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Authors: Faith Bleasdale

Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Women's Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Romance, #Contemporary, #Romantic Comedy, #Contemporary Fiction

Deranged Marriage

BOOK: Deranged Marriage
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Deranged Marriage

 

Faith Bleasdale

 

 

Copyright © Faith Bleasdale 2014

 

The right of Faith Bleasdale to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

 

First published in the United Kingdom in 2003 by Hodder and Stoughton.

 

This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

 

 

 

 

For Mum and Dad. The best parents in the world.

 

 

 

Table of Contents

 

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-seven

Chapter Twenty-eight

Chapter Twenty-nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-one

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-three

Chapter Thirty-four

Chapter Thirty-five

Chapter Thirty-six

Chapter Thirty-seven

Chapter Thirty-eight

Chapter Thirty-nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-one

Chapter Forty-two

Chapter Forty-three

Chapter Forty-four

Chapter Forty-five

Chapter Forty-six

 

 

Prologue

 

At some stage in life, most people make a marriage pact. This arrangement is an undertaking to marry someone as long as you are both unattached by the time you reach a certain age.

There are certain guidelines to follow when you are entering such a pact:


You should be much younger than the deadline you set as the marriage-pact age. This gives both parties ample time to find their destined life partners before the agreement expiry date.


It has to be a verbal commitment. No lawyers need be involved in this type of contract.


Both parties should feel vulnerable and unloved before entering the agreement.


Both parties must be intoxicated.

If you adhere to these simple guidelines, then you have made a successful marriage pact. However, the rules do not end there. They carry on into the aftermath of the ‘deal’:


Once made, it must be forgotten. A distant memory, only recalled when you are both happily married to other people.


The main condition is that once made, you do not ever intend to carry out the pact. Because destiny will wash your true love up on to your shore. It’s a bit like panic-buying: when you hear there’s going to be a shortage of something, you buy because you have to, not because you want to.

Take a word from the wise, as my mother would say, because I am now wise. I was twenty when I made my marriage pact. Without knowing the rules, I failed to adhere to some of them. Yes, I was drunk, as was he. I was vulnerable, as was he. I wasn’t in love with him; he wasn’t in love with me. We had set a ten-year deadline—adequate time to find the true loves of our lives. However, we failed, by ignoring the simplest of the rules: we didn’t make a verbal agreement, we produced a written one.

We didn’t stop there, we rolled drunkenly to the local off-licence with it and asked the man behind the counter to witness the ‘document’. Looking back, I think we took the intoxication rule a tad too far. Afterwards, we left our wayward path, returned to the rules, and forgot about it.

Then, one fateful day, it all came back to haunt me in the most unimaginable way.

 

 

Chapter One

 

Two
Men

 

‘What do you wear to court?’ I screamed in frustration at my wardrobe. I was staring at rows and rows of clothes as if they would tell me. Of course they wouldn’t, clothes had a habit of refusing to answer important questions. I had been awake for hours, I felt sick and tired, and more than a tiny bit hysterical. Joe came up behind me.

‘Try to stay calm,’ he said. Like a red rag to a bull.

‘I’d like to see you try to stay calm, if you were me.’

‘Sorry.’ Joe looked suitably contrite, although none of this was his fault.

‘What do you think I should wear?’ I asked, nicely, throwing in a smile for good measure.

‘A suit,’ Joe replied.

My resolution dissolved immediately. ‘Yeah thanks, mastermind. What colour?’ I felt awful for the way I was treating him but I had no control over my bitchiness.

‘Well, I’m wearing a grey suit so wouldn’t it make sense for us to match?’

‘Yes, maybe, but I don’t own a grey suit. It’s a pity you didn’t think of that earlier.’

‘Holly Miller, I’m not your enemy. I’m on your side. Let me have a look.’ He proceeded to flick through my clothes. He was trying so hard and didn’t deserve my wrath.

I sat on the bed in a sulk while Joe worked his way through my wardrobe. I could tell by the way his back was hunched that he was worried about making the right choice. I couldn’t see his face but I could picture the look on it. His brows would be furrowed the way they did when he was concentrating, and his lips would be pursed together tightly. He was so beautiful when he was engrossed. Just as I was about to kiss him and apologise for my earlier outburst, the buzzer interrupted. I answered the intercom to my boss Francesca, and my friend and work colleague, Freddie. I waited at the door for them to climb the stairs. Within seconds and like a slightly out-of-breath fanfare, they arrived.

‘You poor lamb,’ Francesca cried, hugging me. I experienced another blast of nausea as I inhaled her generous perfume. She was such a maternal boss; it was all I could do to stop myself from crying. I chastised myself, I’m not a big cry-baby and I hate tears.

