Bad Brides (2 page)

Jodie’s heart was beating fast with excitement. Even though many of the guests here knew what was about to be announced – the reveal of the first-ever issue of
Style Bride
,
anchored by a photograph of the Bride of the Year, smiling in glorious triumph at her coup in having snagged the cover – Jodie was over the moon at her own achievement. She had turned a
tortuous and agonising process into a glossy first issue, so thick with copy and advertisements that its girth measured two centimetres.

Two centimetres! That was huge in magazine terms! And at that thought Jodie’s smile spread as wide as the Bride of the Year’s. In work as in marriage, size really
did
matter.

Stanclere Hall, July

The Fracking Queen commands and we obey
, Edmund St Aubrey, Earl of Respers, thought with amusement as he contemplated the duck-egg blue Tiffany box on his dressing
table. Inside it was a four-carat pink diamond engagement ring, the central stone encircled by smaller, no less bright white diamonds; the whole thing had cost over forty thousand pounds.

It was a sum which Edmund would have been quite incapable of affording himself. And even if he had had a spare five figures kicking around – an unimaginable amount! – he would have
poured it into some much more pressing need: urgent repairs to the roof of Stanclere Hall, his ancestral home. Or the almost equally vital task of replumbing the Hall and installing a new boiler:
the clunks and creaks whenever someone tried to run a bath were frankly terrifying, as if gremlins inside the ancient pipes were hitting them with tiny hammers. Or buying desperately needed new
farm equipment. Edmund winced, thinking about his ancient John Deere tractors, so corroded by now that the workers joked that the rust was all that was holding them together.

But you don’t need to worry about the roof or the boiler or the tractors now!
he told himself, taking a deep breath, fighting back the panic that wrapped around him every time he
thought about how much money he needed to keep Stanclere Hall running.
All the jobs in the house and on the estate are safe now, thank God.
Edmund could not separate the interests of
Stanclere Hall, its landscaped gardens, its arable land and its loyal staff; they were all essential parts of a whole without which he would never be complete. The Earls of Respers had always lived
at Stanclere Hall, and with that privilege came huge responsibility. Edmund did not own the Hall; he held it in trust for the future generations of Respers and also for all the people to whom it
provided jobs and a roof over their heads, in the form not only of the Hall itself but all its tied cottages. Some of the families had worked for the Respers as long as the latter had been in
residence.

So no pressure, Edmund, as the Fracking Queen would say
, he thought, smiling. No pressure at all. Just the wages bill every month, the soaring costs of electricity and gas, a crumbling
ancient stately home to maintain, an ornamental lake covered in algae . . .

Mercifully, inside the small square Tiffany box was the solution to all his problems. It might be unorthodox for the mother of his future fiancée to have bought her own daughter’s
engagement ring, but the Fracking Queen had been insistent, and she always got her way. She had demanded that Brianna Jade, Edmund’s heiress bride-to-be, was not to be proposed to with some
old ring from the Respers family jewels. Edmund had argued that there were some very good pieces of jewellery in the safe: being part of the entail, he couldn’t sell them to raise money to
maintain the estate. Edmund, who disliked to see so much money thrown away on what he privately considered to be just a bit of shiny carbon, had tried to tell the Fracking Queen that it was much
more typical of the English aristocracy to bestow a family heirloom on one’s bride. But the Fracking Queen had countered with the fact that when Prince Oliver, the heir to the British throne,
had proposed to his late bride, Princess Belinda, he had done so with a ring bought from Garrard’s jewellers, and what was good enough for the royal family was damn well good enough for
Brianna Jade.

There was really no arguing with the Queen when she was set on something; she would pull out her tablet thingy, whizz around it, tracing a perfectly manicured finger on the screen, and come up
with a devastating fact that would stop you in your tracks. And since she hadn’t insisted that Edmund purchase the pink diamond ring himself, or even pick it out, but had done all that
herself, there was also no denying that she played fair. The box had been produced triumphantly today when she arrived from London, as she and Edmund drank sherry in the library while Brianna Jade
supervised the unpacking of her and her mother’s weekend wardrobes.

