From Bridal Designer to Bride

by Kandy Shepherd

  With a bright smile pasted on her face, she came back into the living room to find Josh flicking through the glossy decorating magazine that had published a feature on her renovation of this apartment. He got up on her approach.

  ‘Impressive what you’ve done here,’ he said. ‘The article says you could make your living in interior design if you changed your mind about wedding gowns.’

  ‘Flattering, isn’t it? But fashion is my first love, and I don’t ever want to do anything else. Eloise Evans Atelier is more than just my work—it’s my life. I enjoyed doing this place up but I wouldn’t want to do it for a business. The apartment was my grandmother’s and I wanted to honour all the lovely times I had with her here while at the same time updating her old-lady décor.’

  ‘You’ve done a great job,’ he said, looking around. ‘It’s very elegant.’ She realised he must have seen the photos of her bedroom in the magazine and resisted the urge to show it to him.

  She held up a small, rust-spotted box. ‘But this ring I’ve left just as she had it because I value it that way. It’s a large stone and I believe the setting was quite avant-garde for its time.’

  ‘May I see it?’ he said.

  She flipped open the box and handed it to him. ‘I don’t know when it was last worn.’

  One thing was for sure, her grandmother would not have approved of her intended subterfuge. And her mother would be horrified when she heard about it. But protecting her business was her priority—and she intended to do everything she could do to make @lindytheblonde’s attack on it fail.

  Josh looked at the ring nestled in the very old velvet. ‘I don’t know anything about engagement rings but aren’t they meant to be diamond? Will this be believable? I don’t want to look cheap.’ He was really entering into the spirit of the charade.

  ‘I believe an engagement ring can be anything you want it to be. Anyone who knows anything about me knows I like vintage. I think this will pass muster. And it’s actually very valuable.’

  He held the little box awkwardly. ‘Do...do I have to put it on your finger?’

  She couldn’t meet his eye. ‘I... I think that would actually be a bit weird.’ She took the ring from him and slipped it onto the third finger of her left hand. She held out her hand to display it, fingers splayed. ‘This is how I’ll show it off to anyone who asks. We don’t need to give any details about where we got it or anything else.’

  ‘It suits you,’ he said. ‘The ring suits you, your car suits you, so does the way you dress. You’re your own woman. If people ask I’ll say that’s one of the reasons that attracted me to you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, not sure what else to say, not sure if it was a compliment or not.

  ‘It makes me wonder, do you actually need anyone else in your life?’

  ‘I have friends, my mother—’

  ‘I mean a life partner. Or are you like me, a lone wolf at heart?’

  She looked up at him. ‘I’m happy on my own but I... I don’t think I’m a lone wolf. I’ve often felt there’s something missing in my life, something intangible. Perhaps that’s from being an only child. But as far as relationships go, I won’t compromise and I’ve had bad luck with the wrong kind of man.’

  A lazy smile hovered around the corners of his mouth. ‘So, in fact, you haven’t met “the right man” yet?’

  She forced a laugh. ‘Back to the old cliché. Perhaps in our role play at the wedding I can tell them I finally did meet him.’

  She paused and the silence again became awkward. She had no experience to call upon to help her manage this situation. A fake engagement.

  ‘I can’t think of anything else we have to rehearse, can you?’ she said.

  She didn’t give him a chance to reply. She really couldn’t endure any more, alone here together in her apartment with all this make-believe talk of falling in love and phone sex and that undeniable, sizzling current of attraction between them.

  ‘We’ll have two hours in the car tomorrow to cover anything we’ve missed,’ she said. ‘The wedding starts at four. I need to be there around two as Becca, the bride, wants me to be there for a final check on her gown. I’d rather leave earlier than later. How about I pick you up from your hotel after breakfast?’

  ‘Sounds like a plan to me,’ he said.

