Bridesmaid for Hire Read online

  Bridesmaid for Hire

  The Almost Wives Club, Book Three

  Nancy Warren

  Ambleside Publishing

  Contents

  Bridesmaid for Hire

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Also by Nancy Warren

  About the Author

  Bridesmaid for Hire

  Every day, as the days roll on, Bridesmaids’ garb we gaily don, Sure that a maid so fairly famed Can’t long remain unclaimed.

  Gilbert & Sullivan, Ruddigore

  Chapter 1

  Tasmine Ford did not think of herself as a superstitious woman, but, as she stood in Ashley Carnarvon's bedroom, holding the runaway bride’s hastily discarded wedding gown, it occurred to her that this was her thirteenth time being a bridesmaid. And this wedding hadn’t turned out to be very lucky.

  This was definitely the first time she’d been left holding an empty wedding dress while the bride fled out the window. Through the still-open window, she could hear the sound of an engine fading as the getaway car headed further away. She could also hear the determined strains of music from the chamber quartet playing on the grounds of the Carnarvon estate, where two hundred guests, another pair of bridesmaids, matching groomsmen and, oh Lord, a groom, stood waiting for a bride who was not going to show up. Tasmine was conscious of a wild urge to dump the designer dress on the bed and escape out that window herself.

  A light breeze blew in from the ocean that fronted the Carnarvon estate in Malibu, making the dress shiver in her arms like an abandoned lover. It was such a beautiful dress, too. The silk was exquisite, the lace hand sewn, and at least a hundred real pearls decorated the bodice. Tasmine had seen a lot of wedding dresses in her time, but none as stunning as this one. The dress even smelled like a perfect wedding. Ever-so-slightly floral with a hint of spice.

  Tasmine pulled in a breath, so her ribs hit the bodice of her bridesmaid dress. She wouldn’t have chosen the bridesmaids’ dresses herself, they were black and fitted in the bodice with a white chiffon skirt worn with black heels. She’d made sure each dress fit, that both of the other bridesmaids had the correct shoes, hose and undergarments and she’d personally delivered the dresses and made the other bridesmaids try them on in front of her so any mistakes could be remedied. It had all gone so smoothly she should have worried. Weddings weren’t supposed to run so perfectly in the planning stage. There were always hitches, but not with this one.

  Tasmine had started her business, Bridesmaid for Hire, on a whim after she’d ended up organizing yet another wedding when she’d been asked to be a bridesmaid. She saw firsthand that most bridesmaids were too busy, or too flakey, to be a real help to the bride. Even though she also had a full-time job, she was organized enough that she could take on a lot of the duties without breaking a sweat.

  A friend of that bride had come up to her after the wedding and suggested that, even though they weren’t friends, she’d like Tasmine to be her bridesmaid. “I thought a thousand dollars would be fair. What do you think?”

  Tasmine thought earning a thousand bucks for something she enjoyed doing was a great idea. It was amazing how word spread and soon she was an in-demand bridesmaid. She sat down, wrote up a business plan, and came up with a set of service packages: everything from simply showing up on the special day to organizing parts or all of the wedding. She loved organizing and attending weddings and her side hustle was starting to make her a decent second income. She never advertised—she didn’t have to. Her name was mysteriously passed along from bride to bride. Many of them had become personal friends in the process.

  Ashley had been so easy going. Too easy going she now realized. Like she wasn’t really invested in the ceremony, which recent events now proved she wasn’t. Eric was handsome in black tie and tails and stayed out of the way. The two mothers had got on well and shared similar tastes.

  The venue was the Carnarvon estate, and Millicent and Duncan Carnarvon were seasoned entertainers who knew exactly where the tents should go, and where the best spot was for the chamber orchestra. They’d hired a company who did all their events and everything had arrived on time, as ordered.

  Even the damn weather was flawless. A perfect California day with not a cloud in the sky.

  She should have known that so many good things in a row were a bad omen.

