The Bridesmaid's Best Man
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In the twenty-first century, an educated girl was expected to avoid this kind of pitfall. She cringed inwardly, could hear her father’s lecture already.
Oh, help.
‘Cheer up, Sox.’
Hearing her childhood nickname, Sophie smiled and quickly shoved thoughts of her parents aside. She would deal with them later. Much later.
She sighed again, heavily. ‘I suppose I was crazy to insist on talking to Mark while he’s out in the middle of nowhere, and now I’m going to have to wait another whole week until he gets home and I can speak to him. But I can’t think, can’t work out what to do about…about anything until I’ve had a chance to talk to him properly.’
‘What are you hoping for?’
Unable to give a straight answer, Sophie twisted the locket Emma had given her as a bridesmaid’s present.
‘That he’ll ask you to marry him?’ Emma suggested gently.
‘Good heavens, no.’ She might have been silly enough to get pregnant, but she wasn’t so na"ive that she believed in fairy tales.
‘It’s not the easiest option, is it?’
‘To marry a man I’ve known for less than twenty-four hours?’ Sophie regarded her friend with a sharply raised eyebrow. ‘It wouldn’t be very smart, would it?’ She gave an annoyed little shrug, and tried to ignore a stab of jealousy. Emma was newly married and blissfully happy with Tim, and not pregnant.
‘Just the same,’ she added quickly. ‘I need to know how Mark feels about—well—about everything.’ Her lower lip trembled as she remembered just how deeply she’d been smitten by him that night. Stop it.
‘For example,’ she said quickly, ‘if Mark’s going to demand visitation rights there’ll be steep air-fares to negotiate.’
Emma slipped from the bed and squeezed onto the window seat, wrapping an arm around Sophie’s hunched shoulders. ‘It’ll work out. You’ll feel better once you’re able to have a proper talk with Mark, when he gets back from this—’ She frowned. ‘What did you say he was doing exactly?’
Sophie rolled her eyes. ‘Rounding up cattle. But apparently they call it “mustering” in Australia. He seems to be way out in the very centre of the Outback somewhere.’
Emma’s upper lip curled with poorly restrained amusement. ‘It’s hard to imagine Mark Winchester doing the whole cowboy thing in all that heat and dust, isn’t it? I mean, he was so wonderfully dashing when he was best man at the wedding. Even I managed to drag my eyes away from Tim long enough to notice how tall, dark and handsome Mark was. And beautifully groomed.’
‘Yes,’ Sophie agreed with another sigh. ‘That was the problem. He was far too dashing and handsome. He had such a presence. I wouldn’t be in this pickle now if he hadn’t been quite so eye-catching.’
‘Or if Oliver wasn’t such a pig,’ Emma added darkly.
Sophie’s jaw dropped as she stared at her friend. ‘Did you guess?’
‘That you started flirting madly with Mark to show Oliver Pembleton that he hadn’t hurt you?’
Miserably, Sophie nodded.
‘It wasn’t hard to figure out, Sox. I know you’re not normally a flirt. But I can’t blame you for giving it a go at the wedding. Mark was attractive enough to make any girl flutter her eyelashes. And the way Oliver pranced around in front of you with his ghastly new fianc'ee was insufferable.’
Sophie nodded and felt a momentary sense of comfort that a good friend like Emma understood just how humiliated she’d felt when Oliver had turned up, with his glamorous heiress wearing the sapphire-and-diamond ring originally intended for her.
Practically everyone at the wedding had known she was Oliver’s reject. Most had tried not to look sorry for her, but she’d felt their sympathy. It had been smothering. Suffocating. Had sent her a little crazy.
Her good friend let out a huff of annoyance. ‘I’m still furious with my mother for letting Oliver come to the wedding. When he broke off with you he should have been axed from the invitation list, but somehow he wangled his way in, plus a fresh invite for her, as well.’
‘The thing is,’ said Sophie, not wanting to dwell on what might have been, ‘getting back at Oliver isn’t exactly a suitable excuse for getting pregnant. I mean, it’s not something I can explain to my parents, is it? Or to my child in the future, for that matter.’
She wasn’t sure she could explain to anyone exactly how getting back at Oliver had morphed into getting pregnant with Mark.
But, deep inside, she knew. Her heart could pinpoint the precise moment she’d looked into Mark Winchester’s dark eyes and the chatter in her head about Oliver had stopped, and she’d been drawn radically into the present. She’d been suddenly and completely captivated by the magnetic allure of the tall, rangy Australian. It had been like coming out of a deep sleep to find her senses truly awakened for the very first time.
As she’d danced with Mark, her entire body had tensed with an excitement beyond anything she’d ever experienced. Her fingers had longed to touch the suntanned skin on his jaw and, as they’d danced, she’d kept thinking about how his lips would feel on hers.
‘So you’re definitely going to keep the baby?’ asked Emma.
Sophie blinked, then nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘That’s wonderful.’
Was it? Sophie wished she could feel more excited about the fact that she was going to be a mother. It was still so hard to believe.
A heavy sigh escaped her. ‘I think I did something silly when I was talking to Mark. I suggested I might come out to see him, so we could talk through what we’re going to do about the baby.’
‘But that’s a fabulous idea. It’s exactly what I was hoping you’d do. I told Tim last night—’
‘You told Tim about it?’
‘Sophie, he’s my husband, and he’s your friend as well as Mark’s best mate. He’s worried about both of you. You’re so far apart, it’s almost like being on another planet. He said last night that if only you two could get together again you’d be able to sort this all out. And I agree.’
‘So you think I should go?’
‘Absolutely. It’s going to be horrendous to try to talk about everything from the opposite ends of the earth.’
That was true. But it would be horrendously extravagant to go all that way for a conversation she could have over the phone.
Except…she would see Mark again. And she might feel stronger about facing her family after she’d spoken to Mark.
And there was always a chance—a tiny, tiny chance admittedly—that when she and Mark got together again, they might…