Claire narrowed her eyes at him when she opened the door. Though he noticed that she didn’t ask him why he was here. Clearly she had a pretty good idea that he already knew she’d lost his sister’s wedding dress and he wasn’t happy about the situation.
‘I’m Skypeing Ash right now,’ she said quietly. ‘And I don’t want her upset any more today, so can we leave the fight until she’s chosen another dress and I’ve said goodbye to her?’
Claire clearly realised that they were about to have a fight. A huge one. But Sean agreed with her about not rowing in front of his sister. Right now, Ashleigh’s feelings had to come first. ‘OK.’
‘Good. Come in. If you want a drink, feel free to make yourself something. There’s tea, coffee and mugs in the cupboard above the kettle, though I’m afraid there’s only long-life milk.’ She gestured to a doorway which obviously led to the business’s kitchen.
‘Thank you,’ he said. Though he wasn’t about to accept any hospitality from Claire Stewart, even if it was do-it-yourself hospitality.
‘If you’ll excuse me, I have a wedding dress to sort out.’ She gave him a level look. ‘And I’m modelling the dresses for Ash, which means I’ll need to change several times—so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t come through to the back until I’m done.’
‘Noted,’ he said.
She locked the shop door again, still keeping the ‘closed’ sign in place, and vanished into the back room. Feeling a bit like a spare part—but wanting to know just how Claire had managed to lose a wedding dress—Sean waited in the main area of the shop until she walked back out, this time dressed in faded jeans and a strappy top rather than a wedding dress.
‘No coffee?’ she asked.
‘No.’
She folded her arms. ‘OK. Spit it out.’
‘Firstly, does Ashleigh actually have a dress?’ he asked.
‘There are three she likes,’ Claire said. ‘I’m taking them all over to Capri as soon as I can get a flight. Then she can try them on, and I’ll make any necessary alterations in time for the wedding.’
‘What I don’t understand is how you managed to lose her dress in the first place.’ He shook his head in exasperation. ‘Why wasn’t it with you in the plane?’
‘Believe it or not,’ she said dryly, ‘that was my original plan. I cleared it with the airline that I could put the boxes with her dress and mine in the overhead storage compartments, and if there was room they’d hang Ash’s dress on a rail in the stewardesses’ cabin. I packed both the dresses in boxes that specifically met the airline’s size guidelines. Your waistcoat and cravat, plus Luke’s and Tom’s, are packed in with my dress.’
So far, so sensible. But this was Claire—the woman who was chaos in high heels with a snippy attitude. ‘But?’
‘It turned out there were three other brides on the flight. One of whom was a total Bridezilla and demanded that her dress should be the one in with the stewardesses. There was a massive row. In the end, the captain intervened and ordered that all the bridal dresses should go in the hold with the rest of the luggage—even those belonging to people who weren’t involved in the argument with Bridezilla. He wouldn’t even let us put the dresses in the overhead lockers. The atmosphere on the plane was pretty bad.’ She shrugged. ‘The airline staff have looked in London and in Naples, and there’s no sign of the box with Ash’s dress. They’re still checking. It might turn up in time. But it probably won’t, so these dresses are my contingency plan—because I don’t intend to let Ash down. Ever.’
It hadn’t been entirely Claire’s fault, Sean acknowledged. But, at the same time, she had been the one responsible for the dress, and right now the dress was missing. ‘Why didn’t you buy a seat for the dress?’
‘They said I couldn’t—that if I wanted the dress to come with me, it would have to be treated as additional cabin luggage. Which,’ she pointed out, ‘is what I organised and what I paid for.’ Her blue eyes were icy as she added, ‘And, just in case you think I’m perfectly OK about the situation, understand that I’ve spent weeks working on that dress and I’m gutted that my best friend doesn’t get to wear the dress of her dreams—the dress I designed especially for her. But moaning on about the situation isn’t going to get the dress back. I’d rather do something practical to make sure Ash’s wedding goes as smoothly as possible. So, if you’ll excuse me, I have three wedding dresses to pack and a flight to book.’ She shrugged again. ‘But, if it makes you feel better, do feel free to storm and shout at me.’
Funny how she was the one in the wrong, but she’d managed to make him feel as if he were the one in the wrong, Sean thought.
Though she had a point. Complaining about the situation or losing his temper with her wouldn’t make the dress magically reappear. And Claire had spent most of today travelling—two and a half hours each way on a plane, plus an hour each way on a train and waiting round in between. Now she was just about to fly back to Italy: yet more travelling. All for his sister’s sake.
Claire Stewart was trying—in both senses of the phrase. But maybe he needed to try a bit harder, too.
‘Do you want me to find you a flight while you pack the dresses?’ he asked.
