Page 71 of From Best Friend to Bride
I knew exactly who was behind this one, and I was going to kiss Ellie when I next saw her.
She’d had the heroine use this in her last book, after all.
“What are you—” Fred stilled when he turned and saw me holding it in my hand. “What the ever-loving fuck is that thing?”
“This?” I held it up and looked from the purple machine to him. “You’ve never seen one before?”
“I can’t say that I, myself, have a great need for female sex toys.”
“Why? Because of your superior skills in the bedroom?” I asked dryly.
“That and the fact I’m not a fucking woman, Delilah.”
I could see how that would be a problem. “Okay, but this?” I wiggled it. “This is something every man should know how to use on his woman, so your next wife really is lucking out here.”
He tilted his head to the side, narrowing his eyes slightly. “Are you really talking about my supposed next wife on our wedding night while holding a sex toy?”
“Yeah.” I shrugged. “Okay, so this bit… Ooh, it’s a bendy one!” I gently bent the toy into a u-shape and showed it to him. “This end goes inside, and this bit—the sucker—goes on the clit. Press the buttons to turn it on, and voila. It’s like all your Christmases come at once. An out-of-body experience, if you will.”
Fred looked warily between the toy and my face. “I didn’t ask.”
“Consider it my first act of wifely assistance.”
“I’d like to unsubscribe from this added extra.” He rounded the bed, plucked the toy from my hand, and tossed it back in the bucket with everything else. Then, he picked up the bucket and carried it to the wardrobe where he shut it inside with a decisive slam of the doors.
“Aww,” I said, staring at the wardrobe. “Can I grab that later?”
He curled his hand into a fist and pressed it against his forehead. “This is going to be the longest marriage in the world, isn’t it?”
“Only until we divorce,” I said brightly, wiping the stupid rose petals off the bed. “Ugh, these are a mess.”
“Tell me about it.” He grabbed his pyjamas from the drawers and glanced at me. “I’m going to shower. I swear to God, if you get that toy out and I walk in here to you doing unspeakable things to yourself, I will throw you off the balcony.”
I touched my fingertips to my temple in a salute and jumped onto the bed. I was already in my pyjamas, so I shoved the duvet aside and grabbed my phone.
As if I’d do that where he could see me.
In the privacy of my own bedroom next door, though? I was going to get to know that little machine very well.
Very well indeed.
I fired a quick text off to Ellie thanking her for her service to my nervous system and got the confirmation I needed that she was the genius behind that little addition. With a promise to make good use of it, I switched my attention to Instagram.
Photos of our wedding were already flooding my feed, and none of them belonged to either Fred or me. We hadn’t cared about sharing anything first, and the formal announcement would be in next week’s paper, so we’d just told everyone to go wild and post, as long as it was done after ten p.m.
Thankfully, everyone had listened to us.
There were carousels and reels galore under the ‘FreDeli’ hashtag. I would never, ever escape that fucking ship name for as long as I lived, but at least it finally had a good use.
Despite how this day had come about, I couldn’t help but smile as I looked at everyone’s posts. There was a reel of our first dance, but all it really was was me stepping on Fred’s feet and him looking like he was trying not to murder me. There was a photo of him smushing icing from our cake on my cheek, and another in the same post of me dotting the back of his jacket with the same frosting.
I’d gotten sixteen fingerprints of frosting on him before he’d realised what I was up to.
A smile stretched across my face. Despite how we’d ended up here, today had been fun. Everyone had let their hair down, and for a while today, all the bad things had been forgotten.
There was no cancer, no ticking clock on Nana’s life, and no worries of running into people we didn’t want to see.
Everything had gone perfectly. Not a single second of the day had messed up, and I knew I had our mothers to thank for it.
