by Holly Martin
‘Hey, you’re not peeking at your presents, are you?’
‘No, I was just… rearranging them to make room for all the hundreds of presents I’ve bought you.’
He laughed. ‘Come on, we’re going to be late.’
‘And whose fault is that?’ Eden said, replacing the square box and standing up. She grabbed her bag and coat and pulled her hat on and was just doing up her buttons when she stepped out onto the street and froze.
There standing on the street in front of her, stamping his feet, was a unicorn. Well OK, it wasn’t, it was Saint Nicholas, the white shire horse from the Christmas market, only without his sleigh and with a long pink sparkly horn strapped to his head.
Dougie closed the door behind her and stepped up by her side. ‘You said that you knew you would never get to ride on the back of a magical unicorn so I thought I would try to fix that for you.’
Her heart swelled with love for him. ‘You are so silly.’
The man who had been the driver of the sleigh ride was standing by Saint Nicholas’ head, holding the reins. He smiled at Eden.
‘Come on then, we don’t want to be late,’ Dougie said, holding his hands out so he could give Eden a leg-up. She stepped into his hand and braced herself on his shoulder as he pushed her up into the saddle. Once she was settled Dougie climbed up behind her.
‘God, we’re so high up,’ Eden said as she gathered the reins. She had ridden a horse before but not very often.
‘Don’t worry. I won’t let you fall,’ Dougie murmured in her ear and she smiled.
The man started leading them down the street towards Rosa’s as Dougie wrapped his arms around Eden, holding her against him.
‘I’m working on the flying dragon, but that might take a while,’ Dougie said and she laughed.
‘You’re making all my dreams come true.’
‘I’m working on it.’
People stopped and stared as they clip-clopped slowly down the darkened street. Some of them laughed and pointed, others took pictures.
‘You’d think they’d never seen a unicorn before,’ Dougie said as he smiled and waved at the small crowd.
They arrived outside Rosa’s restaurant and Saint Nicholas came to a stop. Dougie slid down from the back of the horse and held out his hands to help Eden down too.
She swung her leg over and slid down into his arms, wrapping her arms around his neck and giving him a brief kiss on the lips before he lowered her to the floor.
‘Thank you.’
‘My pleasure.’
He took her hand and they both called their thanks to Saint Nicholas’ owner before they made their way inside.
Bella, Rome and Freya were already waiting for them, though there was no sign of Isaac. They had clearly seen how they had arrived as Bella and Freya were leaning over the back of the booth watching them and Rome was standing up too. They were staring at them with a mixture of shock and happiness.
Dougie sat down and pulled her into the booth next to him. ‘Yes, we are seeing each other, yes, I am sleeping with your sister and it’s fanbloodytastic and yes we love each other,’ he said. ‘Any other questions?’
Eden blushed at the quick rundown of their relationship and decided to change the subject in case there were lots of questions.
‘Where’s Isaac?’
‘Oh, he’s just finishing up on a telephone conference call, he’ll be down shortly,’ Bella said.
Eden watched her carefully. Though Bella was smiling, it didn’t quite meet her eyes.
‘Is everything OK?’
‘Yes, fine,’ Bella said, her voice high with anxiety.
Everyone looked at her with concern. She wasn’t fooling anyone.
‘And the wedding plans, are they going OK?’ Eden asked gently.
To her surprise, Bella suddenly burst into tears.
Eden’s heart dropped. All the plans for a wedding Bella didn’t actually want had clearly taken their toll. Eden had seen this coming and she should have done something to stop it before now.
‘Hey, what’s wrong?’ Freya asked as Eden leaned across the table to hold Bella’s hand and Rome put an arm around her.
‘This bloody wedding, I hate it. The five-star hotel with its giant ballroom and crystal chandeliers, the seven-tier wedding cake, the chocolate fountain, the two-thousand-pound flower arrangements, the photographer, the videographer, the band, the DJ for when the band is having a break, the five-course meal, the finest champagne, I don’t want any of this stuff,’ Bella cried. ‘The way I’m feeling at the moment…’ Eden looked up as Isaac walked through the door ‘…I don’t want to get married at all.’
