Work In Progress (Red Lipstick Coalition #3) - Staci Hart Page 0,41

To date, I’d only worn it to dress up for the swing club we frequented with Val and her boyfriend.

I wished again that my friends were there, but they didn’t even know it was happening, not yet. Their absence was probably for the best. It already felt too real. This way, I could easily remind myself that it was all fake anyway.

I wore my lipstick in solidarity, and I liked to think they would have been proud.

I certainly never thought I’d wear it on my wedding day. But it was a costume, a mask. The girl in the mirror was blissfully in love with Thomas Bane. That girl was beautiful, as if someone had taken me and, with some magic and makeup, made me a caricature, a bigger, brighter, bolder version of myself.

I wasn’t even sure I knew who that girl in the mirror was. But when my hand moved from my stomach to the bouquet, hers did, too.

She was me, but I wasn’t sure if I was her.

Theo entered the silent marble room, smoothing his tie, walking lightly. But the sound of his footfalls were deafening all the same. On his face was an expression of gracious pity.

“Are you ready?”

“Absolutely not,” I said on a meager laugh.

He offered me a smile and his arm. “He’s scared, too.”

One of my brows climbed. “Isn’t he an old pro?” I asked, slipping my clammy hand into the crook of his elbow.

“Not at this. Never this. It’s one thing to date a model. It’s another to get married. If he wasn’t desperate, he never would have asked this of you.”

“If he wasn’t desperate, I wouldn’t have agreed.”

He looked down at me, his face so like his brother’s—utterly ridiculous on all levels. “Tommy will be good to you. He’s far more concerned with your virtue than he is his own. We’re…we’re just so grateful for you, Amelia. Thank you.”

“I just hope it helps.”

He covered my hand with his and squeezed. “It will. Now, let’s go get you hitched.”

My eyes fixed on the seam of the doors as “Clair de Lune” began to play.

ABCs—acknowledge, breathe, connect, I thought, acknowledging that this was crazy. Breathing like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the room. Connecting the dots between real and pretend to draw a fine, delicate line.

The moment the doors opened, I found myself caught in a slipstream, aware only on the fringes of my mind.

The chapel was beautiful, with a soaring ceiling topped with peaked glass panes like a greenhouse. The walls were covered in ivy, the chairs wooden and elegantly rustic, the room bathed in brassy light from Edison bulbs stretched across the space. And at the end of the marble aisle, under an archway of ivy dotted with fairy lights, was Thomas Bane.

I floated down the pathway, tethered to the earth by Theo’s steady arm, my eyes locked on Tommy, and his locked on me. He was resplendent in a suit as black as his hair and beard, as deep as his eyes. It was cut to perfection—the line of his shoulders sharp, the breadth of his chest and the narrowness of his waist accentuated by a single fastened button.

Those eyes, fathomless and magnetic, were trained on me as I drifted toward him like a specter, voiceless and anchorless. He grew before me until he filled every sense. He was all I could see, the total of my vision, filled to every corner with his herculean frame. The scent of him, clean and crisp—oranges and a hint of some spice, clover perhaps—slipped over me. Theo took my bouquet, and Tommy’s hands reached for mine, closed them in his until they disappeared. And when he spoke, it was the coup de grâce that threatened to end me completely, the rumbling resonance of his words vibrating through me like a tuning fork.

“You’re beautiful, Amelia.”

Earnest and reverent were those words, stealing all my wits, all my fears.

My eyes cast down, my gaze landing on our hands, my cheeks aflame as I whispered, “Thank you.”

Time stretched and sped under that ivy arch, my ears ringing and mind spinning as the officiant spoke. And in flickers of awareness, the girl in the mirror promised to love and cherish Thomas Bane, in sickness and health, till death did they part. She looked up into his ridiculous, beautiful, banged-up face, golden under the fairy lights as he held her hands so tenderly and slipped a ring the size of a small meteor onto her third finger, trembling left hand, and said