One Wedding Required!

by Sharon Kendrick

  ‘Paralysed?’ Amber repeated the word in disbelief, because surely Ursula must have made a mistake. The world swayed, then righted itself again.

  ‘I’m so very sorry,’ said Ursula gently.

  ‘No!’ Amber shouted in denial. Dots danced in front of her eyes and a great muffling roar rose up and constricted her ears as she felt herself slipping forward...

  When she opened her eyes, she had her head bent over her knees, with Ursula smoothing her hair back from a cold and clammy neck. She tried to sit up, but Ursula wouldn’t let her.

  ‘I thought you knew!’

  Amber shook her head muzzily. ‘Knew what? Will you please tell me what is going on?’

  Ursula helped her over to the sofa. ‘Ross read about it in Prague—it’s been all over the news. Finn is desperately ill with some bizarre illness called...’ she frowned with concentration as she tried to remember how to pronounce it ‘...Guillain-Barré syndrome. He was rushed into hospital—’

  ‘Which hospital, Ursula?’ demanded Amber urgently.

  ‘Which hospital?’

  ‘St Jude’s.’

  ‘Just call me a cab,’ said Amber grimly. ‘I must go to him.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘This very minute!’

  ‘Then I’m coming with you!’

  The journey to St Jude’s seemed to take for ever, and the taxi seemed interminably slow as it crawled its way through the London traffic. Amber was scarcely aware of her surroundings—in fact she barely noticed a word of what her sister was saying to her. She had wanted to come on her own, but Ursula had insisted on accompanying her, telling her that she was too vulnerable in her present state to be left on her own.

  Vulnerable?

  She wasn’t the one who was vulnerable. Her beloved Finn was the vulnerable one, lying sick in some lonely hospital bed. She gulped down the ever-present sob which seemed to have taken up residence in the back of her throat and blindly walked into the reception area of St Jude’s, where people instinctively stepped aside to let her pass, their faces frightened as they looked into her haunted eyes.

  A silent metallic lift sped up to the intensive care unit, and Amber couldn’t help but notice the alarm on the face of the charge-nurse sitting at the nurses’ station and writing in the notes as she half stumbled towards him. Her arms and legs seemed to be on some uncoordinated automatic pilot; her limbs didn’t seem to belong to her any more.

  She found herself briefly wondering what kind of spectacle she must present—her eyes wild with grief and red with weeping. She had dressed in the first things that had come to her shaking fingers—everything was mismatched—and she had done little more than drag a brush through the tangle of her hair. But she didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything except seeing Finn.

  The charge-nurse rose to his feet. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Where’s Finn?’ Amber blurted out.

  A professional look of concern came over his face. ‘Perhaps you would like to—’

  ‘I want to see Finn Fitzgerald! Please!’ she begged.

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘I’m his—’ Amber waved her left hand in front of the man’s face to show him her sparkling diamond, as if to validate her words, but then she remembered that she had taken it off. Tom it from her finger and stuffed it to the back of a drawer as soon as she had arrived at Ursula’s, having run away from the public humiliation of seeing him kissing another woman.

  But suddenly that seemed of no consequence. How could she care about that—about anything—when Finn was lying, fighting for his life? Her darling, beloved Finn.

  ‘I’m his fiancée,’ she said weakly. ‘I’m Amber O‘Neil and I must see him. I must!’

  The charge-nurse frowned. ‘I’m afraid that his family are with him at the moment, and there have to be limits about the amount of visitors he’s allowed to have—’

  ‘Well, how is he, for heaven’s sake? You must be able to tell me that!’

  The charge-nurse shook his head. ‘You must understand that we’ve had a number of requests about Mr Fitzgerald’s condition,’ he answered gently. ‘The press have been swarming around the place like locusts, and we can’t just give out information without checking. So if you’d like to take a seat—’

  Amber only just stopped herself from grabbing the charge-nurse by his lapels and shaking him. She must calm down. The man was only doing his job—and she was in such a state that she probably didn’t look fit to see a sick person.

  She drew a deep, soothing breath. ‘Have his family flown over from Ireland?’

