by Nancy Warren
Secondhand Bride
The Almost Wives Club, Book 2
Nancy Warren
Secondhand Bride © Nancy Weatherley WarrenAll Rights Reserved, except where otherwise noted
Contents
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Other Titles You May Enjoy
About the Author
Secondhand Bride
It’s bad enough that Ashley Carnarvon has to wear a hand-me-down wedding dress, but does it have to be cursed?
Ashley’s always felt a kinship with Cinderella, only without the glass shoe or the prince. She’s the poor relation, living on her uncle and aunt’s huge estate in Malibu. When Eric Van Hoffendam, the guy she’s been hanging out with for nearly ten years, proposes, getting married makes sense. He’s fun, cute and easy to be with. To her surprise, his snooty family are thrilled by the engagement.
But when her teenage crush, now a hotshot screenwriter, moves into the vacant pool house on the property, she’s suddenly torn. Plus, she uncovers secrets that could change her life.
Maybe there’s something to this cursed dress after all.
Join five women as this designer wedding dress passes through their hands and they end up joining The Almost Wives Club.
Will any of them ever wear the gorgeous gown?
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Chapter One
ASHLEY CARNARVON WAS TRYING TO DIG a single black sock out from under Eric Van Hoffendam’s bed when he proposed. Which meant, given her position, hips in the air, feet wedged against the wall to give her leverage to reach the pesky sock, that he proposed to her butt.
In fact, most of what he’d said sounded like a radio announcer’s voice coming from another room. He slapped her lightly on the part of her that was in his line of vision, and she backed out, sock firmly in hand, to ask, “What did you say?”
Eric lounged against his headboard, his blond head just-woke-up sloppy. He was a great-looking guy. On his best days, he looked like Ryan Gosling. Not Ryan all dressed in a tux to go to the Oscars, more schleppy Ryan, the guy who looked like he’d either just got out of bed or was thinking of going to bed. Eric was bearded; mostly, she thought, because he was too lazy to shave.
In fact, Eric was pretty lazy about most things. In a family of wealthy overachievers who made the Kennedys look like a bunch of dilettantes, he was definitely bringing down the average. He liked to party, he liked to sleep in, he liked to spend his days pretending to look for a job while generally hanging out.
Ashley was the official Carnarvon family slacker, so they suited each other perfectly. Since he still lived in his old bedroom in his parents’ mansion, she snuck in at night, as she’d been doing on and off for nearly ten years, since she was sixteen.
He wore a gray T-shirt over pajama bottoms and, while she’d been dressing, he’d opened a stack of mail. He held out a wedding invitation. She squinted, but it was hard to decipher the words through the scrolls and curlicues of the font on the wedding invitation. It was as though even the printer was excited about the wedding. “Melissa and Douglas?” she guessed. They were mutual friends who’d announced their engagement last fall.
He shook his head. “Donovan and Kylie.”
“Wow, wedding invitations already? They just got engaged!”
He tossed the invitation aside and rolled toward her. He had a twinkle in his eyes that he usually got when he was about to pull a prank. For a lazy man, he put a lot of energy into his pranks. “I said that it feels like everybody we know is getting married. Maybe we should, too.”
She pulled her sock on, yawning. She’d love to lounge in bed all day but she had to get to work. It was only barista work, but it helped pay her expenses. Unlike Eric, she didn’t have a cozy trust fund to fall back on. “We should do what?” She’d kill for a cup of coffee but the unspoken rule was that her nighttime visits to Eric didn’t exist. So she always left discreetly, finding her bike against the back wall of the grounds and letting herself out onto the private drive so she could bike home.
“Get married!”
She dropped the boot she was holding so it clunked to the floor. She turned to stare at him. “Get married?”
“Yeah.” He didn’t look like he was joking. He looked slightly pink in the cheeks like he might actually be blushing.
“To each other?”
“Why not? We like each other. We’ve been hanging out together since high school. You’re a cool girl.”
“Your parents would never let you marry me. They’re the worst snobs on the planet.”
“Why wouldn’t they like you? You’re a Carnarvon.”
“Only because my loser dad never got around to marrying my mom. I have no money, no trust fund, no decent job. I live in a shack on my uncle and aunt’s estate. I’m a charity case.”
He reached out and traced her arm with a fingertip. “Come on. It’ll be fun. We’ll throw a huge party. My parents always said they’d buy me a house when I got married.”
“You want to get married so you’ll get a house?”
“No. I don’t know… I want to get on with my life. You and me, we’re both stuck. I think we could help each other out. We’ve been together ten years. I think we should get married.”
It wasn’t like they’d been boyfriend and girlfriend for a decade. His parents had always looked down their noses at her and she’d never once been invited to a family event. She was convenient to him, as he was to her. But there was something appealing about the idea of both of them getting out from under the heavy weight of family disapproval.
