ZOEY HEPBURN SHOVED the hotel window a little further open, hoisted her bare foot up onto the sill and cursed as her hem got caught on the latch—again. She was beginning to regret the strapless hot pink dress she’d chosen for her rehearsal dinner. However pretty the lacy skirt was, it was not getaway-friendly.
Of course, when she bought it, she hadn’t been planning on escaping through a back window the night before her wedding. But then, she never did.
‘People are looking for you, you know.’ The calm, almost lazy voice behind her made Zoey jump just enough to whack her head on the window frame. Ow. ‘Also, you made me promise I wouldn’t let you do this again this time.’
‘Again feels a little harsh. I’ve never actually climbed out of a window before.’ Maybe her shoulders would fit through the small gap better if she twisted them more to the left.
Zoey tried it. They wouldn’t.
Ash sighed. His usual, What did I do in a past life to get lumbered with you as my friend? sigh. Zoey was alarmingly familiar with it.
‘They want to do the speeches,’ he said. As if the idea of hearing David’s father waffle on about how important his family was—to him and to the world at large—might tempt her back into the hotel restaurant. Everyone in there knew what trouble his company was in anyway, whatever tall tales he told about famous people he’d met once and who would never remember his name.
David didn’t do that, she reminded herself. David was reasonably modest. Well, compared to his father anyway, which wasn’t a very high bar, she had to admit.
Still, it meant she probably couldn’t use ‘pompous name-dropper’ as a reason for not marrying him.
‘Since when did speeches become a must for rehearsal dinners, anyway?’ she asked, eyeing the window again. ‘Can’t they save them for tomorrow? You know, the actual wedding.’
‘Seems to me they’re being sensible getting them in early,’ Ash said, and she just knew he was raising an eyebrow at her, the way he always used to when she and Grace came home from the pub tipsy and tried to deny that last bottle of wine they’d shared. ‘Tomorrow is not looking like a sure thing right now.’
Outside, a warm breeze fluttered past like butterfly wings. She was in paradise—a luxurious island in the middle of the Indian ocean, a boutique hotel filled with her and David’s friends and family, private villas on stilts stretching out into the azure sea from a wooden boardwalk for all her guests.
It was just unfortunate that, from the minute she’d arrived three days ago for the last-minute wedding preparations, she’d felt as if she’d been trapped in purgatory.
But she wasn’t going to escape hell through this window—even if she had followed any of those ‘Lose Ten Pounds for your Wedding Day’ diets her mother had kept leaving strategically around the house. Which she hadn’t.
Resigned, Zoey pulled her head back through the open window, turned to face her best friend’s husband and sat down on the windowsill. ‘I can’t go back in there, Ash.’
Ash took a seat on the table she’d climbed up on to reach the window. ‘Because rehearsal dinners are a terrible tradition that should be banned, or because you don’t want to marry David tomorrow?’
‘Both,’ Zoey replied promptly. ‘And I should know. I’ve had three rehearsal dinners, including this one.’
‘And not a wedding between them,’ Ash said mournfully. ‘Not to mention the two other broken engagements.’
Zoey winced. ‘Three, actually. One of them was before Grace and I met you.’
‘The musician, right?’ Ash tilted his head to the side as he looked at her. ‘Grace told me about him. I think calling that one off was legit.’
‘As opposed to the others?’ She gave him a sideways look. ‘Do you honestly think I should have married Harry, or Julian, or Fred?’
‘I suppose not.’ Leaning back, Ash rested his elbows on the table and looked up at her. His bright blue eyes were too knowing, and Zoey had to work to resist the urge to brush his sooty hair away from them. He really was absurdly good-looking. The thought registered, as it always did—an acknowledgement of a fact, like saying the ocean was blue.
She’d never let herself dwell on it beyond that. That way lay madness and misery.
‘It’s just a shame you never figured out that they weren’t the right guy for you until the morning of the wedding,’ Ash went on, and she focused on his words rather than his looks again. ‘As much as I love a last-minute runaway bride drama, I think some other people might be thinking it’s gone a little far now.’
He could have a point, Zoey allowed. In fact, she had a nagging suspicion that David might have had an ulterior motive for insisting the wedding took place on an island in the middle of nowhere.
She frowned. Ash would know. ‘When David spoke to you about booking the wedding, did he say why he wanted to have it here?’ She hadn’t wanted to ask before. But if not now, when?
Ash, as heir to the Carmichael Luxury Travel business, had organised the use of the island hotel as his wedding present to them. She was pretty sure his company actually owned the island, as well as the hotel, when it came down to it. Zoey wondered if she’d have to pay him back for that if the wedding didn’t go ahead. She hoped not. Her job as an art gallery assistant in London was her dream, but the benefits weren’t all entirely financial.
‘He might have mentioned the advantages of having control over which boats and sea planes arrived at—and more pertinently left—the island,’ Ash said diplomatically.
‘You mean he was trying to make sure I couldn’t run away.’ Zoey frowned. Was He manipulated my wedding venue choice a good enough excuse not to marry him? And why did she need an excuse at all beyond I don’t want to?
Because your mother is going to pitch a fit. Not to mention all the other people you’re letting down.
Not Ash, though. Even if he had gone along with David’s possibly nefarious scheme.
‘Why didn’t you tell me that sooner?’ she asked, trying to feel outraged and failing. ‘I mean, you’d let me marry a man who didn’t give me an out on my wedding day? What kind of a friend are you?’
Ash rolled his eyes. ‘Yes, obviously this is my fault. Zoey, you know that if you told me you wanted out then I would get you out—planes, boats and automobiles be damned. But, if you recall, you also told me—quite definitely—when we had dinner last month that David was absolutely the one, and that I wasn’t to let you get cold feet this time, because you’d regret it for the rest of your life.’
Had she really said that? It was hard to imagine somehow, here and now. Impossible to summon up that certainty again—and not because of the island, or his father’s pompous speeches. But because now it came down to it she simply could not picture spending the rest of her life with David.
But she had been able to once. She must have