  ‘Yes, I believe they have.’

  ‘Then please go and check with them,’ said Amber, trying to get the words out in a steady voice. ‘They’ll vouch for me. They’ll tell you I’m who I say I am. And he’ll want to see me!’

  The charge-nurse nodded and disappeared, returning minutes later with Finn’s sister Philomena at his side. The oldest of the seven Fitzgerald offspring, Philomena had met Amber just the once, when Finn had taken her to Ireland for Easter last year. Philomena was almost fifty, now a grandmother herself, and normally the most unflappable of women, but right now her face looked as white and as fragile as parchment.

  ‘My dear child,’ she moaned, and put her arms tight round Amber. ‘Dear, dear child. What in the name of God has been happening?’

  Amber felt like a child, clasped in Philomena’s firm grip—she would have liked to have stayed like that all day if it hadn’t been for the grim reality of what was happening. ‘H-how is he?’

  ‘He’s a sick man, Amber,’ said Philomena quietly. ‘Very sick indeed. He can’t breathe for himself—he’s on a ventilator.’

  ‘Dear God!’ gasped Amber, as if she had been punched.

  Philomena closed her eyes in despair, but ploughed on with the stark, horrible truth. ‘He’s paralysed in all four limbs, and they don’t know what the outcome might be. He’s a strong man—the doctors say he’s as strong as an ox—but there’s no telling—’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  As if in a daze, Philomena dropped her arms at the sound of a low, foreign accent, and Amber couldn’t believe the evidence of her own eyes as she looked up to see Birgitta crossing the shiny floor towards them. She froze with outrage and shock. How dared she? How dared she show her face here?

  Ridiculously, and obsessively, Amber noticed the Swedish woman’s clothes. She was wearing a pristine ice-pink suit—so that today she did not resemble a femme fatale at all, but instead looked like some sleek, efficient air hostess. How could she? thought Amber brokenly. How could she put her make-up on so neatly and co-ordinate all her clothes when Finn was lying close to death?

  Instinct powered over restraint, and Amber turned on the woman, her eyes blazing, her fists clenched tightly by her side. ‘What are you doing here, Birgitta?’

  Birgitta’s mouth flattened. ‘I was asked to come.’

  ‘Really?’ questioned Amber. ‘I find that a little difficult to believe!’

  ‘But—’

  ‘How have you got the nerve to turn up here, after everything you’ve done? Is that how you get by in life? By publicly throwing yourself at other women’s fiancés? ’

  Birgitta’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘But Finn kissed me,’ she pointed out. ‘Don’t you remember?’

  Philomena placed a confining hand on Amber’s arm, but Amber took no notice. ‘He doesn’t want you here, Birgitta!’ she spat. ‘He’s sick and he’s mine! So get out!’

  Was that regret or apology which briefly appeared in Birgitta’s ice-blue eyes? she wondered. ‘Amber, it’s you I want to speak to—’

  ‘Well, tough! I’m busy and I’ve got nothing that I want to say to you! Do you understand? Nothing—other than to ask you to leave. Right now!’

  With an expression of regret, the Swedish woman reached into her ice-pink handbag and pulled out an envelope. As soon as Amber saw the distinctive, sloping black handwriting, she didn’t need to ask whose hand had written it.<
br />
  ‘Feen asked me to give you this.’

  Some deep, unfurling fear made Amber want to reject the letter, but she couldn’t do that—especially not now, when Finn was so ill. She snatched the envelope from Birgitta’s pale fingers and carried it over to the corner of the room, her own hands shaking like crazy. She stood by the visitors’ coffee machine while she ripped the envelope open to read it.

  It was not Finn’s usual flowing and fluid style—it was a short and somewhat stilted note, and she wondered how difficult it must have been for him to write. Not half as difficult as it was for her to read, she would wager.

  It had been written on New Year’s Day, and it said,

  Dear Amber,

  I know I have chosen a cowardly way to go about telling you, but I fear that I can no longer see a future together for us. As you will no doubt have judged from my recent behaviour, I have grown extremely fond of Birgitta—and you know that I have always been a one-woman man. You have meant a great deal to me, and you always will. We shared so many good things, and I would rather leave the memories of all those times intact. Therefore, I think it best if we did not see each other again, at least for the time being.