  As much as she wanted to throw off her own fancy gown and escape out the window in Ashley’s wake, she didn’t. Tasmine was not the runaway type. Grace Van Hoffendam, the groom's mother, had hired her as part wedding consultant and part bridesmaid. Tasmine had taken up being a professional bridesmaid because she had such a flare for organization, and no matter what happened, she never panicked. However, she'd never been in a situation quite like this before and she could feel panic fluttering behind her ribcage like a trapped bird. She tried to organize her scattered wits.

  First thing she had to do was to quit clutching this dress as though it were a silk and lace life preserver. She found a white satin hanger and carefully placed the gown on it. There was no time to tuck the acres of silk into the fancy bag with the oh-so-desirable logo, the simple name of the wedding designer, Evangeline, in elegant script. With great care, she hung the dress from the open door of the wardrobe. What she needed to do, and fast, was to alert Grace Van Hoffendam or somebody to the current catastrophe. No one would know better how to deal with this crisis with the minimum embarrassment. Not that there wasn't going to be a huge dose of embarrassment, mostly for the poor, jilted groom standing there fidgeting in his finery.

  She took a hasty step towards the door of the cottage that Ashley and her mother had shared on the Carnarvon estate. She wanted to make sure that Eric got the bad news as soon as possible so that he could quietly slip away before all two hundred of the extremely socially, politically, and economically powerful guests at the wedding realized he'd been made a complete fool of.

  Marshaling her wits, she planted a calm smile on her face, took a deep breath, and opened the front door. She squeaked in alarm when she nearly bashed into Eric Van Hoffendam coming into the cottage as she was going out.

  She immediately flew into traditional bridesmaid role. "Eric! What are you doing here? Don't you know it's bad luck to see the bride before the wedding?"

  She stared up at him and her heart sped up as it always did when he was around. She couldn’t help herself, he was so gorgeous. Even though he wasn't usually the best-dressed guy around, Eric was still hot. But in a black tie, with freshly trimmed hair and his beard barbered down to smooth stubble, the man was absolutely gorgeous. His blue eyes were the color of the summer sky, his body tall and straight on this day of all days, the day that he would begin life as a married man.

  Except, he wouldn't.

  And she was the only one who knew that. How she wished she had remained with the other bridesmaids, and not rushed back to make sure everything was okay with the bride. When Ashley had claimed she wanted a couple of minutes to herself, when she’d urged her three bridesmaids to go ahead and she’d be right there, Tasmine had experienced a tiny buzz of alarm. That was all it had been, like a whisper so faint, she could barely hear it. But, with a dozen weddings under her belt, she had an instinct for trouble. Not that she’d expected anything more than that maybe Ashley was going to kiss her favorite teddy bear goodbye, or shed a few tears over leaving her home.

>   Never in her wildest dreams could she have pictured any woman, never mind Ashley, running away from a chance to be with Eric.

  The groom sent her a lightning-quick grin, the kind that let him get away with murder. "Nobody needs to know I was here. I just want to make sure Ash is okay."

  All right, so she wasn't the only one with a nose for trouble. She gazed up at him and could not find the words. She remained rooted, mute.

  Perhaps he read something in her expression, for his sunny blue eyes clouded and he gently but firmly moved her out of his way and walked into Ashley’s bedroom.

  She didn't know what to do but follow him.

  When she got to the doorway, she paused. He stood in the center of Ashley’s room turning in a slow circle, obviously noting that his bride wasn’t there. Also that the window was wide open, a pair of white satin pumps lay on the plank floor like cast dice, and one of her dresser drawers was wide-open from where she’d hastily grabbed the clothing she’d run away in. Finally, his gaze landed on the wedding gown hanging on the back of the open closet door, beautiful, but lacking a bride.

  "Well I'll be damned," he said at last. “She bolted.”

  "Eric, I'm so, so sorry."

