The Wedding Planner. Eve Devon

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       Chapter 2

       Fortuna Favours The Brave

       Gloria

      Incessant wedding talk!

      That’s what had brought Gloria to Fort Tuna the Terra Pest.

      Every day since Emma and Jake’s engagement Gloria had felt snippets of her former snarky-self seeping through the puncture wounds left by Whispers Wood’s specialist chosen ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ subject.

      Emma was her boss and her friend and the thought of ruining that friendship or losing the job she’d come to love over being driven mad because everything was bloody ‘weddings’ this and bloody ‘weddings’ that …

      Admittedly not from Emma and Jake, which, okay, was a little weird but, hey, there was a secret comfort in the fact that if the very people who were engaged weren’t talking openly about when they were getting married, maybe that meant they wouldn’t actually get around to getting married. Which would definitely cover the whole, Why Would You Even Want To/Need To feels that Gloria had discovered she was experiencing in spades.

      Ugh.

      The Feels.

      All the things she’d done to cauterize them and now they popped back up to the surface again?

      Startling her, annoying her.

      Scaring her.

      ‘This can’t be my last session,’ Gloria stated carefully, focusing her attention on the large hammered silver bowl sat politely in the centre of the pale wood coffee table between the neutral grey sofa and bland beige chair.

      ‘Why can’t it?’ Fortuna asked. ‘You’ve reached the goals you set out for yourself when you came here.’

      ‘But I’m not fixed yet.’ The words tumbled out of her mouth in a rush as if embarrassed at having to be spoken. Reaching out, she plucked one of the stress balls from the bowl she’d been staring at. ‘Only this morning I told my boss that her engagement ring – which naturally, turned out to be a family heirloom – looked like a dehydrated blueberry.’

      ‘I see.’ Fortuna looked very much like she was trying not to smile, but Gloria was almost certain she wouldn’t have been smiling if it was her engagement ring that was being dismissed. ‘Did something happen for you to feel you needed to express that particular opinion?’

      Gloria’s mouth turned down as she remembered Emma showing off her ring to harmless Betty Blunkett and Betty then going on and on and on about her own emerald ring which she’d now had on her finger for fifty-five years.

      Tossing the stress ball up in the air, Gloria caught it in her other hand and squeezed it hard. ‘Nothing happened,’ she answered. ‘I said it because I could. Because it’s what I do, isn’t it?’

      ‘Is it?’

      Gloria’s gaze flicked to Fortuna defiantly before dropping to her left hand and noticing once more that there wasn’t even an indent left to show she’d once been married.

      The cold shame she’d felt after insulting Emma’s taste, and by association, Jake’s entire family, washed over her once again.

      Was that what all this was about?

      She was suffering from petty jealousy?

      For something she wanted no part of ever again?

      Where was her perspective?

      Why couldn’t she just let all the endless wedding talk float over her head?

      ‘Gloria?’ Fortuna prompted. ‘Is a quick quip still your first defence mechanism? Because I believe you might have more than that in your arsenal, these days?’

      ‘But killing people with kindness isn’t as much fun,’ Gloria responded with a pout.

      Fortuna did smile this time. ‘So what happened afterwards?’

      ‘I apologised.’ She hadn’t needed to see the flicker of hurt in Emma’s eyes for the sorry to be immediate. She’d been mortified that in another unguarded moment, this time she’d managed to upset the actual bride-to-be.

      You see? It just wasn’t right, was it? Getting so pernickety over an institution that people could enter freely into and did, day after day, the world over. There was no need whatsoever to be feeling this … this burning need to save Emma and Jake from going through the rigmarole of a big special day only to end up a modern-day statistic.

      Not that all marriages came to an end.

      She wasn’t stupid.

      She was just …

      Jaded.

      A look which so didn’t mesh with her metamorphosis.

      She breathed out slowly.

      ‘Why the sigh? Wasn’t your apology accepted?’ Fortuna asked.

      ‘It was, although if I was Emma, I guarantee I wouldn’t have let myself off that lightly. I swear it’s like I’ve somehow managed to get the nicest person on the planet to like me.’

      ‘And that baffles you?’ Fortuna surmised.

      It did.

      She didn’t have a great track-record in the friendship department. She’d spent most of her childhood deliberately making it difficult for anyone to like her and as an adult the few friends she’d cultivated had scarpered as soon as Bob had left.

      She swapped the stress ball back to her other hand. ‘How can simply apologising every time I let my tongue get away from me be enough? How is that progress?’

      ‘Keep practising all the techniques we’ve been working on.’ Fortuna leant forward in her chair, her hands folded neatly over the top of СКАЧАТЬ