He watched as her green eyes widened. Then she whirled away and stalked off.
Two
The three-way conference call might as well have been invented for the girlfriend gab fest, Tamara thought.
She’d just dialed Belinda and Pia from her office phone. After Saturday’s wedding disaster, she’d held off on calling. It was somewhat uncharacteristic behavior for her after a girlfriend crisis, but the truth was she’d been nursing a proverbial hangover herself. Plus, let’s face it, this wasn’t any old run-of-the-mill crisis involving men, money or bad bosses. It wasn’t every day a woman had a bomb land on her wedding in the form of a heretofore unknown husband.
But now it was Monday morning. It was past time, Tamara thought, that she checked in and saw how her friends were holding up.
“Well, Mrs. Hollings is all over this one,” she began without preamble after putting her girlfriends on speaker phone. “I swear if I ever get my hands on that woman…”
The thought that the old dragon of gossip was in Sawyer’s employ only made her more irate.
Turning her mind in a different direction, she softened her tone. “Are you okay, Belinda?”
“I’ll live through this,” her friend responded. “I think.”
“Are you still, ah, married to Colin Granville?” Pia asked, voicing the question Tamara herself wanted to ask.
“I’m afraid so,” Belinda admitted. “But not for long. Just as soon as I get the marquess—” she stressed Colin’s title sarcastically “—to agree to a valid annulment, everything will be all right.”
“A quick end to a quick marriage…” Pia said brightly before trailing off uncertainly.
None of them needed a reminder of Belinda’s ill-fated run to a Las Vegas wedding chapel.
Tamara knew that the Wentworths and Granvilles had been neighbors and rivals in the Berkshire countryside for generations. It was likely why Belinda had wanted her marriage to the Marquess of Easterbridge undone quietly, and had kept mum to everyone, including even her closest girlfriends, about the apparently short-lived elopement.
“Colin isn’t giving you a hard time about the annulment, is he?” Tamara asked.
“Of course not!” Belinda replied. “Why would he? After all, it’s not as if we had a real marriage. We dashed into a Las Vegas wedding chapel. The next morning we regretted our mistake. Colin said he’d take care of the annulment!”
“Let’s back up to the part where you went into the chapel,” Tamara said drily. “How did it happen? You dash to the airport to avoid missing a flight. You dash into a supermarket for some milk.”
“You might even dash into Louis Vuitton to grab their latest it bag,” Pia suggested.
“Exactly,” Tamara went on. “But you do not dash into a wedding chapel to get hitched on the fly.”
Belinda sighed. “You do if it’s Vegas, and you’ve just run into someone…unexpected. And you’ve had a drink or two that have gone straight to your head.”
Pia’s groan of commiseration sounded over the phone.
Tamara wondered how much blame to place on a couple of drinks, and how much on Colin himself. Her meticulous friend wasn’t the type to get tipsy, at least not without a reason.
“You didn’t change your name to Granville, did you?” Tamara asked. “Because if you did—”
Pia gasped. “Oh, Belinda, tell me you didn’t! Tell me you didn’t legally become one of the enemy!”
“Not to mention you would have been misrepresenting yourself as Belinda Wentworth for the past two years,” Tamara commented.
She cringed for her friend. It looked as if Belinda, who was always so self-possessed, had dug herself a hole.
“Don’t worry, I didn’t change my last name,” Belinda responded drily.
“So it was okay to marry a Granville, but not to become one?” Tamara quipped. “I love the way the tipsy you thinks.”
“Thanks,” Belinda retorted. “And don’t worry—the tipsy me is not getting out of her locked and padded cell again.”
Tamara laughed, but then quickly sobered. What was it about a man with a title that made a woman lose her head? Her thoughts drifted to Sawyer, and then, annoyed with herself, she focused on the topic at hand again.
Among their trio of friends, Belinda had always been the levelheaded, responsible one. After getting her degree in the history of art from Oxford, she’d begun a respectable career working at a series of auction houses. Tamara just couldn’t picture Belinda eloping in Vegas with her family’s nemesis. Pia, maybe, Belinda, no.
“There wasn’t an Elvis impersonator involved, by chance, was there?” she heard herself ask.
Pia stifled a giggle.
“No!” Belinda said. “And I just want this headache to disappear!”
“Not likely,” Tamara remarked. “I don’t see Colin going away quietly.”
“He will,” Belinda replied adamantly. “What would make him want to stay in this ridiculous marriage?”
Now there was the million-dollar question, Tamara thought. Belinda sounded as if she was trying to convince herself as much as anyone else.
Tamara decided to turn the conversation in a different direction, to take the pressure off Belinda.
“Pia, I saw you stalking off to the kitchen at one point,” she said. “You looked upset.”
“I wasn’t upset about Colin crashing the wedding,” Pia responded. “Well, I was upset for Belinda. But I had s-someone—ah, other things on my mind.”
Pia’s slight stutter was in evidence, and Tamara knew it only came out these days when her friend was agitated about something.
Tamara decided to probe delicately. “Ah, Pia…these other things wouldn’t have anything to do with a certain very toff British duke-turned-financier, would it?”
Pia gasped. “That didn’t make Mrs. Hollings’s column, too, did it?”
“I’m afraid so, sweetie.”
Pia moaned. “I’m doomed.”
According to the Jane Hollings column that had appeared in Sawyer’s newspaper that morning, there had been an argument at Belinda’s wedding reception between Pia and the Duke of Hawkshire. Reportedly, Pia had discovered at the reception that the duke was none other than the man she’d known only as Mr. James Fielding when she’d been involved with him a few years before. Upon the discovery of how she’d been mislead, Pia had apparently smashed some hors d’oeuvres into the duke’s face.