Two Weddings and a Baby Read Online Free PDF Page A

could only be described as a cape, mostly because it
was
an actual cape. During her teens Tamsyn had bleached her hair and then dyed it pink, had got a secret tattoo of a butterfly on her left shoulder blade and pierced her own belly button with a needle, until it went septic and she needed a course of antibiotics, but she had never had the courage to wear a cape in the town that fashion forgot. That was one thing Cordelia wasn’t short of, courage … ‘Mum’s right,’ Cordelia squinted at her. ‘You are too thin – are you a size zero, or what?’
    ‘I’m a ten!’ Tamsyn exclaimed. ‘I’ve been exactly the same size since I was nineteen. I’m just tall and leggy …’
    ‘Rub it in,’ Keira laughed. ‘It’s really not fair that you were the only one to get Dad’s long legs. Well, you and Ruan, and he doesn’t even need them.’
    ‘I wouldn’t say that. They do come in handy, especially for running away from all of my sisters.’
    Somehow Tamsyn had forgotten for a few minutes that the reason she was in Poldore in the first place was because of Ruan, for his impending wedding, and now that he was here, standing next to her, she discovered she had nothing to say, caught as she was between an impulse to hug him and to hide.
    ‘Sis,’ Ruan nodded at her. ‘Long time no see.’
    ‘No,’ Tamsyn nodded. ‘Right, well, you know how it is.’
    ‘Yep, five years fly by when you’re making dresses,’ Ruan said, that familiar storm brewing between his brows.
    ‘Well, I haven’t exactly noticed you beating down my door, asking to come and visit,’ Tamsyn said. ‘Mum did. Cordy, Keira and the kids did. Now I’m here, when have you ever been to Paris?’
    ‘Why would I ever want to come to Paris?’ Ruan asked her. ‘It’s full of French people.’
    ‘Xenophobe,’ Tamsyn said, her treacherously idiotic mouth betraying her before she could contain it. ‘Although why I should expect more of my brother, the country bumpkin I don’t know. Anyway, I see you found a replacement.’
    ‘You—’
    ‘—Are so kind for coming all this way.’
    Tamsyn and Ruan broke their deadlock and turned to the newcomer. This had to be her, Alex, the woman that had got to Ruan. She was pretty, but not perhaps the siren that Tamsyn had been expecting. Lightly tanned fair skin, scrubbed clean of make-up, clear blue eyes and a thick mane of dark hair that looked enviably smooth and shiny. Pleasantly made, with hips and breasts, she was exactly the sort of woman who would never fit into one of Bernard’s dresses, which, Tamsyn realised as she took in her outfit of a pair of comfortable jeans and a t-shirt, she probably wouldn’t give two hoots about anyway. She knew Ruan had met Alex when she’d arrived to take on the job of Cornwall’s first female harbour master, but from what Cordelia had told her, it had been their roles as Mary and Joseph in Sue Montaigne’s Christmas pageant that had thrown them together, and then quite a lot of toing and froing had ensued, including Alex saving her brother’s life, before they finally got together. Alex looked like a real woman, an ordinary one, and despite certainly hearing Tamsyn refer to her as a ‘replacement’, she looked surprisingly friendly.
    ‘Well, of course,’ Tamsyn smiled. ‘Mum said if I didn’t come she’d kill me.’
    A beat too late, she realised that what she said sounded incredibly rude, at exactly the same moment that Ruan looked like he’d quite like to tip the pint he was holding over her head.
    ‘Mums are very convincing that way,’ Alex laughed. ‘You should meet mine. I didn’t even know her for most of my life, then she turns up out of the blue, breaks into my home and now she’s organising my wedding. Funny, isn’t it, how just when you think there’s no hope for something or someone, everything changes? I wouldn’t be without her now.’
    Alex’s smile was sweet, open, genuine, kind. She wanted this to work, Tamsyn understood. She