The Bridesmaid's Baby

And there was organ music, billowing and rippling like the background music in a sentimental movie. Will tried to swallow the lump in his throat. Why was it that weddings were designed to zero straight in on unsuspecting emotions?

He glanced at Jake and saw his Adam’s apple jerk.

‘You OK?’ he whispered out of the side of his mouth.

‘I’ll be fine once Mattie gets here.’

‘She won’t be late,’ Will reassured him and again he nervously patted the rings in his pocket.

There was a flurry in the little porch at the back of the church and, as if everyone had been choreographed, the congregation turned. Will felt fine hairs lift on the back of his neck. His stomach tightened.

The girls appeared in a misty mirage of white and pink. Will blinked. Lucy, Gina and Mattie looked incredibly out-of-this-world beautiful in long feminine dresses and glamorous hairstyles, and with their arms filled with flowers.

He heard Jake catch his breath, felt goose-bumps lift on his arms.

The organist struck a dramatic chord.

Lucy and Gina, apparently satisfied with their arrangement of Mattie’s dress and veil, took their places in front of her, Lucy first.

Will couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t trembling.

Lucy stood, shoulders back, looking straight ahead, with her blonde head high, her blue eyes smiling. To Will she looked vulnerable and yet resolute and his heart began to thunder loudly.

It was so weird.

He’d seen countless weddings and endless processions of bridesmaids, but none of them had made him feel the way he felt now as the organist began to play and Lucy began to walk down the aisle with her smile carefully in place.

She’d always tried to pretend she was a tomboy, keeping her hair short and wispy and preferring to live in T-shirts and jeans, but today nothing could hide her femininity.

Her pastel off-the-shoulders dress and the soft pink lilies in her arms highlighted the paleness of her hair, the honey-gold tints in her skin, the pink lushness of her lips. She had never looked lovelier.

Except perhaps…that one night on a shadowy veranda, when she’d turned to him with tears in her eyes…

He willed her to look at him. Just one glance would do. For old friendship’s sake. He wanted eye contact, needed to send her one smile, longed for one tiny link with her.

Come on, look this way, Lucy.

She smiled at the people in the congregation, at her particular friends, at Jake, but her gaze didn’t flicker any further to the right. It was clear she did not want to see Will.

Or, perhaps, she simply felt no need.

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