Free Last-Minute Bridesmaid by Nina Harrington

in place. One liberal spray of the old-fashioned floral vanilla fragrance that her grandmother had worn all of her life and she was good to go.
    Kate took one final glance in the dressing table mirror and turned sideways before grinning at her reflection and winking.
    She couldn’t think about Amber’s warning about Heath. She had to push down the flicker of apprehension and make the best of this wedding, one way or another, for the sake of her business.
    Limos. Manor houses. Hot millionaires. Oh, yes! Bring it on.

FIVE
    Heath kept losing his place in the financial report he had brought to read. Or maybe he was too distracted to make the effort to find it. Every time he started to work, he was interrupted by chatter, exclamations of excitement and questions from his travelling companion. But one thing had rapidly become only too clear.
    He had never met anyone like Kate Lovat.
    It was no doubt a lady’s right to wear fragrance which filled the car with the smell of flower gardens in summer and not even the excellent air conditioning could cope with the way it seemed to linger on Kate’s jacket and hair so that every time she moved a new waft came in his direction.
    And she did move around. A lot.
    Kate Lovat was an expert in the fine art of fidgeting.
    The girl simply could not keep still.
    She had explored every inch of the car in intimate detail before they had negotiated the narrow street where she lived. The drinks cabinet and mini refrigerator had been particularly fascinating but she had soon moved on to the personal control settings and pressed every button and toggled every switch in the car like a toddler high on fizzy drinks packed full of sugar and artificial colours.
    It was a new experience for him to meet a girl who had such an open and childlike enthusiasm for the new and was not afraid to express it.
    The publishing professionals and booksellers he met in his work were focused on their careers and business plans. All working, heads down, all driven by a common passion for great books. Eyes on the prize.
    Kate was like a squirrel. Leaping around on her seat as they passed one London landmark and then another, apparently only too happy to give him the complete tourist guide to the city he rarely visited these days and, when he did, it was only for business.
    To Kate, London was a city of constant delight and amazement.
    Heath tugged hard at the cuffs of his long-sleeved Sea Island cotton shirt, which had come from his favourite London tailor. His father had been the one who had decided almost a year earlier that he would open the London office and create a new marketing unit geared towards Europe and the Middle East.
    Maybe it was simply coincidence that his father had started dating Alice Jardine again about a year ago?
    Or maybe the London office was the excuse he needed to stay in England instead of working out of the Boston office where the company was based?
    The team there rarely saw him these days and, for a private company in a challenging business environment, the one thing the employees needed was to see the company owner in his office or walking in the print room, talking to them and reassuring them that they had a future.
    Not happenimg. Not yet at least.
    But once this wedding was over...then they would have the talk.
    Once the wedding was over.
    Heath abandoned his report onto his seat table. Who was he kidding? It was never going to be over. Alice would be in Boston, living in the family house where he had grown up. And his dad would be even more distracted than ever, trying to keep his new bride happy.
    The cellphone in the inside pocket of his suit jacket beeped discreetly and Heath glanced at the caller display before answering it.
    ‘Good morning, Lucas,’ he said, picking up the call and looking out of the window at the motorway verges. ‘Or should that be good afternoon in Hong Kong?’
    There was a guffaw down the phone from the jovial Canadian with a passion for books and selling