One Wedding Required! Read online

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  Dedication

  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

  Copyright

  Three brides in search of the perfect dress—and the perfect husband!

  Welcome to this fabulous new trilogy by talented Presents author Sharon Kendrick. On a bride’s special day, there’s nothing more important to her than a beautiful wedding dress—apart from the perfect bridegroom! Meet three women who are about to find both....

  This month in One Wedding Required!, Amber wears the very same dress that Holly Lovelace wore in One Bridegroom Required!

  And don’t miss One Husband Required! in April (Harlequin Presents #2023), when Amber’s sister, Ursula, walks up the aisle in it, too!

  Read on and share the excitement as Holly, Amber and Ursula meet and marry their bridegrooms!

  Dear Reader,

  Planning a wedding is like writing your first book—you should stick with what you know! My husband and I were flat broke when we got married, and the only way to guarantee a show-stopping dress was to have it made for me (refusing to accept that my curvy shape looked nothing like the supermodel on the front of the pattern!). So I bought slippery satin and filmy organza and the dress was made and...

  And I looked like a whale!

  Two weeks before the ceremony, I had to rush out to buy a replacement dress. Luckily I found one—but I ended up with two wedding dresses and a lot of extra expense!

  With weddings, it’s best to play safe....

  At least until after the service is over!

  SHARON KENDRICK

  One Wedding Required!

  TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

  AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY HAMBURG

  STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID

  PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

  To legal-eagle Catrin, honey-voiced Hyim,

  and their three gorgeous children,

  Naomi, David and Daniella

  PROLOGUE

  THE wedding dress gleamed indistinctly through its heavy shrouding of plastic.

  It was an exquisite gown—simple and striking and fashioned with care from ivory silk-satin. Organza whispered softly beneath the skirt and the matching veil was made of gossamer-fine tulle.

  At a little over twenty years old, it was ageless and timeless, a future heirloom—to be passed down from bride to bride, each woman adapting it and making it uniquely hers.

  The dress already had a history. It had been worn once, by Holly Lovelace, but it had originally been bought for the weddings of two other women: two sisters.

  One of those sisters was Amber O’Neil, and it was her destiny to wear that dress.

  But everyone knew the many twists and turns that destiny could take...

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘SO, AMBER—’ the journalist looked up from his notebook and smiled at her encouragingly ‘—can you tell us the story of how you and Finn Fitzgerald actually met?’

  Amber hesitated, the question making her uncomfortably aware that she was breaking an unspoken rule. This wasn’t the kind of thing she normally did. She never gave interviews. Neither did Finn. Never allowed cameras inside their home either, and yet she had done just that today. Then had spent the afternoon changing into a variety of outfits and striking a number of different poses all around their home.

  There had been Amber in black satin, reclining against huge white cushions on their king-size bed. Amber in a pink cashmere dress, her hair tucked neatly behind her ear, while she pretended to talk into the telephone. Amber in jeans, drinking juice and swinging her legs from the kitchen counter. And, of course, Amber wrinkling her nose at the photographer as she stood in front of the scarlet-ribboned Christmas garlands the journalist had brought with him to decorate her mantelpiece. She was to be in the pre-Christmas edition of the magazine, which they were shooting several weeks before the festival itself—and therefore they had to manufacture an early Christmas.

  Amber didn’t mind a bit. Christmas was one of her favourite times of year—a time when she always went rather mad. She had needed very little persuasion to put the tree up a few weeks earlier than she would normally have done. After all, the shops had had them in their windows for weeks and weeks!

  The photographer had got quite excited as he gazed into his viewfinder, telling her that the subtle gleam of her golden dress contrasted beautifully against the dark green of the pine needles.

  They had wanted to shoot her standing in the garden, wearing a filmy dress, but, apart from the fact that the weather was too cold, Amber knew that trick of old. They would take the shot and carefully use the position of the sun to ensure that the dress ended up looking entirely see-through. Her body would be on show for all the world to see—as surely as if she were naked!

  And while Amber still wasn’t sure what Finn’s reaction to this article would be, she knew damn well that he would draw the line at that! For a man who worked in an industry where nudity barely caused a flicker of consternation, Finn Fitzgerald was curiously old-fashioned when it came to his fiancée.

  Fiancée!

  Amber swallowed down her excitement, and allowed her gaze to drift to the whacking great stone which glittered so brilliantly on the third finger of her left hand. It was still hard to believe, but the engagement ring was solid and real, and confirmation enough. She was engaged to be married to Finn Fitzgerald—the man she loved with a passion which terrified her. The man of her dreams. The man...

  ‘Amber?’

  ‘Mmm?’ Amber looked up and stared back at the journalist who had broken into her reverie, her dark blue eyes first blinking, then focussing as she forced her thoughts back to the present.

  ‘You were saying?’ he prompted, with all the smoothness of the professional interrogator.

  Amber blinked. ‘I was?’

  ‘About Finn. And how you met.’

