Last-Minute Bridegroom

Tasha suppressed a smile. It was certainly true that the family were going to see marriage as an unexpected sign of good behaviour on the part of their most disgraceful member. ‘You’re so cynical,’ she said. ‘People have been saying to me for years that you weren’t bad at heart, you just hadn’t found what you were looking for, that if you just found the right woman it would make all the difference. They’ll just be happy because they’ll think you’ve found the right person. It’s not their fault that it’s not true.’

The black eyes gleamed. ‘It sounds just the sort of thing they would say,’ he said sardonically. ‘No surprises there. The question is, Tash darling, what did you say back?’

He gave a shout of laughter at her embarrassed expression. ‘Unrepeatable, was it?’ he said, grinning. ‘Thought so. Let’s see, I’ll bet you said if I ever did find the right woman heaven help the woman.’

‘I don’t remember what I said,’ said Tasha.

‘How convenient,’ said Chaz, with a gleaming glance. ‘Well, it’s what I’d say, so I don’t see why you shouldn’t. But enough of me. We have something to celebrate.’

‘Do we?’ said Tasha.

‘Sure we do,’ said Chaz. ‘This calls for champagne. Does your father have champagne?’

‘No,’ said Tasha.

‘Well, let’s stick to Scotch, then,’ said Chaz. ‘We seem to have done all right on it so far.’

He filled their glasses.

He raised his own. ‘To Jeremy,’ he said. ‘The word “cad” has gone out of fashion, but the behaviour never goes out of style. Here’s hoping he gets what’s coming to him.’

‘That’s a horrible toast,’ said Tasha.

‘But one from the heart,’ said Chaz, looking uncharacteristically grim.

‘Well, I’m not going to drink to it,’ said Tasha.

Chaz smiled at her. ‘Well, propose your own, then.’

‘All right, I will,’ said Tasha. She gave him a mischievous smile, and raised her glass. ‘To the right woman, heaven help her.’

Chaz laughed. ‘Well, I’ll drink to that.’ A sardonic eyebrow flicked up. ‘To the right woman, heaven help her,’ he repeated, raising his glass, and he drained it at a single swallow.

CHAPTER THREE

IN THE days that followed Tasha was to find herself looking back on that evening with blank incredulity. She’d been upset, yes. She’d had a couple of stiff drinks, yes. That still didn’t explain how she’d come to kiss Chaz and enjoy it, let alone agree to the most insane proposition she’d ever heard of in her life. The most likely explanation was that she had, in fact, been temporarily insane. The problem was, once she’d agreed to the suggestion in a moment of derangement she was stuck with it when sanity returned.

Chaz had not only had to pay a lot of money for the special licence. He had also had to find a bishop and persuade him that the circumstances requiring the licence were seriously special—on a par with, say, the groom being called off to fight for his country at short notice. Given that he had been able to talk Tasha into it in the first place it was perhaps not surprising that he was able to talk a bishop around as well, but Tasha had a feeling it had not been as easy as he had made it sound.

He had then commandeered the guest list and taken it upon himself to notify all guests of the change. To cancel the wedding now would involve not only notifying everyone again, but explaining how she had come to acquire and discard a new fiancé in a few days’ time. She just didn’t feel up to it.

She found the actual wedding much harder to bear than she had expected.

When Chaz had made the suggestion she’d thought only of the invitations she wouldn’t have to retract, the problem of having to live with Chaz for a year afterwards. It wasn’t until she was actually walking down the aisle on her father’s arm that she remembered the comment Chaz had made, that she’d go through as a charade something she’d expected to be for real.

The whole point of marrying Chaz, after all, had been to avoid upsetting the arrangements. The result, naturally, was that the wedding was in every detail exactly what it would have been if she had been marrying the man she’d expected, only last week, to be spending the rest of her life with.

The dress was obviously the same. It had a bodice of white beadwork that glinted in the soft filmy fabric like tiny pearls, and a long narrow skirt of layers and layers of the same filmy white. Putting it on, she had not been able to help remembering the day she had chosen it, the endless fittings she’d undergone, imagining always the day when Jeremy would see this vision of loveliness walk down the aisle towards him. Now the vision of loveliness was walking up to Chaz, who she suspected would take a completely cynical view anyway.

