Total pages in book: 124
Estimated words: 121898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
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.”