The Wedding Dress

by Dani Atkins

  The

  Wedding

  Dress

  For Hazel, my beautiful friend,

  who wore a blush pink wedding dress

  ALSO BY DANI ATKINS

  Fractured

  The Story of Us

  Our Song

  Perfect Strangers

  This Love

  While I Was Sleeping

  A Million Dreams

  A Sky Full of Stars

  The

  Wedding

  Dress

  DANI ATKINS

  www.headofzeus.com

  First published in the UK in 2021 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Dani Atkins, 2021

  The moral right of Dani Atkins to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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

  ISBN (HB): 9781800246492

  ISBN (XTPB): 9781800246508

  ISBN (E): 9781800246522

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM

  Contents

  Dedication

  Also by Dani Atkins

  Title Page

  Copyright

  PART ONE: Suzanne

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  PART TWO: Bella

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  PART THREE: Mandy

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  PART ONE

  Suzanne

  1

  The carpet was thick. And expensive. It was the type that left footprints in the pile when you walked across it. It was the palest of greys, the colour of a dove’s wings or an iridescent pearl plucked from an oyster. Surely it was a ridiculously impractical colour for a shop? I looked up at the rows of dresses lining the walls: white, ivory, champagne and cream. It was a bit like being in Heaven; everything around me was coloured in shades of white and the palest of pastels. Everything was immaculate. Dirt, soil and everyday grime simply wouldn’t be tolerated here. But just to be on the safe side, I spent much longer than usual grinding my feet backwards and forwards on the coconut doormat.

  A woman emerged from a shadowy area at the rear of the shop. Tall and as thin as a crochet hook, she was dressed from head to toe in black. Even her hair was ebony, the kind of shade that nature doesn’t do on Caucasian women. It was pulled back into the sort of topknot that surely had to hurt, and was neat enough to look as though it had been superglued into place. Absolutely no hairpins required.

  ‘Suzanne,’ she said, holding out a long-fingered hand to me as she crossed the distance between us. ‘Welcome back.’

  I smiled a lot more easily than I’d probably done on my first visit to Fleurs, some six months earlier. Of course, then I’d been facing the pressure of making one of the most important shopping decisions of my entire life, and doing it all alone. Except of course, I hadn’t really been alone, and I probably hadn’t even been the one making the decision, because Gwendoline Flowers, the indomitable owner of Fleurs Wedding Gowns, had pretty much decided on which dress I should buy as soon as I entered her shop.

  ‘Have you brought anyone with you today?’ Gwendoline asked, looking past my shoulder at the clearly empty space behind me.

  ‘My mother and my best friend – Karen – will be joining me for the fitting,’ I said, glancing down at my watch. ‘I think I may be a little early,’ I apologised, knowing that I was, in fact, a good fifteen minutes ahead of my scheduled appointment. Nothing new there. My fear of being late – for absolutely anything – was a phobia that at almost thirty-two I was probably never going to outgrow.

  ‘Far better to be early than late,’ Gwendoline announced archly, and I gave a small shudder for the foolhardy bride who failed to keep to her given appointment time. ‘Except for your wedding ceremony,’ she added. ‘You definitely don’t want to arrive early for that. And never get there before the groom,’ she added, with a scarily witch-like cackle. And I would know, seeing as witches had featured so prominently in my formative years. And dragons.

  ‘Take a seat, my dear, while we wait for your entourage to arrive,’ Gwendoline invited, her arm sweeping like a conductor instructing an invisible orchestra towards the same velvet-covered chair I had occupied six months earlier, on my first visit.

  As before, Gwendoline slipped behind the antique desk, and the memory of how our first meeting had felt exactly like a job interview came flooding back. I knew better than to expect any type of refreshments to be offered. There were establishments where the customers were offered a glass of champagne as they shopped for gowns, but Fleurs had a strict ban on food, drinks, small children and anything that walked on four feet.

  ‘So, just three weeks until the big day,’ Gwendoline said, smiling in a way that managed to reveal practically every one of her teeth.

  I felt the nervous knot of tension in my stomach, the one that kept giving me sleepless nights the closer it got to my wedding day, twist and tighten. ‘Yes. It’s all gone terrifyingly fast. I just hope I haven’t forgotten anything. You were absolutely right when you said six months wasn’t long enough to plan a wedding.’

  ‘All you really need are two things,’ the shop owner declared. ‘A magnificent dress…’ – she inclined her head towards a curtained cubicle, where I guessed mine was waiting to be tried on – ‘and a truly wonderful groom.’

  I gave a small happy sigh and smiled. One of those, I definitely had. Although I knew the jury was still out on that verdict as far as some members of our wedding party were concerned. One of whom was my mother. It probably hadn’t helped that she’d had so few opportunities to meet and get to know her future son-in-law before he officially became a member of our family. Or was I becoming a member of his? I really wasn’t sure of the protocol.