  She led him to the door. For a long moment they stood silently, facing each other. With her heels kicked off he seemed taller and she had to look a long way up. Finally, he put his hand to her face and traced a line to her cheek. Such a simple caress, yet it set her nerve ends tingling. ‘I want to kiss you goodnight.’

  She caught her breath. ‘I want to kiss you goodnight too.’

  ‘But you’ve set the rules. No kissing in private.’

  She had to clear her throat to speak. ‘I want to say we don’t need to enforce the rules yet, but I can’t. I like kissing you, Josh. A lot. But I meant what I said the first night. We know where that kind of kissing will lead us and I don’t want to go there.’

  She couldn’t deal with a no-strings fling with Josh. Not when he’d be going home soon. Not when she was starting to like him too much as a friend. To be honest, as more than a friend. Not when she realised if she didn’t keep him at arm’s length she could end up getting hurt.

  ‘So we start as we mean to continue,’ he said. ‘No kissing in private.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said, unable to take her eyes from his sexy, sexy mouth, trembling inside from the need to press her mouth against his lips, to wind her arms around his neck and pull him close.

  He dropped his hand. ‘Then I’ll just say goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight, Josh,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’

  She closed the door before she could change her mind. For a long moment she stood staring blindly at the door. Something told her that Josh was still on the other side and she had to fight the urge to call him back and tell him she’d changed her mind. She held her breath until she heard his footsteps moving slowly away and then let it out on a sigh of what she didn’t know was relief or regret.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  JOSH WAS THOROUGHLY enjoying his ride in Eloise’s vintage sports car. For a car that was almost sixty years old it had a lot of power. Back home, he had driven a new model luxury European car ever since he could afford one. It was an outward flag of status to wave under the nose of the Boston family who had rejected him.

  Yet this smart little white car garnered more attention from passers-by than any of his exceedingly expensive vehicles.

  ‘A friend of my grandmother’s put it up for sale when I’d barely got my driver’s licence,’ Eloise said. ‘My grandmother knew how much I wanted it and lent me the money to get it. I paid her back every cent, of course.’

  She’d been young to have been so sure of what she wanted. Yet he had known what he wanted when he’d been booted out of home at the age of sixteen: to show his former family they’d been wrong about him. He continued to pursue that aim with fierce determination.

  ‘It’s probably worth much more than you paid for it now,’ he said.

  ‘This car has been an excellent investment. New cars depreciate; this one continues to go up in value. Not that I’d ever sell it. I get stopped in the street by admirers all the time, with offers to buy it, offers to hire it.’

  Jealousy, unexpected and shocking, hit him. Were the ‘admirers’ interested in the car or its beautiful driver? Even in the relatively subdued outfit she wore today, narrow-legged trousers in a mottled purple colour with a matching short jacket, she turned heads. Josh realised his fists were clenched tightly on his lap. He forced the feeling to go away. He had no claim on her whatsoever. ‘Have you ever loaned the car out?’

  ‘Just the once. To a movie production company. I knew someone there who begged me to borrow it and paid me a good fee. They returned it with a scrat
ch on it and denied they’d put it there. My beloved car. Never again. I’m not known for my generosity in giving second chances.’

  She said that last sentence in a light-hearted, almost throw-away manner. But he had no doubt she meant every word. Eloise was charming and fun, but you didn’t get to run a successful business like hers with clients all around the world without a certain degree of toughness.

  ‘I have, however, made a promise I intend to keep,’ she continued. ‘When Vinh decides to get married, I’ll lend her my car for her wedding. Friendship trumps all.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, thinking what a contradiction she was and how interesting it made her.

  The wedding destination was on the outskirts of the town of Bowral in the southern highlands, south west of Sydney.

  ‘I promise once we clear the city motorways the scenery will get interesting,’ she said. ‘Bowral is known as Double Bay in the country, as it’s always been a rural retreat for wealthy Sydneysiders. The place is dotted with mansions on magnificent estates. Silver Trees, where the wedding is to be held, is one of them. It’s been in the groom’s family for ever...prize-winning gardens, an ornamental lake, expansive grounds, tennis court, swimming pavilion, stables, you name it—all designed by a renowned architect in the nineteen-twenties.’

