Free The Wedding Dress by Lucy Kevin

Though admittedly slightly less burnt than her usual version of breakfast. She was on her second or third mouthful when the sound of Gareth’s raised voice came to her.
    “I don’t care who you say you are. You aren’t coming in.”
    “You think you can help her hide from this?” another man’s voice demanded in a hard tone. “I was told to deliver this to Anne Farleigh, and you aren’t going to stop me from doing my job.”
    “Wanna bet?”
    Anne shot up from the table, spilling her scrambled eggs as she hurried through to the hall.
    The man at the door was big and tough-looking, dressed in a dark suit and holding an envelope.
    “What’s going on?”
    He started to step past Gareth, but Gareth wouldn’t let him pass.
    “Anne Farleigh?”
    “Yes,” Anne said, “that’s me. Who are you?”
    “My name is Terrence Blithe. I work for Richard Wells, Jasmine Turner’s lawyer. He’s asked me to inform you that Ms. Turner intends to submit to a DNA test proving that she’s Edward Farleigh’s daughter.”
    He threw the envelope to her, and she caught it out of sheer reflex.
    “Those are the details. He’s also told me to let you know that if you don’t agree to take part in this DNA test, he will ask the judge to consider your noncooperation when it comes to deciding how much to award. And that he’ll press for the exhumation of Edward Farleigh to get the DNA evidence he needs.”
    “Wait a minute,” Anne said, staring down at the envelope. She looked back at the man at the door. “I don’t understand.”
    “That’s your problem, lady. Have a nice day.”
    He walked off, leaving Anne standing there, trying to make sense of what had just happened.
    Have a nice day? She’d been having a nice day. The best day ever, and now…
    Her eyes were starting to blur with tears as Gareth put his arms around her and took her into the living room. His voice was gentle. “I’m sorry, I should have warned you, but—”
    “You should have warned me?” Suddenly, Anne felt as if the hardwood floor beneath her was falling away. “You knew ?”
    Anne tried to ignore the negative feelings the way she had so many times before in her life, but this time it was like trying to plug the Hoover Dam with her finger.
    She pushed back from Gareth and stared at him like she didn’t even know him. Because right then, she wasn’t sure she did.
    Especially when he said, “Yes, Anne, I knew.”
    “You knew and you didn’t say anything?” Each word felt brittle as it fell from her lips. “How could you let them blindside me like this?”
    “At first, I didn’t say anything about it because I couldn’t. I had a legal obligation not to.”
    “And rules are rules,” Anne said, half turning away from him as she felt the tears starting to well up in her eyes.
    Years’ worth of tears, all the ones she’d managed to hold back through her sheer determination to be happy, rushed at her.
    “I tried to tell you,” he insisted.
    “When? When did you try?”
    “I needed to find a way to tell you that wouldn’t hurt so much, but it was so hard, and I couldn’t figure out how to do it last night. I hoped it would be easier in the morning, that I could find a way to explain it without hurting you.”
    Anne whirled back toward him, her hands balling into fists. “You think that this doesn’t hurt?”
    Oh God, it hurt.
    So much, like her parents had died all over again. For years, Anne had worked so hard to press that pain down, the depths of hurt that drowned her every time she tried to breathe. She’d only managed it by remembering how much her parents had loved one another. By clinging to that knowledge as tightly as she could.
    But it had been a lie.
    All of it.
    Jasmine and her lawyer wouldn’t ask for a DNA test if they thought there was even the remotest possibility that Edward Farleigh wasn’t Jasmine’s father. Which meant that all the time her father had claimed to love her mother so much, all the time their