Page 22 of Wedding Crasher

Marla grumbled at Bluey as he tried to nudge her awake with his huge head. She turned over and snuggled deeper into the crisp, white, cotton duvet, desperately trying to hang on to the coat tails of her delicious dream. She stuck her head under the pillow as the ever-patient Bluey thumped his way around the bed to poke her again from the other side. She shot up with a guilty flush. She’d been dreaming about Gabe, who for some fathomless reason had been shirtless and fixing her wonky shower when it suddenly sprayed all over him. Jeez, he’d been very, very wet. She shook her head in an attempt to dislodge the disconcertingly sexy image.

Bluey stood by the door whining low in his throat with his head cocked to one side, and it finally dawned on Marla that there was someone knocking on the door. She scowled at the clock. It was just after eight on her first morning off for quite some time, so whoever the hell had decided to interrupt her much-cherished lie-in had better have something vitally important to say.

She shrugged her white waffle dressing gown on over the top of her cotton slip and belted it tight. A peep through the white voile blind didn’t help, because whoever was at the door was too close to the cottage for her to see. She straightened the blind and pushed her toes into her white terry-towelling flip-flops. A gift from Dora – she’d snipped the little pink ribbons off the front before she’d worn them. Jonny had been appalled, and insisted that her obsession with white was a direct reflection of her uptight personality. Marla eschewed his attempts at pop psychology; her mother had analysed her to death over the years. You didn’t get to be the child of a sex therapist and not have your every thought and word examined. Marla had learned pretty early on not to share her inner feelings with her mother unless she had at least an hour to spare and the inclination to spill her guts. She was self-aware enough to know that this was part of the reason behind her reserved nature as an adult. She’d watched her effusive, colourful parents run constantly at life head first and wanted something different for herself. Something less complicated. More relaxed.More white.White just made her feel clean, that was all. It helped her to breathe more deeply, to relax more easily. She shook her head at Bluey to warn him against climbing into her recently vacated, warm bed, and ran her hand along the handrail as she picked her way down the steep cottage stairs to the front door.

Her attempts to peer through the bevelled glass pane in the old oak door proved fruitless; she couldn’t recognise the warped silhouette on the other side. It looked male though. She slid back the bolt and inched the door open. She was right in her assessment. Male. Very definitely male. Very definitely attractive, too. And naggingly familiar somehow, but without its first hit of caffeine her brain had some way to go to catch up with her feet.

His smile sailed through the Marla Jacobs teeth test, and his sparkling blue eyes melted her last vestiges of annoyance at being woken up. To his further credit, he rather heroically didn’t let his eyes wander down over her state of undress.

Belatedly, she noticed the newspaper in his hand.

‘Are you the oldest paperboy in the world?’

He laughed and ran a hand through his floppy hair. It was so Hugh Grant that she wondered if he’d actually cut a photo out of a magazine and taken it to the hairdressers. If he said the words crikey and gosh in the same sentence in the next few minutes she’d know for sure.

‘Marla, hi. You probably don’t remember me from the other night …’

He looked at her as if he fully expected that she might well recall his face. She shrugged, and shook her head with an apologetic smile to soften the blow. He was going to have to help her out a little more than that.

‘I’m Rupert Dean. I was at the public meeting last week. FromTheShropshire Herald?’

She took the newspaper he held out as her brain fog lifted.

Thatwas where she’d seen him. All her memories of that evening revolved around Gabriel Ryan turning up and completely derailing everything.

‘Yes, I remember now,’ Marla murmured, thoroughly distracted by the ‘Village Under Threat!’ headline splashed across the front of the newspaper next to a large colour image of the chapel. A smaller, grainy, black-and-white image of a scowling Gabe also accompanied the piece – he looked positively demonic. Served him right. But then, a second, private image of him snuck back into her head too, of him half-naked and soaked through in her bathroom …

She looked up as she suddenly remembered that Rupert Dean was still standing on her doorstep. He nodded towards the paper with a grin.

‘Thought you might like to see it hot off the press, so to speak.’

Much as Marla was heartened that the paper had taken up their cause, she remained perplexed as to why Rupert had gone to the trouble of providing a personal delivery service.

‘Do you hand-deliver copies to all your front-page stars?’

Rupert scuffed his toe on the path like a bashful schoolboy.

‘Only the beautiful ones.’

Marla laughed and gathered her dressing gown a little tighter.

‘I was just about to put some coffee on. Would you like one?’ She opened the door wider and stepped aside.

‘I’d like that very much, actually.’

She left him in her cosy sitting room whilst she flew upstairs to fling some clothes on, and returned to find the coffee already made and Rupert leafing through her book collection. He had a classical profile, good bone structure and an aquiline nose. His hair flopped in that artful way that oozed Head Boy, but his eyes hinted at the wicked thoughts going on inside his head.

‘For a woman who runs a wedding chapel, your collection seems remarkably light on romance novels.’ He slid the latest John Grisham back into its place on the shelf.

‘Oh, I have a special room upstairs just to house my Mills & Boon collection,’ she joked, unwilling to share her own very private views on romance with a stranger. She was used to people making the assumption that she must be a romance junkie to run a wedding chapel, and she was savvy enough not to disillusion them.

‘Interesting, Ms Jacobs. Are you trying to lure me upstairs to see your smut collection?’ He waggled his eyebrows at her suggestively as she plunged the coffee with a laugh.

‘Would I make the front page again for seducing the paperboy?’ she laughed.

‘No publicity’s bad publicity, as they say.’

His words reminded her of Gabe’s parting shot at the meeting, dampening the flirty atmosphere in the room.

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