Isaac’s face fell as he clearly heard what Bella said, though Bella had no idea that he had just come in behind her. Only Eden had seen him.
Crap.
Isaac stood there frozen in shock for a moment while Eden tried to get Bella’s attention to let her know he was there. But before she could, Isaac turned and walked out.
Shit.
Eden quickly scrabbled out of her seat as she heard Freya encourage Bella to tell Isaac how she felt. Dougie looked up at her sudden departure and then glanced over at the door and obviously saw Isaac too as his eyes widened in panic. Eden ran after Isaac, catching up with him just a few metres away from the café.
‘Isaac, wait,’ Eden said, wishing she hadn’t just taken her coat off as he turned to face her; it was freezing outside. ‘She didn’t mean it.’
‘She sounded pretty serious,’ Isaac said, his voice choked.
‘It’s not you, she loves you more than anything. I know you had your rough patches at the very beginning but I promise you this is not that. It’s the wedding she’s getting upset about, not being married to you.’
He looked at her in confusion and then took his coat off and wrapped it round her. ‘Why would she be upset about the wedding? She’s the one planning it all. I know I’ve taken my eye off the ball with this wedding but I’ve given her everything she wants.’
‘She doesn’t want the big affair. She’s doing all that because she thinks that’s what you want. If I know Bella, she’d be happy with a tiny little wedding in the park or on the beach, just you, her, a few witnesses and maybe a nice meal afterwards and a bit of dancing. She doesn’t need the glitz or the glamour and for someone who has spent her entire life on Hope Island, that’s where she wants to get married, not some fancy hotel in London.’
He frowned. ‘Then why the hell didn’t she say something?’
‘She wanted to make you happy.’
‘I’d be happy with whatever she is happy with. I just want to be married to her and I don’t care whether we do that in a registry office here on Hope Island or on a beach in Mauritius, I just want her to be my wife.’
‘Will you come back in and talk to her? Maybe we can straighten this out,’ Eden said.
Isaac hesitated and looked away. Panic ripped through Eden; there was no way she was letting him walk away from this.
‘Please, come in and talk to her.’ She would ask nicely now but if she had to drag him back inside she would.
‘She should have told me how she felt,’ Isaac said. ‘How can we ever have a proper relationship if she won’t be honest with me? We don’t stand a chance of making this marriage work if we can’t talk to each other.’
‘Can I ask you something, do you want this big fancy wedding?’
‘No, I wanted to get married here, just a few friends, something small but—’
‘And did you tell Bella that?’
Isaac sighed, seeing her point. ‘I just wanted to make her happy.’
‘That’s all she wanted too, it’s not the worst crime in the world. This is all so new to you both, it hasn’t even been a year since you two met. You will both make mistakes in this relationship and you will learn from them but the important thing is that loving each other means seeing past each other’s mistakes and forgiving them. You say she should have talked to you, here’s your chance to
talk to her. It works both ways.’
Isaac nodded and Eden sighed with relief. He followed her back in just as Bella was coming out to look for them.
Bella threw herself into Isaac’s arms as soon as she saw him. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean I didn’t want to get married to you. I really want that, I just…’
Isaac held her tight. ‘What did you mean? Eden says it’s the wedding that’s upsetting you; want to tell me what this is all about?’
Bella led him back to the booth and he sat down next to her. Eden took her seat again next to Dougie who squeezed her hand.
Bella took a deep breath. ‘I know you want this big wedding in London, but… I don’t want that. I know I’m being ungrateful and that you’ve spent thousands on this big party but…’ a sob caught in her throat. ‘That’s not how I want to celebrate our special day. I’ve been going along with all of this because I knew it made you happy and I just kept telling myself that it didn’t matter how I got married, just as long as we were married. But it does matter, this is supposed to be the best day of my life and I don’t want to get married that way.’
