CHAPTER THIRTEEN – SYLVIE
I ran my fingers through my hair and linked them at the back of my head, dropping my forehead down close to the table.
I’d spent three hours trying to fix the veil problem and I’d come up short every single time.
I couldn’t believe that out of all the veils in this entire world, none of them were even remotely close to what my sister wanted. That none of them combined roses and acorns.
The only ones that could came from China and the delivery times were the least questionable thing about that.
I’d had brides who’d ordered dresses to keep costs down. It’d ended up costing them a hell of a lot more than they’d initially saved, let me tell you.
I’d tried to call in everything from desperate requests to favours with people I knew in the industry, and even my one last hope from an atelier in Paris was likely to go up in smoke.
Marie had been honest that she wasn’t sure she had a veil that could work, nor could she find one, but at least she’d been honest with me.
I was running on empty.
Empty of food.
Empty of wine.
Empty of ideas.
Empty of hope.
And I was hurting. Hurting for my sister. Her veil had been her one big secret for the wedding that she’d known Julian would love, and she’d even chosen her plainer dress with the intricate veil in mind, and I’d never felt more useless as a wedding planner or a sister than I did right now.
I sighed, letting my forehead fall right to the table.
Sticky pub tables weren’t usually a place I chose to collapse in tired exhaustion, so that said a lot.
A glass clinked against the table close to my ear, and I slowly turned my head to one side in the direction of the noise, peering up with one eye.
Thomas.
“Forgive me if I’m overstepping,” he said in a low voice that did unfortunately nice things to my lady bits. “But you look like you might need this.”
I slid my gaze towards the glass—the round base, the thin stem, the nice full top of white wine. “If I didn’t feel like my world was ending, I’d be offended by that.”
“You didn’t snipe at me. It must be bad.”
I swung my attention back to him as I sat up. “The night is still young. Don’t get cocky.”
His lips drew up into a smile, and his blue eyes shone with a quiet amusement that warmed me in a very irritating way. “Here.” He rested two fingers on the base of the glass and slid it over to me. “I covered it. It’s yours.”
“Thank you,” I said softly, reaching for it.
My fingertips brushed against his, and a little tingle danced across my skin.
I pretended nothing happened, that I didn’t just feel that zingy zing zing of something, and slid the glass closer to me. “Seriously, thank you,” I said again. “It’s been a long afternoon. I didn’t even drive here. I just… started walking… and ended up here.”
He glanced at the two empty wine glasses on the table. “I did get confirmation of that before I bought your third.”
“How noble of you, Your Grace,” I drawled.
“There it is.” He chuckled, flashing me a grin. “I’m assuming you haven’t been stood up—it’d be a miracle if you charmed anyone enough to agree to go out with you.”
“If you hadn’t just bought me more wine, I’d throw it all over you,” I muttered. “They were small wines, thank you very much. And no, I did not waste my time trying to charm a no-good, lying arsehat to agree to go out with me.”
“Then who hurt you, Sylvie?”
“The HGV driver who used his phone on a motorway today.”
He stilled. “Aren’t your parents coming home this week?”
“In a few days, yes,” I replied, then motioned to the other side of the table. “You might as well join me, seeing as you don’t look like you’re going anywhere.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
“I’m not making any promises either way.”
He put his beer bottle down on the table. “Give me two seconds. I’ll be right back.”
He disappeared before I could say another word, and I watched as he approached the bar, grabbed the bartender, and had a quick conversation with him.
If he was putting his tab on my table for me to pay, I was going to be very glad that I hadn’t promised not to kill him.
Thomas Castleton had far more money than I did.
I just had a bucketload of misery.
Welp.
Maybe a third glass of wine was a bad idea.
“You weren’t putting your tab on my table, were you?” I asked as he sat back down.
He smirked as he reached for his glass. “No. I was putting your table on my tab, if you must know.”
“Oh.” I sighed heavily, letting my shoulders sag with the exhale. “They were small glasses of wine, I swear.”
“What’s wrong, Sylvie?” He leant forwards on the table. Genuine compassion shone in his eyes, but I turned away and shook my head slightly.
“Wedding drama,” I replied.
“That involves an HGV driver and his phone?”