  ‘I look forward to seeing it. I’ve never been outside of Sydney or Melbourne.’

  ‘You didn’t want to go up north to tropical Queensland for a holiday once you’d flown all the way here? An escape from the Boston winter perhaps?’

  ‘I don’t take holidays these days,’ he said, more tersely than probably required.

  ‘Fair enough,’ she said. She drove in silence for a few minutes. ‘Tell me, you asked me if I had childhood dreams of making wedding dresses for celebrities. I know your parents pretty much forced your hand to earn your own living. But was it your childhood ambition to be a billionaire tech mogul?’

  He nearly choked from the shock of her blunt question. ‘No one has ever asked me that before,’ he said once he’d regained his voice.

  She looked straight ahead as she spoke. ‘Maybe because you seem quite formidable.’

  ‘Formidable?’

  ‘Your achievements are incredible. If I’d known who you were, I probably wouldn’t have dared chat to you in the park.’

  ‘I’m glad you did,’ he said. Not for Tori’s sake but for his own.

  ‘Thanks to Daisy,’ Eloise said lightly. ‘But seriously, is that what you set out to be?’

  ‘Does anyone actually set out to become that? I knew I wanted to work in the digital world, and planned on a degree in computer science, but that wasn’t to be.’

  ‘Because of what happened when you were sixteen?’

  ‘It started even before then.’ He paused. ‘Do you really need to know all this?’

  ‘If we were really engaged I’d already know it, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘I guess so,’ he said grudgingly.

  His past was his own private hell, not readily shared. But Eloise had a point: she would be expected to know more about him than she did if she was to be his future wife. Wife. He reeled at the thought, even in a hypothetical context.

  He honestly didn’t know why he had made that spontaneous offer of pretending to be her fiancé. It was all mixed up with his attraction to her, his loyalty to Tori, the fact that his time in Sydney was beginning to seem almost surreal. The meeting with the dog in the park. The paparazzi shot. The hilarity of being fitted for his tux in Eloise’s studio. These kinds of things did not happen to him.

  Then there had been the fantasy first meeting at Santa Monica they’d devised over a Thai take-out and a good Australian white wine. Against all logic, he’d found himself wishing that meeting had really happened. That he’d met Eloise somehow, somewhere, in a context that had nothing to do with Tori. And that he’d been a man open to love rather than one with a protective shield encasing his heart.

  ‘Come on, spill,’ she said. ‘It can’t be any more embarrassing than aspiring to be a mermaid.’

  He couldn’t help but smile at that. ‘If you insist.’

  ‘I do insist.’

  ‘As I told you, even before I turned out to be genetically the wrong fit, I didn’t fit the family mould. I showed no aptitude for the law or banking, the acceptable professions according to my ex-father.’

  ‘You call him your ex-father?’

  ‘What else fits? Technically my stepfather, I suppose, but that doesn’t really apply, as he had no say in the matter. My mother tricked him into believing I was his own. I look at it as if he divorced me.’

  I’m not your dad. You are nothing to do with me.

  ‘I guess that’s a valid way of putting it. By the way, he sounds utterly vile. How could you bring a boy up from a baby and then just turf him out? Weren’t you his son in every way but by blood?’

  ‘I don’t think he particularly cared for me from the start, but he did his duty by me for sixteen years.’

  ‘As he darn well should have, especially as he thought you were his own child,’ she said indignantly.

  He shrugged. ‘Truth was, we never really clicked. I was a disappointment. Not academic. Certainly not a son to boast about at his club. When it came to career advice, he suggested I learn a trade, become an electrician or plumber. He’d say it with a sneer. Not that I thought there was anything wrong at all with learning a trade. I would have willingly done so. But he knew so little of who I was, he had no idea I was already supplementing my allowance by creating apps and trading gaming codes.’

