One Wedding Required!

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 (#u067767b3-c709-5c0a-ab76-fc999275554f)

‘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 afternoon?’

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.’