CHAPTER 6
Selena
‘Does it feel weird to you,’ my sister Octavia asks me, ‘that everything about today is going just as it should, except that you’re marrying a different guy?’
I meet her eyes in the mirror of my dressing table as the hairstylist puts the finishing touches on my chignon while we all drink champagne.
My hair looks picture-perfect—exactly how she and I rehearsed it—which I suppose underlines Octavia’s point.
My sister is eleven years younger than me and has yet to hone her emotional intelligence muscles.
I make an effort with her, because I love her, obviously, but she’s hard work.
At just turned seventeen, she’s superficial and painfully image-focused, even by our family’s standards.
‘A bit,’ I admit to her now. ‘It makes it even more surreal. But honestly, I’m glad everything else is going to plan. I don’t think I could have handled one more change today.’
That’s part of the truth. The rest of it is that I still feel completely discombobulated.
She’s right in that this wedding is going according to plan in every way except the groom.
And I’m not exactly heartbroken over Xavier’s betrayal.
Royally pissed off, yes. Emotionally crushed, no.
I’m still getting what I signed up for: a de Vere brother and a future as a duchess.
Our children will inherit Belvedere and the rest of the estate.
So far, so on track.
But the fact remains that I have spent my life psyching myself up to marry one man and now, with, like, zero warning, am about to walk down the aisle with another.
His brother.
And a completely different human.
How the absolute fuck am I supposed to wrap my head around that?
So yes, while it’s reassuring that all the pre-wedding prep is going perfectly, it’s also surreal to the point of being downright creepy.
I’ve been preparing for this day my entire life…
But I’m marrying Ben!
The only thing I absolutely cannot do is think about how it will be tonight, when we’ve retired to a bedroom at Belvedere, just the two of us.
Because if I start to think about that, then it’s unlikely I’ll make it down the aisle without vomiting from nerves, and that wouldn’t be a good look when I’m wearing two hundred grand’s worth of couture.
‘It’s been a real plug-and-play swap,’ my friend Minty muses.
‘One brother for another. Bam. Done.’ Araminta Stuart is a mate from Le Rosey and can trace her lineage back through the Stuart line to Mary, Queen of Scots.
Like her ancestor, she’s a slim brunette, but where she inherited her sharp tongue from is anyone’s guess.
Flora frowns. ‘That’s easy for anyone who’s not Selena to say. She’s the one who has to rewrite every single plan she has for the future. It must be horrific.’
I shoot her a grateful smile in the mirror.
Flora and I have never been close—she’s so much younger than me and her brothers—but she’s a sweet girl in her first year of uni in London.
I suppose we have our creativity in common, even if working in fashion and studying sculpture are wildly different fields.
‘And whose fault is that?’ another of my bridesmaids, Annabel, drawls in Flora’s direction.
‘What do you mean?’ Flora asks.
‘Well, you introduced Xavier to his new woman, didn’t you? I heard she came to Belvedere as your guest.’
I can no longer see Flora’s face as I tilt my head for the stylist, but her voice sounds so indignant that I can tell it’s genuine.
‘No, not at all. Well, she did, but Xavier introduced us. She was helping me find my feet in London, but he sorted it out. I think he met her at an event or something?’
I frown. I’m keen to get to the bottom of this. I’ll have to pry the salient information out of Benedict at some point, when this bloody day is over.
‘God knows where he found her,’ Minty says.
‘But the point is that no one needs to know the truth. That press release will really set the cat among the pigeons. Lord, the media shitstorm when that thing hits will be… I dunno. Just remember this, darling. All anyone will be talking about is that you caused the biggest playboy in the country to wreck his brother’s wedding. It’s really very fucking hot.’
I hope she’s right. I need her to be right. Ben has spent the past few days refining the release, and I have to say, it packs a punch.
It goes like this:
An announcement from Lord Benedict de Vere:
I have been in love with Selena Wentworth for as long as I can remember.
For years, I have attempted, wholly unsuccessfully, to get my feelings under control.
However, as her wedding to my brother Xavier grew more imminent, I accepted that I would have to act urgently or forever live in abject misery.
Last week, I threw myself on Xavier’s mercy and begged him to walk away, freeing up the woman I love to marry me. Not only did he acquiesce, but he relinquished his right to the Dukedom of Oxford. We both agreed, after all, that Selena was born and bred to be a duchess.
