White Wedding Read Online Free PDF Page A

on loads but still not settled on anything. Maybe she was subconsciously putting off
buying a dress; that was the only possible explanation. She knew she would have to pick one soon, and something kept pulling her back to White Wedding.
    ‘This is nice, but it’s more bridesmaidy than bride, don’t you think?’ said Bel, holding up a cream ballerina-length dress with puffy sleeves.
    ‘Talking of which, how do you fancy being my bridesmaids?’ asked Max suddenly.
    ‘Max – I thought you weren’t having any.’ Bel thought that Max would have forgotten all about her new daft gypsy wedding plans after a good sleep. It wasn’t as if
she had time to arrange something of that magnitude anyway.
    Max raised her eyebrows innocently. ‘Bel, if I have a gypsy wedding I can’t possibly go down the aisle with no bridesmaids behind me, can I? And who else can I ask? I don’t
know any women except the ones that work for me and the ones I sell things to. Or my cousin, Alison, who would scare the living shit out of Jeremy Kyle,’ she said with a shudder. That was the
trouble with workaholics – they too lost their friends along the way.
    Bel looked around idly. There were some gorgeous dresses in her sight but none as beautiful as her late mother’s gown. She was surprised her stepmother, Faibiana, hadn’t got rid of
it; in fact she had done the opposite, placing it in a suit cover to preserve it for the day when Bel might need it. Not that Bel ever thanked ‘Faye’, as she preferred to be called, for
that. Faye Bosomworth had breezed into Bel’s widowed father’s life twenty-eight years ago on a hearty gust of floral perfume and totally and immediately enchanted him. To her
stepdaughter she was nothing but kindness and patience, yet Bel had never quite lost the feeling that the new queen of her father’s heart had unlawfully usurped the old one, who should have
reigned for ever. Bel had never called Faye ‘mother’ and Faye had never pressed her to. Luckily her stepmum was nothing like her cow of a sister Vanoushka – Shaden’s mother.
Or her sow of the other sister, Lydiana, who, thankfully, now lived in Melbourne, Australia, and visited only once yearly. And that was once yearly too much.
    Max carried on hunting along the rails, but there was nothing remotely like gypsy Margaret’s dress. Freya directed Violet to her new stock but she still couldn’t see a dress she
liked enough to consider buying. The only one she tried on had a neckline that was far too low and didn’t flatter her almost non-existent cleavage at all.
    ‘O. M. G.’ Max’s scream was so high-pitched that dogs started barking outside. Violet jumped.
    ‘What’s up?’ she said, rushing over, closely followed by Bel.
    ‘Look. At. That.’
    ‘Here we go again,’ smiled Bel, following the track of Max’s pointing finger. At the very back of the shop, and taking up a lot of its width, was a headless mannequin wearing a
gargantuan white dress. It made gypsy Margaret’s look like a shift.
    ‘That’s it.’ Max was so emotionally overcome that she addressed the gown directly. ‘You’re the one I want.’
    ‘Ooh ooh ooh, honey,’ trilled Bel behind her, but Max wasn’t listening. She was cocooned in a world where only she and this big white cloud of dress belonged.
    ‘I’m making this for display,’ said Freya, appearing at her shoulder.
    ‘Is it for sale?’ Max asked breathlessly.
    ‘Well, yes, if I found a buyer, I suppose,’ Freya answered.
    ‘I think you’ve found one,’ said Bel.
    ‘Can you customize it?’ Max asked Freya. ‘Can you add bits? Flowers? Lights?’
    ‘Caravans,’ put in Bel.
    ‘Of course,’ nodded Freya, as if she were asked every day to sew weird things onto dresses.
    ‘Your fiancé is going to kill you, I think,’ Violet warned her in a sing-songy voice.
    ‘Oh I’ll work on Stuart, don’t you worry,’ Max flapped her hand at her friend. ‘I’ve got a few weeks to bring him round to