Breaking/Making Up: Something Borrowed\Vendetta (3 page)

Ashleigh shook her head in drily amused resignation. Serve herself right for giving James’s mother
carte blanche
with the arrangements.

‘Trust Nancy Hargraves to turn this wedding into a social circus,’ her father muttered crossly as the white Fairlane pulled up next to the stone archway that marked the entrance to the park. A fair crowd of onlookers were waiting there for the bride’s arrival, not to mention several photographers and a video cameraman. ‘Thank God I’ve only got one daughter. I wouldn’t want to go through all this again.’

Ashleigh felt a surge of irritation towards her father. Why did he always have to make her feel that her being female was a bother to him?

If only Mum were still alive, she thought with a pang of sadness. She would have so loved today. Not for the first time Ashleigh wondered how such a soft, sentimental woman had married a man like her father.

People always claimed she took after her mother. She certainly hoped so.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ Edgar O’Neil went on curtly while they sat there waiting for the chauffeur to make his way round to Ashleigh’s door. ‘It’s as well Stuart will be joining the practice next year. You’re going to be too busy having babies and dinner parties to be bothered with doctoring. And rightly so. A woman’s place is in the home.’

Ashleigh was too flabbergasted to say a word. She had always known that her father was one of the old brigade at heart. Also that her younger brother would be joining the practice after he finished his residency. But her father spoke as if her services would be summarily dispensed with!

As for her giving dinner parties...Nancy Hargraves and her late husband might have been the hub of Glenbrook’s social life, the Hargraves family owning the logging company and timber mill which were the economic mainstays of the town. But James was not a social animal in the least, and Ashleigh didn’t anticipate their married life would contain too much entertaining.

She had planned to go on working, babies or not. Or at least she
had
...till her father had dropped his bombshell just now. Her heart turned over with a mixture of disappointment and dismay, though quickly replaced by a prickly resolve. She would just have to start up a practice of her own, then, wouldn’t she?

Alighting from the car, Ashleigh had to make a conscious effort to put a relaxed, smiling face on for the photographers and all the people avidly watching her every move. Heavens, but it looked as if the whole town had turned out to see their only lady doctor getting married.

Or was there a measure of black curiosity, came the insidious thought, over her marrying the wrong brother?

Stop it! she breathed to herself fiercely. Now just you stop it!

‘Doesn’t she look beautiful?’ someone whispered as she made her way carefully up the stone steps and through the archway, her skirt hitched up slightly so she didn’t trip.

‘Like a fairy princess,’ was another comment.

Ashleigh felt warmed by their compliments, though she knew any woman would look good in what she was wearing. The dress and veil combined had cost a fortune, Nancy having insisted she have the very best. Personally she had thought the
Gone With The Wind
style gown, with its heavy beading, low-cut neck, flounced sleeves and huge layered skirt, far too elaborate for her own simpler tastes. But Nancy had been insistent.

‘It’s expected of my daughter-in-law to wear something extra-special,’ she had said in that haughty manner which could have been aggravating if one let it. But Ashleigh accepted the woman for what she was. A harmless snob. James had a bit of it in him too, but less offensively so.

Jake had been just the opposite, refusing to conform to his mother’s rather stiff social conventions, always going his own way. Not for him a short back and sides haircut. Or suits. Or liking classical music. Jake had been all long, wavy hair, way-out clothes and hard-rock bands. Only in his grades had he lived up to his parental expectations, being top of the school.

Irritation at how her mind kept drifting to Jake sent a scowl to her face.

‘Smile, Doc,’ the photographer from the local paper urged. ‘You’re going to be married, not massacred.’

Ashleigh stopped to throw a beaming smile the photographer’s way. ‘This better?’

‘Much!’

‘Come, Ashleigh,’ her father insisted, taking her elbow and shepherding her across the small expanse of lawn to where the imitation aisle of red carpet started and her attendants were waiting. ‘We’re late enough as it is.’

Her chief bridesmaid thought so too, it appeared. ‘Now that’s taking tradition a bit too far for my liking,’ Kate grumbled. ‘I was beginning to think you’d got cold feet and done a flit.’