  ‘Oh.’ Amber smiled. ‘That!’ Well, what the hell? Why not tell their story to the world? Finn had given her the biggest diamond ring she had ever seen—so he obviously didn’t mind the whole world knowing that they were engaged. And in fact a big part of Amber wanted to tell the world. Wanted to cause something of a stir.

  Because after Finn had slipped the ring on her finger, Amber had been aware of a curious feeling of deflation, of anticlimax. As though the engagement should have changed everything between them—and yet everything seemed exactly as it had been before. Was that usual for engaged couples? she found herself wondering worriedly. And was it right?

  ‘How did I meet Finn?’ Amber mused aloud, in answer to the journalist’s searching stare. ‘Well, it was nothing really special. No, let me put that another way—it was very special, of course it was, but...’ Her voice tailed off and she bit her lip, wondering just how to put into words the physical and mental and psychological impact of falling in love at first sight with a man like Finn. A man who regularly bowled women over like ninepins.

  The journalist held up his hand as he fiddled around with the tape recorder, then cleared his throat. ‘Tell you what—’ his smile was fulsome ‘—why don’t we have a drink while we talk?’

  ‘A drink? What—like tea?’

  The man gave a cynical laugh. ‘Ever met a journalist who drinks tea? I was thinking more on the lines of wine!’

  ‘In the middle of the afternoo
n?’

  The man shrugged, thinking that, for such a babe, she was pretty naive. ‘We won’t be breaking any laws That’s why I brought the bubbly with me.’ He pointed to the frosted and expensive bottle. ‘To celebrate your engagement.’

  Amber nodded, absurdly pleased—but then her new status as Finn’s wife-to-be was still too novel for her to behave in a way which could be described as normal! Did newly engaged women drink champagne in the middle of the afternoon with men who were strangers? The journalist obviously thought so. ‘Okay, Mr Millington,’ she agreed with a smile. ‘Why not?’

  The journalist, ‘call me Paul’, took over the task of opening the champagne and pouring two glassfuls with the speed of a man who had performed this particular task many times before.

  ‘To your future happiness,’ he told her rather insincerely, as they touched glasses.

  It sounded like a bell ringing as crystal chinked against crystal. Wedding bells, thought Amber suddenly. She definitely wanted wedding bells. A nice old-fashioned wedding. It didn’t have to be big, but it had to be in a church—not a trendy rush to some upmarket London register office! But they hadn’t even discussed the wedding properly. Not once. And she found herself wondering whether that was right, too.

  ‘Cheers!’ said Paul. He drank deeply and switched his tape recorder back on. ‘Now, fire away. Tell me how it all started. You wanted to be a model, right?’

  Amber shook her head. ‘Not really, no. It certainly wasn’t something I set out to do.’

  ‘But all your life people had been telling you that you were beautiful, right?’

  ‘Wrong.’ Amber shook her head again ruefully. ‘I didn’t grow up in that sort of world. I lived in a rough part of London on a big, sprawling estate—’

  The journalist expelled a long breath of surprise. He would never have guessed it, not in a million years. With the Dresden delicacy of her looks, she looked like a woman who had been born and brought up in the lap of luxury—waited on and fêted all her life. ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’ Amber sipped her wine, almost amused by the shock which had registered on his face. ‘My mother was a widow, and money was very tight. She’d worked her fingers to the bone to bring me and my sister up in a pretty hostile world. And in that world, good looks were dangerous.’

  ‘Dangerous?’ The journalist looked at her with interest, sniffing out a different angle on an old story.

  Amber nodded, the memories crowding in fast now, demanding to be heard. Painful memories. Her mother’s old-fashioned reluctance to talk to her daughters about growing up and sex. The shock of Amber’s periods starting, and the unfamiliarity of her fast-burgeoning breasts. She had been too frightened to ask her mother to buy her a bra, and even more frightened by the raw gleam of desire she’d seen reflected in the eyes of the men who had lived in the council flats around her.

  ‘It was the kind of world where girls of sixteen got pregnant, then deserted. Jobs were scarce and men were fickle. Easy come. Easy go. A pretty face meant that you had to fight them off.’ Particularly if that pretty face was outstanding in its prettiness.

  Amber had quickly learnt to minimise her assets. Hair scraped back. No make-up. Clothes worn to disguise a body rather than to draw attention to it. While Amber’s contemporaries had been squeezing themselves into tight, tight jeans and clinging tops, Amber had been dressing in the kind of clothes which would have looked good in a maternity department. Her sister Ursula had used a different method of concealment—she had just got fat.

  ‘Did you ever get fed up with fighting them off?’ asked Paul slyly.

  Amber laughed. ‘Never. And I never let them get close enough to have to fight them off. I just knew that there was something better out there. A different kind of life. The flat we lived in was poky—far too small for my mother and sister and me. So I left there just as soon as I could—at sixteen.’

  Paul nodded. ‘With qualifications?’