  He stuck his head out the open window as though he might catch Ashley outside. But she was long gone. He drew himself back into the room. His gaze burned into hers. “Did you actually see her leave?”

  She nodded her head. “Yes.”

  “Did she leave alone?”

  Oh, God, why hadn’t she stayed with the other bridesmaids? There was a pause. She swallowed. She couldn’t lie. “No.”

  He sank down on Ashley's bed. "This is a disaster."

  He sounded so dejected. She tried to put things in perspective to bolster him up. "Well, not a disaster in the classic sense. It's not the sinking of the Titanic. It's not a plague of locusts destroying the food supply, it’s not a tsunami roaring up Malibu beach dragging everything into the blue sea. It's not," she stretched her imagination, trying to think of a disaster so extreme that this would seem minor, "the zombie apocalypse."

  His expression was bleak and hopeless. "Yeah, it is."

  "Come on, Eric. Maybe she just got cold feet." She was actually kind of surprised that his reaction was this extreme. He’d always been so laidback during the wedding planning that she had begun to wonder if he was as passionately in love with Ashley as a man on the brink of marriage ought to be.

  "You don't get it," he said.

  Okay, she didn't get it, but what she did get was that there were a couple hundred guests who needed to be informed that today's ceremony would not be going ahead as planned. "Maybe we should go get, I don't know, Duncan Carnarvon?" And she definitely didn't want to be the one who had to deliver the bad news to Ashley's uncle. "Or maybe Millicent Carnarvon is the best person to deal with this?” He hadn’t changed his expression at all. She tried again. "What about your mother?"

  As though she had summoned the woman, Grace Van Hoffendam suddenly appeared in the bedroom doorway, a vision of elegance in a blue silk suit, matching pumps, white gloves, and a jaunty hat perched over her freshly-coiffed hair. "What is going on?" she asked. "Everyone is getting restless, the chamber orchestra had to start their set over again. The ice sculptures are melting."

  When she didn't get a reply from either of them she glanced around, took in the disarray in the room, and walked jerkily toward the open window. She stuck her head out, turned to the right and then to the left, then pulled herself back into the room to stare at the two of them as understanding dawned. "Oh my God. She didn't."

  "Yeah, Mom, she did," Eric said.

  Then, Grace Van Hoffendam, the most elegant society woman that Tasmine had ever seen, did a very strange thing. She walked up to where the dress hung against the back of the door, it's full skirt billowing. She drew back her fist and she punched the dress.

  Tasmine was so shocked she didn't know what to say. Clearly, reciting all the things that would be worse than a runaway bride, everything from the sinking of the Titanic to the zombie apocalypse, was not going to cut it with Eric’s mother. She got the sense that no one ever rejected the Van Hoffendams. All her sympathy had been with Eric and his mom, but when Grace hauled back and punched the dress, she began to wonder.

  However, whatever the outcome of this wedding, she had been hired both as a bridesmaid and as a wedding coordinator. She imagined she was going to have to be the wedding un-coordinator and somehow get rid of the guests with the least fuss possible.

  As gently as she could, she said, "I think someone needs to make an announcement that the wedding is not going to go ahead. Do you want me to talk to Mr. Carnarvon?"

  Grace stared at her for an unseeing moment. "You're absolutely certain Ashley's gone?"

  Tasmine didn't feel like sharing with Grace that she had helped Ashley scramble out of her wedding gown and into street clothes. She didn't share that she had watched Ashley jump into the driver’s seat of an expensive Italian convertible beside the sexiest screenwriter in LA. She didn't share that Ashley had exchanged a passionate kiss with Bennett Saegar right before she jammed her foot on the gas and fled from her own wedding. All she said was, "Yes, I'm sure she's gone."

  Grace’s hands formed fists, and Tasmine moved unconsciously in front of the poor dress to protect it from further violence. She could see a vein pulsing in Grace’s neck beneath a fat string of pearls. Her impeccable blue silk suit, matching pumps and straw hat made an incongruous background for the rage suffusing her face.