‘Never,’ Ashleigh laughed.

‘Well, stranger things have happened. But all’s well that ends well. I’ll just give the nod for the music to start and the men to get ready. I think they’re all hiding behind the dais. Still nervous?’ she whispered while she straightened her friend’s veil.

‘Terrified,’ Ashleigh said truthfully, a lump gathering in her throat as all the guests stood up, blocking out any view of the three men walking round to stand at the base of the dais steps.

‘Good. Nothing like a nervous bride. Nerves make them look even more beautiful, though God knows I don’t know how anyone could look any more beautiful than you do today, dear friend. James is going to melt when he sees you.’

‘Will you two females stop gasbagging?’ the father of the bride interrupted peevishly.

‘Keep your shirt on, Dr O’Neil,’ Kate returned, not one to ever be hassled by a man, even a respected physician of fifty-five. Which could explain why, at thirty, she’d never been a bride herself. ‘We’ll be ready when we’re ready and not a moment before. Your father’s a right pain in the neck, do you know that, Ashleigh?’

‘Yes,’ came the sighing reply.

The organ started up.

Kate grinned. ‘Knock ‘em dead, love.’

‘You make this sound like the opening night of a show,’ Ashleigh returned in an exasperated voice.

Kate lifted expressive eyebrows, then laughed softly. ‘Well, it is, in a way, isn’t it?’

Heat zoomed into Ashleigh’s cheeks.

‘Aah,’ the other girl smiled. ‘That’s what I wanted to see. The bridal blush. She’s ready now, Dr O’Neil.’

As ready as I’ll ever be, Ashleigh thought with a nervous swallow.

The long walk up the red carpet on her father’s arm was a blur. The music played. Countless faces smiled at her. It felt almost as if she were in a dream. She was walking on clouds and everything seemed fuzzy around the edges of her field of vision.

Only one face stood out at her. Nancy’s, still looking a little tense, and oddly watchful, as though expecting Ashleigh to turn tail and run at any moment.

And then the men came into view...

First came James, looking tall and darkly handsome in a black tuxedo, his thick, wavy hair slicked back neatly from his well-shaped head. And next to him was...

Ashleigh faltered for a moment.

For the best man
wasn’t
Peter Reynolds, the new accountant at Hargraves Pty Ltd and James’s friend since college, but a perfect stranger!

Her father must have noticed at the same time. ‘Who the hell’s that standing next to James?’ he muttered under his breath to her.

‘I have no idea...’ The man was about thirty with rather messy blond hair, an interesting face and intelligent dark eyes. After a long second look Ashleigh knew she’d never seen him before in her life.

Her eyes skated down to the other groomsman. Stuart, her brother. He smiled back reassuringly, after which she swung her gaze back to James. Their eyes locked and for one crashing second Ashleigh literally did go weak at the knees. For James was looking at her as if she were a vision, an apparition that he could scarcely believe was real, as if he couldn’t tear his eyes away from her.

All thought of mysterious best men fled, her breath catching at the undeniable love and passion encompassed within James’s intense stare. He’d never looked at her like that before, even when he’d said she was the only woman he’d ever loved, the only woman he could bear marrying. His stunningly smouldering gaze touched her heart, moved her soul.
And
her body.

Ashleigh was startled to find that suddenly the night ahead did not present itself as such an ordeal after all. Her eyes moved slowly over her husband-to-be and her heart began to race, her stomach tightening, a flood of sensual heat sweeping all over her skin.

The raw sexuality of her response shocked her. She hadn’t felt such arousal since...since...

Quite involuntarily one trembling hand left her bouquet to once again touch the locket.

James’s deeply set blue eyes zeroed in on the movement—and the locket—and her hand retreated with guilty speed. Surely he didn’t know anything about the locket, did he? Surely Nancy hadn’t told him about it, and the letter from Jake?

James was frowning now, all desire gone from his gaze.

‘Keep moving, Ashleigh,’ her father ordered in an impatient whisper.

Haltingly she took the remaining few steps that drew her level with the still frowning James. For a second she didn’t know what to do, where to look, but as she gazed up into James’s face she was distracted from her emotional confusion by the dark circles under his eyes. She peered at him intently through her veil, and saw how tired and strained he looked, as though he hadn’t had much sleep the night before.

