Secondhand Bride (The Almost Wives Club Book 2)

by Nancy Warren

She kissed him and then pulled away. “Come on, I have to clean up the cottage before she gets here.”

  “So you’re kicking me out so you can huddle with your bridesmaids?”

  She set her voice to steel. “Do not even think about leaving me alone with that woman.”

  He must have realized that she was serious. Reluctantly he followed her up to the cottage where she rapidly tidied up the small living room and made sure the kitchen table was clean and free of any breakfast crumbs.

  Tasmine arrived with a briefcase. She wore white linen pants and a mint green silk tank under a sweater jacket. She looked like the CEO of her own empire, with a dash of cheerleader thrown in. Ashley looked like the CEO of Club Loser in her short cutoffs and bare feet. She was pretty sure there was sand stuck to her back.

  “You’re working? On a Saturday?”

  “I’m a sales rep for a design company. I set my own hours, but I often end up working Saturdays.” She shrugged, “Life in the fast lane, right?”

  She stepped inside and faltered. “Oh, hi Eric. I didn’t realize you’d be here.”

  “Little woman insisted,” he grumbled. “Not even married yet, I’m already whipped.”

  She let out a trill of delicious laughter. “Oh, don’t be silly. Of course you’re not. Ashley just wants to make sure you’re involved in every step of the wedding. The most successful weddings are the ones where the groom takes an active role.”

  Eric did not look thrilled with the idea of being an active participant in his own wedding. He had his feet up on the couch and was busily interacting with his cell phone.

  Ashley said, “Why don’t we go to the kitchen, so we have more room to spread out?”

  With a last glance at Eric, Tasmine said, “Sure.” She followed Ashley into the kitchen and settled herself at the table. “This is such a darling cottage. How lucky are you to live right by the beach?”

  “I know. Would you like some tea? Coffee? A glass of wine?”

  “I’d love a glass of water if you have one.”

  She poured Tasmine a glass of water and a second one for herself, then settled at the table. Tasmine reached into her briefcase and pulled out a binder, which she set in front of Ashley. She also pulled out a tablet computer and began scrolling.

  “That was such a fun engagement party the other night,” Tasmine said. Then she leaned closer, like they were best friends enjoying a secret. “I didn’t know that Bennett Saegar was living here. Oh, what that poor man has been through. That actress should be shot. And the way the media has blown it all out of proportion? Makes me sick. It’s so nice of your family to give him a place to stay.”

  Ashley hadn’t realized Bennett Saegar was that famous. She asked, “Did he tell you all this?”

  “As if. No, I read it online. I keep up with the news, especially Hollywood news. It’s part of my business to know what’s going on.”

  Ashley opened the binder and looked over a few pages. There were tabs for gift registry, florist, photographer, guest list, and so on. Maybe she wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but Ashley prided herself on being smarter than a butter knife. She glanced up at Tasmine and tried to look tough and steely even with sand skittering down her spine.

  “You are a professional, aren’t you? You’re as much a cousin of Grace’s as I am. I’m guessing Grace hired you and she’s planting you in the bridal party as a kind of spy.” It was more than she’d meant to say, but not more than she’d been thinking ever since this overenthusiastic bridesmaid was first shoved at her.

  Tasmine didn’t look particularly surprised to be busted. She put her elbows on the table and for a moment Ash was sorry that she’d so carefully scrubbed off the spilled raspberry jam that had congealed in exactly the spot where Tasmine placed her right elbow. “Honestly, I suggested to Grace that she tell you up front. I’m not big on subterfuge.”

  “That’s a big word for lying.”

  Tasmine shook her head. “None of it was a lie, technically. I am a cousin, though a distant one, and one summer my family did come up and hang out. I played with Eric, as I said I did. And I have been a bridesmaid in almost a dozen weddings. All that is true. However, you’re right. I’ve made a side business out of it.”

  “I’ve picked my own bridesmaids thanks.”

  “Look, think about it for a moment. There’s a reason brides hire me.”