She looked at him as if he’d just grown two heads.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘Are you actually being helpful?’ she asked. ‘To me?’
He narrowed his eyes at her. ‘Don’t make it sound as if I’m always the one in the wrong.’
‘No. That would be me,’ she said. ‘In your regimented world view.’
‘I’m not regimented,’ he said, stung. ‘I’m organised and efficient. There’s a difference.’
Her expression suggested otherwise.
‘I was,’ he pointed out, ‘trying to call a truce and work with you. For Ashleigh’s sake.’
She looked at him for a long, long time. And then she nodded. ‘Truce. I can do that. Then thank you—it would save me a bit of time if you could find me a flight. I don’t care which London airport it’s from or how much it costs—just let me know as soon as they need paying and I’ll come to the phone and give them my credit card details. But please put whichever airline in the picture about what happened to the dress this morning, and I want cast-iron guarantees that these dresses are going to make it out to Italy with me. Otherwise I’ll be carving their entire check-in staff into little pieces with a rusty spoon.’
He couldn’t help smiling. ‘Spoons are blunt.’
‘That,’ she said, ‘is entirely the point. Ditto the rusty.’
‘You really care about Ashleigh, don’t you?’ he said.
‘Sean, how can you not already know that?’ Claire frowned. ‘She’s been my best friend for more than half my lifetime, since I moved to the same school as her when I was thirteen. I think of Ash practically as my sister.’
Which would technically make her his sister, too. Except Sean didn’t have any sibling-like feelings towards Claire. What he felt for Claire was...
Well, it was a lot easier to think of it as dislike. When they weren’t being scrupulously polite to each other, they clashed. They had totally opposite world views. They were totally incompatible. He wasn’t going to let himself think about the fact that her hair was the colour of a cornfield bathed in sunshine, and her eyes were the deep blue of a late summer evening. And he certainly wasn’t going to let himself think about the last time he’d kissed her.
‘Of course. I’ll get you a flight sorted.’
Though he noticed her movements while he was on the phone. Deft and very sure as she packed each dress in tissue paper to avoid creases, put it inside a plastic cover to protect it from any damage and then in a box. As if she’d done this many times before. Which, he realised, she probably had.
He’d never seen Claire at work before. Apart from when she’d measured the three men
in the wedding party for their waistcoats, and that had been at Ashleigh and Luke’s house. He’d been too busy concentrating on being polite and anodyne to her for his sister’s sake to take much notice of what she was actually doing.
And, OK, it was easy to think of dress designers as a bit kooky and not living in the same world as the rest of the population. The outlandish outfits on the catwalks in Milan and the big fashion shows left him cold and wondering what on earth was going on in the heads of the designers—real people just didn’t wear stuff like that. But the woman in front of him seemed businesslike. Organised. Efficient.
Like someone who belonged in his world.
He shook himself. That was just an illusion. Temporary. Claire didn’t belong in his world and he didn’t belong in hers. They’d be civil to each other over the next few days, purely for Ashleigh’s sake, and then they’d go back to avoiding each other.
Safely.
Copyright © 2015 by Pamela Brooks
ISBN-13: 9781460379585
Best Man for the Bridesmaid
Copyright © 2015 by Jennifer F. Stroka
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www.Harlequin.com
One kiss is never enough!
Claire Stewart thinks her day can’t get any worse—but she’s wrong! As if losing her best friend’s wedding dress isn’t enough, she’s now faced with the ultra-handsome, ultra-successful brother of the bride, Sean Farrell… Oh, and she’s had a crush on him for years!
Sean might have turned his back on romance a long time ago, but somehow Claire manages to slip inside his heart. The trouble is Sean knows that when it comes to Claire one scorching, unforgettable kiss at a wedding just isn’t enough…
Oh, help, Claire thought. She’d been here before.
She could still remember the first night she’d kissed Sean Farrell.
The way his mouth had felt against hers before he’d pulled away and given her a total dressing-down about being seventeen years old and in a state in which an unscrupulous man might have taken advantage of her.
Right now it would be all too easy to let her hands drift up over his shoulders, curl round the nape of his neck and draw his mouth down to hers. Particularly as they were no longer on the dance floor, in full view of the rest of the guests. At some point while they’d been dancing together, they’d moved away from the temporary dance floor. Now they were in a secluded area of the garden. Just the two of them in the twilight.
“Claire…” His voice was a whisper.
And she knew he was going to kiss her again.
Dear Reader,
When I visited Capri with my family a couple of years ago, I thought what an amazingly romantic place it was and how perfect it would be for a wedding. I’ve actually been on the chairlift up to Monte Solaro, and it’s breathtaking—but I’m with my heroine in that no way would I want to do it in a wedding dress (or even a bridesmaid’s dress) while carrying a bouquet!
