Liz Fielding - The Marriage Miracle

‘Really?’ She didn’t miss the oddity that he’d choose a much younger, apparently distant relative. ‘You’re a lawyer?’

‘A banker.’

‘Oh, well, that’s a good choice.’

‘Not if you’re the banker in question.’

She pulled a face. Not exactly a smile, but oddly cheering nonetheless. ‘Obviously the reckoning is about more than a few crates of champagne.’

‘I’m afraid so. But you’re right—it’s terribly bad manners to bring my troubles to a wedding. I really hadn’t intended doing more than putting in an appearance to toast the happy couple, and I’ve done that. I should call a taxi.’

He didn’t move.

‘Would a decent single-malt whisky help lay your ghosts?’

There was nothing of the mouse about her eyes, he decided. They were an unusual colour, more amber than brown, with a fringe of thick lashes, and her mouth was wide and full. He had a sudden notion to see it smile, really smile.

‘It might,’ he conceded. ‘I’m prepared to give it a try if you’ll join me.’ Then he looked towards the heaving marquee and wished he’d kept his mouth shut. The last thing he wanted to do was push his way through the joyful throng to the bar.

‘No need to battle through the dancing hordes,’ she assured him. ‘Just go through those French windows and you’ll find a decanter on the sofa table.’

He glanced towards the house, then at her, this time rather more closely.

‘Making rather free with our host’s hospitality, aren’t you?’ he suggested, vaguely surprised to discover that he was the one grinning.

‘He wouldn’t object. But in this instance the hospitality is mine. I live in the garden flat,’ she said, offering her hand. ‘Matty Lang. Best woman and cousin to the bride.’

‘Sebastian Wolseley,’ he replied, taking it. Her hand was small, but there was nothing soft about it and her grip was firm.

‘The big-shot New York banker? I wondered what you’d look like when I was writing the invitations.’

‘You did?’ He recalled the exquisite copperplate script that had adorned the gilt-edged invitation card to the blessing of the marriage of Francesca and Guy Dymoke and the reception they were holding in their garden to celebrate the fact. ‘Isn’t it the bride’s job to write the invitations?’

‘I’ve no idea, but in the event the bride had other things on her mind at the time.’

‘Oh, well, so long as she has time to concentrate on her marriage I don’t suppose it matters who writes them. She runs her own company, I understand.’

‘She didn’t have much choice,’ Matty replied, rather less cordially, and it occurred to him that he must have sounded unnecessarily critical.

‘No?’ he asked, not especially interested in who’d written the invitations or why. But he’d been rude—wedding celebrations tended to bring out the worst in him; good manners demanded that he allow his victim to put him right.

‘No,’ she repeated. ‘But on this occasion she wasn’t upstairs, busily drumming up some brilliant new PR stunt, she was in the throes of childbirth.’

‘That would certainly count as a legitimate excuse,’ he agreed.

Perhaps deciding that she’d overreacted slightly, Matty Lang lifted her shoulders in a minimal shrug. ‘To be honest, I did feel a bit guilty afterwards. She really wanted to write them herself. But I had to do something to keep my mind occupied and I’d have only been in the way upstairs.’

‘You did them quite beautifully,’ he assured her. ‘I hope she was properly grateful.’

‘Gratitude doesn’t come into it.’ Then, ‘Are you and Guy close friends?’ she asked, not that easily appeased. ‘Or is this duty visit simply the gloss on a thoroughly bloody day?’

‘I didn’t say it was a duty visit. Merely that I hadn’t intended to stay for long. As for friendship, well, Guy and I bonded at university over our mutual interest in beer and women…’ Realising that was perhaps not the most tactful thing to say at the man’s wedding celebrations, he took a verbal sidestep and went on, ‘But you’re right; we haven’t seen nearly enough of one another in the last few years. I live…’ lived, he mentally corrected himself, lived ‘…in New York. And Guy never stayed put in one place long enough for me to catch up with him.’

‘He’s a regular stay-at-home these days, I promise you,’ she assured him.

‘Good for him.’ Then, ‘Why?’

‘Why is he a regular stay-at-home?’

‘One look at his wife answers that question,’ he replied. ‘Why did you want to know what I look like?’

‘Oh, I see. Well, as best woman I get the pick of the unattached males.’ At which point he was amused to see the faintest touch of a blush colour the cheeks of the very cool Miss Lang. ‘Guy, I have to tell you, was no help,’ she went on quickly. ‘The best he could come up with for you was “tallish and darkish”. Friends you might be, but my enquiry regarding the colour of your eyes met with a total blank.’

‘No? Well, to be honest I couldn’t say what colour his are, either, but it’s been a while since we’ve been in the same country.’

‘His excuse was that he’d left gazing into your eyes to the countless females who trailed after you. But even if he had been that observant, I can well understand his difficulty.’

‘Okay, I’m hooked. In what way are my eyes difficult?’

‘They’re not difficult, just changeable. At first sight I would have said they were grey, but now I’m not so sure.’ Then, ‘Drink?’ she prompted. ‘Add a little water to mine. Not too much.’

‘Are you sure you shouldn’t be doing your best woman duty and strutting your stuff with the best man?’

There was just the tiniest hesitation before she said, ‘Would you believe he’s married? To the most gorgeous redhead you’ve ever seen. I ask you, what’s the point of a best man who isn’t available for the best woman to have her wicked way with? I can’t believe someone as smart as Guy could get it so wrong.’

‘Shocking,’ he said, almost but not totally certain that she was kidding. Women usually smiled at him. This one didn’t. He’d changed his mind about her flirting, she was flirting, quite outrageously, but she didn’t smile, or bat her eyelashes, or do anything that women usually did. He wasn’t exactly sure what she was doing, but she’d got his full attention. ‘Definitely time for that drink.’ Then, since flirting under any circumstances should not be a one-way transaction, ‘Unless I can offer myself as a substitute?’

‘For the best man?’

‘Since you’ve been so badly let down,’ he confirmed.

Guy had asked him, but he hadn’t anticipated being in London at the time…

‘Are you suggesting that we disappear into the shrubbery and fool around, Mr Wolseley?’

Her gaze was steady as a rock, and that wide mouth hadn’t so much as twitched. For a moment he found himself floundering, as if he’d stepped unexpectedly out of his depth.

He took a slow breath to steady himself and said, ‘Well, to be honest, that’s a little fast for me, Miss Lang. I like to get to know a girl before I take her clothes off. And I prefer to do it in comfort.’

‘That’s no fun. Not entering into the spirit of the thing at all.’

‘I don’t have to know her that well,’ he said seriously. ‘A dance or two—dinner, maybe? Once that hurdle is passed and we get to first-name terms I’m perfectly willing to be led astray.’

‘But only in comfort.’

‘I like to take my time.’

Without warning her face lit up in the kind of smile that took the sting out of his day, so that dancing with her seemed like the best idea he’d had for a long time.