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CHAPTER ONE
‘WHAT?’
It had taken a few seconds for Celia to register what her client was saying.
‘What do you mean, you’ve decided not to get married after all...?’
She levered herself up from where she had been kneeling, meticulously pinning the hem of the dress she was making.
A wedding dress.
Not in the traditional white because this was marriage number two for Julie Raymond. This was a pale lilac creation, exquisitely beautiful and threaded with hundreds of tiny pearls, each of which had been laboriously sewn on by hand.
Three months of toing and froing over the design, four months of time-consuming putting together with dozens of fittings, at each of which something had had to be changed. Then there was the time spent sourcing just the right fabric from just the right factory with just the right eco-friendly credentials.
Not so much a labour of love as a rollercoaster ride underlaid with simmering panic that the creation in the making might not come to fruition in time for the big day because of the number of roadblocks that kept appearing on the journey.
But here they were, with the wedding a week away and...
Celia stared up at her client in consternation, her green eyes urgently questioning. The expression on Julie’s face was enough to slam shut the door on any notions that she might have misheard. The wedding of the year was being called off.
Should warning bells have started clanging months ago? Should she have paid more attention to throwaway remarks that had become more persistent over the past few weeks?
It wasn’t as if Julie hadn’t confided in her, snippets about her past and the loveless marriage she had endured for four years. She had wed an earl only to discover that with the title came the expectation that he be allowed to continue his womanising bachelor ways, untroubled by the humdrum monotony of married life. The divorce had been protracted and exhausting, Julie had confided bitterly.
So yes, Celia had had insights into her client and slowly they had formed an easy camaraderie, a closeness that sometimes happened between people whose lives ran on different railway tracks. It was the closeness between one with a need to confide and another with an ability to listen, two people who didn’t share the same social platform. It was a safe place for Julie because confidences shared never risked being leaked to mutual friends.
‘I can’t go through with it.’
Celia rested back on her haunches and waited until Julie had stepped down from the squat box on which she had been standing. Then she ushered her upstairs into the tiny kitchen, away from the main body of the shop with its fitting rooms and racks of clothes in the process of being made and the busyness of her two assistants with their clients.
Julie Raymond was an absolutely stunning and statuesque blonde. A dream of a model who could have worn a bin bag and still looked spectacular.
She towered over Celia, who was secretly in awe of her, from her well-behaved, sleek, shiny bob to the impeccably manicured perfection of her fingernails.
The long-sleeved wedding dress, lovingly hugging a willowy body, trailed half pinned and in miserable disarray along the ground, picking up dust along the way.
‘You’re just a little nervous,’ Celia soothed, seamlessly segueing into agony aunt mode. ‘The wedding is only a few days away and life as you know it is going to change but, Julie...you mustn’t let your past ruin a wonderful future. I know you had a...um...disappointingfirst marriage, but that was years ago and I’m sure that...er...Leandro will be a wonderful husband...’
‘Maybe.’ Julie laughed with carefree abandon and rested the mug of tea that had been handed to her on her lap. ‘But definitely not to me.’
What could Celia say to that? How could she wax lyrical about the virtues of someone she had never met?
Not once had the adoring husband-to-be arranged to collect his fiancée so that he could whisk her off to a romantic meal after one of her very many late evening fittings.
Nor, come to think of it, had Julie mentioned him very much at all and, when quizzed, had been conspicuously mealy-mouthed on the subject of the love of her life.
She had vaguely hinted that she had known him for absolutely ages and if she had failed to follow this up with the usual glowing reports of how wonderful he was, then, camaraderie or no camaraderie, that was not Celia’s business. At the end of the day, she was being paid to do a job and an important one. A huge job for an extravagant wedding where her dress would be the star of the show and, for three young girls climbing the career ladder in the competitive world of fashion design, a real opportunity.
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ Julie said gently, and Celia frowned.
She could see the faintest of tea-ring stains from the mug on the pale lilac.
‘Of course I do,’ she said. ‘You have cold feet. It happens. One minute you’re looking forward to a shiny bright future and the next minute you’re terrified that you’ll be giving up all the freedoms that come with singledom...’
‘And have you ever been there, Celia? Torn between the shiny bright future and the allure of singledom?’
Celia flushed and, for a few seconds, she felt the breath leave her body.
