A Groom With a View Read Online Free PDF Page A

stopped. Nick and I don’t really discuss children.
    “Pippa, steady on. Are you sure you’re not overthinking this? It’s just a day, it’s just a way of celebrating us being together with the people we love. You said even Callie thinks we should make a big thing out of it.”
    No, she didn’t, I wanted to say. She said I’d turn into a bridezilla wedding obsessive, because everyone does. But then I thought, Nick has a point. It’s about us, and us means him as well as me, and what if a massive wedding is what he wants? How selfish would it be of me to stop him from having one?
    “So what do you think?” I asked. “What would you like to do?”
    “Well, of course I haven’t thought about it much.” Nick was looking down at his plate again. “I wanted to discuss it with you first.”
    “Bollocks!” I said. “You so have thought about it. And what have you thought?”
    “Okay, okay,” he said. “I have had a few ideas. I thought maybe we should have it near home, you know, where we first got together. Maybe in the New Forest somewhere. There was that wedding in Inspired Bride that was near there, at a stately home. It looked cool. I know you’re mad busy at work, Pip, I don’t want you to stress about it. I don’t want to be one of those men who sits on his arse and lets his fiancée do all the work, and says, ‘I don’t mind,’ when she asks about flowers and. . . er. . . stuff. I want to be involved, I want to be as much a part of it as you. That’s what I thought.”
    He looked excited and a bit embarrassed, and the dimple in his cheek was disappearing then appearing again. I felt a rush of love for him.
    “Callie would be pleased if we got married there,” I said. “And Mum and Dad would be too, I suppose. I haven’t spoken to them yet.” I realised I’d been avoiding telling people, avoiding anything that would make it all seem too real. “I’ll call Mum. I’ll call her this week and arrange to go round and we can tell them, and why don’t you ring that place. . . what was it called again? And see when they’ve got a free Saturday, because I bet they get booked ages in advance. It might be months away, probably a year.”
    “Brocklebury Manor,” said Nick. “Actually, Pip, I emailed them today. You know, just to see what they said. And they’ve had a cancellation in February. It gives us almost four months to plan everything.”
    “This is utterly ridiculous,” I complained to Nick as we made our way through the seemingly endless corridors leading to Iain and Katharine’s penthouse apartment in a converted corset factory in East London. “I mean, having a wedding photo reveal party is bad enough, but insisting that everyone wears the same outfit they wore to the wedding is just beyond bonkers. I look like a total prat in this hat.”
    “I know, Pippa,” Nick adjusted the carnation in his buttonhole. “But apparently Katharine cried when she realised she wasn’t going to get to wear her wedding dress again, and then she had the idea of asking everyone else to wear their wedding kit so she could. Iain’s none too pleased about it either.”
    I could imagine that, just as I could imagine Iain having had very little say in the matter. I’ve always known that Katharine’s girly demeanour conceals a will of iron.
    We tapped the polished steel knocker and Iain opened the front door a second later, red in the face beneath his top hat.
    “Glad you could come,” he said, a bit sullenly, knocking my own hat askew as he tried to kiss me, and clapping Nick on the back. “Come and have a drink. Katharine’s made those cinnamon mojitos you liked so much, or there’s fizz, and we got the caterers who did the wedding to recreate the canapés. Grub’s through in the dining room.”
    I caught Nick’s eye and tried not to giggle, but he was looking surprisingly serious. Perhaps it was the memory of the cinnamon mojitos.
    Walking into Iain and Katharine’s living room felt