Free The Guest List by Melissa Hill

morning. She prayed Conor would understand.
    As per the norm, the phone in the Clancy household rang exactly once before Betty picked up; Cara was convinced that her mother carried the cordless handset around in her pocket from when she woke up in the morning to the time she went to bed at night.
    ‘Hello? Cara? Is that you?’
    Cara smiled. Her mother knew very well who it was. In Betty’s eyes, caller ID was right up there with the discovery of electricity.
    ‘Yes Mum, you know it’s me, didn’t it just come up on the display?’ Cara said giddily.
    ‘Why are you calling so early? Is everything all right? Are you OK? Oh my goodness, has there been an accident? Is Shane OK?’
    Cara shook her head indulgently. In Betty Clancy’s eyes, calling before ten o’clock in the morning meant that someone
must
have been in an car accident, fallen off a cliff or been run over by a lorry, and more than likely they weren’t wearing clean underwear when it happened.
    ‘Yes Mum, everything’s fine. I just wanted to tell you that . . . well, something has happened . . . I have some news.’ She grinned broadly.
    ‘What’s happened, Cara? Where are you, I’ll send your father to go and get you. Just stay where you are, don’t move and don’t talk to anyone.’
    Cara chuckled. There was absolutely nothing in her tone that would suggest an emergency, but her mother had no ability whatsoever to read people. Betty would definitely never have made it as a police investigator, she thought fondly.
    ‘Mum, slow down for a minute. There’s nothing to worry about, quite the opposite actually. I’m just ringing to tell you that Shane and I are engaged – he asked me to marry him last night!’
    A scream of happiness erupted at the other end of the line, so loud that Cara had to hold the phone away from her ear. She smiled delightedly.
    ‘Oh my goodness! Oh Cara, this is just brilliant news. Another wedding! I can hardly wait. Have you set a date yet? When are you going to go shopping for your dress? We can go today if you’d like. I presume you’ve taken the day off and . . . Oh where will we have it? I’ll give Father O’Brien a call about booking the church, and a hotel of course. We’ll need somewhere that could at least fit . . . oh I don’t know . . . three hundred, I suppose? And get going on the guest list of course. Oh I think a spring wedding is always much nicer than the summer, don’t you . . .?’
    ‘Mum, we haven’t even considered any of that yet,’ Cara said, laughing at her mother’s excitable ramblings but at the same time slightly taken aback. What was it she had she said . . . church wedding? Three hundred people on the guest list? Just because Heidi’s marriage to Paul last year had been a colossal, pompous affair didn’t mean that she and Shane wanted the same thing. The opposite in fact, she thought, remembering how much of a bridezilla her little sister had been. And given both her and Shane’s reaction to Audrey McCarthy’s wedding invitation, she guessed he felt the same way.
    They’d both want something small and simple, nothing overblown.
    ‘The proposal only happened last night,’ she replied, laughing easily. ‘We haven’t had a chance to even think about any of those things, let alone start planning anything.’
    ‘Well, you have to start making plans soon. All the good hotels in Dublin get taken up quickly, so we need to get a date set and a deposit put down straight away,’ Betty insisted.
    ‘Mum, honestly, there’s plenty of time,’ Cara said, trying to keep her voice casual, although inwardly she was a little unnerved. She’d been so looking forward to sharing the news with her mother, but hadn’t anticipated that Betty would actually be
that
excited about everything. ‘And there’s no point in booking anything just yet, as Shane and I aren’t really sure what we want. As for three hundred guests . . . I really don’t think so. We were thinking along of the lines of