‘We’ve come to help with the outfit,’ Freddie said, giving me a kiss on the cheek and one of his famous ladykiller smiles. I stood, frozen in my dressing gown, as they pushed passed me and made their way to my bedroom.

I watched Francesca, Freddie and Joe discuss what I should wear. I stood back, nervously chewing my bottom lip. I felt invisible. Finally they decided on a navy-blue shift dress and jacket; the most conservative items in my wardrobe. For some irrational reason, the outfit made me feel even more sick. I went to the bathroom and threw up, praying no one would notice. That would have involved fuss I wasn’t equipped to deal with. Now all I had to do was dress, leave my flat, and go to court. Then it would be over. I tried to be confident, after all it wasn’t even a proper court, but I was still worried. I was in the right, I knew that, but it didn’t help that there could be another outcome, however unlikely, and that outcome could ruin my life.

It came down to two men. Joe, the man I loved, and George, my oldest friend. Not a love triangle; actually, it was anything but a love triangle. Two men and two things happened to kick off everything. I realised I was in love with Joe, then George, my oldest friend who had been out of touch and in New York for the last five years, returned home. How did those two events manage to get me in court? Well...it’s a bit of a long story.

At the time, I was twenty-nine and on the fast track to being thirty. I felt that my life was settled; not boring, but tranquil. Every morning I woke, despite the frequent hangovers or lack of sleep, I woke smiling. Always. I had a job I loved, great friends and a new man in my life. I was even looking forward to being thirty. What I discovered was that I had ‘sorted out the lumps in the cushions’, as my mother would say.

The lumps in question were my twenties. I had some bad relationships, a few drunken encounters with equally drunken and unsuitable men, I lost my best friend, George, to New York, and I had had some disastrous jobs. But that was behind me. I was a woman of the new millennium and I was enjoying what that meant. Obviously there were day-to-day problems in my existence, but that was par for the course. The fact remained that I was deliriously happy most of the time.

Perhaps that’s why it went wrong. I had enjoyed selfish happiness for long enough, and now someone wanted to take that away. If fate was always in control of people’s lives, then fate decided to slam on the brakes, and take my life in a more downhill direction.

I was no longer as happy as I was. Two men in my life, one good, one bad. That was how it all started and that is why I am about to go to court.

 

 

Chapter Two

 

I realised that I was in love with Joe McClaren the moment we had our first row. That row will be stored in the chronicles of our relationship along with our first meeting, our first kiss, and our first time. The row was important because it consolidated my feelings; it opened my slightly closed eyes.

All the signs were there, only I probably hadn’t recognised them as such. Knowing what I know now, I am sure they were. Big neon, flashing lights telling me that I was in love. Once I had identified my feelings, or accepted them perhaps, I knew I had never felt like that before. I was tipsy the whole time but also a little bit vulnerable. There wasn’t a more specific way for me to describe it, which is why people say you just
know
when you’ve met the right person. You do know, but you don’t always know why. I was different, I had more energy. I smiled more, I laughed, I was nice. More than nice, I was wonderful.

I was also terrified, scared of losing that happiness. Even though it’s good, it’s bad, but you have to take the bad with the good and the bad didn’t even feel bad because I certainly wasn’t miserable, just a bit vulnerable and I could cope with that. I could, because although it was confusing, it was amazing.

Over three months ago, in August, I met Joe at a party thrown by a mutual client. They were celebrating a successful publicity campaign; Joe’s company were the designers, my company provided the PR. I had never met Joe before.

I don’t like parties, I never have. Parties are too full of anonymous people and I liked my social life to be familiar. If I am standing in a room I like to know the room, I don’t like to look out on a sea of strangers and hope that one of those strangers might be interesting. I’m a bit of a bitch when it comes to new people; with men—unless I am going to fall in love with them or at least have sex with them—I can’t be bothered. Usually I judge women really quickly. However, that is part of my job, and normally I manage to put on a façade and be civil when duty calls. I can boast, unhappily, that I have gone to every type of party; from the corporate, dull ones, to film premieres where, naturally, I was ignored by celebrities. Parties are part of my professional life, but not a part of my personal lifestyle.

Certainly I wasn’t enjoying myself on this particular evening. The party was in a cavernous bar, somewhere which was trendy once, but was definitely passé. The invitation—a white card embossed in gold—declared an evening to ‘celebrate success!’ Although the sentiment was nice, the reality was quite different.

BOOK: Deranged Marriage
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ads

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