Something Borrowed

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.’