  ‘Your interests lay elsewhere.’

  ‘In the burgeoning digital marketplace my conservative family barely acknowledged existed. Forget studying law at Harvard, I was destined to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.’ He paused. ‘Until I wasn’t. I was cut off with nothing, certainly no college fund.’

  ‘The media calls you a self-made billionaire.’

  ‘I don’t deny the label. There was no one to give me a leg up. I got where I am under my own steam. I took risks, I had setbacks, but I pushed through. And I’m proud of it.’

  ‘You’ve given your ex-father something to boast about now.’

  He spoke through gritted teeth. ‘I make very sure he knows what I’ve achieved. My ex-brother too. But neither of them would be boasting about me.’

  A year ago, he’d seen his ex-father in the distance at the exclusive yacht club to which they both belonged. Josh was sure he’d seen him too but he’d turned away without acknowledging him. Not as his son, but not as his equal in the rich man’s club. It had still hurt. And further fuelled his anger.

  Eloise might think less of him if he admitted to the business deals he’d diverted from his brother, the wealthy clients he’d deflected from his father’s law firm. She’d called him ruthless. She would be shocked if she knew just how ruthless. The power of having a lot of money had facilitated his actions. His fantasy wasn’t of a happy-ever-after family reunion but of his father admitting he was wrong about him. As a teenager he’d been hurt and heartbroken at what his father and brother had done to him. As an adult, no love or respect remained, and he despised them for how they’d treated a kid who’d thought he belonged with them.

  The car was stopped at traffic lights and Eloise turned to face him. Her expression was troubled. ‘So when it boils down to it, your success has been fuelled by bitterness and revenge?’

  ‘You could say that,’ he said. ‘Although it was sheer survival at first.’

  ‘How good is that for you?’

  ‘Satisfying in the extreme.’

  ‘I mean for your health, your spiritual health if you like.’ The lights changed and she faced the road again.

  ‘I’ve never felt healthier,’ he said, knowing that wasn’t what she meant.

  ‘For how long does it continue?’
she said. ‘I don’t want to say the wrong thing here but surely your...your ex-father must see by now how wrong he was about you, how you might not have been born to his grand family but you were certainly worthy of it.’

  The drive to prove himself had been his focus for so long, Josh didn’t know how to think any other way. But when would enough be enough? ‘I sometimes feel nothing I do would be enough to make him admit he was wrong.’

  ‘He sounds a horrible man, not worthy of someone as brilliant as you. Why do you continue to seek his approval?’

  ‘That’s not what I’m doing,’ he said tersely.

  But underneath it all, was Eloise right? Was he still making a futile effort to seek the approval of that cold, unfeeling man who had kicked the boyish love he’d given so unstintingly as a child back in his teeth?

  ‘That kind of negative emotion isn’t good for a person. I know we don’t know each other very well, but it makes me worry for you, Josh,’ Eloise said. ‘It cuts you off from the kinder side of life.’

  A cold shiver ran up his spine at her words, the echo of Tori’s. ‘I worry about you, Josh. You’re cutting yourself off from life.’

  ‘I can look after myself,’ he said gruffly. ‘I’ve been doing so for a long time.’

  ‘I’m sure you can,’ she said, with the resignation of someone who knew she was fighting a losing battle.

  ‘Chalk that up to being another thing you now know about me,’ he said.

  ‘It’s actually not something I’d be introducing into the conversation,’ she said. ‘That’s your personal business.’ An air of disapproval lingered for a long time in the car.

  With the outskirts of Sydney left behind, the road took them through vast tracts of bushland, the green fields of dairy farms and horse studs, vineyards and turn-offs to historic villages with names like Berrima and Yerrinbool. ‘The names are from the language of the people indigenous to this area,’ Eloise explained.