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Her hand fluttered up unconsciously to touch the locket lying in the deep valley between her breasts.
Any worry over her wedding-night was distracted, however, when the park came into view. Oh, my God, she thought as her eyes ran over what Nancy had arranged for her favourite son’s wedding.
A rueful smile crossed Ashleigh’s lips. James’s vetoing a church service clearly hadn’t stopped his mother’s resolve to have a traditional and very public ceremony. Right in the middle of the park under an attractive clump of trees sat a flower-garlanded dais, with an enormous strip of red carpet leading up to it, on either side of which were rows and rows of seats, all full of guests. But the pièce de résistance was the electric organ beside the dais, which seemed to have a hundred extension leads running from it away to a van on which two loud speakers were placed.
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.
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