  Yours ever, Finn.

  There was, Amber noted dully, no mention of love. She turned round to see Philomena standing watching. Finn’s sister was clearly confused by events—but it was Birgitta’s beautiful, serene face which scorched its way indelibly into her line of vision, like a mocking, triumphant symbol of everything she had lost.

  Holding the note aloft, like a white flag of surrender, Amber met Birgitta’s eyes. ‘Do you know what the note says?’ she demanded, her voice sounding reedy. ‘Do you?’

  Birgitta nodded. ‘He showed it to me, yes.’

  ‘And he’s in love with you? Or thinks he is?’

  Birgitta gave a wry smile. She appeared to choose her words very carefully, and when she spoke she sounded extremely formal, and yet—conversely—more foreign than ever before. ‘I would not presume to talk of love at this stage. We have not known each other for long enough.’

  From out of the corner of her eye, Amber could see that Ursula had appeared by Philomena’s side, and was watching her warily, as if afraid of what she would do next.

  Well, what would she do next? Launch herself at Birgitta? Punch? Kick? Scream? Shout? Cry? Maybe all of these?

  And lose what little dignity she had left?

  Amber turned to Philomena, her face full of appeal. ‘Please, can I see him—just for a moment?’

  Philomena flushed, her face uncomfortable. She looked at Ursula, and an almost imperceptible shake of the head passed between the two women. ‘I think perhaps it’s better that you don’t—’

  Amber looked at Birgitta, and swallowed down the primitive desire to pull her flaxen hair out by the roots. Instead she took a step forward, but, to her credit, Birgitta did not flinch.

  ‘Just you make sure you look after him properly!’ Amber warned, her voice in danger of cracking in defeat.

  But then some innate pride—inspired by the love she knew she and Finn had shared—came flooding over her like a soothing balm.

  For he had once loved her enough to put his ring on her finger and want to marry her, and now he lay poised between life and death. She would not run out of there like some vanquished loser.

  Instead, she nodded almost regally to her sister, and she and Ursula walked out of the unit, side by side.

  They did not speak to each other all the way down in the lift, nor even in the taxi, which Amber directed to Finn’s apartment. She was too fraught and too terrified of breaking down to be able to utter a single word, and one look at her sister was enough to keep Ursula silent for the rest of the journey.

  It felt like a lifetime since Amber had been at the flat. There was still some debris left over from the party, and some lingering remnant of domesticity almost had her loading up the dishwasher, until she remembered her situation and stopped. No doubt Birgitta would be coming back here to tidy things away. She turned to her sister instead, her face deathly pale and oddly calm.

  ‘Will you wait while I pack up a few things?’

  ‘Of course I will.’

  ‘And can I store them at your flat?’

  ‘Oh, Amber! Of course you can! You can stay there for as long as you like—you know that.’

  But Amber shook her head regretfully. ‘No, I can’t do that. I’ll stay—but only for as long as it takes to find out if Finn will be...’ She swallowed back the words, as if saying them would make them real. ‘Until I know that Finn’s out of danger.’

  ‘And what will you do after that?’

  Amber stared sightlessly around the bright flat which had once been her home. ‘I don’t know.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  OUTSIDE, the morning sky was the palest powder-blue, expensively gilded with gold, and Amber dunked her croissant into the bowl of milky coffee and ate with an appetite which was gradually returning to normal.

  Odd, really—she felt as though she were convalescing from some terrible, debilitating illness. Though maybe she was—hadn’t people in the Middle Ages considered love to be like a sickness?

  Still, she must put that love behind her now. It was all over. There had been a total news blackout on Finn’s progress, but, according to a sweet letter sent by Philomena, he was ‘recovering slowly’. As soon as she had received it, Amber had taken herself off to the South of France for her own kind of recovery.

