Bad Brides

by Rebecca Chance

  Praise for Rebecca Chance:

  Praise for Divas:

  ‘Rebecca Chance’s Divas sizzles with glamour, romance and revenge. Unputdownable. A glittering page-turner, this debut had me hooked from the first page’ Louise Bagshawe

  ‘I laughed, I cried, I very nearly choked. Just brilliant! This has to be the holiday read of the year’ Olivia Darling

  Praise for Bad Girls:

  ‘Glitzy, hedonistic and scandalous, this compelling read is a real page-turner’ Closer

  ‘A fun, frivolous read’ Sun

  Praise for Bad Sisters:

  ‘Blistering new bonkbuster’ Sun

  ‘A gripping and exciting novel’ Closer

  Praise for Bad Angels:

  ‘The perfect bonkbuster for lazy holiday reading’ Star

  ‘Pure festive escapism’ Heat

  Praise for Killer Heels:

  ‘The perfect sunlounger fodder in the form of power games, illicit romps and some menacing high-heeled shoes’ The People

  ‘A perfect mix of sex, secrets and back-stabbing, this sizzling bonkbuster deserves a place in your beach bag’ Closer

  Praise for Killer Queens:

  ‘I give Killer Queens five stars – massively enjoyed the book – and it’s perfect for all the royal celebrations we’re having!’ Sun

  Also by Rebecca Chance

  Divas

  Bad Girls

  Bad Sisters

  Killer Heels

  Bad Angels

  Rebecca Chance’s Naughty Bits

  Killer Queens

  First published in Great Britain by Simon and Schuster, 2014

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © Rebecca Chance, 2014

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Rebecca Chance to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

  Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Paperback ISBN 978-1-47110-172-4

  Trade Paperback ISBN 978-1-47110-171-7

  eBook ISBN 978-1-47110-173-1

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Typeset in Berling by M Rules

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  To all the brides out there – good or bad!

  Enjoy your special day!

  Acknowledgements

  Huge thanks to:

  At Simon and Schuster: Clare Hey and Carla Josephson, who’ve slaved to get this book into print on a very tight deadline. Sara-Jade Virtue and the amazing marketing team – Alice Murphy, Dawn Burnett, Ally Glynn – who work just as hard promoting the books. Dominic Brendon, James Horobin, Gill Richardson, Rumana Haider and Rhedd Lewis are raising my sales with every book, and I’m incredibly grateful. Hannah Corbett in publicity has been brilliantly efficient and very generous with the bubbles!

  At David Higham: Anthony Goff, my ever-wonderful agent. Marigold Atkey has been helpful and efficient way beyond the call of duty, and Chiara Natalucci and Stella Giatrakou in foreign rights do a fantastic job of selling Rebecca Chance overseas.

  Emma Draude and Sophie Goodfellow at Emma Draude PR, who are getting reams of fabulous coverage for my books. Lucky me!

  Antonio di Meglio, whose beautiful chandeliers feature in the book, and Massimo Panuccio, of Sartoria Massimo, who was kind enough to do fabulous sketches for Brianna Jade and Tamra’s dresses for the ceremony, you can see them on www.pinterest.com/rebeccachance1/badbrides.

  Travis Pagel is my marketing guru, and Marcos ‘stop me’ Malkmuth is my personal DJ . . . Love you boys!

  Dan Evans at Plan 9 and Oscar Henriquez for my beautiful new website www.rebeccachance.net.

  Marco and Alice Baldini, for getting married with perfect timing for me to use the details in this book! And Gabriella and Leonardo Lenzi of Tenuta Neve d’Agosto for their exquisite taste, plus all the fascinating information about the history of their beautiful venue.

  Matt Bates and Karl Frost, fantastic friends, wonderful company and a gorgeous couple!

  Michael Devine of www.makethemostofyourgarden.com designed Tamra’s ridiculously extravagant Chelsea garden so wonderfully that I almost believe it exists!

  My intern, Lydia Laws-Wall, who’s an absolute star. I feel so lucky to have her!

  Paul Willis, Greg Herren, and Beth Hettinger Tindall gave me amazingly detailed help with the description of Kewanee Hog Days and Illinois corn-fed life. Thank you three so much, you really brought Tamra and Brianna Jade’s backgrounds to life. Emma Louise, aka ‘The Harry Potter Girl’, Kevin Loh and Emma Beynon for sharing the #bananalove!

