Husband Material (London Calling #2)(73)

And Oliver, looking, I thought, significantly more awake than he had three minutes ago, crossed the room after me. He dropped to his knees and settled his body over mine, and I reached up my arms to embrace him. As it turned out, the whole fireplace thing hadn’t been totally oversold. The light painted us in tiger stripes of gold and shadows, and the heat fell over us gently like all the good bits of a blanket.

I can’t lie, I felt sexy as hell.

“Oh, Lucien,” Oliver murmured.

And I gazed up at him, too tired and too happy to resent to my own sincerity. “I love you.”

So. Yeah. That was a thing that happened.

Oliver and a fireplace and a soft rug. It was probably the least me thing I’d ever done, and I was okay with that.





I WASN’T SURE WHAT I’D expected Coombecamden Cathedral to look like. On the one hand, it was a cathedral, and cathedrals are usually pretty bling. On the other hand, Coombecamden was a tiny little postage stamp of a place that was considered a city only because of a weird religious convention from the fifteen-forties.

So I was at once impressed and disappointed when we followed the large and surprisingly boisterous wedding party into town—or what passed for town, since a lot of it was countryside because a surprising number of English cities were—and found ourselves headed towards a towering Gothic structure that, while it wasn’t exactly Westminster Abbey, also clearly wasn’t your local parish church.

“Okay, architecture boy”—I leaned over to Oliver, who was looking out of the window of the minibus with the kind of genuine interest that I was far too cynical to be capable of—“tell me about this one.”

“I think it’s probably a mixture,” he said. “It looks like a medieval core with additions down the centuries until at least the Victorians.”

I gave him a sceptical look. “How do you know that?”

“I don’t particularly,” he admitted, “but when a small town has a big Anglican cathedral in it, it’s usually old. Otherwise, it would have been built somewhere more important. And since it hasn’t been downgraded to a church in the intervening centuries, it will have been added to over the years. If we go poking around, we might find some desecrated statues from the Reformation.”

Trying not to let my second wind ebb away before lunchtime, I did something against his shoulder that definitely wasn’t snuggling.

“Are we going to go poking around?”

“Might be a bit rude at a wedding.”

We pulled up across the road from the cathedral and Rhys ordered us all out onto the pavement. Once we’d disembused ourselves, I realised how utterly incongruous the CRAPPers’ green minibus looked in the convoy of wedding vehicles. There it squatted amongst the gleaming column of Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, and Daimlers, like a brick that had crashed through a jeweller’s window and was now gleefully displacing diamond rings and strings of pearls.

As the crowds gathered and began flowing into the cathedral, we didn’t exactly stop standing out. I’d thought we scrubbed up okay.

Rhys had his shabby chic thing going on, Ana with one n looked fabulous, and even Barbra Clench had turned out nicely in a rather natty blue dress with floral sleeves. But none of us had outfits that cost as much as a small family home or were wearing a hat wider than our shoulders or those grey pinstripe trousers which were fucking awful but which posh men were apparently obliged to put on for formal occasions.

And actually obligation seemed to be the order of the day. I’d been low-key expecting something to go catastrophically wrong with Alex’s wedding because something going catastrophically wrong was the background music of his life. But it seemed like I’d reckoned without the vast institutional inertia of the upper classes. Sure, Alex could spill tea over donor lists, double-book our only meeting room, and get his tie caught in a filing cabinet he didn’t even have any files in. And sure, his peers and the members of his immediate social circle could preside over the collapse of the country’s economy and the accelerating deterioration of its social safety nets. But this was a society event, and come hell or high water, it would run smoothly and decorously, or the whole system would be for nothing.

We let the crowd carry us in. We’d been seated miles from the actual service, presumably so we didn’t accidentally get middle-classness on the happy couple. And once everyone was in place— which took a while because “everyone” was basically every landowner in the Home Counties, plus us—Alex made his entrance.

He looked… Somehow he looked like he always looked. There was something about Alex that meant even dressed as he now was, in a three-piece suit, electric-blue cravat, and silk top hat, his essential Alexness shone through. Or maybe it was the other way around.

Maybe on some level Alex was always wearing an electric-blue cravat and a silk top hat.

After he’d made the long walk down the aisle—in my mind, Oliver elbowed me and said, The nave, Lucien. The aisle is the bit down the side—there was a suitable pause before Miffy made her entrance. And it was significantly more entrancey. In retrospect, I wasn’t sure why Alex had been so keen to avoid seeing her before the wedding because the gown—and the five others she would be wearing over the course of the weekend—had probably been thoroughly profiled on Instagram and in multiple lifestyle magazines.

To be fair, it deserved to be, on account of being a designer masterpiece in silk and lace, modern without being trendy, timeless without being fussy, and with a train that said Fuck off. I am taking up all the space, and I don’t care, but without running all the way out the door like Bridge’s had.