I stared at him for a moment. The desire to unload on him was almost overwhelming. He was completely removed from the situation, and as much as I didn’t want to, a part of me knew that he would be completely impartial and just let me unload as I needed to.
Not that I had any desire to involve him in my life any more than I needed to.
Which was zero.
Not at all.
Thomas did not need to know about any part of my life. At all.
But he was all I had right now.
He was the only person sitting in front of me, willing to listen to my yammering on about the problem I was facing.
So, I told him everything about the blasted veil that was currently the bane of my existence.
When I was done, Thomas grimaced, and I could swear he even winced a little. “The wine makes sense now.”
“I don’t know what to do,” I admitted. “Usually, I can fix every problem that comes my way, but I don’t think I can fix this one.”
“Sylvie… Have you considered that you really can’t fix it?
” he asked, somewhat gently with a softness in his gaze.
“As in there is no humanly possible way of fixing it and Hazel has to accept something else. It might not be as special or as personal as what she originally wanted, but if there’s no time to have it remade, then she’s going to have to get over it, as cruel as it sounds. ”
“I know,” I said honestly. “Trust me, I do know that. But it’s still my job to find a replacement, and I don’t even know where to begin to start. She hasn’t stopped crying all day, so it’s not even like she’s in a state to help me right now.”
“It’s just a veil. It’s not the end of the world.”
“You haven’t been around many brides, have you?”
“I’ve been to far too many weddings in the past eighteen months, but I tend to avoid the whole planning part these days. As it turns out, I’m much better off being a guest than a participant.”
Right.
He had an ex-fiancée.
I so badly wanted to ask about her, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Did he even know that I knew?
Did it even matter? I suppose you could say we were… sort of friends… but not the kind that would warrant me nosing into his love life in any way at all.
“Anyway, Hazel doesn’t strike me as a bridezilla,” he continued, oblivious to the silent conversation happening inside my head.
“Aside from one little incident at the start, she’s been pretty good.
Mostly. She’s just a bit fussy and unpredictable.
” I slowly twisted the wine glass by the stem and looked at the liquid inside.
“Although, you’d be surprised at who turns out to be one.
I had a bride a couple of years ago, and she was the sweetest person I’d ever met in my life.
The only problem they had was that their mothers were both completely overbearing and had very strong opinions about how the wedding should go, and since both parents were paying equally for things like the venue and catering, they both felt they had a say in it. ”
“Uh-oh.”
A small laugh escaped me, and I peered up at him for a second.
“Yeah. She worked so hard to please them both, then two weeks before the wedding they went for a dress fitting, including both mums, and it turned out they’d chosen the exact same dress to wear…
In the same colour… Even though she’d given them both approved colours, and their dress colour was not on either of their lists. ”
Thomas’ mouth formed a little ‘o.’ “Oof.”
“Yeah. Anyway, shit hit the fan, and my sweet, soft-spoken bride who’d been nothing but courteous to these two women for the past fourteen months of hellish planning flipped her absolute shit.
And I mean she flipped.” I raised my eyebrows to drive home just how badly her shit had been flipped.
“She screamed at them both, grabbed her phone, and called her fiancé there and then and said the wedding was off. She said she couldn’t marry him if it meant being tied to his mother for the rest of her life and that she loved him too much to subject him to being tied to her mother for the rest of his life. ”
“I bet that went down well.”
“She ranted for the next fifteen minutes about how they were ruining her life, how she wasn’t having the wedding she wanted because of them both and proceeded to list every single one of their infractions over the past year or so.
And I mean every single little thing that hurt her, finally culminating in them being so controlling that they couldn’t even stick to the colours she’d asked them to wear which was her one single request of them in the whole process. ”
He touched his hand to his lips. “What did you do?”
“Absolutely nothing.” I laughed. “There was nothing I could do. It’d all built up inside the poor thing and she needed to explode, and until she was done, I just let her at them.”
“Did they ever get married?”
I nodded. “The maid of honour handled the seamstresses, I kicked the mothers out of her house, and together we got to work. The big wedding was cancelled after their dads intervened and paid for them to go to Greece to get married at a small villa through a friend of mine.”
“Wow. That took a wild turn.”
“I got a free week in Corfu. Personally, I thought it was a great turn of events.”
He laughed, shaking his head. “Do you know how it all ended up?”