The jonquils and paper-white narcissus on the pews were just what she’d wanted for a spring wedding, and lining the benches were all the innocent guests she’d invited, for whose benefit she was staging the performance. Quite a lot of the people there had been married to each other at one time or another. She could see why Chaz was so cynical about the whole thing, but she’d taken it seriously. She had practised saying the words she would say, words she wouldn’t have said if she hadn’t meant them. Except that now she was going to say them anyway...

Her bridesmaids paced behind her in the dresses they’d chosen, laughing over colour schemes and designs. The flower girls paced behind them in the tiny dresses she’d chosen for them. She’d never realised how many decisions had to be made in organising a wedding; she’d spent months trying to get everything just right, and all for an empty show.

She had reached the head of the aisle. Chaz was standing there waiting. His eyes met hers, a spark of mischief in them. Well, men didn’t fantasise about their weddings; even as a little girl she’d been imagining hers, and she’d never thought she would stand here with someone she didn’t love. All the same, that conspiratorial glance had warmed her; here was the one person for whom she didn’t have to pretend. Here was someone who knew what she was going through—who’d known better than she had herself what this would be like.

The minister was asking whether anyone could show any just cause why these two should not be joined together. Tasha would have liked to stop the whole thing then and there, but she stayed standing in front of him.

‘I require and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgement when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, that if either of you know any impediment, why ye may not be lawfully joined together in Matrimony, ye do now confess it.’

Tasha gritted her teeth. Why, oh, why had she said she would do this?

The minister read inexorably on. Chaz said ‘I will’ with an air of patient politeness. Tasha repeated the words mechanically. And now they had come to point of no return.

‘I Chase Adam Zachary Taggart take thee Natasha Susan Merrill to my wedded wife....’

Chaz progressed through a long series of vows he’d gone out of his way to avoid heretofore, and certainly had no intention of keeping, with aplomb.

Then it was Tasha’s turn. ‘I Natasha Susan Merrill,’ she whispered, ‘take thee Chase Adam Zachary Taggart to my wedded husband...’

Somehow she managed to pronounce the words.

‘I pronounce that they be Man and Wife together,’ said the minister. ‘You may kiss the bride.’

Chaz brushed her mouth with his lips.

‘Well done,’ he said softly. ‘Not too much longer now.’ Soon they were walking back down the aisle. It was done now. Maybe one day she would meet a man she loved and many him, but if they had a ceremony she would know that she’d been through it before, and lied.

Then there was about an hour outside the church with the photographer. After the sham ceremony the perfectionism of the photographer was almost unbearable; first this group, then that, then about twenty different positions of her and Chaz, just as if anyone would ever care enough about this wedding to open a photo album and look at the pictures. He was just doing his job, of course. He had no way of knowing that there would never be children to leaf through an album, laughing at the old-fashioned nineties clothes, looking at their parents when they were young and in love... There would never be grandchildren looking through the yellowed pages, trying to imagine their parents’ grey-haired parents when they were a young and handsome couple...

Chaz glanced down at the woebegone face beneath the veil. They were standing to one side while the photographer took shots of the parents of the happy couple. This was taking some time, since two out of the four had not been on speaking terms for years and arrangement of the party was a delicate business.

‘You all right?’ Chaz asked.

Tasha nodded.

‘Well, if you say so.’ A sardonic eyebrow flicked up. ‘Fifty pounds says you’re thinking of all the adorable children who’d be looking at this rubbish if it were the real thing.’

‘It wouldn’t be rubbish if it were the real thing,’ Tasha hissed.

‘Tash, darling,’ said Chaz, sounding impossibly bored. ‘If it were the real thing you’d have a lot of pictures of you with a man passionately in love with six million pounds you don’t happen to have. The only good thing you could hope for in those circumstances would be that there wouldn’t be any children left sitting in the wreckage afterwards. You can’t make it the real thing by feeling the right thing at the right time, so stop wallowing in sentimentality.’

Tasha glared at him. ‘I’m not.’

‘No?’

