Makeshift Marriage

"But what about the wedding?" Stefanie Varney's mother wailed, looking up from the flimsy single page she had just read. A perfect pink carnation slipped from the fingers of her other hand, the big vases of mixed blooms forgotten behind her. "Everything's been arranged for tomorrow!"

The utility room was strewn with roses, carnations, chrysanthemums and ferns, the perfume of the flowers cloying in the small space. They were supposed to have been placed in the church tonight.

"There isn't going to be a wedding." Stefanie distractedly brushed back a strand of fine, dark brown hair that had strayed across her eyes. "At least, not for me."

She was surprised that her voice sounded normal, if a bit flat. When she'd come home early from work and taken the several letters waiting for her to her room, she'd opened Bryan's first, touched and pleased that he'd bothered to write to her when this evening he'd be driving down from Auckland for their wedding rehearsal, bringing her chief bridesmaid with him.

Once she'd read the letter and absorbed its contents her instinct had been to hide it away - hide herself too, stay in her room and pretend this wasn't happening. Because it couldn't be.

"It wouldn't be so bad," Patti said, "if he'd said something earlier! Oh, this is awful !" Then, as if realising what it meant for her daughter, she stepped forward and enfolded Stefanie in a maternal embrace. 'My poor darling - I'm so sorry!"

With her mother's tears wetting her cheek Stefanie returned the hug, while her own eyes remained stubbornly dry. Everything seemed unreal.

But she wasn't the only one affected. More than a hundred people had been invited to attend the wedding. More than a hundred friends and relatives - both hers and Bryan's.

Patti was sobbing now. Gently Stefanie freed herself. 'I'm all right," she said. "But we have to let people know."

"Yes, but there's so little time! The caterers ... the guests ... the church! What on earth are we going to say to everyone?"

"That the wedding will not now take place?" Stefanie offered. "I think that's the usual form."

"How can you be so calm," her mother marvelled almost crossly, fishing for a handkerchief, "when you've just been left practically at the altar?"

Inwardly Stefanie winced. At least Bryan had spared her that, if only by a hair's breadth. "We weren't exactly at the altar."

"As near as makes no difference!" Patti said viciously. "How could he? And Noelle? Your chief bridesmaid! She's supposed to be your best friend! I always knew there was something about that girl!"

There was - something that Bryan, like so many other men, had evidently found irresistible.

Something that Stefanie had never envied until now - a kind of vulnerable, lush yet innocent sexuality that Stefanie knew she would never have had, even if like Noelle she'd been a petite, curvy blonde with big violet-blue eyes instead of being averagely tall, average-looking, her eyes an indeterminate grey-blue flecked with amber. As a tall, gangly teenager she'd wondered if she would ever develop a bust, and even now it was nothing spectacular. Although Noelle professed to envy her friend's long legs, Stefanie had never been the object of the kind of instant male attention that Noelle attracted.

Foolishly, she'd thought Bryan was immune, perhaps by dint of having grown up in the same town as both her and Noelle. But he wouldn't have seen much of Noelle between her leaving with her family to live in New Zealand's largest city, and meeting her again at his and Stefanie's engagement party, shortly before Noelle had announced her own engagement. Presumably he'd viewed her since then through new eyes.

Something seemed to be squeezing Stefanie's heart into a small, cold ball. Bryan and Noelle. Coupling the names in her mind, she felt a bleak sense of dislocation. This was going to hurt like hell when the unnatural detachment wore off, but right now she could almost believe it was all happening to someone else while she looked on, a distant observer.

And she was grateful for the illusion. There were things to think about, things that must be done before tomorrow. She said, "I wonder if Quinn knows."

"Noelle's fiancé? Do you think she's told him?"

"I hope so." Although Stefanie was doubtful. She didn't know Quinn Branson very well, but even at their first meeting she had gained a definite impression of smouldering masculine power.

They'd attended a function in Auckland as a foursome - Noelle's idea. Noelle and Stefanie were briefly alone while the men got drinks, and as they'd waited another man approached, hopefully ogling Noelle. Quinn, swiftly returning to her side, had warned the interloper off with no more than a look.

Noelle hadn't seemed to mind, snuggling up to Quinn, raising her adoring gaze to his stern face and making it relax into a smile, indulgent but subtly laced with desire. Stefanie remembered that look vividly.

Her guess was that he wouldn't have tamely accepted the news that Noelle was leaving him for someone else. And Noelle had never stood up well to angry confrontations. More likely she had followed Bryan's example and sent him a Dear John letter.

Patti started to cry again. "Oh, how could they?" Her voice rose. "Do you suppose Bryan's parents know? They would have been in touch, surely! What's your father going to say? And Tracey was so looking forward to being a bridesmaid."

Like her mother, seventeen-year-old Tracey burst into tears when she was told the news. Gwenda, the middle and married one of the Varneys' three daughters, having rushed to the house in response to an incoherent call from Patti, sharply advised her younger sibling to stop being such a baby and think how poor Stefanie must feel.

Gwenda had always been the practical one. It was she who broke the news to their father when he arrived and found them all sitting around the table in the big kitchen-cum-dining room, while Stefanie stared into the dregs of the well-sweetened coffee Gwenda had almost forced her to drink.

Stephen Varney's first explosive words of shocked fury made Patti wince. But even she didn't protest, perhaps glad that someone in the family was giving vent to what they were all feeling.

His gaze on Stefanie's pale face, he said, "Are you all right, Stef?"

"Yes." She tried to smile, but her lips felt as if they were made of tyre rubber.

"If it will help," he offered, "I'll tear the young bastard limb from limb."

Stefanie stifled a forlorn laugh. The idea of her scholarly and gentle schoolteacher father doing violence to her erstwhile bridegroom was ludicrous, although she appreciated the thought. 'Thank you, Dad, but I don't see that it would do any good."

"It might make me feel better," he told her grimly.

"But if he still means something to you ..." His eyes questioned her anxiously.

"Right now I don't know what I feel," Stefanie confessed. "I've known Bryan practically all my life. I can't suddenly change my feelings just like that."

"He wasn't good enough for you." Her father came over to her and squeezed her shoulder. "Bryan always seemed a bit lightweight to me."

He didn't mean physically, of course. Bryan was solidly built and an accomplished sportsman. He had narrowly missed selection as an All Black, representing New Zealand on the rugby fields of the world. That was when Stefanie had seen a new side of him, a vulnerable, unsure side that aroused her compassion and, eventually, her love.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Makeshift Marriage by Daphne Clair Copyright © 2003 by Harlequin Enterprises Ltd.
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.