Page 62 of The Duke Who Saved Christmas
“You haven’t been around many brides, have you?”
“I’ve been to far too many weddings in the past eighteen months, but I tend to avoid the whole planning part these days. As it turns out, I’m much better off being a guest than a participant.”
Right.
He had an ex-fiancée.
I so badly wanted to ask about her, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Did he even know that I knew?
Did it even matter? I suppose you could say we were… sort of friends… but not the kind that would warrant me nosing into his love life in any way at all.
“Anyway, Hazel doesn’t strike me as a bridezilla,” he continued, oblivious to the silent conversation happening inside my head.
“Aside from one little incident at the start, she’s been pretty good. Mostly. She’s just a bit fussy and unpredictable.” I slowly twisted the wine glass by the stem and looked at the liquid inside. “Although, you’d be surprised at who turns out to be one. I had a bride a couple of years ago, and she was the sweetest person I’d ever met in my life. The only problem they had was that their mothers were both completely overbearing and had very strong opinions about how the wedding should go, and since both parents were paying equally for things like the venue and catering, they both felt they had a say in it.”
“Uh-oh.”
A small laugh escaped me, and I peered up at him for a second. “Yeah. She worked so hard to please them both, then two weeks before the wedding they went for a dress fitting, including both mums, and it turned out they’d chosen the exactsame dress to wear… In the same colour… Even though she’d given them both approved colours, and their dress colour was not on either of their lists.”
Thomas’ mouth formed a little ‘o.’ “Oof.”
“Yeah. Anyway, shit hit the fan, and my sweet, soft-spoken bride who’d been nothing but courteous to these two women for the past fourteen months of hellish planning flipped her absolute shit. And I mean sheflipped.” I raised my eyebrows to drive home just how badly her shit had been flipped. “She screamed at them both, grabbed her phone, and called her fiancé there and then and said the wedding was off. She said she couldn’t marry him if it meant being tied to his mother for the rest of her life and that she loved him too much to subject him to being tied tohermother for the rest of his life.”
“I bet that went down well.”
“She ranted for the next fifteen minutes about how they were ruining her life, how she wasn’t having the wedding she wanted because of them both and proceeded to list every single one of their infractions over the past year or so. And I mean every single little thing that hurt her, finally culminating in them being so controlling that they couldn’t even stick to the colours she’d asked them to wear which was her one single request of them in the whole process.”
He touched his hand to his lips. “What did you do?”
“Absolutely nothing.” I laughed. “There was nothing I could do. It’d all built up inside the poor thing and she needed to explode, and until she was done, I just let her at them.”
“Did they ever get married?”
I nodded. “The maid of honour handled the seamstresses, I kicked the mothers out of her house, and together we got to work. The big wedding was cancelled after their dads intervened and paid for them to go to Greece to get married at a small villa through a friend of mine.”
“Wow. That took a wild turn.”
“I got a free week in Corfu. Personally, I thought it was a great turn of events.”
He laughed, shaking his head. “Do you know how it all ended up?”
“Oh, yeah. She reached out to me about six months ago with pictures of their new baby. Turns out their mums knew each other growing up, and their fathers were business rivals, so they’d never gotten along. Neither one had ever mentioned it as they didn’t think the relationship would last, so it was purely a matter of one upmanship on both sides when it was clear they were in it for the long haul. She pointed out that their behaviour had cost them seeing their only children get married and it would cost them their grandchildren if they didn’t fix things.”
“Ouch. They didn’t go to the wedding?”
“Nope. Their dads and grandparents did, but they left their mums out to make a point. They’ve never regretted it.” I shrugged. “Last I knew, they’re now good friends and the parents bought a holiday home together.”
“Wow. That was a ride.”
“No kidding. She wasn’t exactly a bridezilla, more just a frustrated bride who exploded in the end, but she did cancel a ninety-grand wedding two weeks before to elope to another country, so that does kind of push her into bridezilla territory just a bit just on principle.”
Thomas snorted. “You know, I’m starting to think I dodged a bullet.”
My eyebrows shot up, but before I could take the appropriate moment to ask what he was talking about, a waiter came over with two plates and stopped at our table.
“Two cottage pies?” he said, looking at us.
I glanced between him and Thomas. “I didn’t order—”