Edmund had blinked at how very bright the ring was. It looked as if it had been cut specifically to refract the maximum light possible, as if you could, in a pinch, use it to spark a fire by
channelling sunlight through it, as they did with mirrors in the Boy Scouts. But the Fracking Queen had smiled complacently at the sparkling diamonds she had produced, sculled her sherry in one
swift gulp –
my God, she can hold her drink,
he thought respectfully; he’d seen her knock back glasses of good single malt as if they were spritzers – and stood up,
announcing that she would send Brianna Jade downstairs in an hour or so and that she expected Edmund to have ‘sealed the deal’, as she put it, in time for champagne before dinner.

Champagne which she had had sent from Harrods, of course, because Edmund couldn’t possibly afford her favourite, Cristal. Cases of it had arrived the day before, together with hampers of
foie gras, caviare and vast quantities of bresaola, some sort of Italian beef slices on which the Queen mainly existed for diet purposes. Cook was fascinated.

He raised his eyes from the little blue box and looked at himself in the mirror of his dressing table. Being born an Earl had not made Edmund arrogant in any way. If anything, it had humbled
him, the knowledge that he had so much responsibility but lacked the business skill to run his estates profitably. Nor was he arrogant about his looks.

I’m just an average sort of chap
, he thought, considering his reflection. He was tall enough – six feet – with nice regular features.
At least I have a decent
jawline.
It might be a cliché that many of the British aristocracy were chinless wonders, but it didn’t make it any less true. His light brown hair, his grey eyes, his square
forehead and straight mouth were all Respers features, seen in many of the family portraits. The men were attractive in a traditionally manly way, but the solid features, wide shoulders and strong
jawlines were harder on the women. Respers females tended to be described, charitably, as ‘a little on the masculine side’.

Well, Brianna Jade will definitely raise the Respers aesthetics considerably,
Edmund thought, picking up the tie that was draped over his valet stand and placing it around his upturned
shirt collar. He had never really believed that women as beautiful as her existed outside films and magazines. Or that, even if they did, one of them would conceivably want to marry him. He was the
envy of the entire county. Brianna Jade looked like the model for Botticelli’s
Birth of Venus
, she was the sweetest-natured girl Edmund had ever met, and she was bringing him a dowry
that would literally transform Stanclere.

And what did he have to give her in return? A title, a big delapidated house and – he looked at himself again in the mirror as he straightened his tie – an average-looking man who
just happened to be an Earl.

He really was the luckiest chap in the world.

As Edmund St Aubrey contemplated his good luck, Brianna Jade Maloney sat quietly in the corner of one of the tatty chintz sofas in the morning room of Stanclere Hall, waiting
for its owner to come with his sure light tread down the creaky central oak staircase and stride across the tatty old carpets in the Great Hall. Tamra, Brianna Jade’s mom, said that as soon
as Edmund and her daughter were officially engaged, there would be major,
major
renovations on the Hall, and you’d better believe all the ancient rugs would be the first thing to go,
before the moths in them got to her Italian cashmere.

Brianna Jade’s hands were folded in her lap, her expression perfectly composed as she pictured Edmund appearing in the doorway of the morning room, smiling at her with his polite,
English-gentleman smile, about to say –

But Brianna Jade made herself stop right there, before she actually heard the words in her head. She wanted them to be lovely and new when Edmund said them to her, to have her own reaction be
completely spontaneous. This was a luxury she had barely ever enjoyed in her adult life to date: from the age of fifteen, she had competed in one pageant after another for four straight years, and
pageant competitors were programmed like computers. Even though those days were behind her, had ended when Tamra married vast amounts of money in the shape of Ken Maloney, the Fracking King of
America, Brianna Jade had still needed to learn how to behave in her new life, to follow another set of rules. She was very much looking forward to a marriage in which her own vast dowry would
allow her, hopefully, just to be herself.

It’s the start of a new life now,
she thought with great relief.
I’m settling down.
Finally, she knew where she belonged: in this lovely house in the country with
farmland all around it. She had always wanted to live on a farm. And England was so pretty and green, so much prettier than Illinois. Brianna Jade loved it here.

