Saying Yes To The Dress!. Сорейя Лейн

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СКАЧАТЬ abound. She had chosen the linens from the castle supply room herself.

      Becky set the box on the bed. A sticker in red caught her eye. They were instructions stating that the dress should be unpacked, taken out of its plastic protective bag and hung immediately upon arrival. And so Becky opened the box and lifted it out. She unzipped the bag, and carefully lifted the dress out.

      Her hands gathered up a sea of white foam. The fabric was silk, so sensuous under her fingertips that Becky could feel the enchantment sewn right into the dress. There was a tall coatrack next to the mirror, and Becky hung the silk-wrapped hanger on a peg and stood back from it.

      She could not believe what she was seeing. That long-ago dress that Allie had drawn and given to her, that drawing still living in the back of Becky’s dresser drawer, had been brought to life.

      The moment was enough to make a girl who had given up on magic believe in it all over again.

      Except that’s not what it did. Looking at the dress made Becky feel as though she was being stabbed with the shards of her own broken dreams. The dress shimmered with a future she had been robbed of. In every winking pearl, there seemed to be a promise: of someone to share life with, of laughter, of companionship, of passion, of “many babies,” fat babies chortling and clapping their hands with glee.

      Becky shook herself, as if she was trying to break free of the spell the dress was weaving around her. She wanted to tell herself that she was wrong. That this was not the dress that Allie had drawn on that afternoon of girlish delight all those years ago, not the drawing she had handed to her and said, This is your wedding dress.

      But she still had that drawing. She had studied it too often now not to know every line of that breathtakingly romantic dress. She had dreamed of herself walking down the aisle in that dress one too many times. There was simply no mistaking which dress it was. Surely, Allie was not being deliberately cruel?

      No, Allie had not kept a drawing of the dress. She had given the only existing drawing to Becky. Allie must have remembered it at a subliminal level. Why wouldn’t she? The dress was exactly what every single girl dreamed of having one day.

      But Becky still felt the tiniest niggle of doubt. What if Drew’s cynicism was not misplaced? What if his brother was making a mistake? What if this whole wedding was some kind of publicity stunt orchestrated by Allie? The timing was perfect: Allie was just finishing filming one movie, and another was going to be released in theaters within weeks.

      With trembling hands, Becky touched the fabric of the dress one more time. Then she turned and scurried from the room. She felt as if she was going to burst into tears, as if her every secret hope and dream had been shoved into her face and mocked. And then she bumped right into Drew and did what she least wanted to do. She burst into tears.

      * * *

      “Hey!” Drew eased Becky away from him. She was crying! If there was something worse than her laughing and being joyful and carefree, it was this. “What’s the matter?”

      “Nothing,” she said. “I’m just tired. There’s so much to do and—”

      But he could tell she wasn’t just tired. And from working with her for the past week, he could tell there was hardly anything she liked more than having a lot to do. Her strength was organizing, putting her formidable mind to problems that needed to be solved. No, something had upset her. How had he come to be able to read Becky English so accurately?

      She was swiping at those tears, lifting her chin to him with fierce pride, backing away from a shoulder to cry on.

      The wisest thing would be to let her. Let her go her own way and have a good cry about whatever, and not involve himself any more than he already had.

      Who was he kidding? Just himself. He’d noticed his crew sending him sideways looks every time she was around. He’d noticed Tandu putting them together. He was already involved. Spending the past days with her had cemented that.

      “You want to be upset together?” he asked her.

      “I told you I’m not upset.”

      “Uh-huh.”

      “What are you upset about?”

      He lifted a shoulder. “You’re not telling, I’m not telling.”

      “Fine.”

      “Tandu asked me to give you this.”

      “How could Tandu have possibly known you were going to bump into me?” Becky asked, taking the paper from him.

      “I don’t know. The man’s spooky. He seems to know things.”

      Becky squinted at the paper. “Sheesh.”

      “What?”

      “It’s a map. He promised it to me over a week ago. Apparently there’s a waterfall that would make a great backdrop for wedding pictures. Can you figure out this drawing?”

      She handed the map back to him. It looked like a child’s map for a pirate’s treasure. Drew looked at a big arrow, and the words, Be careful this rock. Do not fall in water, please.

      “I’ll come with you,” he decided.

      “Thank you,” she said. “That’s unnecessary.” She snatched the map back and looked at it. “Which way is north?”

      “I’ll come.”

      The fight went out of her. “Do you ever get tired of being the big brother?”

      He thought of how tired he was of leaving Joe messages to call him. He looked at her lips. He thought of how tired he was getting of this friendship between them.

      “Suck it up, buttercup,” he muttered to himself.

      She sighed heavily. “If you have a fault, do you know what it is?”

      “Please don’t break it to me that I have a fault. Not right now.”

      “What happened?”

      “I said I’m not talking about it, if you’re not talking about it.”

      “Your fault is that you don’t answer questions.”

      “Your fault is—” What was he going to say? Her fault was that she made him think the kind of thoughts he had vowed he was never going to think? “Never mind. Let’s go find that waterfall.”

      * * *

      “I don’t know,” Becky said dubiously, after they had been walking twenty minutes. “This seems like kind of a tough walk at any time. I’m in a T-shirt and shorts and I’m overheating. What would it be like in a wedding dress?”

      Drew glanced at her. Had she flinched when she said wedding dress?

      “Maybe her royal highness, the princess Allie is expecting to be delivered to her photo op on a litter carried by two manservants,” Drew grumbled. “I hope I’m not going to be one of them.”

      Becky laughed and took the hand he held back to her to help her СКАЧАТЬ