The Bride's Baby by Liz Fielding Page A

mildness of his tone belied the hard glitter in his eyes as he looked over Geena’s head and straight at her. As if the fact that he wasn’t was somehow her fault.
    Along with global warming, the national debt and the price of fuel, no doubt.
    ‘You know each other! Excellent. The thing is, Tom, Sylvie needs a stand-in fantasy man. Are you game?’
    ‘Nnnnnn…’ was all she could manage, since not only were her vocal cords in a knot, but her tongue had apparently turned into a lump of wood.
    ‘That rather depends on the nature of the fantasy,’ he replied, ignoring her frantically shaking head. His expression suggested that he harboured any number of fantasies in which she was the main participant…
    ‘Well, all I need is for you to stand there looking hot and fanciable.’ She smiled encouragingly. Then, before he could move, ‘That’s it. Perfect.’
    ‘I didn’t do anything,’ he protested.
    ‘You don’t have to,’ she said, grinning hugely at her own cleverness. ‘Right, Sylvie. Get your imagination into gear.’
    ‘Geena, I think…’
    ‘Thinking is the last thing I want from you. This is all about feelings. The senses,’ she said bossily, stepping from between them and, taking her by the shoulders, lined her up so that she was facing him.
    The sun was streaming into the morning room and she’d shrugged off the loose knee-length cardigan-style wrap that had become a permanent cover-up since her pregnancy had begun to show and her condition was unmistakable.
    And his expression left her in no doubt as to his feelings. He was angry…
    ‘Forget that sweater, those pants, excellent though they are,’ Geena said. ‘For this exercise he’s wearing a morning suit…’ she glanced down at the purple shoes ‘…a grey morning suit with a purple waistcoat and violets in his buttonhole.’
    Tom McFarlane made a sound that suggested ‘not in this life’.
    ‘He’s standing at the altar and he’s—’
    ‘What altar?’ Tom demanded, having been finally jerked out of his own private fantasy world in which, no doubt, all wedding coordinators were fed on wedding cake—the kind with rock-hard royal icing—until their teeth fell out.
    What had he done with that wedding cake…?
    ‘Good point, Tom. Village church, Sylvie?’ she asked, breathing into her thoughts.
    Sylvie opened her mouth, determined to put an end to this nightmare, but it was apparently a rhetorical question because Geena swept on without waiting for an answer.
    ‘Where else? But you don’t have to worry about that, Tom.’
    ‘I don’t?’ he said, apparently unconvinced, but Geena was in full flow and nothing, it seemed, was going to stop her.
    ‘Absolutely not. We’re doing all the work here.’
    Sylvie shrugged helplessly as Tom McFarlane lifted a brow in her direction, putting them, for the briefest moment, on the same side.
    Not possible.
    In the middle of the night she might have succumbed to the impossible dream. The happy ever after. But that was all it had ever been—a dream.
    ‘Okay, Sylvie. The church doorway is decorated with evergreens and flowers. Your bridesmaids are waiting. All adults?’ she asked. ‘Or will you be having children too?’
    Concentrate on the wedding. Just make the most of this fantasy moment…
    ‘One adult,’ she said. If this were real, she’d want Josie in the rear, running things. Parting her from her boots might be difficult, but at least her hair already matched the colour scheme. ‘Assorted children. Four girls, one boy.’
    Her fantasy should, after all, be as close to reality as possible and she had four god-daughters who would never forgive her if they were excluded from the big day. And a five-year-old godson who would probably never forgive her if he was expected to appear in public in a pair of satin breeches. But he’d look sweet and his sisters could use the threat of posting the photographs on the Internet to keep him in order when he was at that difficult age—the one