Wedding Wishes: A Wedding at Leopard Tree Lodge. Liz Fielding

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      CHAPTER TWO

      Luxurious surroundings will add to the bride and groom’s enjoyment of their special day.

      —The Perfect Wedding by Serafina

      March

      JOSIE, despite her many misgivings, was impressed.

      Leopard Tree Lodge had been all but invisible from the air as the small aircraft had circled over the river, skimming the trees to announce their arrival.

      And the dirt runway on which they’d landed, leaving a plume of dust behind them, hadn’t exactly inspired confidence either. By the time they’d taxied to a halt, however, a muscular four-wheel drive was waiting to pick up both her and the cartons of wedding paraphernalia she’d brought with her. ‘Just a few extras…’ Marji had assured her. All the linens and paper goods had been sent on by Serafina before she had been taken ill.

      The manager was waiting to greet her at the impressive main building. Circular, thatched, open-sided, it contained a lounge with a central fireplace that overlooked the river on one side. On the other, a lavish buffet where guests—kitted uniformly in safari gear and hung with cameras—helped themselves to breakfast that they carried out onto a shady, flower-decked terrace set above a swimming pool.

      ‘David Kebalakile, Miss Fowler. Welcome to Leopard Tree Lodge. I hope you had a good journey.’

      ‘Yes, thank you, Mr Kebalakile.’

      It had felt endless, and she was exhausted, but she’d arrived in one piece. In her book that was as good as twenty-four hours and three planes, the last with only four seats and one engine, was going to get.

      ‘David, please. Let’s get these boxes into the office,’ he said, summoning a couple of staff members to deal with all the excess baggage that Marji had dumped on her, ‘and then I’ll show you to your tree house.’

      Tree house?

      Was that better than a tent? Or worse?

      If you fell out of a tent at least you were at ground level, she thought, trying not to look down as she followed him across a sturdy timber walkway that wound through the trees a good ten feet from the ground.

      Worse…

      ‘We’ve never held a wedding at the Lodge before,’ he said, ‘so this is a very special new venture for us. And we’re all very excited at the prospect of meeting Tal Newman. We love our football in Botswana.’

      Oh, terrific.

      This wasn’t the slick and well practised routine for the staff that it would have been in most places and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, it was the groom, rather than the bride, who was going to be the centre of attention.

      The fact that the colour scheme for the wedding had been taken from the orange and pale blue strip of his football club should have warned her.

      Presumably Crystal was used to it, but this was her big day and Josie vowed she’d be the star of this particular show even if it killed her.

      ‘Here we are,’ David said, stopping at a set of steps that led to a deck built among the tree tops, inviting her to go ahead of him.

      Wow.

      Double wow.

      The deck was perched high above the promised oxbow lake but the only thing her substantial tree house—with its thatched roof and wide double doors—had in common with the tent she’d been dreading were canvas sidings which, as David enthusiastically demonstrated, could be looped up so that you could lie in the huge, romantically gauze-draped four-poster bed and watch the sun rising. If you were into that sort СКАЧАТЬ