He gave her the white-toothed grin that always undid her. When Eric turned on the charm she’d do pretty much anything he asked. “I love you,” he said.
“You love me?” This was the first time he’d ever said those words.
He shrugged, clearly uncomfortable, and pulled at the edge of a pillow. “Sure. Obviously. Don’t you love me?”
“I—” She’d been part of Eric’s life forever. She knew all his bad points as well as his good ones. He was a youngest child, a charmer who gazed around cheerfully, cracking jokes, pulling pranks, waiting for good things to rain down on him. And mostly they did. When he smiled at her she felt as though good things were raining down on her, too. She’d always loved him, of course she had. So, she nodded. “You know I do.”
He jumped off the bed and threw his arms up in a victory dance, he jumped and gyrated his way around the bed, then he picked her up and swung her around, kissing her, a big smacker on the lips. She was giggling helplessly when he put her down.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go celebrate.”
“Celebrate? It’s eight in the morning.”
“I’ll buy you breakfast, then we’ll tell my parents. I can’t wait. They’ll be so happy.”
She wasn’t so sure about that. “I can’t. I have to work.”
He made a pffft sound. “Blow it off. You just got engaged, you can take the day off.”
“Not if I want to keep my job.” Which she didn’t, actually, but she needed the c
ash. “Besides, you should tell your parents on your own. In case they hate the idea.”
“They’ll love it,” he said with complete confidence. “Trust me. Come for dinner.”
She kissed him swiftly. “Call me later.”
“How do you feel about Tahiti for the honeymoon?”
“Why not?” Then, she and her newly engaged butt got on her bike and wheeled home in a daze.
The big gates of the Carnarvon estate were open for a delivery truck, so she pedaled past and rode down the path to the old gardener’s cottage where she’d lived all of her life, or as much of it as she could remember, with her mom.
The smell of brewing coffee met her as she entered. Score.
“Hi, hon,” her mother called from her bedroom. Soft music played and she knew her mother was writing her morning pages. Melody Carnarvon had taken a writing course years earlier that promoted morning pages as a way to unleash creativity. Her mother had stuck religiously to her morning pages, which were basically a journal. If her creativity had been unleashed, Ashley had seen no evidence of it.
She poured coffee into the green pottery mugs they both favored because they were huge, and took the coffee in to her mom’s room.
At forty-seven, Melody Carnarvon was in a constant struggle against time and gravity. Ashley thought her mom looked great, with a yoga trained body, hair that was still long and blond, and pretty blue eyes, but her mom spent a lot of her time and most of her money on attempting to stay young.
“Morning,” she said, as Ashley passed her a mug of coffee. “Oh, thank you. I really should drink more green tea.”
She said this most mornings but still drank her coffee.
Ashley settled on the end of her bed and sipped her own coffee, hoping a jolt of caffeine would get her world to make sense again. “I need to talk to you.”
“What’s up?” Her mom put down her journal. The current notebook was bright blue and featured dragonflies.
“I think Eric Van Hoffendam just proposed to me.”
Her mother was as surprised as Ashley had imagined she’d be. “What? Eric proposed? Like marriage proposed?”
“I think so.”
“Well, what did he say?”
“He talked about how a lot of our friends are getting married, which is true. He flapped a wedding invitation at me. Then he said, we should do it. Get married.”
Her mother was listening so intently she wished she had a more romantic tale to tell. But Eric wasn’t much for romantic gestures. “And what did you say?”
“I think I said, ‘yes.’” But when she recalled the conversation she couldn’t be sure.
“You’re not pregnant, are you?” She didn’t say it in a judgmental way. The same thing had happened to her, without the benefit of a marriage proposal.
“No. Of course not.” She hoped she was smarter than her mom had been.
Her mom sat there for a second, and then jumped up and down on the bed from her sitting position, careful not to spill her coffee. “Oh, my God. You’re going to marry Eric Van Hoffendam?”
She felt like this must all be happening to someone else. “Yes… Yes. Unless it was some kind of practical joke.”
“Nobody jokes about getting married.”
If anyone did it would be Eric, but she’d known him forever and she was certain that he’d been sincere. “I guess not.”
“I can’t believe it!” Melody slapped her free hand to her cheek. “There’s so much to do. To plan.” She set down her coffee and grabbed up her journal, turning to a blank page. “A list. We need to make a list. Let’s see, a date of course. Have you set a wedding date?”
She laughed. “Mom, I’ve been engaged about thirty-five minutes. I haven’t decided anything.”
“Well, we need to start thinking about these things. Good venues book up ages in advance. It’s not every day my only daughter gets married.” Then her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, honey, I’m so happy for you.”
“And you think it’s the right thing?”