‘Hang on, I don’t want the big party either, I was only doing all that for you.’
Bella stared at him incredulously. ‘You didn’t want it? But Claudia said…’
Isaac’s face darkened at the mention of his PA. ‘What did Claudia say?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Bella said, quietly. ‘She was just trying to do the best thing for you.’
‘It does matter, what did she say?’
‘When we announced our engagement, she came in to see me and said that she knew we had talked about getting married at Christmas but that the end of January was the best time for you in your diary, as selling off your companies in London was still going to take several weeks. She had already taken the liberty of contacting the Kensington Tower Hotel in London, one of your favourite hotels, who were able to accommodate us. She already had all these menu choices and florists we could use and recommended a band and then she produced this huge guest list of people that I would need to invite and I didn’t know any of them.’
Isaac shook his head. ‘She had no right to interfere like that. I told her that you might need some help organising the wedding but I didn’t expect this. Christ, my wedding is not a big PR stunt. It’s about marrying the woman I love. She came to me and said you wanted the Kensington Tower Hotel, which had a capacity of five hundred people, and asked if I was happy for her to take care of the guest list. I thought how ridiculous it would be if it was just us six in a room that big, so I just went along with it assuming if you had chosen a location that big then you obviously wanted a big grand party to fill it. Why did you agree to the Kensington Tower Hotel if you didn’t want to get married there?’
‘I tried to tell her. When I told her I wanted to get married to you here she said that would make you look silly and it would be expected that you would get married in London. She said that you had attended several clients’ and business associates’ weddings over the years and they would expect to get an invite to your wedding too. I didn’t want you to look silly in front of your colleagues so I just decided I would go along with it all to make you happy.’
Isaac looked gutted. ‘She told you it would look silly? How can marrying you in my home look silly? Besides, I don’t care what anyone thinks of me. I’d get married in a clown suit with oversized purple shoes if that’s what you wanted. This day is about us promising to love each other for the rest of our lives, not what anyone else wants or thinks.’
‘And then your mum gave me this long list of relatives that I needed to invite and everything just got so much bigger than I ever wanted but I thought this was what you wanted too,’ Bella said.
Isaac groaned. ‘I just went along with all this because I thought you wanted some big extravagant wedding. Christ, this is all my fault. I’ve been so busy trying to tie up my connections with my companies in London so I could give all my time to you here and to working with Dougie on Fairy Gifts after Christmas that I completely took my eye off the ball when it came to our wedding.’
Eden cocked her head at the mention of Fairy Gifts; she had heard that name before –although now was definitely not the time to focus on that.
Isaac took Bella’s hand. ‘The wedding wasn’t turning out how I imagined it would, so I just decided to let you have full rein in whatever you wanted to do. But nothing is more important to me than you and our wedding day. We really need to talk to each other more. Bella, what is it that you want?’
‘It doesn’t matter, I’m just being silly. We can’t cancel the wedding now, hundreds of people are coming, we’ve already paid out thousands of pounds and I refuse to let you lose all of that. Your mum arrives tomorrow and she has all these big ideas for the wedding too and I don’t want to let her down.’
Isaac sighed. ‘Our wedding day is about us, me and you, not Claudia, not my work colleagues, not my mum or any of my distant relatives I haven’t seen for years. I don’t want this wedding and you don’t want this wedding so I’ll be damned if I’m going to let our special day be dictated to us. We can always continue with the big party in London anyway so we don’t have to cancel the whole thing, but we can get married our way first. What do you want for our wedding day?’
Bella stared at him, a slow smile forming on her face. ‘What do you want?’
‘You saying I do.’
She smiled. ‘That part is guaranteed, how did you imagine the day itself?’