  “Or their future mothers-in-law hire you,” she muttered.

  “Or that.” She set the tablet down and gave Ashley her full focus. “I met your bridesmaids the other night. Really great gals and I can see why you chose them. But they’re also super busy and didn’t seem like they had really embraced the bridesmaid role as enthusiastically as I would like to see. I can pick up the slack.” She glanced significantly toward the doorway that led to where Eric was lounging. “Or between you and your future mother-in-law. I will do ten times the work of a normal bridesmaid. I am truly organized, I’ve got fabulous contacts, and I can make your journey a lot easier. Getting married is stressful; there’s a lot more planning than you realize. I can help with that.”

  She hated feeling manipulated, even though everything Tasmine said made sense. “I don’t know.”

  “Here’s what I propose. I’ll leave that binder with you. Look it over.” Her fingers flew over her tablet for a few moments and then Ashley heard a text message alert on her smart phone. “I just texted you a list of references. These are brides who’ve hired me. Talk to them, then let me know what you want to do.”

  “But I didn’t hire you. It’s Grace who should get your references.”

  For the first time Tasmine looked slightly less perky than usual. She leaned in slightly. “I get a lot of requests. I’m not desperate for business, believe me. I told Grace I’d do this, but I’m not interested in helping someone who does not want my help.”

  “You’re saying I can fire you?”

  “Absolutely.” She gathered her things and rose.

  When she got to the door she turned. “Oh, and one last thing?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m very photogenic. I look great in wedding photos.” Then she winked and was gone.

  “What was that about?” Eric asked as she closed the door behind Tasmine.

  She turned to him, “Tasmine hires herself out as a bridesmaid.”

  Eric’s face wrinkled in puzzlement. “What do you mean she hires herself?”

  “I mean, she gets paid to be a bridesmaid. And your mother hired her.”

  She might’ve suspected that Eric knew all about his mother’s plot to plant a hired bridesmaid in her bridal party except that no one could fake shock that well. “Girls want to be bridesmaids so badly they do it as a job?”

  He put down his phone and sat up.” Hey, maybe that’s what I should do. I should rent myself out as a classy groomsman. Want do you think?”

  “I think that in order to get paid you would have to do a lot more work than simply showing up and looking cute.”

  “Damn. I knew it was too good to be true.” He picked up his phone again and settled back on the couch.

  She watched him for a minute. They hadn’t talked anymore about her getting driving lessons from Ben so she settled on the end of the couch, pushing his feet out of the way so she could sit down. “You seemed kind of upset that Ben gave me a driving lesson.”

  “I was surprised. That’s all.”

  “I do want to learn how to drive. It’s a pain not having a license.”

  “Yeah. I get it.”

  “But, if you want to teach me how to drive, that would be cool.”

  She could almost hear his thought process, she’d known him so long. In the end, as she had suspected, his laziness won out over his jealousy. “No, that’s okay. If you say he’s just a friend, then I believe you.”

  “And you’re okay with it if he teaches me to drive?”

  He shrugged. “You’re right. It’s lame that you don’t even know how to drive. I don’t want to h
ave to drive everywhere when we’re married. This way you can be my designated driver when I get wasted.”

  “Such an incentive to get my license.”

  Chapter Twelve

  ERIC TOOK HER OUT FOR SUSHI, and then, since he was playing poker with the boys, dropped her off back home.

  The cottage was dark and quiet exactly the way she liked it. Her mom had met a man online and was on her second date. When she was between boyfriends, she tended to grill Ashley about the details of her life as though trying to live vicariously through her. She knew she had the kind of mom who would share clothes with her, except that Melody was a smaller size, a fact she knew thrilled her mother to her pedicured toenails.

  Whatever.

  When she was dating, she tended to give her daughter more space. Ashley shut to door to her room and booted up her laptop. She knew she should pay more attention to the news but it was so violent and depressing most of the time that she didn’t bother. Her Uncle talked politics endlessly so she knew how a staunch republican of a certain age might view the world, and she knew there were things going on out there that deserved her outrage, but she found it easier not to know.

