Page 33 of Husband Material
I kept stroking. “Oh yeah, they’re a mess. Extremely dusty.”
“Thrilled as I am for you to dust me in a car park, are there not maid-of-honour duties you need to attend to?”
Leaning in, I nuzzled needily into his neck. “I know. I mean, I think it’ll mostly be standing around providing moral support while Bridge gets her hair done or whatever. But…your lapels. What if they get dusty again?”
“Then”—his voice was soft and full of his smile—“I shall seek you out at once.”
“Please do. Spending a whole wedding without you would be awful.”
“I promise you faithfully, Lucien, you will only have to spend parts of weddings without me.”
Duly reassured, I left Oliver’s lapels alone and we set off down a long gravel drive towards the speck on the horizon that was apparently Judy’s house.
“You know”—Oliver had taken my hand as we walked, a habit we’d honed over a number of slightly embarrassing strolls around the parks of Clerkenwell—“it’s occurring to me that one day you might have to admit that you’re just a bit posh.”
I made a choking sound. “I am not posh. I’ve only got one surname, and I come from a broken home.”
“So does Prince Harry. And generally people who make a bigdeal out of being too common for opera can’t also get a baroness to lend them her front room at short notice.”
“It’s not her front room, it’s her—”
“Grounds?” finished Oliver.
Okay, that sounded worse. And, worse still, Oliver totally had a point. “Oh, this is nice,” I told him. “It reminds me of when we were first going out and I didn’t like you.”
And it was testament to how far we’d come that I could say something like that and he’d laugh. And Oliver laughing in a special-occasion suit was a very good Oliver indeed.
Eventually we arrived at the court bit of Pfaffle Court. And while I didn’t know much about history, it was definitely the kind of place that the kind of person who wanted to get married in that kind place would want to get married in. Which was to say, big and fancy-looking with lots of windows and a dedicated posing staircase between two ornate pillars.
“Oh my,” said Oliver. “What a lovely Tudor manor.”
And, again, it was testament to how far we’d come that I had only a slight desire to shove him into a ditch. “Stop showing off.”
“But I’ve always felt my passing familiarity with well-known, highly distinctive architectural styles is an essential part of my bad-boy image.”
It felt bad to be laughing at the notion of Oliver having a bad-boy image because I knew he could be a bad boy when it counted. “Should I ask how you know it’s Tudor, or will I regret it?”
He shrugged. “We do a special house-recognising course in barrister school.”
“I know you’re joking, but even if you weren’t, that would not be the weirdest thing about your job.”
“My job,” began Oliver with the gravity of a legal professional, “is—”
Before he could insist that his job wasn’t weird and I couldpoint out that any career that involved wearing a wig but never lip-synching was weird by definition, Melanie came flying towards us with impressive speed for a woman in a rose-gold frock and matching stilettos.
“Luc,” she cried. “Great to see you. Can you tell Bridge I’ll be back in two minutes? There’s an emergency at work. Don’t really have time to talk about it”—she took a deep breath—“but one of our authors is starting a book tour of the States on Monday. And we’ve accidentally booked him appearances in New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas.”
This seemed a fairly minor crisis by the standards of Bridge and Melanie’s jobs. “Aren’t they quitegoodplaces for a book tour?”
“Not when they’re New York, Texas; Los Angeles, Texas; and Las Vegas, New Mexico. This is why we don’t normally have the UK office book the U.S. tour dates.”
Oliver was doing his interested-in-everyone face. “I take it none of those are big book towns?”
“New York, Texas,” replied Melanie, sweeping a stray braid out of her face, “has a population of twenty and Los Angeles, Texas, is less than a mile across, but there’s quite a nice library in Las Vegas, New Mexico, so…he might like that. Anyway, I have to go and sort this out. Bridge is in a small guest room in the Lodge—that way.”
And with that, she dashed off to disappoint a dozen Texans.
“You should probably commence maid-of-honouring.” Oliver gently de-coupled our hands. “I’ll see if I can be useful somewhere else. Call me if you need me—or even if you don’t.”
