Free The Wedding Dress by Lucy Kevin Page A

marriage had seemed so perfect, he’d been having an affair with some other woman.
    And had been the father of another little girl.
    “Anne,” Gareth began, reaching out to touch her shoulder.
    “Leave me alone!”
    Anne had wanted to believe that she and Gareth had found the same magical love as her parents. But now she knew that the two of them were just as big a lie as her parents had been. Because the whole time that she was in Gareth’s arms and he was kissing her and sharing her bed, he’d known what was going to happen.
    In her rush to get away from him, she crashed into her mother’s wedding gown on the dress stand.
    Wedding dresses were a symbol of two people promising to love one another. Promising to be faithful to one another. Anne had made her living stitching together a symbol of perfect love, but now she knew that love was the biggest lie of all.
    “I hate this stupid thing!”
    She tore the dress from the stand, wanting to tear it into rags, then burn those rags like the meaningless scraps of fabric they were. Her fingers ripped at it, pulling apart seams and opening up lines of stitching like wounds.
    And yet, none of it, none of the mess she’d just made of the once-beautiful dress, looked as bad as she felt right then.
    “Anne! What are you doing?”
    He caught her arms and pulled her back from the dress, holding her against his chest.
    Anne fought to break free from him. She wasn’t going to let herself cry in his arms the way she had before. And she definitely wasn’t going to let him promise her that everything would be all right.
    Nothing was all right…and wouldn’t ever be again.
    “Let. Me. Go.”
    “I know how upset you are right now,” Gareth said as she pushed away from him, “but don’t keep destroying your mother’s dress. Not when I know how much it means to you.”
    “You don’t know anything about me,” Anne snapped back, letting herself lash out for the first time in her life. “I was stupid enough to think I loved you, but love is just a word, isn’t it? Just something people say to try to feel better about their pointless lives.”
    “That’s not what love is,” Gareth insisted.
    “No, you’re right,” Anne said. “Love isn’t even that, because it doesn’t make you feel better. It just tears you up inside.”
    Gareth reached out to put his hands on her waist and wouldn’t let her evade his touch no matter how she tried. “You have to keep believing in love.”
    “Why should I, when it’s just another lie?”
    “Because love is real.”
    “And how could you possibly know that?”
    He didn’t hesitate. “Because I love you.”
    A part of Anne wanted so desperately to believe him. Because if she could believe in his love, then maybe…
    No, she wasn’t going to put her faith in any more fairy tales. She couldn’t.
    She broke free of his grip. “Get out, Gareth. Just…get out.”
    “Anne—”
    “Get out !”
    A few seconds later, when the door closed behind him with a soft click, Anne collapsed on the pile of ripped and ruined fabric from her mother’s wedding dress and cried every last one of the tears she’d held back since she was a little girl standing at the window with her mother watching the taxi take her father away one more time.

Chapter Fifteen
     
    Gareth waited in his car outside Richard Wells’s office until he saw the lawyer leave for the meeting Gareth had set up for him using a false name. What he was about to do would only work if the lawyer wasn’t there. Even then, Gareth would be breaking so many laws he could barely believe he was really about to do this.
    Breaking and entering, burglary, possibly even industrial espionage. If he was caught, he could not only get his PI’s license revoked but maybe even end up in jail.
    But if it helped Anne, he didn’t care.
    All those years of sticking to the law, yet for Anne, he’d gladly break the rules if it would take away her look of betrayal when she’d found out that he