  However, Tasmine’s little speech about Ben had her curious. He’d told her briefly why he was here but she hadn’t realized that even someone like Tasmine might know the details.

  She typed in a Google search of Bennett Saegar plus Ravensong and was shocked at how fast the hits appeared.

  And she had to admit after reading for half an hour that if she didn’t know Ben, she’d think he was a manipulative user who would take an innocent woman’s trust, her talent and her love, and then suck her dry. Although she was cynical enough to wonder why a woman recovering from near death by suicide had so much energy for giving interviews.

  Also, from the photos of her in her hospital bed, it was obvious she’d used makeup to make herself even more waiflike. Her huge blue eyes were outlined in black and everything else, including her lipstick, was white. She even wore white, filmy nightgowns as she gave interviews from the private convalescent home.

  Ben had outdone himself. He’d got involved with a woman who was both a bimbo and a victim, but also cunning enough to use both to her advantage.

  She was reading through a particularly juicy blog called LA Insider. Dotted throughout were photos of the filming of Ravensong, and one, which all the online news magazines had also published, showed Ben and Vanessa Moore in close conversation.

  She was shaking her head, about to turn off her computer for the night, when a new headline caught her attention.

  Diva Designer Cursed

  She’d have scrolled past, except she saw a photograph of a wedding gown that looked a lot like—Oh, no, Oh, crap… it was the same gown she’d be wearing when she married Eric. There were no others like it in the world. It was a one-off design.

  What?

  She read on:

  Evangeline and a wedding gown she designed are cursed, according to inside sources from the design house of Evangeline.

  It’s an open secret that the former model and actress turned wedding gown designer only designs for the rich and beautiful. What’s not so well known is that the famous Brit is a shrew when it comes to treating her staff. “She’s so demanding, she throws fits if everything’s not absolutely perfect,” said a source, who asked not to be named. The source, who works closely with the Diva Designer, said that during a final fitting of the wedding gown she designed for Kate Winton-Jones’s marriage to uber-eligible bachelor Edward Carnarvon, the designer flew into a rage and fired an underling on the spot. The angry woman, said to be of gypsy origin, cursed both the dress and its designer.

  “The Romani have very powerful magic,” the same source told us.

  Within days, the bride disappeared from sight and pretty soon the wedding was cancelled. Coincidence? Maybe. The dress is set to make an appearance at a lesser celebrity wedding, when Eric Van Hoffendam, youngest son of Charles and Grace Van Hoffendam, marries a Carnarvon cousin.

  Evangeline’s press office said she was unavailable to comment, but strangely, no one’s seen the Diva Designer in public since the curse.

  Ashley didn’t feel sleepy anymore. She slumped to her bed. Cursed? Somebody had cursed her hand-me-down wedding gown? It was bad enough wearing a castoff on the one day that was supposed to be all about her, but did they have to hand down a curse?

  Could curses even be handed down?

  She went back to her search engine and typed in, ‘Can a curse be handed down?’ then scoffed at herself. She was twenty-five, not twelve. That article had about as much credibility as the one about Ben causing a suicide.

  And this Carnarvon cousin needed to go to bed.

  She slammed the lid shut on her computer and dragged on her pajamas. While she brushed her teeth, she decided that being stuck here with her mother and Carnarvon relatives was a much bigger curse.

  Still, she took her phone into bed with her and texted Eric.

  “Wish you were here.”

  “Me too.” He then proceeded to tell her all the things he wanted to do to her.

  She powered down the phone. She’d kind of wanted to hear that he loved her or something, not indulge in a sexting session.

  She didn’t sleep well. Discovering her wedding dress was cursed kept her awake. And when she did dream, the dress kept intruding, like a creepy stalker, following her around in her dreams. “Stop it!” she finally yelled and the sound of her own agitated voice woke her up.

  Not sure if she was becoming unhinged, or whether she was in some kind of Gypsy curse danger, she did what she always did when confronted with a tricky problem. She called Whitney and Sienna and asked them to meet her at Wainrights.

