Something Borrowed

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Ashleigh eyed her future mother-in-law with both curiosity and concern. It wasn’t like Nancy to be so flustered. When she’d offered to help with the wedding arrangements Ashleigh had very gratefully accepted, her own mother having died several years before. She imagined not many women could have smoothly put together a full-scale wedding in the eight weeks that had elapsed since the night she’d accepted James’s proposal. But Nancy Hargraves had for many years been Glenbrook’s top social hostess, and all had been achieved without a ruffle.

Ashleigh got slowly to her feet, taken aback to detect red-rimmed eyes behind the woman’s glasses.

‘What’s happened?’ she said with a lurch in her stomach.

‘I...I’ve heard from Jake,’ came the blurted-out admission.

Ashleigh felt the blood drain from her face. She clutched her dressing-gown around her chest and sank slowly down on to the stool again. It was several seconds before she looked up and spoke. ‘I presume he rang,’ she said in a hard, tight voice. ‘There’s no mail on a Saturday.’

The other woman shook her head. ‘He sent me a letter through a courier service. It arrived a short while ago.’

‘What...what did he say?’ she asked thickly.

‘Apparently the wedding invitation only just reached him,’ Nancy said with the brusqueness of emotional distress. ‘He...he sends his apologies that he can’t attend. He...he also sent this and specifically asked me to give it back to you today before the wedding.’

Ashleigh stared at the silver locket and chain dangling from the woman’s shaking fingers. Her own hand trembled as she reached out to take it, a vivid memory flashing into her mind.

‘What’s this?’ Jake had asked when she’d held the heart-shaped locket out between the bars of his cell the night before the verdict had come down.

Her smile had been pathetically thin. ‘My heart,’ she’d said. ‘Keep it with you while you’re in here. You can give it back to me when you get out, when you come to claim the real thing.’

‘I could be here for years, Leigh,’ had come his rough warning. Jake always called her Leigh, never Ashleigh.

‘I’ll wait...I’ll wait for you forever.’

‘Forever is a long time,’ he’d bitten out in reply. But he’d taken her offering and shoved it in the breast pocket of the shabby shirt he’d been wearing.

Now she stared down at the heart-shaped locket for a long, long moment, then crushed it in her hand, her eyes closing against the threatened rush of tears.

‘I’m sorry to have upset you, Ashleigh,’ Nancy said in a strained voice. ‘I know what Jake once meant to you. But believe me when I say I wanted nothing more than to see you and James happily married today. I did not want to come here with this. But I had to do what my son asked. I just had to. I...’

She broke off, and Ashleigh’s wet lashes fluttered open to see a Nancy Hargraves she’d never encountered before. The woman looked grey, and ill.

Anger against Jake flooded through her, washing the pain from her heart, leaving a bitter hardness instead. How dared he do this, today, of all days? How dared he?

Ashleigh pulled herself together and stood up, the locket tightly clasped within her right hand. ‘It’s all right, Nancy,’ she stated firmly. ‘I’m all right. I have no intention of letting Jake spoil my wedding-day. Or my marriage. You haven’t told James about the letter, have you?’

Nancy’s blue eyes widened, perhaps at the steel in Ashleigh’s voice. ‘N...no...’

‘Then everything’s all right, isn’t it? I certainly won’t be mentioning it. By tonight, James and I will be driving off on our honeymoon and he’ll be none the wiser.’

She was shocked when her future mother-in-law uttered a choked sob and fled from the room.

CHAPTER TWO

ASHLEIGH stood there for a few moments in stunned silence, her thoughts in disarray. But she soon gathered her wits, renewing her resolve not to let Jake spoil her marriage to James. No doubt Nancy would soon collect herself as well and present a composed face at the ceremony in little over half an hour’s time.

‘Mrs Hargraves gone, I see?’ Kate said as she breezed back into Ashleigh’s bedroom. ‘What on earth did she want? She looked rather uptight.’

‘Yes, she did, didn’t she?’ Ashleigh agreed with a deliberately carefree air. Kate was a dear friend but an inveterate gossip, the very last person one would tell about the correspondence from Jake. Everyone in Glenbrook would know about it within a week, with suitable embellishments. It had been Kate who had furnished Ashleigh with the news of Jake’s fleeting visit over three years before, the information gleaned from Nancy Hargraves’s cook, a talkative lady who had her hair done at Kate’s salon every week.

Ashleigh smiled disarmingly at her friend. ‘It proves that even someone like James’s mother can be nervous with the right occasion. I thought something must have gone wrong there for a moment. But she just called in to give me this to wear today.’ And she held up the locket and chain. ‘Must be one of your mob, Kate. An upholder of old traditions. This is to be my something borrowed.’

The irony of her excuse struck Ashleigh immediately, but she bravely ignored the contraction in her chest. She’d lent Jake her heart, and now he’d given it back to her.

Good, she decided staunchly. I’ll entrust it to James. He’ll take much better care of it, I’m sure.

With a surge of something like defiance, she slipped the chain around her neck. ‘Do this up for me, will you?’ she asked her chief bridesmaid.

