Page 59 of Wedding Crasher

‘I don’t want to smash your marriage up.’

‘No. Thank you. Me neither.’

‘I need to get out of here.’ He pushed his hands through his hair and stood up. ‘I’ll call you sometime. Maybe we can talk again, when I’ve got my head around it.’

Emily nodded, and the sincerity in his blue eyes reminded her why he’d been the one she’d turned to when the chips were down. His gaze dropped to her bump.

‘It suits you.’ A tiny, sad smile glanced across his mouth. ‘This pregnancy thing. It really suits you.’

Emily watched him walk away. His usual swagger was nowhere to be seen. In fact, he looked like a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

‘Yoohoo! Marla, honey!’

The distinctive squawk assaulted Marla’s ears across the crowded arrivals hall. She held her arms out and her mother tumbled into them, all suntanned wrinkles and expensive jewellery that jangled every time she moved.

‘Let me look at you.’ She gripped Marla hard by the upper arms and leaned backwards.

‘Still too pale.’ She clucked her tongue then reached up and pinched a cheek. ‘Are you using that juicer I sent you?’

Marla laughed. It had taken all of forty seconds for her mother to find fault. She just couldn’t help herself. Moments later she noticed the short man a few steps behind her mother, locked in a battle with two trolleys piled high with coordinated luggage.

‘Honey, this is my fiancé, Brynn. Brynn, meet Marla. Isn’t she every bit as gorgeous as I said she was?’

Brynn shuffled forward, a vision in crumpled cream linen and an ivory fedora. Marla shook his outstretched hand and tried not to wonder where a taxidermist’s hand might spend the majority of its time.

And fiancé? Was it her mother’s life mission to reach double figures?

‘Good to meet you, Marla. Cecilia has told me so much about you.’

He had a thin voice, and when he fixed her with his gimlet eyes, Marla got the alarming feeling that she was being sized up for a glass display case.

She forced a smile, but her heart had well and truly sunk at the thought of her serene cottage being invaded by her mother, the lover and their luggage. She eyed the trolleys to double-check Brynn hadn’t smuggled any dead foxes or suchlike through customs, before leading them outside to her car.

Neither of her passengers offered to help as Marla loaded the cases into the boot. Nor when she took them all out again because they wouldn’t fit. She heaved the largest case onto the back seat next to Brynn, and then shoehorned the rest into the boot space.

‘Have you been to the UK before, Brynn?’

‘Only on a one-night stopover a couple of years back en route to the Austrian taxidermy championships.’

‘Oh.’ Great. He was a conversation killer as well as an animal stuffer.

Marla steered the car through the busy airport traffic onto the motorway and attempted to get the conversation with Brynn back on track.

‘So. How long are you visiting for?’

‘Oh, not long for me I’m afraid. I’m a keynote speaker at the London taxidermy exhibition, and then it’s on to Russia.’

‘Another lecture?’

‘No. I’m collecting a dead zebra from Moscow Zoo.’

Marla met his gaze in the rearview mirror and couldn’t decide whether or not he was joking. Terrific. Trust her mother to bring Hannibal bloody Lecter to visit.

‘Please Jonny! You owe me.’

Jonny pouted as Marla clutched his checked shirtsleeve in desperation.

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