I am therefore delighted to confirm that Selena and I are marrying today at Christchurch Cathedral, Oxford.
I know it by heart. I’ve been over it and over it, worrying that some aspects are too far-fetched.
‘You’ve been with hundreds of women,’ I argued when he came by yesterday to check in on me and finalise the wording. ‘No one will believe you’ve had a thing for me all this time.’
‘On the contrary, princess, it’s classic broken-hearted behaviour. All of it was acting up, overcompensating. Trying to fill the void, you know?’
‘You’ve certainly filled a lot of voids in your time,’ I grumbled, but I could see his point. ‘And do we honestly expect them to believe that Xavier would just walk away and hand you the title of his own accord?’
‘That’s a tougher pill to swallow,’ he admitted.
‘But he’s known to be honourable, and I think it’s believable that he would make the sacrifice for his brother.
Think about it—why would you walk away from the title for me?
I haven’t said anything here about your loving me back.
It’s always been an arranged marriage for you, regardless of which brother you ended up with.
So I think we can make people believe that it was an act of brotherly devotion.
’ He makes an amusing face. ‘Too bad they’ll never know I’m the one who’s too devoted to his brother. ’
I blew out a big breath. ‘It’s all such a tangled web. How will we ever keep our story straight?’
‘Never complain, never explain, remember?’ He put an arm around me and gave me a reassuring squeeze.
‘And you’re overthinking it. You’re forgetting that they’ll see what they want to see.
We’re giving them the ultimate romantic fairytale: two brothers, one woman, and the Great Groom Swap.
Just look at you. There’s no reason for them to doubt that you could drive a man to desperate acts. None.’
I smiled gratefully at him. ‘I suppose you’re right—about them seeing what they want to see, I mean.’
‘I’m always right,’ he said. ‘Helen of Troy, remember?’
Dammit. That had me thinking about his trouser submarine.
Thankfully, my friend Ewan pulls me back to the present.
If anyone were justified in peacocking today, you’d think it would be the bride—but no.
Ewan is, apparently, the most self-satisfied dandy to ever have dandied.
Like the other bridesmaids—and he has most definitely declared himself a bridesmaid rather than a bridesman—he’s wearing powder-blue satin courtesy of Wentworth, only his ensemble takes the form of an elegant, slim-cut suit. See? A dandy.
‘To say it’s very fucking hot is the understatement of the century, love,’ he tells Minty now. ‘The two most eligible brothers in the UK have fought over her, and the fuckboy won.’
‘That’s hardly how it went down,’ I protest weakly.
‘Doesn’t matter. It’s how everyone thinks it’s gone down that matters, and you should know that better than anyone. Perception is reality, doll. It’s practically a Wentworth family motto. And speaking of going down—’
‘Yes, that’s quite enough, thank you,’ I say firmly to shut him up.
Ewan is truly the only person I allow to give me this kind of shit.
He’s my number two on the Wentworth Home team and the type of creative genius whose talent is almost indecent.
That said, there’s only one person in this room who’d like to ruminate on oral sex with Benedict, and that’s definitely not me. It’s not poor Flora, either.
‘I’m just saying’—he crouches over me to adjust his tie in the mirror—‘no one likes an ungrateful bitch. You got the title, the house, the hot guy. Quit whining.’
All this is, of course, tongue in cheek.
Ewan was the first bridesmaid I called with the news that Xavier had dumped me and Benedict had stepped up with a proposal of his own.
I worked on the assumption that Flora would already be in the know, and I couldn’t face Minty and Annabelle’s particular brand of superior schadenfreude.
Sometimes, in my more paranoid moments, I wonder if they wouldn’t have been happier had I been left with egg on my face, whereas Ewan was amazing.
I manage a watery smile at him in the mirror. Thank you, I mouth.
‘Of course.’ He grins at me. He’s very handsome—tall and slim with dark hair and brown eyes.
He’s painted himself beautifully for today, with a subtle powder-blue eyeshadow that makes his eyes pop and a few false lashes at the outer corners.
‘I still can’t believe you wouldn’t let me wear a ruffled shirt. It would have looked so Grosvenor.’
Grosvenor is a scandalously spicy Regency TV show that Ewan and I watch solely for the décor and the sex.
‘You say that, but all I could see when you pitched it was Jim from American Pie.’
He straightens up. ‘Such a bitch on her wedding day, even though she’s in bloody couture and she’s making us all wear off-the-peg.
