Husband Material (London Calling #2)(22)

Delete. The picture. It’s important. Sorry, Bridge. I should have taken this week off.”

She kissed him on the forehead. “It’s okay. I knew you were in Intelligence. I just didn’t know you were James Bond.”

“You didn’t?” Tom risked a smile. “I thought that was why you wanted to marry me.”

James Royce-Royce leaned between the seats. “Oh, that would be a very bad call. James Bond only got married once, and she was dead by the end of the film.”

“James,” said Tom, “stop helping.”

“And…” Bridge seemed to be having a lot of feelings. “And she really was an informant? Not, like, an international sex assassin?”

“She’s an informant, Bridge. There are no international sex assassins. International assassins are just ordinary-looking blokes who stab you with an umbrella or slip you an exploding cigar.”

“And you haven’t bought her a necklace?”

It took me a moment to remember what she meant by that, but Tom got there immediately. “I haven’t even bought her a Joni Mitchell CD.”

“And we’re still getting married?”

Tom gazed up at her, with a loving exasperated expression that Oliver sometimes got when he was looking at me. “I fucking hope so.

Otherwise you just compromised a major drug bust over nothing.”

They kissed, and they kept kissing for long enough that we all had to suddenly get very interested in our phones. Which was convenient because mine chose that exact moment to ring.

And, thank God, it was Oliver.

“Lucien,” he said. “I got your text and I just wanted to call to make sure you were okay. I would have texted back but I was in court.”

“I definitely knew that,” I told him. “And wasn’t in any way worried you were going to dump me.”

He gave an embarrassed little cough. “I’ve been behaving badly because I miss you and want to spend time with you. Dumping you in retribution would be extremely counterproductive.”

Lovingly logical Oliver was one of my top five favourite Olivers. “I miss you too. But we found Tom. It turned out he wasn’t cheating on Bridge, and we actually caused a minor national security incident.”

“That does sound on-brand for you.”

“Minor National Security Incident is the name of my sex tape.”

“Well, that’s ruined any possible segue I could have come up with, but when are you coming home?”

“Pretty much now unless—” My phone screen flashed ominously.

“Shit, the venue’s calling. I have to take this.”

And so I hung up on the boyfriend I was just patching things up with to do a bit more wedding admin. Five minutes later, I realised I was going to have to do a lot more wedding admin.

“Uh, guys?” I did my best to attract Bridge’s attention.

“Yes, Luc?” She was all smiles again. “And thanks for being there for me. You’re the best.”

“Yeah, about that. You know the church?”

Bridge’s face fell. “The church where I’m getting married?”

“That would be the one. That was their vicar on the phone, and it’s… Well, it might have, umm, ever so slightly… Well, it might have burned down?”





"OKAY," I SAID. "I UNDERSTAND. Basically what I expected, thanks.”

It was the forty-fifth venue I’d called in two days, and it had given me the same answer as the other forty-four. No, funnily enough, we can’t fit in a lavish wedding of your dreams at less than a week’s notice. We’re kind of booked up.

I directed a bad-news expression at Bridge. We were back in her flat with Tom, who was taking a couple of days off to be with his fiancée and avoid getting an informant murdered, and Liz, who was working the church angle. “Sorry,” I told them.

“No, it’s fine.” Bridget had a severe case of it’s-not-fine face.

“We’ll keep going. We can keep going, right?”

Liz looked up from her own phone. She’d annexed a corner of the room and had an enormous leather-bound planner, bulging with sticky notes and spare bits of paper, open in front of her. “I think churches are a no-go. I’d have to find one you had a connection to that wasn’t already hosting another wedding, then meet up with their vicar at extremely short notice and arrange a lot of complex theology things. And that also means I’m ruled out of officiating.”

It was the latest item in a long run of bad news, and Bridge gave an involuntary sob. “But we promised,” she said. “When you first became an ordinand.”

“We originally promised that you were going to be my first wedding, and that didn’t pan out either.”

Both of them glared at Tom.

“Hey”—he put his hands in the air—“would you really want me to have proposed before we were ready just so you could keep a promise you made in your early twenties?”

“Yes,” cried Bridge. “It would have been romantic and it would have been perfect, and because we waited, we’re cursed and everything is falling apart.”

Liz shifted uncomfortably. “I think as a vicar I should be on the side of taking marriage seriously?”