yes,’ her father grumbled from his seat beside her. ‘If we go round this damned block one more time I’ll be in danger of being car-sick for the first time in my life!’
‘Kate insisted I be at least ten minutes late,’ Ashleigh defended, feeling more than a little churned up in the stomach herself. But it wasn’t car-sickness. Much as she had maintained a cool exterior since the perturbing encounter with Nancy, inside she was a mess. And it was all Jake’s fault. The whole catastrophe of her personal life so far had been Jake’s fault!
But no longer, she decided ruefully. She was going to marry James and be happy if it killed her!
She slanted her father a sideways glance, thinking wryly that he was far from comfortable in his role as father of the bride. He was a good doctor, but an antisocial man, whose bedside manner left a lot to be desired.
Ashleigh believed she’d contributed a lot to his practice since joining it, always being willing to lend a sympathetic ear, especially to women patients. They certainly asked for her first. She planned to continue working, at least part-time, even if she did get pregnant straight away, which was her and James’s hope.
Thinking about having a baby, however, brought her mind back to the intimate side of marriage, and the night ahead of her. Another attack of nerves besieged her stomach. Dear heaven, she groaned silently. She hadn’t realised that going to bed with James would loom as such an ordeal.
Her hand fluttered up unconsciously to touch the locket lying in the deep valley between her breasts.
Any worry over her wedding-night was distracted, however, when the park came into view. Oh, my God, she thought as her eyes ran over what Nancy had arranged for her favourite son’s wedding.
A rueful smile crossed Ashleigh’s lips. James’s vetoing a church service clearly hadn’t stopped his mother’s resolve to have a traditional and very public ceremony. Right in the middle of the park under an attractive clump of trees sat a flower-garlanded dais, with an enormous strip of red carpet leading up to it, on either side of which were rows and rows of seats, all full of guests. But the pièce de résistance was the electric organ beside the dais, which seemed to have a hundred extension leads running from it away to a van on which two loud speakers were placed.
Ashleigh shook her head in drily amused resignation. Serve herself right for giving James’s mother carte blanche with the arrangements.
‘Trust Nancy Hargraves to turn this wedding into a social circus,’ her father muttered crossly as the white Fairlane pulled up next to the stone archway that marked the entrance to the park. A fair crowd of onlookers were waiting there for the bride’s arrival, not to mention several photographers and a video cameraman. ‘Thank God I’ve only got one daughter. I wouldn’t want to go through all this again.’
Ashleigh felt a surge of irritation towards her father. Why did he always have to make her feel that her being female was a bother to him?
If only Mum were still alive, she thought with a pang of sadness. She would have so loved today. Not for the first time Ashleigh wondered how such a soft, sentimental woman had married a man like her father.
People always claimed she took after her mother. She certainly hoped so.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ Edgar O’Neil went on curtly while they sat there waiting for the chauffeur to make his way round to Ashleigh’s door. ‘It’s as well Stuart will be joining the practice next year. You’re going to be too busy having babies and dinner parties to be bothered with doctoring. And rightly so. A woman’s place is in the home.’
Ashleigh was too flabbergasted to say a word. She had always known that her father was one of the old brigade at heart. Also that her younger brother would be joining the practice after he finished his residency. But her father spoke as if her services would be summarily dispensed with!
As for her giving dinner parties...Nancy Hargraves and her late husband might have been the hub of Glenbrook’s social life, the Hargraves family owning the logging company and timber mill which were the economic mainstays of the town. But James was not a social animal in the least, and Ashleigh didn’t anticipate their married life would contain too much entertaining.
She had planned to go on working, babies or not. Or at least she had...till her father had dropped his bombshell just now. Her heart turned over with a mixture of disappointment and dismay, though quickly replaced by a prickly resolve. She would just have to start up a practice of her own, then, wouldn’t she?
Alighting from the car, Ashleigh had to make a conscious effort to put a relaxed, smiling face on for the photographers and all the people avidly watching her every move. Heavens, but it looked as if the whole town had turned out to see their only lady doctor getting married.
Or was there a measure of black curiosity, came the insidious thought, over her marrying the wrong brother?
Stop it! she breathed to herself fiercely. Now just you stop it!
‘Doesn’t she look beautiful?’ someone whispered as she made her way carefully up the stone steps and through the archway, her skirt hitched up slightly so she didn’t trip.
‘Like a fairy princess,’ was another comment.
Ashleigh felt warmed by their compliments, though she knew any woman would look good in what she was wearing. The dress and veil combined had cost a fortune, Nancy having insisted she have the very best. Personally she had thought the Gone With The Wind style gown, with its heavy beading, low-cut neck, flounced sleeves and huge layered skirt, far too elaborate for her own simpler tastes. But Nancy had been insistent.
‘It’s expected of my daughter-in-law to wear something extra-special,’ she had said in that haughty manner which could have been aggravating if one let it. But Ashleigh accepted the woman for what she was. A harmless snob. James had a bit of it in him too, but less offensively so.
Jake had been just the opposite, refusing to conform to his mother’s rather stiff social conventions, always going his own way. Not for him a short back and sides haircut. Or suits. Or liking classical music. Jake had been all long, wavy hair, way-out clothes and hard-rock bands. Only in his grades had he lived up to his parental expectations, being top of the school.
Irritation at how her mind kept drifting to Jake sent a scowl to her face.
‘Smile, Doc,’ the photographer from the local paper urged. ‘You’re going to be married, not massacred.’
Ashleigh stopped to throw a beaming smile the photographer’s way. ‘This better?’
‘Much!’
‘Come, Ashleigh,’ her father insisted, taking her elbow and shepherding her across the small expanse of lawn to where the imitation aisle of red carpet started and her attendants were waiting. ‘We’re late enough as it is.’
Her chief bridesmaid thought so too, it appeared. ‘Now that’s taking tradition a bit too far for my liking,’ Kate grumbled. ‘I was beginning to think you’d got cold feet and done a flit.’
‘Never,’ Ashleigh laughed.
‘Well, stranger things have happened. But all’s well that ends well. I’ll just give the nod for the music to start and the men to get ready. I think they’re all hiding behind the dais. Still nervous?’ she whispered while she straightened her friend’s veil.
‘Terrified,’ Ashleigh said truthfully, a lump gathering in her throat as all the guests stood up, blocking out any view of the three men walking round to stand at the base of the dais steps.
‘Good. Nothing like a nervous bride. Nerves make them look even more beautiful, though God knows I don’t know how anyone could look any more beautiful than you do today, dear friend. James is going to melt when he sees you.’
‘Will you two females stop gasbagging?’ the father of the bride interrupted peevishly.
‘Keep your shirt on, Dr O’Neil,’ Kate returned, not one to ever be hassled by a