Lauren Weisberger - Revenge Wears Prada - The Devil Returns

Andy had been terrified to be photographed by such a famous photographer – and one who specialized in nudes – but St Germain had immediately put her at ease. She could see right away what made him so good.

‘What a relief!’ he had crowed the moment he stepped into Andy’s bridal suite with two assistants in tow. When they arrived at the estate, Andy remembered feeling inexplicably grateful they’d even shown up. Despite wearing only a strapless bra and knee-to-chest Spanx, Andy felt nothing but joy and appreciation at the sight of the photographer.

‘What? That you only have to shoot one average bride rather than an entire brigade of swimsuit models? Hi, I’m Andy. It’s so nice to finally meet you in person.’

St Germain couldn’t have been an inch over five-six, with a slight build and a lily-white complexion, but his voice sounded like it belonged to a linebacker. Not even his indeterminate accent (French? British? A hint of Aussie?) seemed to fit. ‘Hah hah! Yes, exactly. Those girls were crazy, completely aberrant ! But seriously, ma chérie, I am so happy we do not need full-body makeup. It is so tiresome.’

‘No full-body makeup, I promise. If all goes as planned, you will not be able to tell whether I’m up to date on my bikini wax, either.’ Andy laughed. All the drama his booking required had prepared Andy to hate him, but St Germain was irresistibly charming. She knew from his ‘friend’ that he’d flown in directly from Rio, where he’d been shooting the latest Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. Five days, two dozen models, hundreds if not thousands of inches of tanned and toned legs.

St Germain nodded as though she’d just said something very serious. ‘This is good. Ach, I am so tired of looking at skinny girls in bright bikinis. Of course, this is a dream of most men, but you know what they say … show me a beautiful woman, and I will show you a man who is tired of … well, you probably have heard the rest.’ He smiled devilishly.

‘It really doesn’t sound like you had such a terrible time,’ Andy said with a smile.

‘Yes, perhaps not.’ He reached forward and turned Andy’s chin toward the light. ‘Don’t move.’

Before she knew what was happening, an assistant handed him a camera with a lens the size of a fire log, and St Germain clicked twenty or thirty times.

Andy’s hand flew to her face. ‘Stop! They haven’t done my eyes yet. I’m not even wearing the dress!’

‘No, no, you’re beautiful just like that. Gorgeous! Does your fiancé tell you you look marvelous when you’re mad?’

‘He does not.’

St Germain thrust the camera to his left. A black-clad assistant immediately reached for it and exchanged it for another. ‘Mmm, well he should. Yes, just like that. Twinkle for me, darling.’

Andy let her shoulders drop and turned to face him. ‘What?’

‘Go on, twinkle!’

‘I’m not sure I know how to twinkle.’

‘Raj!’ he barked.

One of the assistants leaped up from behind the couch, where he was holding a reflector. He jutted out a hip, pursed his lips, cocked his head slightly to the side, and lowered his eyes in an approximation of a sexy, come-hither look.

St Germain nodded. ‘See? Like I tell all the swim babies. Twinkle.’

Andy laughed again now, remembering it. She pointed to one of the thumbnails Daniel was scrolling past. Her eyes were heavy lidded to the point of looking drugged and her mouth was puckered like a duck’s. ‘See? I twinkled there.’

‘You what?’

‘Never mind.’

‘Here,’ Daniel said, enlarging a photo of Andy and Max, midkiss during the ceremony. ‘Look how beautiful.’

Andy could only remember the out-of-body anxious sensation that had started the moment the doors swung open. Hearing the first notes to Pachelbel’s Canon had confirmed that her window for fleeing was closed. Clutching her father’s arm, she spotted her brother-in-law’s parents, a pair of her mother’s distant cousins, and Max’s Caribbean nanny, the woman Max thought was his mother until he was four. Her father led her ever so gently, both pulling her along and, perhaps, keeping her upright. A group of girlfriends from college and their husbands smiled at her from the right. In front of them, Max’s gaggle of boarding school friends, nearly a dozen in total, each one irritatingly handsome with an equally attractive women beside him, all turned and watched her. She briefly wondered why they hadn’t divided themselves into the bride’s side and the groom’s side. Didn’t people do that anymore? Shouldn’t she, the resident wedding expert, know the answer? But she didn’t.

A flash of chartreuse from her right side caught her eye: Agatha, the fashion-forward assistant she and Emily shared, who’d apparently gotten a memo from the great hipster in the sky that neons, in addition to beards and fedoras, were a go. The office staff, nearly twenty in all, flanked Agatha on all sides. Some, like her photography director and her managing director, managed to feign delight at spending Columbus Day weekend at their boss’s wedding. The assistants, associate editors, and ad sales girls didn’t do as good a job faking it. Andy thought it cruel to invite them all, to obligate them to spend time at a work function when they already clocked in so many hours, but Emily had insisted. She argued it was good for morale to get the whole office together, drinking and dancing. And so, like she had about the florist and the caterer and the size of the wedding, Andy had conceded.

As Andy neared the front of the room, her legs feeling as though she’d trudged through two feet of snow, one face in particular caught her eye. His blond hair had darkened a bit, but the dimples were unmissable. His suit was fitted, crisp, black – not a tuxedo, of course, because he’d never have been caught dead in so pedestrian a costume. He always said dress codes were for styleless people. He always said a lot of things, and Andy remembered hanging on his pontifications as though god himself had decreed them. The post-Alex, pre-Max mistake: Christian Collinsworth. He looked every bit as gorgeous and pompous and confident as the last time she’d woken up beside him in his room at the Villa d’Este five years earlier, still naked and tangled in his sheets, mere moments before he’d casually announced that his girlfriend would be joining him in Lake Como the following day, and would Andy like to meet her? When Emily had asked Andy to invite him as a personal favor to her, Andy vehemently refused, but when Mrs Harrison placed him at the top of her guest list, right alongside Christian’s parents, who were very dear friends of the Harrisons, there was nothing she could say. Oh, Barbara? So sorry, but perhaps it’s inappropriate to invite someone with whom I had a fabulous affair to our wedding? Don’t get me wrong, he was fantastic in bed, but I’m worried it might make cocktail hour uncomfortable … You understand, don’t you? So there he stood, a hand on his mother’s back, turned toward Andy and giving her that look. The one that hadn’t changed one bit in five years and said, You know and I know that we have a delicious secret. It was the look Christian gave exactly half the women in Manhattan.

‘I’m going to be walking down the aisle and seeing someone I used to have sex with,’ Andy had complained to Emily when she first saw Mrs Harrison’s guest list. Never mind that Katherine had been lopped off the list at Max’s behest. Andy had wanted to cheer when he told his mom over a wedding-planning brunch, ‘No Katherine. No exes,’ despite her status as ‘close family friend.’ When Andy had confessed to Max afterward that Christian Collinsworth was also on his mother’s list, he looked her in the eye and said, ‘I don’t give a rat’s ass about Christian if you don’t.’ Andy had nodded and agreed: it was probably best to leave well enough alone and not further upset Barbara.