“Of course, I do. Eric’s a dear boy.” Then her tears turned to laughter. “And please let me be the one to tell Duncan. I want to watch my brother’s face when I tell him that his niece is getting married, after his precious son pretty much got jilted at the altar and made a complete fool of himself.”
She’d never forget that performance. After Ted and Kate Winton-Jones had broken up, Ted suddenly grew a pair and announced to his parents that he was in love with another woman. He’d insisted on bringing her to dinner, and Millicent had invited her and her mother to join them, probably hoping that if she invited more people over then Duncan would have to be polite.
She’d never forget that meal as long as she lived.
Ted had walked in with a woman who was older than him by at least a decade and looked as though she did all her shopping in the East end of Melrose Avenue.
Long red hair in ringlets, heavy makeup, the gravelly voice of a smoker.
Marlene was her name. Seeing Ted try and make his parents like this woman, well, it was the only time she remembered feeling sorry for her big cousin.
The evening had ended in a yelling match the likes of which she hadn’t seen before or since. Ted had stormed out and sworn he’d never come back.
Later, he’d texted her and asked her to pack up his stuff from the pool house where he’d been living. Since she didn’t have a driver’s license, she’d had to ask Eric to help her take the boxes of Ted’s belongings to their secret meeting spot, a Starbucks parking lot.
The cleaning staff had gone in and scoured out the pool house. Now it was as though Ted had never stayed there.
He still worked at the family firm and she imagined one day the drama would end, but for now she knew her mother would enjoy telling the oh, so perfect Duncan and Millicent about Ashley marrying into a family even more prestigious than theirs.
She hadn’t done very much right in their eyes. It was funny to think that marrying a slacker like Eric was a real coup in the Carnarvon world.
If she was really going to marry him. Eric wasn’t like Ted. If his parents didn’t approve of his choice, and she couldn’t imagine she was their dream bride for their son, then the wedding was probably off.
She headed to the coffee shop where iced mochachinos, soy lattes, half-sweet, skinny, no whip hot chocolates kept her too busy to think of much other than the end of her shift.
On her break, she pulled out the sketchpad she always had with her and flipped to a blank page. She began designing wedding rings for her and Eric. They weren’t traditional, naturally. She knew a jewelry designer and had some ideas on matching rings that would be inexpensive but really, really cool.
Assuming Eric’s proposal hadn’t been a practical joke.
Chapter Two
WHEN SHE GOT HOME THAT AFTERNOON, her mother was on the phone. Their house phone, which hardly ever rang. She widened her eyes when Ashley walked in. “Absolutely, Grace. Ashley and I are looking forward to it. Yes, six is fine.”
She hung up and they looked at each other. “That was Grace Van Hoffendam.”
“And?”
“She invited both of us to dinner tonight.”
“How did she sound?”
“Like she was delighted to welcome you into the family.”
“Really? What did she say?”
“That she was delighted to welcome you into the family.”
“Huh. Guess I must be delightful, then.”
Her mom hugged her with one arm. “You are a piece of perfection. My work is done. Oh, good thing I’ve made my list. I spent all afternoon on websites, and I got a few books on wedding planning.” She gestured to the couch where a stack of books leaned precariously next to a fan of bridal magazines. “I want the Van Hoffendams to know that we’ll plan a great wedding.”
“But mom, we can’t afford—”
“Hey, you’re my only daughter. You’re getting married. We’ll figure it out.” Her mother was looking seriously hap
py. “Oh, and the best part of you getting engaged on a Saturday morning is that Duncan wasn’t at work. I made an excuse to pop by.”
“Really? Borrowing a cup of sugar?”
“Please. You give me no credit for subtlety. I asked if they had any bridal magazines or wedding planning books I could borrow.”
“Queen of subtlety, that’s you.”
“I know. So, naturally, they wanted to know why I wanted such a thing, and, naturally, I told them that their niece is marrying into the Van Hoffendam family.”
“How’d they take it?”
“After Duncan recovered the power of speech, he said mostly nice things.”
“Mostly?”
“He might have mentioned the lack of job factor on Eric’s part, but he soon saw the positive. You know, an alliance with another powerful family.”
“And Aunt Millicent?”
“Not sure she ever recovered the power of speech.”
It was so nice, for once, to be the model of perfection and for her cousin Ted to be the one screwing up. “I’m sorry I missed it.”
“Me too. But, they want to throw you and Eric an engagement party.”
“Wow. That’s so nice of them.”
“I know. Get used to it. You marrying Eric puts us back in the club.”
“Is it a club we want to belong to?”
Her mother shrugged. “The food’s always good.”
The strange sense that her life had suddenly been turned inside out continued that evening when they turned up for dinner and she and her mother were greeted at the front door by the Van Hoffendams’ maid.
For all the times she’d snuck in the back way to Eric’s room, she could count on the fingers of one hand the times she’d come in by the front door. And usually, Eric had been with her.