  I honestly don’t think I could have written this book in a very short amount of time without the Rebecca Chance fanfriends on Facebook to cheer me up, distract me and banter with! Thanks, Angela Collings, Dawn Hamblett, Tim Hughes, Jason Ellis, Tony Wood, Melanie Hearse, Jen Sheehan, Helen Smith, Katherine Everett, Julian Corkle, Robin Greene, Diane Jolly, Adam Pietrowski, John Soper, Gary Jordan, Louise Bell, Lisa Respers France, Stella Duffy, Shelley Silas, Rowan Coleman, Serena Mackesy, Tim Daly, Joy T Chance, Lori Smith Jennaway, Alex Marwood, Sallie Dorsett, Alice Taylor, Joanne Wade, Marjorie Tucker, Teresa Wilson, Ashley James Cardwell, Margery Flax, Clinton Reed, Valerie Laws, Simon-Peter Trimarco, Kelly Butterworth, Kirsty Maclennan, Amanda Marie Fulton, Marie Causey, Shana Mehtaab, Tracy Hanson, Nancy Pace Koffman, Katrina Smith, Helen Lusher, Russ Fry, Gavin Robinson, Laura Ford, Mary Mulkeen, Eileen McAninly, Pamela Cardone, Barb McNaughton, Shannon Mitchell, Claire Chiswell, Dawn Turnbull, Michelle Heneghan, Jonathan Harvey, Jeffrey Marks – and Bryan Quertermous, Derek Jones, David W. Rudlin and Colin Butts, the very exclusive (i.e. tiny) club of my straight male readers. Plus of course Paul Burston, the Brandon Flowers of Polari, and his loyal crew – Alex Hopkins, Ange Chan, Sian Pepper, Enda Guinan, Belinda Davies, John Southgate, Paul Brown, James Watts, Ian Sinclair Romanis and Jon Clarke. And the handful of beloved relatives brave enough to read my books – Dalia Hartman Bergsagel, Ilana Bergsagel, Sandy Makarwicz and Jean Polito. If I’ve left anyone out, please do send me a message and I will correct it in the next book.

  Kirsty Mcdonald won the Twitter competition to have her name in the acknowledgements: here it is. Congratulations!

  Thanks to Vina Jackson and Stella Knightley for their lovely quotes – fantastic writers and very good friends.

  Tarquin’s surreally nonsensical lyrics were crowd-sourced on FB but ended up mostly coming from the deliciously twisted brain of Dorcas Pelling.

  The gorgeous team of McKenna Jordan and John Kwiatkowski and everyone at Murder by the Book, for bringing my smut to Texas.

  And as always – thanks to the Board. We are so lucky to have each other.

  Lastly, to the FLs of FB, all of whom are Gone With the Wind fabulous. Twirl!

  Author’s Note

  Readers of my previous novel, Killer Queens, will recognize members of the royal family that feature in Bad Brides. You absolutely don’t need to have read that book before starting this one, but for those who haven’t read Killer Queens, all you need to know is that
I created a set of British royals who are definitely not the Windsors – though some of mine may share a few similarities with certain real-life royals! The heir to the throne in my parallel universe is Prince Oliver, whose son and heir Hugo recently married his long-term girlfriend, Chloe Rose. And the character who reappears in Bad Brides is Hugo’s sister Sophie, who was previously both a brat and a bitch, partly due to the death of her mother Princess Belinda in a ski accident years ago.

  However, since the events of Killer Queens, Sophie’s become much nicer to entertain at an engagement party in your newly renovated stately home – should you want to invite her! Just make sure you have some good-looking young footmen in uniform for her late-night entertainment . . .

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  London, August

  ‘Ladies, gentlemen, thank you so much for coming out this evening!’

  Jodie Raeburn, editor of both Style UK and its latest offshoot, Style Bride magazine, launching that very day at a hyper-fashionable party in Harrods Bridal Boutique, surveyed the packed room of glitterati with considerable pride. Because shepherding the debut issue of Style Bride into print had been, without question, the most teeth-rattling, white-knuckled roller-coaster ride of her editorial life.

  In all her years of wrangling temperamental photographers, coke-crazed fashion designers and anorexic models, Jodie had never had to cope with a last-minute crisis this dramatic. She had made a strategic decision to have two celebrity brides-to-be compete against each other for the cover of the magazine and the prestigious title of Style Bride of the Year, hoping to garner maximum publicity for her new launch and impress her highly demanding managing editor.

  And, as far as publicity was concerned, Jodie had succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. Two crack Style teams had watched in shock and awe as both wedding ceremonies took very unexpected turns, cameras capturing every moment of the drama, prompting an emergency of epic proportions. Jodie had been forced to delay publication of the magazine for several weeks, which would usually have signalled disaster: but her team had worked round the clock, and the press coverage of the competing brides’ various meltdowns had been so compelling that Style Bride had almost doubled its advertising as bridal designers and cosmetic companies fell over themselves in a last-minute race to appear in a magazine that was bound to fly off the shelves. Even with the huge printers’ bill, the first issue of Style Bride was already a raving financial success.

  As she continued with her prepared speech, Jodie’s mind raced back to the choice she had thought she was making months ago. The candidates for Style Bride of the Year had been narrowed down to a shortlist of two: on the one hand, exquisitely pretty Milly Gamble, a young starlet on the rise, engaged to Tarquin Ormond, even more famous than her as the lead singer of a folk-rock band garlanded with Brit awards and Grammies. On the other, Brianna Jade Maloney, nicknamed the ‘Fracking Princess’ by the media, an American ex-pageant beauty, all teeth, hair and golden tan, whose marriage to Edmund, Earl of Respers, had been arranged by her equally gorgeous mother, Tamra.