Now, duckie.’ He swivels and turns to Flora, who seems to find him endlessly amusing.
‘Spill all the tea on Xavier’s new friend, Ivy.
And I mean all of it. I want an entire samovar full of tea. ’
‘That makes two of us,’ Annabel says. I press my lips together. The hairstylist is, like everyone else helping with the wedding, NDA’d up to the eyeballs, but even this level of disclosure is more than I’m comfortable with.
‘I don’t know,’ Flora says helplessly behind me. ‘She’s really nice. I know you probably think she’s the baddie, but she’s not. She never, ever thought my brother would leave you for her. She really didn’t. She walked away and blocked his number and everything.’
I assume that last part is for my benefit. I hold my hand up so that the hairstylist will stop prodding me and swivel around on my stool. All of us, except for Ewan, are still in our robes. I’m delighted Charlotte is here; she’s keeping Mum company downstairs, thank fuck.
‘Yeah, right,’ my sister pipes up. I have to agree. There’s no way I believe she wasn’t playing Xavier, at least a little.
‘Seriously,’ Flora insists. ‘She was completely distraught. I met up with her before I came home for Christmas. She honestly believed she was never going to see him again.’
‘Well, I’m sure she’s smiling like the Cheshire Cat now.’ It comes out as a hiss.
‘She’s not. She has no idea Xav’s called things off with you. I told you, she blocked him. He’s on his way down there right now to try to win her back. As far as she’s concerned, he’s walking down the aisle today.’
‘That,’ Minty says, ‘is the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.’
I purse my lips. ‘Thanks a lot.’
‘So is Benedict stepping up,’ Ewan reassures me, twirling the stem of his champagne flute between his fingers.
‘That’s not romantic,’ I point out. ‘It’s pragmatic. Generous, yes, but not romantic.’
‘But he told you he wanted a “real marriage”,’ Annabel points out. There’s a snarky undertone that tells me she’s far more interested in rattling me than reassuring me, and it has me regretting divulging that particular detail to her and Minty.
I make a face I suspect confirms that her jibe has landed. To be clear, the prospect of getting physical with Benedict de Vere isn’t remotely unappealing.
But it’s still bloody terrifying, even having had five days to muse on it.
‘How long will you make him wait before you fuck him?’ Ewan asks, his incorrigible desire for gossip clearly overpowering any compassion he might feel for me.
I glance at Flora, who’s looking around the room as if desperate for an out. Poor girl. Octavia is making a horrified face beside her. ‘I’m not having this conversation,’ I say.
‘Hear me out,’ he says. ‘So, you know how in olden times posh women used to, like, hire other women to breastfeed their babies? Like, wet nurses. Well, if you don’t want to suck Benedict’s dick, I could be your proxy. Like, your “wet mouth”? And I wouldn’t even charge you.’
I can’t help it. A very unbecoming snort escapes me. Ewan is so outrageous, and I’m so bloody relieved he’s here to lighten the atmosphere today. I don’t know how the hell he comes up with this shit, I really don’t, but God bless him all the same. The other three crack up, too.
‘I think the word you’re looking for is whore,’ I say.
‘That works too,’ he agrees airily. ‘What do you think?’
‘Does Benedict get a say?’ Annabel wants to know. ‘I’m not sure you’re his type.’
‘I’m everyone’s type,’ he says. ‘Besides, I’d make it worth his while. I’d give him a lot more back-passage access than Wentworth here would, and you all know it. God, I’d bend over for that man so quickly. He wants wedding-night anal? I’d be like, Bring it on, my friend. Just work me open.’
I’m shaking my head now, my jaw hanging open. He is unbelievable.
I just wish he would stop reminding me that, if I somehow survive the ceremony today, my wedding night awaits me later.
‘For the love of God, can you please at least try to rein in that relentless libido of yours?’ I ask, attempting to sound fed up when I’m nothing of the sort. The thought of Benedict taking out his relentless libido on Ewan is pretty amusing.
‘Fine,’ he says with a huff. ‘I’ll think of something completely repellent.’
He stands still and closes his eyes, and we all watch him in silence. After a few seconds, he opens them and sighs happily. ‘Done.’
‘What did you think about?’ Flora, who absolutely shouldn’t encourage him, asks.
‘Oh, it was an easy one,’ he says. ‘I just imagined having to shag Wentworth here. Ugh.’ He shudders. ‘Totally sorted me out.’