  Part of the problem was that my mother lived in Cornwall, and the other part was that she hated men… No, that wasn’t entirely true; it was only my father she truly disliked. Which is probably part of the reason she also hated marriage, both as an idea and as an experience that having tried once she’d chosen never to repeat.

  Darrell liked to describe his future mother-in-law as delightfully eccentric, a phrase I hoped for his sake he never decided to share in front of her. He also took considerable delight in her celebrity status, certainly far more than I had ever done. My mother is an author, a very successful one. If I told
you the name on my birth certificate, you’d know instantly who she is. There’s probably not a child in the country who hasn’t read one of the books in her series about magic, witches and fearsome, molten-lava-spewing dragons.

  I was uncommonly popular at school, which had nothing whatsoever to do with me. I was a quiet and introverted little girl, the kind who lurked at the edges of the playground; who never dared to hang upside-down on the climbing frame; who was the last child over every finishing line on sports day. But there was an almost obscene clamour to be my friend, to be invited back to tea after school, or even – the holy grail of achievements – to be invited for a sleepover. I’ve no idea whether my classmates were disappointed to discover we lived in a very comfortable, but otherwise boringly normal house, rather than the castle they were clearly expecting.

  My father had bounced happily from one money-making scheme to another, doing his best to spend my mother’s income at a rate that almost outpaced her ability to earn it. It was certainly a surprise when, after many years of living together, they chose to get married just before my fifth birthday. Far less surprising was their divorce, just after I turned eight. My father had disappeared to Spain shortly after that, taking with him a sizeable chunk of my mother’s latest advance, which he’d used to open a bar in Malaga that unexpectedly became hugely successful. He’d left nothing behind except bad memories for my mother, and his surname, which I legally adopted; this at least prevented me from having to answer the inevitable ‘I don’t suppose you’re related to…?’ every time I was introduced to someone.

  It was difficult to know if some of my mother’s anti-Darrell feelings were because – despite her objections – I’d asked my father to give me away at the wedding, thereby forcing my warring parents, who hadn’t exchanged more than a dozen words in over twenty years, to spend a day in each other’s company without killing their former spouse.

  ‘Does the dress look good?’ I asked, suddenly aware it had been several minutes since either Gwendoline or I had spoken. Normally I was comfortable with silence, but today I wanted noise and distraction around me.

  ‘Are you worried you won’t still like it?’ asked Gwendoline, raising one perfectly threaded brow. ‘Because you don’t need to be. You will. It’s going to look beautiful and will fit you perfectly.’

  How she knew that was a mystery, but it was one I was prepared to accept without question. She knew it in the way I understood a ledger book, or how to file a VAT or tax return. When, six months earlier, I’d sat opposite her across this same desk and admitted I really had no idea what kind of wedding dress I wanted, or what would suit me, she’d drawn herself up in her chair, and for just a moment her nostrils had flared, and I was reminded of the fire-breathing dragons who lived in my mother’s imagination. And then Gwendoline had smiled and risen gracefully to her feet, declaring with a confident smile, ‘I do love a challenge.’

  She’d stood me on one side of the room and had walked slowly around me, as though I was a horse at a county fair. Occasionally she’d murmured instructions. ‘Turn to your left.’ ‘Now your right.’ ‘Lift your hair off your neck.’ ‘Now let it fall.’ It had all seemed a little arbitrary and when she’d disappeared, returning a minute or two later with three cellophane-covered dresses draped over her arm, I had had my doubts. Just three dresses? In a shop that surely held hundreds, if not thousands?

  The first dress was ‘the one’. I tried on numbers two and three, just to be polite, but I think we both knew my mind was already made up; it had been even before Gwendoline had finished lacing up the bodice. I’d taken far longer deciding whether or not to accept Darrell’s – very unexpected – proposal, which was something that bothered me a little whenever I thought about it too much. So I tried not to.

  Darrell and I had only been dating seriously for four months, and the very last thing I’d been expecting was to see him drop down on one knee in the restaurant where he’d taken me for Valentine’s Day. Every table around us had fallen embarrassingly silent, forks poised halfway to mouths as they waited to hear my reply. There were waiters standing prepped and ready at the edge of the room with a bottle of chilled champagne in a silver bucket, so clearly even they’d known this had been on Darrell’s mind for longer than I had.

  I remember looking down into his large soulful brown eyes, and even while some part of me knew I should be saying something sensible like We really haven’t been together all that long yet or Why don’t we just move in with each other? or even Hey, slow down, what’s the rush?, somehow none of those would have been what the waiters, the other diners, or Darrell had been expecting me to say. So I said the only thing I could, given the circumstances. I said ‘yes’.

