CHAPTER ONE
The First Wedding
‘I’M SORRY you’re going to be loaded with Fletch as your partner, Tammy, but we had to make him a groomsman. He is my brother and it was safer to include him in the wedding party than try seating him anywhere else at the reception. Being such an arrogant pig he’s bound to offend whatever guests shared his table. Stuck at the end of ours, he shouldn’t upset anyone, and since you’ll be at the other end, you won’t have to put up with much of him for long.’
Celine’s apologetic, semi-pleading speech was doing a rerun through Tammy Haynes’s mind as the limousine carrying the five bridesmaids set off for the church. Although they’d all been friends with Celine since the beginning of high school, none of them had ever met Fletcher Stanton. He’d always been referred to as ‘my brother, the brain,’ doing ‘his thing’ overseas, and largely absent from his younger sister’s life.
Having flown home to Sydney only yesterday, he’d begged off the wedding rehearsal, pleading jet lag, making Celine gnash her teeth over his lack of caring for her wish for everything to go perfectly on her big day. ‘No consideration. Thinks he can just waltz through anything and get it right,’ had been her vexed mutter. ‘He could have come a day earlier, but I bet he thought it was beneath his intelligence to rehearse anything.’
His formidable intelligence clearly did not win any brownie points from his sister, though it did have to make him a stand-out kind of guy, Tammy thought, her curiosity piqued despite Celine’s criticisms of her brother. There weren’t too many people in the world who’d achieved what Fletcher Stanton had.
Quite recently there’d been an article about him in Time Magazine, headlined Technological Wizard of the Year, detailing how remarkable he was. From an early age he’d been a superstar of mathematics, winning international competitions even before his teens, doing university maths when other boys his age were still finishing primary school, graduating from Sydney University with an honours science degree at sixteen, then being invited to do a Ph.D at Princeton in the USA, which he’d gained at the amazing age of twenty-one.
He’d walked straight out of academic life and become the driving force behind creating a highly advanced computer system that could track any form of transport anywhere in the world, and he and his team of colleagues were currently making billions of dollars out of it, selling it to governments and Internet companies. None of which changed Celine’s sour view of her brother.
‘He’s even more arrogant since he’s made all that obscene wealth,’ she had commented in her warning speech to Tammy. ‘Everyone kowtowing to him and a heap of gold-digging women feeding his ego to get what he can give them. Don’t let him turn your head with his billions, Tammy. Believe me, you wouldn’t want to live with him.’
The warning wasn’t needed. No way was Tammy going to get hooked into the life of a rich man. She’d seen her mother go down that track all her life, trading on her beauty to snag wealthy husbands who’d ditched her when the desire she’d stirred was replaced by desire for someone else who looked more attractive to them. There’d been no real love in any of those marriages, nor in the affairs that had failed to make it to a wedding. It sickened Tammy to see her mother growing more and more anxious about her looks, becoming a gym junkie to keep slim and fit and resorting to cosmetic surgery to maintain a youthful desirability, as though she wasn’t worth anything if she didn’t have that.
Being a rich man’s brief possession was certainly not on Tammy’s life agenda. If she ever did marry, it would be because she truly loved the man and he truly loved her back. Like Celine and Andrew. She decided to view Fletcher Stanton simply as a curiosity, letting any arrogance from him flow right past her, refusing to let anything spoil this special day—the first wedding of one of the gang of six from school.
They’d shared so much together, counting on each other to be there at times of stress, making the joy of any great occasions so much more fun. For Tammy, the bond of their friendship had made up for the emptiness of her home life, giving her teen years a sparkle and warmth that dispelled much of the loneliness of having no family, apart from a mother who preferred her daughter not to be hanging around her neck. Even though the six of them had taken different paths into their twenties, the friendship was still as strong as ever, and Tammy hoped it always would be.
Celine, of course, was in the following limousine with her parents, but the rest of them were here—Kirsty, Hannah, Lucy, Jennifer and herself, thrilled to be fulfilling the pact they’d made years ago, standing shoulder to shoulder as bridesmaids whenever one of them became a bride.
The girls were chatting excitedly and Tammy joined in the animated conversation, putting the problematic groomsman out of her mind. Hannah was thrilled with the copper streaks in her brown hair, done especially to match up with Lucy’s naturally auburn colour. Lined up at the altar there would be two blondes—Celine and Kirsty—two redheads, then two brunettes—Jennifer’s hair being dark brown and Tammy’s almost black. The dresses were lovely; soft, floaty organza with frills around the neckline and hem. Kirsty was in pink, Hannah in lemon, Lucy green, Jennifer blue, and Tammy mauve, all of which definitely created a romantic, rainbow bridal party.
Delighted with everything, they piled out of the limousine at the church, grinned at Celine as she emerged from her car, joked with her father who was beaming with pride in his daughter, ensured that their bride looked absolutely perfect: veil falling properly, bouquet held just right. Once in the foyer, they checked each other over before lining up for the procession down the aisle, determined on doing their friend proud on this, her day of days.
Tammy felt a flutter of nerves when the music started. She was leading off and was suddenly frightened of stepping out of beat.
‘Go!’ Jennifer hissed from behind her.
Everyone in the church had turned to look. She made her feet move, concentrating fiercely on how it had been done in rehearsal. Smile, she told herself, seeing the grin on Andrew’s face at the other end of the aisle—a happy man, waiting for his bride. Her gaze skated down the line of groomsmen beside him. The last one would be Celine’s brother, probably a nerdy-looking guy wearing horn-rimmed glasses, and with a caved-in chest and round shoulders from all that work at a computer.
Except he wasn’t one bit like that!
The jolt to her heart was so hard and unexpected, her forward progress almost faltered. Some magical automatic pilot kicked in and kept her going as a wild excitement erupted through her, scrambling her usually sensible mind and staging the dance of the bumble bees in her stomach. Fletcher Stanton was gorgeous. Drop-dead gorgeous. She completely forgot his much-vaunted brain. And his billions. On a purely physical level he was dreamboat material.