A possible solution to the mystery of the missing best man catapulted into her mind. Peter had taken James out on a stag night last night,
against
everyone’s advice. Maybe they’d really tied one on and something had happened to Peter in the process. A severe hangover, perhaps?

James reached out his left hand towards Ashleigh. Still rattled, she almost took it without first handing her bouquet over to Kate. Turning to do so, she caught a glimpse of Kate and the others, staring and frowning, first at the strange best man, then at her. Ashleigh shrugged, handed the bouquet to Kate then turned back to place her hand in James’s. When his right hand moved to cover it she looked down and almost died, her mouth falling open as she stared down at the bruised knuckles, the badly grazed skin.

Her eyes flew to his. ‘James,’ she husked. ‘What happened to your hand? What—?’

‘Ssssh,’ he hushed. ‘Afterwards... The celebrant’s ready to start.’ And he urged her up on to the wide step, where they would be in full view of the guests.

‘We are gathered here today to celebrate the marriage of...’

Ashleigh found it hard to concentrate on the ceremony, her head whirling with questions. The image of James in a physical fight was so out of character that she couldn’t even think of what possible reason there could be for it. And whom had he been fighting with, anyway? Surely not Peter?

Peter was even less physically inclined than James, being older and much slighter in build, as well as a connoisseur of the finer things in life. Art...the theatre...fine wines... Ashleigh often wondered what he was doing in a small timber town like Glenbrook. He didn’t appear to like the place any more than he liked
her
.

Not that he ever said as much openly. But she had seen the coldness in his eyes when he looked her way, and he rarely let an opportunity go by to slip in a mildly sarcastic comment about women in general, even though Ashleigh knew they were really directed at one woman in particular. Namely herself.

In fact, Peter Reynolds was the one dark cloud on the horizon of her future with James, one made all the darker because she hadn’t been quite able to pin down the reason for his antagonism towards her. Usually she got on well with men on a social level. Better than with women, who seemed threatened by her being a doctor.

Except for Kate, of course, Ashleigh thought warmly. Kate was never threatened by anything.

‘Till death us do part.’

‘A tight squeeze on her fingers snapped Ashleigh back to the present.

‘I...I do,’ she said shakily, and flashed James an equally shaky smile.

He didn’t smile back.

Ashleigh stared. At his grim mouth; his hooded eyes; his clenched jaw.

It was at that moment she realised something was dreadfully wrong. James had not been involved in some silly male spat with Peter after drinking too much. It was something much more serious than that. Not only serious. But somehow dangerous.

To her...

CHAPTER THREE

P
ANIC clutched at Ashleigh’s insides, making her heart-rate triple and her thoughts whirl.

But not for long. Ashleigh was a logical thinker and she quickly calmed down, accepting that she was being ridiculous and fanciful. The events of the day so far had clearly unnerved her.

James would
never
do anything to hurt her, or cause her to be in any danger. She was mad to even think so. He was too kind, too caring, too gentle. As for his having been in a physical brawl with Peter... The very idea was ludicrous! There had to be some other reason for his damaged hand. Certainly something
had
happened to Peter, but probably no more than the hangover she’d first envisaged. Meanwhile she refused to let her imagination run away with her.

Lifting her chin slightly, she turned her eyes to the front. But, despite all her inner lectures, an uneasy churning remained in her stomach.

A long shuddering breath of self-exasperation trickled from her lungs, which brought a sharp glance from the groom,
and
the celebrant, who was about to start James’s vow.

She let her eyes drop away from both of them, staring uncomfortably at the floor while the celebrant’s deep male voice rolled on.

‘Do you, John James Hargraves, take...?’

Ashleigh’s eyes jerked up, her lips parting in protest. For John James was what
Jake
had been christened, the exact reverse of James’s names.

But as the celebrant continued, loud and clear, she reconciled herself to the mistake and shut her mouth again. Why make a fuss? These things happened all the time at weddings. Nevertheless, she hoped James didn’t mind the mix-up.