  Amber shook her head. ‘You’re joking! The school I went to wasn’t famous for getting its pupils through exams.’ Her voice was wry. ‘If it kept them out of the remand centres and off the streets, it considered that it had done a good job!’

  Paul scanned the sheet of paper in front of him. ‘But you didn’t join the Allure agency until you were almost twenty, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So what does a girl of sixteen with no qualifications do?’

  ‘She gets a job living in. Hotels, usually. You can always find a job in a hotel. I’ve been a chambermaid and a receptionist. I’ve worked behind bars and I’ve waited tables. The money is lousy, but at least you can get yourself a room in central London.’

  ‘Smart girl.’ The journalist refilled his glass. ‘And you made the most of the city, did you?’

  I tried. I did everything that was free—so I knew all the art galleries and museums like the back of my hand.’

  ‘Exciting times,’ murmured the journalist sarcastically.

  ‘Those bits I loved,’ Amber defended staunchly. ‘And I started reading, too. Devouring books which filled in the education I’d missed.’

  ‘Then what?’

  Amber shrugged. ‘Too many people kept telling me that I had a beautiful face—’

  ‘And that was a problem?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, of course it wasn’t a problem—I’ d grown up seeing real problems, and having a sympathetically proportioned face certainly didn’t qualify! But after a while it becomes a little difficult to ignore, especially when the novelty of having your own place wears off. The hours at the hotel were long and tedious, and the money was lousy, and all of a sudden my poky little room began to look less like a palace and more of a prison.’ And there had been more men to fight off. Rich, slick businessmen whose rooms she’d cleaned, who’d thought that their fat wallets and fat stomachs would make them appealing to a young girl with only her looks and her natural intelligence as assets.

  The whirr of the tape recorder was the only sound in the room. It was a hypnotic sound. ‘Go on,’ said Paul smoothly.

  It was strangely cathartic to be able to talk so honestly about her past. Amber narrowed her navy eyes and let the words come spilling out, shuddering as she remembered the corpulent company director who had asked her to become his mistress!

  ‘I found myself looking into the future,’ she said slowly. ‘And I realised that, if I wasn’t careful, then I was consigning myself to a life of drudgery just like my mother’s had been. Only things were different for me. I wasn’t a widow with two children—I didn’t have to live like that I was limiting my horizons for no other reason than that I feared my attraction to the opposite sex.’

  The journalist gave a cynical laugh. ‘So you really threw yourself in at the deep end by getting hooked up to a man like Finn Fitzgerald?’

  Amber shook her head. ‘I didn’t get “hooked up” with Finn for ages. First of all, I went along to the Allure agency—’

  ‘What made you choose Allure? You’d seen a picture of the owner, right?’

  ‘Wrong. I had no idea that Finn existed—I just knew that Allure was the biggest and the best agency in London, and the most central. I walked in, and...and...’

  ‘And?’

  It was difficult to put into words just how she had felt when she had first set eyes on Finn. She had been dressed to kill. Or so she had thought. Her sister had told her that if she was planning to visit a modelling agency, then she had better do something dramatic about her appearance.

  So she had.

  Out had gone the stark pony-tail and the layered clothes. The amber-gold hair which had given her her name had been washed and crimped, so that it had blazed around her shoulders like a pleated golden cloud. But she had committed the cardinal crime of the novice where her make-up was concerned. She had borrowed bright blue eye-shadow and boot-black mascara and shiny cyclamen lipstick and had ladled them on freely. If she had had a best friend, then the best friend might have told her that she resembled a
pantomime dame. But there had been no one other than Ursula, and her sister had had even less idea about make-up than she had.

  Her clothes had been her own—bought specially for the occasion. A skirt which had been too short and a blouse which had been too tight. Market clothes, both of them—and as cheap as you could buy. It made her shudder now to think what she must have looked like. She had tottered into the Allure office on high, squeaky shoes which hurt her feet, and...

  ‘And?’ prompted the journalist again.

  Amber sighed as she remembered the impact of first meeting Finn. Of meeting the kind of man she never would have thought existed, not in real life. Not in her life, anyway...

  Her heart picked up speed as she remembered. ‘I walked into the Allure office and Finn Fitzgerald was sitting there, dressed entirely in black. Black polo-neck sweater. Black jeans. Black hair. And his hair was all ruffled. There was just something about him—I can’t describe it. Something which drew your eye to him, and only him—no matter who else was in the room. As though he had a special, inner illumination all of his own. He was—’ She bit her lip as she tried to think of a way to describe Finn.

  ‘The sexiest thing on two legs?’ Paul Millington suggested. ‘Testosterone personified?’

  Amber burst out laughing. It was an outrageous way of putting it. But true. ‘Well, yes,’ she conceded. ‘But his appeal goes much deeper than his good looks. He’s very charismatic.’

  ‘Well, that goes without saying!’

  ‘Mmm,’ agreed Amber dreamily. ‘It does. Anyway, he was sitting at this circular desk, talking into the phone, with pictures of the most beautiful women all over the walls behind him. I nearly walked out at that point.’