Before she could crush him with a retort, they were swept off to the reception. Hundreds and hundreds of guests shook their hands. A substantial proportion whispered in Tasha’s ear how glad they were to see Chaz had found the right woman at last.

Then it was time to wander around the reception greeting people. Chaz stayed close by her side, murmuring wicked comments about people just out of earshot and providing a running commentary on the proceedings. At one point an elderly gentleman came up and shook Chaz’s hand.

‘Well, you won’t remember me,’ he said bluffly. ‘It’s Mr Phipps.’

‘Mr Phipps,’ Chaz said suavely. ‘Of course.’

‘Oh, you won’t remember,’ said Mr Phipps. ‘But it’s good to see you. Good of you to invite me. To tell you the truth I wouldn’t have recognised you, Jeremy—but then that’s often the way, as I always tell my boys. Sometimes the plainest little devils you could imagine turn into real ladykillers, heh, heh, heh.’

‘Is that a fact?’ said Chaz, with a perfectly straight face.

‘Well, life is full of surprises,’ said Mr Phipps. ‘But I won’t keep you.’ He wandered off in search of the buffet.

‘I wonder if it’s true,’ said Tasha. ‘After all, you were beautiful from the day you were born.’

‘You weren’t born when I was born,’ said Chaz.

‘I’ve seen pictures,’ said Tasha. ‘For all we know, all the ladykillers he thinks plain boys have grown into have been impostors.’

‘For all you know someone could have faked those pictures,’ he pointed out. ‘It isn’t true of you, anyway.’

‘I know,’ Tasha said with a grimace. ‘I was nothing much to look at then, and I never grew out of it.’

An eyebrow swooped up in exaggerated scepticism. ‘Fishing for compliments, Tash? You were lovely then; you must know you’re lovely now. I’m happy to say it if you’d like to hear it.’

Tasha stared at him in astonishment.

‘Natasha the fairy princess,’ he said mockingly. ‘Corny but true. Look at your hair. What colour is it? It’s not blonde, or brown, or red. It’s got threads of gold and silver and copper that catch the light, and every time the light changes your hair changes with it... And look at your eyes. What colour are they? You might as well ask what colour is water. Green? Silver? Depends on the light.’

He looked at her with narrowed eyes, as if trying to bring her into focus. ‘The funny thing is, it never comes out in photographs at all. I’ve never seen a picture of you that wasn’t terrible. It’s as if there really was something magical about it, something the camera can’t catch.’

Tasha was struck literally speechless. She couldn’t believe Chaz could actually mean this seriously—he had to be making fun of her. But he didn’t seem to be joking. But if she took it seriously he’d probably burst out laughing because she’d swallowed it.

‘You don’t believe me?’ he said. ‘I knew there was a jinx on cameras; don’t tell me it works on mirrors as well?’

‘I—I,’ she stammered. ‘That is, we—we’d better go in to dinner.’

The seating for the dinner had been one of those problems which make a bride wonder whether there isn’t something to be said for elopement. Jeremy’s side of the family had been all right; he came with a complement of two parents, both speaking to each other. They might not have had a lot to say, but they didn’t snub each other and they didn’t insult each other.

On Tasha’s side, on the other hand, were her father, her mother, her father’s second wife, her father’s second wife’s third husband—the marriage to Professor Merrill hadn’t lasted, but they wouldn’t miss Natasha’s wedding for worlds. There were also her mother’s third husband, her mother’s second husband and her mother’s second husband’s third wife—the marriage to her mother hadn’t lasted, but they wouldn’t miss little Natasha’s wedding for worlds. There were also Aunt Monica and her five husbands—the third, of course, being Chaz’s father as well, though this had not been uppermost in her mind when struggling with the seating plan. There were sundry former and current wives who had always had a soft spot for little Natasha—including, as it happened, Chaz’s mother, though again this had not been uppermost in her mind when devising a seating plan. There were lots and lots of more or less connected children.

It wasn’t that she wanted an ex-rated wedding—but there wasn’t a single person there who hadn’t made a point of calling her, when his or her own marriage was on the rocks, to say how much they’d always liked her, how much they hoped she wouldn’t drop out of sight just because the formal connection wasn’t there. There was no one who wouldn’t be mortally hurt if left out, or even relegated to a table for friends of the family. Well, what had she been supposed to do?