‘Will do. But what are you going to do for the something old, something new and something blue?’

‘No trouble,’ Ashleigh tossed off. ‘My pearl earrings are old, my dress is new, and my bra has a blue bow on it.’

‘Spoil-sport,’ Kate complained. ‘I had a blue garter all lined up for you.’

‘OK. I’ll wear that too. Now help me climb into this monstrosity of a dress, will you? The photographer’s due here in ten minutes.’

‘You’re suitably late now, Miss O’Neil, ’ the chauffeur of the hire-car informed. ‘Shall I head for the park?’

‘God, yes,’ her father grumbled from his seat beside her. ‘If we go round this damned block one more time I’ll be in danger of being car-sick for the first time in my life!’

‘Kate insisted I be at least ten minutes late,’ Ashleigh defended, feeling more than a little churned up in the stomach herself. But it wasn’t car-sickness. Much as she had maintained a cool exterior since the perturbing encounter with Nancy, inside she was a mess. And it was all Jake’s fault. The whole catastrophe of her personal life so far had been Jake’s fault!

But no longer, she decided ruefully. She was going to marry James and be happy if it killed her!

She slanted her father a sideways glance, thinking wryly that he was far from comfortable in his role as father of the bride. He was a good doctor, but an antisocial man, whose bedside manner left a lot to be desired.

Ashleigh believed she’d contributed a lot to his practice since joining it, always being willing to lend a sympathetic ear, especially to women patients. They certainly asked for her first. She planned to continue working, at least part-time, even if she did get pregnant straight away, which was her and James’s hope.

Thinking about having a baby, however, brought her mind back to the intimate side of marriage, and the night ahead of her. Another attack of nerves besieged her stomach. Dear heaven, she groaned silently. She hadn’t realised that going to bed with James would loom as such an ordeal.

Her hand fluttered up unconsciously to touch the locket lying in the deep valley between her breasts.

Any worry over her wedding-night was distracted, however, when the park came into view. Oh, my God, she thought as her eyes ran over what Nancy had arranged for her favourite son’s wedding.

A rueful smile crossed Ashleigh’s lips. James’s vetoing a church service clearly hadn’t stopped his mother’s resolve to have a traditional and very public ceremony. Right in the middle of the park under an attractive clump of trees sat a flower-garlanded dais, with an enormous strip of red carpet leading up to it, on either side of which were rows and rows of seats, all full of guests. But the pièce de résistance was the electric organ beside the dais, which seemed to have a hundred extension leads running from it away to a van on which two loud speakers were placed.

Ashleigh shook her head in drily amused resignation. Serve herself right for giving James’s mother carte blanche with the arrangements.

‘Trust Nancy Hargraves to turn this wedding into a social circus,’ her father muttered crossly as the white Fairlane pulled up next to the stone archway that marked the entrance to the park. A fair crowd of onlookers were waiting there for the bride’s arrival, not to mention several photographers and a video cameraman. ‘Thank God I’ve only got one daughter. I wouldn’t want to go through all this again.’

Ashleigh felt a surge of irritation towards her father. Why did he always have to make her feel that her being female was a bother to him?

If only Mum were still alive, she thought with a pang of sadness. She would have so loved today. Not for the first time Ashleigh wondered how such a soft, sentimental woman had married a man like her father.

People always claimed she took after her mother. She certainly hoped so.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ Edgar O’Neil went on curtly while they sat there waiting for the chauffeur to make his way round to Ashleigh’s door. ‘It’s as well Stuart will be joining the practice next year. You’re going to be too busy having babies and dinner parties to be bothered with doctoring. And rightly so. A woman’s place is in the home.’

Ashleigh was too flabbergasted to say a word. She had always known that her father was one of the old brigade at heart. Also that her younger brother would be joining the practice after he finished his residency. But her father spoke as if her services would be summarily dispensed with!

As for her giving dinner parties...Nancy Hargraves and her late husband might have been the hub of Glenbrook’s social life, the Hargraves family owning the logging company and timber mill which were the economic mainstays of the town. But James was not a social animal in the least, and Ashleigh didn’t anticipate their married life would contain too much entertaining.

She had planned to go on working, babies or not. Or at least she had...till her father had dropped his bombshell just now. Her heart turned over with a mixture of disappointment and dismay, though quickly replaced by a prickly resolve. She would just have to start up a practice of her own, then, wouldn’t she?

Alighting from the car, Ashleigh had to make a conscious effort to put a relaxed, smiling face on for the photographers and all the people avidly watching her every move. Heavens, but it looked as if the whole town had turned out to see their only lady doctor getting married.

Or was there a measure of black curiosity, came the insidious thought, over her marrying the wrong brother?

Stop it! she breathed to herself fiercely. Now just you stop it!

‘Doesn’t she look beautiful?’ someone whispered as she made her way carefully up the stone steps and through the archway, her skirt hitched up slightly so she didn’t trip.

‘Like a fairy princess,’ was another comment.