So—take one wedding dress designer, one toffee magnate and an airline that loses something important on a really important day. Add a bit of stubbornness to both of them, make them be polite to each other at a wedding…and that’s when the magic starts.
Claire and Sean have very different takes on the world. She goes with the flow, whereas he likes things planned. And it’s the fact that they both need to learn to compromise that makes their story so much fun!
I hope you enjoy it.
With love
Kate Hardy
It Started at a Wedding…
By Kate Hardy
Award-winning author Kate Hardy lives in Norwich, England, with her husband, two children, one spaniel and too many books to count! She’s a fan of the theater, ballroom dancing, posh chocolate and anything Italian. She’s a history and science geek, plays the guitar and piano, and makes great cookies (which is why she also has to go to the gym five days a week…).
Books by Kate Hardy
HARLEQUIN ROMANCE
Once a Playboy…
Ballroom to Bride and Groom
Bound by a Baby
Behind the Film Star’s Smile
Crown Prince, Pregnant Bride
A New Year Marriage Proposal
Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles
To the Harlequin Romance authors, with much love and thanks for being such brilliant colleagues and friends—and for letting me bounce mad ideas off you!
Contents
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
EPILOGUE
EXCERPT
CHAPTER ONE
NO.
This couldn’t be happening.
The box had to be there.
It had to be.
But the luggage carousel was empty. It had even stopped going round, now the last case had been taken off it. And Claire was the only one standing there, waiting with a small suitcase and a dress box—and a heart full of panic.
Where was her best friend’s wedding dress?
‘Get a grip, Claire Stewart. Standing gawping at the carousel isn’t going to make the dress magically appear. Go and talk to someone,’ she told herself sharply. She gathered up her case and the box containing the bridesmaid’s dress, and went in search of someone who might be able to find out where the wedding dress was. Maybe the box had accidentally been put in the wrong flight’s luggage and it was sitting somewhere else, waiting to be claimed.
Half an hour of muddling through in a mixture of English and holidaymakers’ Italian got her the bad news. Somewhere between London and Naples, the dress had vanished.
The dress Claire had spent hours working on, hand-stitching the tiny pearls on the bodice and the edge of the veil.
The dress Claire’s best friend was supposed to be wearing at her wedding in Capri in two days’ time.
Maybe this was a nightmare and she’d wake up from it in a second. Surreptitiously, Claire pinched herself. It hurt. Not good, because that meant this was really happening. She was in Naples with her luggage, her own bridesmaid’s dress...and no wedding dress.
There was nothing else for it. She grabbed her mobile phone, found a quiet corner in the airport and called Ashleigh.
Whose phone was switched through to voicemail.
This definitely wasn’t the kind of news Claire could leave on voicemail; that would be totally unfair. She tried calling Luke, Ashleigh’s fiancé, but his phone was also switched through to voicemail. She glanced at her watch. It was still so early that they w
ere probably in the middle of breakfast and they’d probably left their phones in their room. OK. Who else could she call? She didn’t have a number for Tom, Luke’s best man. Sammy, her other best friend, who was photographing the wedding, wasn’t flying to Italy until tomorrow, after she’d finished a photo-shoot in New York. The rest of the wedding guests were due to arrive on the morning of the wedding.
Which left Ashleigh’s brother. The man who was going to give Ashleigh away. The man who played everything strictly by the rules—and Claire had just broken them. Big time. He was the last person she could call.
But he wasn’t in Capri yet, either. Which meant she had time to fix this.
What she needed was a plan.
Scratch that. What she really needed was coffee. She’d spent the last two weeks working all hours on Ashleigh’s dress as well as the work she was doing for a big wedding show, and she’d skimped on sleep to get everything done in time. That, plus the ridiculously early flight she’d taken out here this morning, meant that she was fuzzy and unfocused.
Coffee.
Even thought she normally drank lattes, this called for desperate measures. She needed something strong and something fast. One espresso with three sugars later, Claire’s head was clear enough to work out her options. It meant more travelling—a lot more travelling—but that didn’t matter. Claire would’ve walked over hot coals for Ashleigh. She was more than Claire’s best friend; she was the sister Claire would’ve chosen.
She tried calling Ashleigh again. This time, to Claire’s relief, her best friend answered her mobile phone.
‘Claire, hi! Are you in Naples already?’
‘Um, yes. But, Ash, there’s a bit of a problem.’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Honey, I don’t know how to soften this.’ There wasn’t a way to soften news like this. ‘Is Luke with you?’
Harlequin Romance April 2015 Box Set Page 55