  *

  ‘Whoa, I’m seriously gonna need sunglasses before I look at that thing again,’ my friend and colleague Karen had cried when I’d walked past her desk the morning after accepting Darrell’s proposal. It was Monday and the first thought that had flashed through my head when my six a.m. alarm had sounded was Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m actually engaged. I’d rolled over, reaching out for the man who’d placed the square-cut diamond on my finger the night before, only to remember that he hadn’t been able to stay the night. ‘I’m so sorry, sweetheart, but my flight to Berlin is crazy early, and I still haven’t packed yet,’ Darrell had apologised, kissing me very slowly and thoroughly just to prove how much he didn’t want to leave.

  ‘I understand,’ I’d said with a regretful sigh, trying to ignore the voice that had whispered annoyingly in my head, the one that wasn’t too shy to ask why he’d chosen a night when he’d known he’d have to pop the question and run.

  Darrell travelled. A lot. I should know that better than anyone, because the first time I’d met him had been on one of his many business trips. I’d been on a company conference, and after an evening of less-than-scintillating conversation – there’s a reason accountants have earned a reputation for being boring – I’d done something quite out of character and walked into the hotel bar alone. Just a nightcap, I told myself. I won’t even put it down to expenses, and then I’ll go straight up to my room.

  I’d felt more than a little self-conscious as I crossed the room to the long beaten-copper-surfaced bar. A single woman in a hotel bar wasn’t unusual, not these days – but it was unusual for me. I was seriously regretting my decision, when an attractive man in his mid-thirties, seated on a stool to my right, looked up from his drink and smiled. There was something about him, something engaging and warm, that made me think that, for just one night, it might be all right to be the kind of girl who could accept the offer of a drink from a good-looking stranger.

  One drink led to three, then four, and then I lost count. The bar emptied, until we were the last two people in it. The hotel employee who’d been serving us had coughed discreetly, having wiped down and cleared away everything that needed tidying, tipped out the bowls of nuts, and switched off most of the lights.

  Darrell had chivalrously taken my elbow as I’d climbed down from the bar stool, which certainly seemed a lot further from the ground than it had done when I’d climbed up on to it a few hours earlier. I’d intercepted a brief look of concern on the bartender’s face as his eyes flashed from me and then to the man who was carefully supporting my weight. I was swaying slightly, and while logically I knew the floor was perfectly stationary, it still felt as though I was on the deck of a boat on turbulent waters.

  ‘I’ll see she gets safely to her room,’ assured the man who’d been my companion for the evening. The barman frowned, making a single bushy monobrow form over his eyes. If there’d been a thought bubble above his head, it would clearly have said, That’s what I’m worried about.

  I don’t remember crossing from the dimly lit bar into the overly bright hotel foyer, or summoning the lift. I’d closed my eyes against the disturbing image of the flushed-face young woman in the mirrored walls of the lift carriage, and only opened them again when we’d pinged to a stop at my floor. Darr
ell took the plastic key card from my hand, and after glancing down to check my room number, had taken my arm, as though escorting me into dinner in a period drama, and guided me to my door.

  I do remember becoming almost-all-the-way-sober as he slid the card into the slot, withdrawing it smartly as the light turned green. What the hell was I doing? This wasn’t me. I wasn’t the kind of girl who picked up random strangers in hotel bars and took them up to my room. I didn’t do this.

  Neither, it turned out, did Darrell. He’d placed one smartly polished shoe in the opening, to prevent the door from closing, and bent to graze my cheek lightly with a kiss so fleeting I scarcely even felt the touch of his lips. Then he’d gently propelled me into the room.

  ‘Drink all the water from the mini bar,’ he’d advised, his eyes twinkling warmly as I groped on the wall for the light switch. ‘Sleep well, Suzanne,’ he said softly, as he withdrew his foot and the door began to swing to a close. ‘It’s been really lovely meeting you.’

  *

  ‘God, you were so lucky,’ Karen had declared, when I’d recounted the story to her several days later, on my return to the office. ‘He could have been an axe murderer, or a rapist, or… or…’

  ‘I think you’ve probably covered most of the worst-case scenarios,’ I’d said, my voice a little brittle because I was embarrassed, and also because I knew she was right. I don’t take risks, I think everything through, weigh it up carefully, and then always, always, play it safe. I am the epitome of careful. I’m made of the stuff that most likely earned accountants their reputation for being dull.

  ‘It was a one-off moment of madness, a temporary lapse, which luckily I walked away from unscathed,’ I said, gathering up the armful of files that I’d temporarily dropped on to her desk as we chatted. I picked them up and made to return to my own work station, at the opposite end of the huge open-plan office floor.