She had totally earned this. All those years of walking onto pageant stages, smiling till her mouth cramped and saying what the judges wanted to hear without any idea of what she actually
thought about the questions they were asking. And then, after her mother had married Ken, catapulting them into the lap of luxury, they both swiftly realized that they had to learn how to talk
right and know how to act classy enough for Florida high society, which had turned out to be just as exhausting.

Being the Countess of Respers, by contrast, seemed like it would be a walk in the park. The London upper crust had been hugely welcoming to the Fracking Queen and Princess: no one in Britain
cared about what kind of an American accent you had. US class distinctions were meaningless over here.

Brianna Jade might not have been the brightest bulb in the chandelier intellectually, but she was richly gifted with common sense. She was perfectly aware that almost everyone in London society
had been so very friendly because she and her mother Tamra had swept in on a glittering tide of money, as if their dollars had been golden coins that her mother scattered from her carriage, like
she pictured people doing in the olden days. Of course, some of the younger women hadn’t been
quite
so nice to her, but that was only to be expected. Brianna Jade knew all about
mean-girls’ cliques and how they didn’t like a new girl at the best of times, let alone one who was pretty enough to be on the pageant circuit.

And the rich, titled, twenty-something British women, led by some girl called the Honourable Araminta, were complete pushovers compared to the hardcore bitches from back home in Illinois, all
scrabbling to win the titles of Kewanee Pork Queen or Watseka Corn Queen. Those were girls who’d rub baby oil into your false lashes so they wouldn’t stick on, doctor your shampoo with
Kool-Aid to streak your hair, glue up the nozzle of your hairspray can and refuse to let you use theirs, even push you into a stinging-nettle patch or rub poison ivy into the inside of your
dress.

Nope, the Honourable Araminta, aka ‘Minty’, and her girlfriends had no idea how to catfight as dirty as the Kendras, Taylors and Kymbers on the pageant circuit. In the US, Tamra had
done plenty of battling for her daughter, but here Brianna Jade was more than equal to the task. What had these Honourables and Ladies ever lacked in their life? Had they ever had to shop at
Goodwill or the Salvation Army, make a packet of ready-made grits last a couple of days between two of them, or hitch to school because they had two tyres bald as eagles and no money for gas? No
way.

Brianna Jade didn’t understand half of what they said, anyway, because of their sharp clipped accents which made their words like stabby little knives thrown too short to reach the target.
And she wouldn’t have answered even if she had, because she’d figured out early on that what drove them really crazy was if she just smiled back at them with her perfect teeth, her best
‘I’m a Christian and I forgive you’ pageant smile. For some reason she couldn’t work out, they
hated
that smile. They actually recoiled when they saw it, like she
had a full water pitcher in her hand and they were the Wicked Witches from every compass point going.

The Honourable Minty and her crew did have one thing in common with the girls back home, though: they were equally wary of Brianna Jade’s mom. Tamra provoked that reaction in women. It
wasn’t her fault; her God-given looks meant that she was catnip to every dad, male teacher and, frankly, a lot of those girls’ teenage boyfriends. That had been Tamra’s ultimate
threat to the really bad mean girls, that she’d flirt with their boyfriends and turn their heads around so they literally couldn’t even see their girlfriends any more, they were too
dazzled by Tamra Krantz.

Because Tamra was the ultimate MILF. She’d had her only daughter at sixteen: when, at fifteen years old, Brianna Jade won the title of Pork Queen of Kewanee (a fact Tamra
never
wanted mentioned in later life), Tamra was thirty-one and looked twenty-four. She was the perfected version of what Brianna Jade would hopefully become, with her thick mane of strawberry-blonde
hair, her big luminous eyes, her skin lightly tanned and so smooth that even the haters couldn’t help calling her ‘Barbie’ as a grudging compliment.

Brianna Jade regularly heard girls at school bitching that Tamra had better legs than they did, a flatter stomach and, for a while, bigger boobs: however, on marrying Ken, which took them up in
the world like an express penthouse elevator to Classy Town, Tamra had taken a good look around her, realized that D cups didn’t fit into the Armani or Carolina Herrera dresses worn to
fundraising Florida balls, and had the implants removed. Ken had bitched and moaned about it, but, as always, he went along with what Tamra wanted.