Authors: Jennifer Joyce
The Wedding Date (36 page)
Wait, she could even taste mince pie. Had she angrily eaten one before bed last night? She hadn’t really done her mum’s festive spread justice yesterday evening, what with seething about Calvin all through the meal. She’d gone to bed hungry so maybe that hunger had driven her to the kitchen in the night. A belly full of burnt pastry would certainly account for the bizarre fairy dream.
Judy couldn’t seem to locate the alarm. Squinting through one blurry eye, Judy realised what the problem was. She was sleeping on the wrong side of the bed, which meant the alarm was next to Calvin. She gave him a nudge, which ended up being more of a shove. Maybe there was a little residual anger left from their stupid row last night.
Calvin failed to stir and Judy knew there was no point giving him another nudge. Her husband could sleep through a hurricane rampaging through the bedroom. Reaching over Calvin’s cocooned body, she switched off the alarm and dragged herself out of bed, her eyes bleary from lack of sleep. She’d tossed and turned for what felt like hours before she’d eventually succumbed to sleep what felt like only a matter of minutes ago. Shoving her arms into her dressing gown, Judy made her way out into the hallway. The dressing gown felt oddly snug, as though it had shrunk in the wash.
Scott’s bedroom door swung open as she reached out to knock on it, revealing her scowling son.
‘Your stupid alarm woke me up.’ Scott pushed past Judy and stomped his way to the bathroom, only to poke his head back out to face her again. ‘Why are you wearing Mum’s dressing gown? Pink really isn’t your colour.’ Scott sniggered and disappeared into the bathroom, slamming the door shut. Judy would normally tell her son off about the door-slamming (he needed reminding at least five times a day) but she was too preoccupied by the dressing gown thing. Why are you wearing
Mum’s
dressing gown?
Judy turned around as a door opened behind her. Charlie emerged from her bedroom, one leg of her pyjamas lodged mid-calf so that she resembled a nineties rapper. Judy always thought her daughter looked adorable first thing in the morning, her curls amassed around her head to Sideshow Bob proportions. Of course, it wasn’t quite so adorable when Judy had to brush the curls later on, but for those first few minutes of the day she could appreciate the charm.
‘Is it morning, Daddy?’
Daddy?
Judy looked down at the increasingly uncomfortable dressing gown, pulling it tightly across her body, and realised she was wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts underneath.
Boxer shorts?
Slowly peeling away the dressing gown again, she gasped when she caught sight of the hairy belly and even hairier chest beneath the fabric. And her legs! What the hell had happened to her legs? Yes, it was winter and she wasn’t quite as razor-happy as she was in the warmer months but she
looked like a Yeti.
‘Can I go and watch cartoons?’ Charlie asked.
‘Yes, sweetie.’ Judy clamped a hand over her mouth, shocked by the voice emerging from her lips. It was gruff but not in a first-thing-in-the-morning, bottom-of-hamster-cage sort of way. It was not her voice at all. It was a man’s voice.
‘Yay!’ Charlie bounded down the stairs, not at all concerned that her mother had spouted an alarming amount of body hair overnight and adopted a man-ish tone.
With shaking fingers, Judy pulled the waistband of the boxer shorts away from her body, wincing as it snapped back into place once she saw what was in there.
That
did not belong in there at all.
‘Da-ad!’ Charlie hollered up the stairs. ‘What’s happened to the Christmas tree?’
Judy’s eyes widened. The Christmas tree!
The fairy had catapulted into the tree, knocking it to the floor and scattering its pine needles. But that was a
dream
.
Wasn’t it?
‘Just leave it, sweetie. I’ll sort it out in a minute.’ Judy covered her face with her hands. That was
definitely
a man’s voice coming out of her mouth. Specifically, her husband’s.
‘What’s up with Mum?’ Scott asked as he emerged from the bathroom. Judy sighed with relief. So Scott could see it too. She wasn’t going mad and imagining things! ‘She usually gets up with us. Are you taking me to football?’
‘I don’t know,’ Judy said in Calvin’s voice. ‘I don’t know what’s going on.’
‘Okay.’ Scott gave Judy a funny look. ‘Whatever. I’m going downstairs.’
‘Don’t touch the tree,’ Judy said before dashing into the bedroom and heading straight to the dressing table mirror. An anguished cry escaped her as she saw the image looking back at her. This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real.
Judy crept towards the bed, releasing another anguished cry as she saw the body sprawled out in the bed. Instead of her husband, she saw herself. Man, she looked rough first thing in the morning.
‘Calvin,’ she hissed, shaking his –
her –
body. ‘Calvin, wake up. Something’s happened.’
‘What?’ Judy watched as her body propped itself up on its elbow and rubbed at its eyes. It threw back its head and flung open its jaws to yawn. Yep, there were her fillings.
‘Calvin!’ Judy hissed again, eager to get this mess sorted out.
‘What do you want?’ Calvin asked in Judy’s voice. He opened his eyes and shook his head as he took in his own image staring back at him. ‘What the –’
‘We’ve switched bodies.’ Judy sank onto the bed and grasped Calvin’s – or rather or her own – arm. Gosh, this was confusing. ‘I had a dream. We were visited by an overgrown fairy.’
‘She woke us up,’ Calvin said slowly.
‘Yes!’ Judy’s eyes almost popped out of her skull. ‘Yes, that’s right! She appeared in our sitting room. Crashed into the tree.’
‘We ate a burnt mince pie and we made a wish,’ Calvin said. It started to come back to Calvin then, slowly at first and then rushing at him and knocking the breath from his body. The row. The peculiar winged being destroying their Christmas tree. The wish to swap lives. The fairy had said they could switch lives – live as one another – until Christmas Day. All they had to do to make it happen was eat one of those dodgy mince pies.
‘
Up to
Christmas Day?’ Judy had asked. ‘Or
including
Christmas Day? It’s just that Calvin would never be able to handle the turkey and everything. We’d end up having a not-very-festive plate of egg and chips for lunch if it was left to him.’
‘Hey!’ Calvin had cried. ‘I can handle a bloody turkey. All you have to do is shove it in the oven.’
Judy and the fairy had shared a look. ‘Up until Christmas then.’ The fairy gave a decisive nod of her head. ‘You’ll spend Christmas Eve as the other person, then you’ll switch back in time for the big day.’
So they didn’t trust him with the bloody turkey. ‘Isn’t Christmas two weeks away?’
The fairy had turned to Calvin with a sweet smile, her eyes twinkling like a set of fairy lights. ‘Don’t you think you could handle two weeks of Judy’s life, Petal?’
‘Handle it?’ Calvin had snorted with derision. ‘It’ll be like a holiday. Bring. It. On.’
‘Then wish it. Say “I wish we could swap lives”. Both of you. Then take a bite of the mince pie.’
Judy and Calvin had looked at one another before they both uttered the words. ‘I wish we could both switch lives.’
But that wasn’t
real.
It couldn’t have been
real.
‘Look, Calvin.’ Calvin’s replica pointed to the other end of the room, at the large mirror on Judy’s dressing table. The image of Calvin and Judy stared back at them in the wrong order. ‘I’m you. And you’re me. The wish came true.
We’ve switched bodies.
’
CARINA™
ISBN: 978 1 474 04744 9
The Wedding Date
Copyright © 2016 Jennifer Joyce
Published in Great Britain (2016)
By Carina, an imprint of HarperCollins
Publishers
1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
CARINA™ is a trademark of Harlequin Enterprises Limited, used under licence.