  "No," she snapped. "This is our son's wedding. My husband will say everything that needs to be said."

  "Okay. Would you like me to go and get him?"

  For a moment she thought that Grace would nod her head and relinquish the unpleasant task to Tasmine, but suddenly the small woman drew her shoulders back. "No. A bridesmaid rushing up to him will only cause comment. If his wife goes and sits beside him, that will seem perfectly natural. I'll explain the situation, and Charles will make a short announcement."

  Eric glanced up. "Do you want me to come with you, Mom?"

  Graces lips thinned in an angry line. "No. The best thing you can do is stay quietly out of sight." She turned to Tasmine. "That little tramp was never good enough for my son, or my family.” Then she snapped, “Your job is to keep him out of sight."

  She nodded. She understood that Grace was snapping orders because she was upset, but it was interesting how during the whole run-up to the wedding, even though she was distantly related to the Van Hoffendams, Grace had never let her forget that she was hired help.

  Grace walked to the dressing table where a scatter of makeup and hairbrushes littered the surface. For a second Tasmine thought she was going to fix her makeup or comb her hair or something, then she realized Grace was staring down at Ashley’s engagement ring. The ring had belonged to Grace. With shaking fingers, Eric’s mother picked up the ring and pushed it onto the ring finger of her right hand. Then she stalked out of the room.

  After his mother left, Eric looked so devastated she had to fight the urge to put her arms around him and offer him comfort. She heard the front door shut with a bang as his mother left to deliver the bad news to Charles Van Hoffendam.

  She settled herself on the bed, a couple of feet away from where Eric sat staring at the floor. "I am so sorry. You must really love her." And maybe if Ashley could see him like this, she’d see what she was throwing away.

  When Eric gazed up at her, it wasn’t heartbreak she saw in his eyes. It was despair. He shook his head. "You don't understand. If I don't marry Ashley Carnarvon, I'm going to jail."

  Chapter 2

  "Jail?" She stared at Eric in stunned disbelief. Sure, he had a reputation for being a wild child and a playboy. The youngest son of the prestigious family, Eric seemed to be prolonging his adolescence as long as he could. He wasted a lot of his time and his family’s money and he’d rather party than do anything useful, but what could he have done that would threaten jail
? And why would marrying Ashley Carnarvon help? "Did you do something to Ashley?"

  His expression was shocked when he said, "No!"

  "Well then, what happened? And what does Ashley escaping out that window have to do with you going to jail or not?" She was so confused she felt like her head might explode. Her makeup, camera-ready on this special day, felt suddenly like plastic wrap on her face. The dress that was designed for waltzing up and down an aisle pinched her ribs when she sat on the bed. Even her shoes felt too small.

  Eric heaved a deep sigh. "I might as well tell you. Everybody will know soon enough." He dropped his head in his hands. "Oh God, the media. My family will be so humiliated."

  "Did you kill someone?"

  Once more he gave her that shocked expression. "No!”

  “Well, it can’t be worse than that,” she said practically.

  “Okay.” He held up a hand. “Don’t start with the plagues of locusts and zombies again. I’ll tell you.” Then he paused as though trying to figure out where to start. She waited patiently until he said, “You know how sometimes I drink too much?”

  “Oh, yes.” She’d seen him more than a little inebriated at a couple of the pre-wedding events. Still, he was a happy drunk. She’d been very careful to quietly ensure he didn’t get behind the wheel of a car, but had soon realized he never drove if he was going to be drinking so she didn’t imagine he’d crashed his car or anything.

  “Well, this one night I got totally wasted. Me and some buddies were partying." He looked at her, and she saw the puzzlement in his eyes. "I don't know what came over us. My buddy has these neighbors, real stick-up-their-ass people, friends of the Carnarvons. We were pissed to the gills and somehow ended up on their property. My buddy decided that we were going to call on them and get them to invite us in for a drink. And yes, we were drunk enough that this seemed like a possibility.”