She had finally worked out a plan which placed each person between two other persons of the opposite sex with whom that person was not going to exchange insults. The change of groom had meant that about eight hours of solid anguish had been for nothing. Chaz’s parents obviously had to sit next to him, which meant that the whole meticulously calculated plan fell apart and had had to be started from scratch.

In the end she had just put names in a hat and dealt them out. She was not going through that again. Sure enough three sworn enemies were now sitting side by side; she sat between Chaz and her father, confidently expecting an explosion.

To her surprise, none came. On the principle that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, everyone seemed to have discovered common ground in their previously undisclosed loathing of Jeremy. Up and down the table people could be heard agreeing that better late than never. The closest anyone came to a nasty remark was the heartfelt wish, by Chaz’s mother, that she had had the sense to trade up before walking down the aisle.

‘Still, darling, you wouldn’t be here if I had, so perhaps it’s all for the best,’ she concluded cheerfully, blithely ignoring a black look from the man who should have got away.

Tasha almost wished they would all start fighting. She ate her way through the dinner, shrinking further and further into her chair, while the marital veterans called out more or less cynical pieces of advice. ‘Don’t make the mistake I made,’ they would begin, and then explain how it had all gone wrong and how she or Chaz could avoid this. Basically the mistake was to assume it would last for ever: what you were supposed to do was assume something was going to go wrong, assume a marriage was going to break up unless you watched it every single second to patch it up again as soon as cracks started to show.

If she’d been marrying someone she loved, and who loved her in return, she might have stood up to them, or at least believed something else was possible. But how could she believe that with the kind of marriage she’d ended up with? It was as if the one thing she’d always wanted was the one thing she could never have. She’d spent most of her childhood and adolescence on the sidelines of relationships going wrong, waiting for things to fall apart and then finding herself suddenly in the middle of a brand new family being polite to the complete strangers who were now married to her parents. Her father had tried to provide an element of stability, but she’d wanted more than an element of stability. All she’d ever wanted was something she knew was going to last. Maybe they were right, and that was the one thing you could never have and never know.

Chaz glanced down at his drooping bride, then around the table at their relatives. He rapped on his glass with a knife. ‘Order, order,’ he said. He looked coolly round their startled faces, then laughed suddenly. ‘You’re giving Tasha the horrors,’ he said. ‘Stop it, all of you. The next one to mention a prenuptial contract gets sent out of the room.’

There was a little ripple of laughter.

‘Sorry, darling,’ said Tasha’s mother. ‘You know we just want what’s best for you, and you know what they say; an ounce of prevention—’

Chaz silenced her with a look.

‘I may have missed something in the ceremony just now,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember anything about covering my back or making sure Tasha didn’t take advantage of me. The only things I can remember have to do with doing things for her.’ He gave them all a lazy smile. ‘Now you all know what a monster of selfishness I am. I’ve been to a few weddings over the years, and the deal never appealed to me. In business you look after your own interests, and the other guy looks after his interests, and if you’re me you end up with a lot of money and a lot of people who don’t like you very much.’

There was another ripple of laughter.

‘Now of course it’s true that in the marriage ceremony you exchange vows, so if you promise to do everything you can to make the other person happy they promise to do the same for you. So if they do their part maybe you won’t lose out too badly.’ A black eyebrow slid up. ‘On the other hand if you’re as good as I am at looking after number one, why would you want to delegate?’

Someone said, ‘Hear, hear.’

Chaz smiled. ‘Quite.’ He took a sip of wine. ‘Well, it had me puzzled for years, why anyone would want to sign on for something like that.’ He picked up the bottle of wine and filled Tasha’s glass. ‘Then I happened to remember a rather wet story I once read by O. Henry. The story is about a couple at Christmas. The gist of the story is that they don’t have any money, but each has one precious thing. She has very long beautiful hair, and he has a gold watch. So she sells her hair to buy him a watch chain, and he sells his watch to buy her a tortoiseshell comb.

‘You might think they both ended up losing out, because they’d each lost the one precious thing they had in the world. But what they actually had was something so rare you hardly ever come across it—they each wanted the other’s happiness more than anything in the world. The hair and the watch were gone, but they still had that.’