‘I actually thought we could use our house. We are always at our happiest when we are there, just the two of us and our crazy dogs. It makes sense that we would celebrate our life together under our roof. Invite these guys, your parents, my mum, maybe a few others.’
‘I thought that too. When you first proposed on Blueberry Bay, I imagined that we would get married there, on New Year’s Eve, just before midnight so we could start the new year as Mr and Mrs Scott. Then we’d go back to our house and dance and drink and eat nibbles. No speeches, no staged photos, nothing fancy. Just me and you under the stars declaring that we would love each other forever.’
He smiled at her. ‘I really like the sound of that. I know we only have just over a week until New Year’s Eve but do you think we could arrange our wedding for then? I’m off work now until the new year so I can take care of a lot of what we need.’
‘Really?’ Bella said, her smile widening.
‘I want that more than anything,’ Isaac said. ‘I’ll handle Claudia and my mum.’
‘Then I can handle the rest.’
Eden smiled at them as the discussion continued about how they were going to pull it off in such a short amount of time. If only they’d talked about it before now, they could have prevented all of this from happening. Communication was such an important part of a relationship and as she looked up at Dougie she knew she needed to talk to him about her fears of losing him and her concerns about the validity of their relationship. Isaac was right: if they were going to work then she had to be honest with him.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The conversation had moved on from Bella and Isaac’s wedding as Dougie finished off the last piece of pizza.
He was glad that everything was sorted out for them – he loved seeing Bella with a smile on her face – but if he was honest he was finding it hard to concentrate on any of the conversation that evening.
‘Are you OK?’ Eden asked softly as the waitress cleared their plates away. ‘You’ve been very quiet all night.’
He nodded. He knew he had hardly said a word because there was only one thing on his mind and he could barely breathe with the nerves and excitement of it all.
‘Well, since we are all here,’ Rome said. ‘And it’s a night for sharing and happy news, now you two have decided to actually talk about the wedding you both want, Freya and I have something we’d like to share as well.’
Dougie looked up and focussed on his best friend as Rome pulled a photo out
of his wallet and placed it on the table, with his hand over the top.
‘We went for our scan yesterday and we thought you’d like to see our little bean.’
Eden and Bella immediately got excited, squealing and cooing before they had even seen the photo. They both pored over it and ooohed and ahhed at the tiny grainy image.
‘Wait, is that…?’ Eden pointed at the photo.
Freya grinned. ‘Yes it is, we’re having a little boy.’
The noise was deafening as both Eden and Bella squealed so loudly that everyone in the restaurant looked over at them. Dougie smiled and congratulated Rome and Freya as Eden passed him the photo so he could see for himself.
He stared at it, stunned with how clear the image was. He could see the tiny fingers, the dark patch in the head which was probably the brain, and the little white dot in the middle of the chest that was probably the baby’s heart, and sure enough the tell-tale sign that Freya was carrying a little boy. He couldn’t take his eyes off the photo. The tiny little lips and nose, the little fat belly. Suddenly this baby felt more real than it had before. They were going to have a son and Dougie couldn’t have been happier for them… or more envious.
He suddenly felt that the last twelve years had been such a waste. He had focussed on his career, on building his life in America, when really he belonged here. If he’d come back years ago or never left in the first place, this was the life he would have had with Eden. Getting married and having babies, and yes they could still have that life, but in many ways he was starting from square one all over again, trying to gain her trust, trying to prove to her he was in this for the long haul. Maybe it was time to skip forward a few steps. He wanted forever with Eden and maybe it was time to prove that.
Eden was lying with her head in Dougie’s lap as they watched the end of It’s a Wonderful Life. The fire was crackling in the fireplace, the fairy lights were chasing each other around the tree and Dougie was gently stroking her hair. This was bliss.
The film came to an end and Dougie switched off the DVD and the news came on instead. She was about to launch into how important it was for Dougie to see his worth, just as George had finally done in the film, but what was on the news caught her attention.