Ashleigh felt warmed by their compliments, though she knew any woman would look good in what she was wearing. The dress and veil combined had cost a fortune, Nancy having insisted she have the very best. Personally she had thought the Gone With The Wind style gown, with its heavy beading, low-cut neck, flounced sleeves and huge layered skirt, far too elaborate for her own simpler tastes. But Nancy had been insistent.

‘It’s expected of my daughter-in-law to wear something extra-special,’ she had said in that haughty manner which could have been aggravating if one let it. But Ashleigh accepted the woman for what she was. A harmless snob. James had a bit of it in him too, but less offensively so.

Jake had been just the opposite, refusing to conform to his mother’s rather stiff social conventions, always going his own way. Not for him a short back and sides haircut. Or suits. Or liking classical music. Jake had been all long, wavy hair, way-out clothes and hard-rock bands. Only in his grades had he lived up to his parental expectations, being top of the school.

Irritation at how her mind kept drifting to Jake sent a scowl to her face.

‘Smile, Doc,’ the photographer from the local paper urged. ‘You’re going to be married, not massacred.’

Ashleigh stopped to throw a beaming smile the photographer’s way. ‘This better?’

‘Much!’

‘Come, Ashleigh,’ her father insisted, taking her elbow and shepherding her across the small expanse of lawn to where the imitation aisle of red carpet started and her attendants were waiting. ‘We’re late enough as it is.’

Her chief bridesmaid thought so too, it appeared. ‘Now that’s taking tradition a bit too far for my liking,’ Kate grumbled. ‘I was beginning to think you’d got cold feet and done a flit.’

‘Never,’ Ashleigh laughed.

‘Well, stranger things have happened. But all’s well that ends well. I’ll just give the nod for the music to start and the men to get ready. I think they’re all hiding behind the dais. Still nervous?’ she whispered while she straightened her friend’s veil.

‘Terrified,’ Ashleigh said truthfully, a lump gathering in her throat as all the guests stood up, blocking out any view of the three men walking round to stand at the base of the dais steps.

‘Good. Nothing like a nervous bride. Nerves make them look even more beautiful, though God knows I don’t know how anyone could look any more beautiful than you do today, dear friend. James is going to melt when he sees you.’

‘Will you two females stop gasbagging?’ the father of the bride interrupted peevishly.

‘Keep your shirt on, Dr O’Neil,’ Kate returned, not one to ever be hassled by a man, even a respected physician of fifty-five. Which could explain why, at thirty, she’d never been a bride herself. ‘We’ll be ready when we’re ready and not a moment before. Your father’s a right pain in the neck, do you know that, Ashleigh?’

‘Yes,’ came the sighing reply.

The organ started up.

Kate grinned. ‘Knock ‘em dead, love.’

‘You make this sound like the opening night of a show,’ Ashleigh returned in an exasperated voice.

Kate lifted expressive eyebrows, then laughed softly. ‘Well, it is, in a way, isn’t it?’

Heat zoomed into Ashleigh’s cheeks.

‘Aah,’ the other girl smiled. ‘That’s what I wanted to see. The bridal blush. She’s ready now, Dr O’Neil.’

As ready as I’ll ever be, Ashleigh thought with a nervous swallow.

The long walk up the red carpet on her father’s arm was a blur. The music played. Countless faces smiled at her. It felt almost as if she were in a dream. She was walking on clouds and everything seemed fuzzy around the edges of her field of vision.

Only one face stood out at her. Nancy’s, still looking a little tense, and oddly watchful, as though expecting Ashleigh to turn tail and run at any moment.

And then the men came into view...

First came James, looking tall and darkly handsome in a black tuxedo, his thick, wavy hair slicked back neatly from his well-shaped head. And next to him was...

Ashleigh faltered for a moment.

For the best man wasn’t Peter Reynolds, the new accountant at Hargraves Pty Ltd and James’s friend since college, but a perfect stranger!

Her father must have noticed at the same time. ‘Who the hell’s that standing next to James?’ he muttered under his breath to her.

‘I have no idea...’ The man was about thirty with rather messy blond hair, an interesting face and intelligent dark eyes. After a long second look Ashleigh knew she’d never seen him before in her life.

Her eyes skated down to the other groomsman. Stuart, her brother. He smiled back reassuringly, after which she swung her gaze back to James. Their eyes locked and for one crashing second Ashleigh literally did go weak at the knees. For James was looking at her as if she were a vision, an apparition that he could scarcely believe was real, as if he couldn’t tear his eyes away from her.

All thought of mysterious best men fled, her breath catching at the undeniable love and passion encompassed within James’s intense stare. He’d never looked at her like that before, even when he’d said she was the only woman he’d ever loved, the only woman he could bear marrying. His stunningly smouldering gaze touched her heart, moved her soul. And her body.

Ashleigh was startled to find that suddenly the night ahead did not present itself as such an ordeal after all. Her eyes moved slowly over her husband-to-be and her heart began to race, her stomach tightening, a flood of sensual heat sweeping all over her skin.

The raw sexuality of her response shocked her. She hadn’t felt such arousal since...since...

Quite involuntarily one trembling hand left her bouquet to once again touch the locket.