He looked thoughtfully round the table. ‘Well, it seemed to me that that was the point of marriage. You think you care about somebody’s happiness more than you care about the gold watch, and you stand up in front of a lot of people and say so. Of course, you could be wrong—you could both be wrong; you could find you actually care more about the hair or the watch. But the idea of going into it making sure that, whatever happens, you’re still going to have a gold watch at the end of the day strikes me as insane. If that was the thing I cared about most I wouldn’t get married in the first place.’

Even in her rather depressed frame of mind, Tasha couldn’t help being amused by the range of expressions around the table. These were people who’d been calling Chaz’s girlfriends ‘darling’ for years because if you remembered a name from last time you could bet it was out of date. They’d been complaining of his restlessness, his refusal to settle down, his allergy to commitment. And now to be lectured on the meaning of marriage by the prodigal!

Chaz smiled at them benignly. ‘Now, only a few hours ago I promised to do everything I could to make Tasha happy, so I obviously can’t let you all make her miserable, and I can see it makes her miserable to think that marriage is all about hedging your bets. So I’d just like to go on record as saying that I disagree. It’s a gamble—everything in life is a gamble. But in my opinion the thing you’re playing for is the chance that you care about somebody else more than yourself. If you start out worrying about how to keep your watch safe, you’ve already lost the thing you were playing for; you’ve already decided you can’t care about someone that much. Well, we may find we don’t care about each other that way, and if so you can all say you told us so. But at least we’ll have played for something worth winning. And after all, in the immortal words of someone or other, you can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket.’

There was scattered applause around the table. Tasha’s father reached around her to grip Chaz’s shoulder. Chaz’s mother burst into tears.

‘Oh, darling,’ she sobbed into her handkerchief. ‘I’m so happy for you. All these years I thought I’d ruined your life, I thought you couldn’t love anybody, I thought you’d marry some society girl as a business accessory and never find true love.’ She gulped. ‘And now you’re marrying dear little Tasha and you’ll have children of your own. This is the happiest day of my life.’ She burst into sobs again.

Chaz put an arm round his mother’s shoulder and offered her a fresh handkerchief.

Tasha’s mother said, ‘Chaz, dear, that’s a lovely, lovely thought, and I couldn’t be more pleased that you feel that way. You know I’ve always thought of you as a son. I’m just saying that sometimes people have to be realistic.’

Chaz raised an eyebrow. ‘And sometimes they can’t afford to be. Shall we change the subject?’

Tasha’s mother looked at him askance. Everyone in the family knew he had a razor-sharp tongue when provoked; he’d been uncharacteristically restrained today, but who knew how long that would last?

‘Well, Chaz,’ she said drily at last, ‘if worse comes to worst at least I know you know one way to make her happy.’

‘Exactly,’ said Chaz. ‘Protect her from her family. I don’t remember making a vow on the subject, but I’ll do my poor best.’

Tasha’s father gave a crack of laughter.

Tasha’s mother said, ‘I don’t think that’s funny, Gervase.’

Local skirmishes broke out all around the table.

Tasha remembered suddenly just why she hadn’t wanted to invite Chaz to her wedding in the first place.

They got through the rest of the dinner and the speeches somehow, and then their car took them to their hotel. Chaz had booked a suite at the Ritz, with a sitting room and two bedrooms. They were leaving the next morning for Paris.

They took the lift to their floor and were shown to the suite.

The door closed behind them, and they were alone.

‘Alone at last,’ said Chaz.

Tasha gave a rather tremulous smile. Chaz was surveying the suite and looking distinctly unimpressed, though to Tasha’s eyes it looked palatial. When she didn’t reply he glanced down at her. ‘My poor darling,’ he said ruefully. ‘Your lovely wedding in ruins. Come here a minute.’

Tasha went wearily to his side. Considering that Chaz seemed to think sex was the solution for most of life’s little problems she had a pretty good idea of what he had in mind, and she really wasn’t in the mood either for sleeping with Chaz or for arguing with him about it, but she was too tired to argue that she wanted to stay where she was.