. They’ve even offered us a generous donation for our co-operation.’

‘They have?’ No wonder she was excited. ‘They usually only pay for exclusive coverage,’ she warned. ‘That won’t win you any friends with the local press. Willow Armstrong has been very supportive.’

‘I know, but this won’t affect local coverage.
Celebrity
are prepared to be generous because we’re pulling out all the stops for the Club’s tenth anniversary. That’s why I approached them in the first place. Your mother was always one of their favourites. All those wonderful parties…’

‘Yes…’

Throwing parties was something of a family tradition. Experience she’d put to profitable use when everything had gone belly-up.

‘So what do you want from me?’

‘Well, your mother founded the charity…’

‘Yes.’

‘And you are our Honorary President.’

Laura’s slow build-up was beginning to make her uneasy. ‘And?’

‘Well, it all just fits together so perfectly, don’t you see? Your mother’s parties. And now you’re the wedding planner at the top of every bride’s wish list.’