  When she arrived, she snagged a table, ordered a craft beer and waited. She didn’t mind that they were a few minutes late since she’d had a busy day. A driving lesson in the morning—in which Ben had shown diabolically cruel tendencies in making her parallel park in spaces even a Smartcar would have trouble fitting into—and then she’d spent two hours in a history lecture that was so dull she wondered how people had lived through the actual time period without dying en masse of boredom.

  “So, I wanted to talk to you guys,” she began when they arrived, wondering how to bring up a curse, and whether a few more drinks should be consumed first.

  “Hey, I’m sorry,” Sienna said, putting one hand in the air as though bargaining for peace. “I’m totally sorry for being a bad bridesmaid. I know we’re supposed to be doing stuff, but honestly, work’s so hectic, and Bradley’s been acting like a big baby and wants my attention all the time. But I will carve out some time next week, I promise.”

  “It’s okay,” she’d chosen bridesmaids for how much she liked them, not for how efficient they’d be, she reminded herself.

  “We’re organizing your hen party. We’re on it, right Sienna?”

  “Absolutely,” Sienna said, scrunching up her face and staring at the table. No one was a worse liar than Sienna.

  “That’s not why I wanted to get together,” she said, then took a deep breath. “I found an article on the Internet that said my wedding dress is cursed.”

  Whitney had been checking out the crowd, and now turned. “Sorry, what’s that about the curse? You’ll have it on your wedding day?”

  “Bummer.”

  “No. Not the curse. A curse.” She stared at the two puzzled faces sitting across from her. “I found an article online about the dress designer, Evangeline. And my dress. It said that Evangeline went postal on some poor seamstress and the woman turned around and cursed both Evangeline and the dress.”

  “You can’t curse Evangeline. She used to live with UK’s sexiest man alive, Grant Bakersfield .”

  “I guess the seamstress didn’t know that because she cursed both the designer and the dress. And now I have the dress.”

  She was glad she’d already confessed that her dress was a hand-me-down so she didn’t have to go into it all a
gain. They could concentrate on the curse part.

  “Wow.”

  “So, my question is, can a dress be cursed?”

  Whitney snorted and leaned back, which meant she was about to tell a story. “Oh, yeah. My blue Zac Posen? The one I got on sale at Barney’s? Totally cursed. Seriously, the first time I wore it this hideous toad kept hitting on me and left sweat marks where he’d had his hand on my shoulder. I am not kidding. I had this big, meaty handprint sweated into my back. So I had the dress cleaned, and then the second time I wore it, Bradley broke up with me.”

  “Bradley broke up with you?”

  She waved a hand. “Only for about thirty minutes. He was having an artistic crisis. But the point is, I’m never wearing that dress again. It’s totally cursed.”

  “So, what do you think? Should I tell my aunt I can’t wear the dress she gave me because it’s cursed?”

  The three of them pondered the problem. Finally, Whitney, the budding lawyer said, “You’ve got to look at both sides of the argument. If you don’t wear the dress, you possibly avoid this alleged curse, but then Millicent will be pissed at you which might be a bigger curse.” They all nodded.

  “Or, you suck it up and wear the dress, and everybody’s happy.”

  “Assuming the dress isn’t actually cursed.”

  “Right, or that the curse can’t be handed down along with the dress.”

  This whole conversation was making her feel morbid and sorry for herself. “I’ve had everything else handed down, why not a curse?”

  Sienna said, “Look on the bright side.”

  “Okay,” she said, waiting.

  Sienna seemed to search her brain. “I can’t think of anything, I’m sorry.”

  The night out with her bridesmaids didn’t help her solve the problem of the cursed dress, but it did clarify one thing for her.

  Her friends were great but they were busy as hell and not the most reliable pair. She needed Tasmine the hired bridesmaid. As much as it irked her that Grace had hired her a bridesmaid and secret wedding planner, she realized after her two besties left the bar promising to call her the following week that she needed the help.