  Tamra was here tonight, the Fracking Queen herself, resplendent in a stunning cocktail dress. And so was Brianna Jade, close to the podium, dressed more demurely than her mother, but still with that polished, American-groomed glow about her, radiantly beautiful as always. Jodie scanned the crowd to see if she could spot Milly or Tarquin, but the head count was so dense that she couldn’t pick out their near-identical ringleted blonde curls.

  Jodie’s heart was beating fast with excitement. Even though many of the guests here knew what was about to be announced – the reveal of the first-ever issue of Style Bride, anchored by a photograph of the Bride of the Year, smiling in glorious triumph at her coup in having snagged the cover – Jodie was over the moon at her own achievement. She had turned a tortuous and agonising process into a glossy first issue, so thick with copy and advertisements that its girth measured two centimetres.

  Two centimetres! That was huge in magazine terms! And at that thought Jodie’s smile spread as wide as the Bride of the Year’s. In work as in marriage, size really did matter.

  Chapter One

  Stanclere Hall, July

  The Fracking Queen commands and we obey, Edmund St Aubrey, Earl of Respers, thought with amusement as he contemplated the duck-egg blue Tiffany box on his dressing table. Inside it was a four-carat pink diamond engagement ring, the central stone encircled by smaller, no less bright white diamonds; the whole thing had cost over forty thousand pounds.

  It was a sum which Edmund would have been quite incapable of affording himself. And even if he had had a spare five figures kicking around – an unimaginable amount! – he would have poured it into some much more pressing need: urgent repairs to the roof of Stanclere Hall, his ancestral home. Or the almost equally vital task of replumbing the Hall and installing a new boiler: the clunks and creaks whenever someone tried to run a bath were frankly terrifying, as if gremlins inside the ancient pipes were hitting them with tiny hammers. Or buying desperately needed new farm equipment. Edmund winced, thinking about his ancient John Deere tractors, so corroded by now that the workers joked that the rust was all that was holding them together.

  But you don’t need to worry about the roof or the boiler or the tractors now! he told himself, taking a deep breath, fighting back the panic that wrapped around him every time he thought about how much money he needed to keep Stanclere Hall running. All the jobs in the house and on the estate are safe now, thank God. Edmund could not separate the interests of Stanclere Hall, its landscaped gardens, its arable land and its loyal staff; they were all essential parts of a whole without which he would never be complete. The Earls of Respers had always lived at Stanclere Hall, and with that privilege came huge responsibility. Edmund did not own the Hall; he held it in trust for the future generations of Respers and also for all the people to whom it provided jobs and a roof over their heads, in the form not only of the Hall itself but all its tied cottages. Some of the families had worked for the Respers as long as the latter had been in residence.

  So no pressure, Edmund, as the Fracking Queen would say, he thought, smiling. No pressure at all. Just the wages bill every month, the soaring costs of electricity and gas, a crumbling ancient stately home to maintain, an ornamental lake covered in algae . . .

  Mercifully, inside the small square Tiffany box was the solution to all his problems. It might be unorthodox for the mother of his future fiancée to have bought her own daughter’s engagement ring, but the Fracking Queen had been insistent, and she always got her way. She had demanded that Brianna Jade, Edmund’s heiress bride-to-be, was not to be proposed to with some old ring from the Respers family jewels. Edmund had argued that there were some very good pieces of jewellery in the safe: being part of the entail, he couldn’t sell them to raise money to maintain the estate. Edmund, who disliked to see so much money thrown away on what he privately considered to be just a bit of shiny carbon, had tried to tell the Fracking Queen that it was much
more typical of the English aristocracy to bestow a family heirloom on one’s bride. But the Fracking Queen had countered with the fact that when Prince Oliver, the heir to the British throne, had proposed to his late bride, Princess Belinda, he had done so with a ring bought from Garrard’s jewellers, and what was good enough for the royal family was damn well good enough for Brianna Jade.

  There was really no arguing with the Queen when she was set on something; she would pull out her tablet thingy, whizz around it, tracing a perfectly manicured finger on the screen, and come up with a devastating fact that would stop you in your tracks. And since she hadn’t insisted that Edmund purchase the pink diamond ring himself, or even pick it out, but had done all that herself, there was also no denying that she played fair. The box had been produced triumphantly today when she arrived from London, as she and Edmund drank sherry in the library while Brianna Jade supervised the unpacking of her and her mother’s weekend wardrobes.

  Edmund had blinked at how very bright the ring was. It looked as if it had been cut specifically to refract the maximum light possible, as if you could, in a pinch, use it to spark a fire by channelling sunlight through it, as they did with mirrors in the Boy Scouts. But the Fracking Queen had smiled complacently at the sparkling diamonds she had produced, sculled her sherry in one swift gulp – my God, she can hold her drink, he thought respectfully; he’d seen her knock back glasses of good single malt as if they were spritzers – and stood up, announcing that she would send Brianna Jade downstairs in an hour or so and that she expected Edmund to have ‘sealed the deal’, as she put it, in time for champagne before dinner.

  Champagne which she had had sent from Harrods, of course, because Edmund couldn’t possibly afford her favourite, Cristal. Cases of it had arrived the day before, together with hampers of foie gras, caviare and vast quantities of bresaola, some sort of Italian beef slices on which the Queen mainly existed for diet purposes. Cook was fascinated.