  Not the warmest place to be in spring, true, but an infinitely better place to be than London, where the memories of the man she couldn’t seem to stop loving were still too acute to be bearable. Everyone told her that of course you recovered from a broken heart, that it was a necessary part of your emotional development to go through a bust-up, and that you came out of it on the other side a stronger person all round.

  And Amber believed them. She wanted to believe them. She had to. It was the one thing she was clinging onto: that one day this terrible black cloud of missing him would lift from over her. Next week she would begin to plan her future—a future which she suspected would keep her well clear of the fish-bowl world of modelling...

  ‘Mademoiselle?’

  Amber looked up. Monsieur Joseph was the patron of the hotel Plan-du-Var, where she had gone after finding out that Finn would get better. Ursula’s boss, Ross Sheridan, had recommended the small and simple pension which lay by the side of the river Var, up in the mountains above Nice. There were few guests staying in the tiny village of Plan-du-Var at this time of year, and Monsieur Joseph and his family had welcomed her as if she had been one of their own.

  In the three months since she had been there, Amber had done little more than rest, read and take walks through the breathtaking countryside. And Jackson had flown back to England just as soon as he had heard about Finn’s illness, so at least she knew that Allure was safe in his capable hands. Though why she still cared about Allure...

  ‘Mademoiselle?’ Amber looked up as Monsieur Joseph prompted her once more. ‘C’est le téléphone!’

  ‘Merci, Monsieur.’ Amber went through into the private salon and picked up the phone.

  ‘Allô!’ she said automatically.

  ‘Amber, it’s Ursula!’

  Fine beads of sweat misted Amber’s forehead. ‘Is it Finn?’

  ‘In a word, yes.’

  ‘He hasn’t relapsed?’

  ‘No.’ There was a pause. ‘I’m acting as a go-between, Amber.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Finn has asked me to set up a meeting between you and him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He wouldn’t...didn’t say. He just wants you to agree to meet him.’

  Amber gave a feigned laugh. ‘He doesn’t want much, does he? Why doesn’t he ask me himself?’

  There was silence at the other end of the phone. ‘How are you, Amber?’

  ‘I’m fine. Well, fine-ish.’ She sighed. ‘I don’t want to talk about how
I am—how’s Finn?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him. He’s only just rung and asked me to arrange a meeting.’

  ‘So everything is to be on Finn’s terms, huh?’

  ‘Do you want me to tell him no?’

  Amber snorted. ‘Of course I don’t want you to tell him no! I have to see him.’

  ‘Amber—’ Ursula’s voice sounded worried. ‘Are you still as much in love with him as before?’

  ‘What kind of a question is that?’

  Ursula sighed. ‘A sisterly question. A concerned question. Are you?’

  ‘I’m not a victim, Ursula. I don’t hanker after men who make it plain they don’t want me.’

  ‘So you’re not?’

  ‘I do want to see him,’ said Amber, realising that she hadn’t answered Ursula’s question, and realising that she wasn’t going to. It was too shameful to admit that she still cared, but of course she still cared. True love was something that grew—and her love had been true, even if Finn’s had not. And it didn’t just wither and die overnight. That took time. And effort.

  She tried to explain her feelings to her sister. ‘I need to see Finn, to see him as a real person again. At the moment, he’s all these conflicting romantic images in my mind—the dream lover and the philandering bastard who then lies critically ill on his sickbed. I need to see Finn now. Post-illness—and post-me. I need to see him as some other woman’s dream lover, no longer mine.’

  ‘You’re not saying that you want him to bring Birgitta with him?’ Ursula’s voice sounded outraged.

  Amber swallowed down the bitter bile of jealousy. ‘Of course I don’t. I don’t need to see her with him to know that he’s no longer mine. I’ve had time enough to get used to that fact. So, yes, Ursula—I’ll see him. In England, I presume?’

  ‘I’ll find out. He didn’t give me any details, just wanted me to find out whether you would agree to see him in principle.’

  ‘Tell him I’ll look forward to it,’ said Amber grittily.

  ‘Well, I’ve some slightly more cheerful news for you, too! You remember Mother’s wedding dress?’