Page 34 of One Bridegroom Required!

As the steady stream of customers filed into the shop, Holly soon realised that she was going to have to recruit more outworkers than she had originally anticipated. She needed workers who were good enough to sew her intricate designs and close enough for her to be able to keep an eye on them. She scribbled out an advertisement and put it in the Echo.

On a dull Monday morning, a couple of weeks before Christmas, Holly was rearranging her window display when she saw a woman standing waiting on the pavement outside, trying to catch h

er attention.

‘Are you open?’ mouthed the woman, pointing exaggeratedly at her watch.

‘Not until ten!’ Holly mouthed back, then wondered why she was sounding so inflexible. It was her business, and she could open when she liked! With a final twist of fern, which Michelle had concocted into a huge, old-fashioned bouquet with white silk roses, Holly jumped down out of the window and went to unlock the door.

‘Come in,’ she smiled

‘You’re not supposed to be open until ten, are you?’ murmured the woman, but she stepped into the shop anyway and looked around. She was wearing dark corduroy trousers, a green padded jacket and wellington boots. She wore the traditional country clothes well—they suited her clear skin and her neat, butter-coloured hair. She was trim, with tiny wrists and tiny ankles—the sign, or so Holly had been told by her mother, of a true lady.

‘You’re only ten minutes off, and the shop is still very new,’ said Holly with a smile. ‘I need to build up a reputation, and it wouldn’t do mine much good if I forced you to stand outside in the cold, instead of bringing you in here and letting you browse around. I’m presuming that you are a bride-to-be?’

‘I most certainly am!’ giggled the woman. It was an attractive, infectious laugh, but a little girlish, too. And maybe just a tad inappropriate for someone pushing thirty, Holly thought. Until she reminded herself sternly that she was here to make wedding dresses, not value judgements! Still, she would bet, with a giggle like that, that this woman would go for flounces and frills and a bouquet as big as the Blackwall Tunnel!

‘When,’ asked Holly immediately, ‘is the wedding?’ The woman pursed her lips together in a smile. ‘Well, we haven’t quite decided yet—you know what men are for making a commitment! My fiancé came over without me—to get everything ready,’ she added with a coy shrug.

‘But you’re not planning a sudden Valentine wedding, are you?’ asked Holly quickly. ‘Because if you are, we’ll have to get a move on.’

The woman shook her head. ‘Oh, no! My fiancé and I haven’t actually discussed a date—but I want to be sure that, when we do, I’ll be ready to go!’

Keen, thought Holly with a smile. But, there again, so many brides were—and it would be a little disappointing if they weren’t! ‘Then we’d better introduce ourselves,’ she said. ‘I’m Holly Lovelace—owner and designer.’

‘Caroline,’ said the blonde, holding her hand out. ‘Caroline Casey. I’m afraid that I’m a novice at all this—what do I do now?’

‘You take a look at all those sample gowns hanging over there on the rail, and decide which ones you like the look of. Then you try them on, see which suits and whether you want any modifications made, and then I can have it made to measure.’

‘And do they all have price tags?’

Holly nodded. ‘Yes, they do.’ Not all shops carried prices on their gowns, but it had been a conscious decision of hers to do so, because nothing was worse than falling madly in love with a wedding dress, only to discover that it was much more than you could afford. Holly knew that brides rarely looked too closely at a gown which was financially out of their reach. ‘But if you’re on a budget and particularly like a certain design, then we can sometimes have it made up in a less expensive fabric.’

‘Oh, no!’ Caroline laughed delicately, showing teeth which were straight and white and even—teeth which told of a lifetime’s good nutrition, of sunshine and milk and no sweets to cause cavities. ‘Money’s certainly no object.’ She paused and gave Holly a helpless little shrug. ‘My fiancé has just come into a very large inheritance!’

Blinking away a brief but distracting feeling of déjà vu, Holly managed to smile, even though she thought the woman sounded more than a little smug. ‘Good for him! And for you!’ she added robustly, supposing that it was difficult to talk about a large inheritance without sounding smug. ‘Nice to be in love,’ she said wistfully. ‘And it’s probably even nicer if he’s rich into the bargain!’

‘Oh, I’d never have agreed to marry him if he hadn’t come into money,’ said Caroline, smiling and shaking her head when she saw the look of horror on Holly’s face. ‘Oh, no! I don’t mean that I’m marrying him just for the money—although I have to agree, it helps! It’s just that money brings with it responsibilities. And, more importantly, stability. And my fiancé was pretty wild before he inherited!’ She wrinkled up her pretty nose. ‘Very wild!’

The mind boggled. ‘In what way?’ asked Holly curiously.

‘In every way.’ Caroline shrugged. ‘The original rolling stone!’

Holly smiled, feeling a sneaking sympathy for the man. She suspected that the pretty but determined Caroline Casey would keep her errant flancé on a very short rein indeed! ‘Listen—why don’t I make us some coffee and leave you to browse through the dresses at your leisure?’

‘That’s very sweet of you.’

When Holly came back with coffee, it was her turn to feel smug, since the woman had done exactly as she’d predicted and picked out the most frothy, fairy-princess dress on the rail! It had a low, flounced neck, a jewel-encrusted bodice, nipped waist and a skirt wide enough to hide a family of six beneath its voluminous silk folds.

Holly didn’t just design dresses that she was passionate about—she also designed dresses to sell. You had to if you were a businesswoman, or so her favourite tutor had told her at college. And frothy, traditional dresses did sell—no doubt about it, there was always a market for them.

Caroline experimentally held the dress up in front of her. ‘Do you like it?’

‘Your waist is going to look like Scarlett O’Hara’s in that,’ promised Holly truthfully.

Caroline clutched the dress to her. ‘I’ve dreamed of a wedding dress like this one ever since I was a little girl!’

‘Well, that’s what tends to happen.’ Holly smiled. ‘Just so long as you aren’t marrying a man who wants you to elope in a short red dress on the back of his motorbike!’

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