A Wedding at Leopard Tree Lodge / Three Times A Bridesmaid…. Nicola Marsh

birthday and, gathering her own special hero and a couple of children on the way, lived in Botswana, Kenya and Bahrain—with pauses for sightseeing pretty much everywhere in between. She finally came to a full stop in a tiny Welsh village cradled by misty hills, and these days mostly leaves her pen to do the travelling. When she’s not sorting out the lives and loves of her characters she potters in the garden, reads her favourite authors, and spends a lot of time wondering ‘What if…?’ For news of upcoming books—and to sign up for her occasional newsletter—visit Liz’s website at www.lizfielding.com

      CHAPTER ONE

      Destination weddings offer up a host of opportunities for a ceremony with a difference…

      —The Perfect Wedding by Serafina

      March

      ‘WHERE?’

      Josie Fowler wasn’t sure which stunned her most. The location of the wedding which, despite endless media speculation, had been the best kept secret of the year, or the fact that Marji Hayes, editor of Celebrity magazine, was sharing it with her.

      ‘Botswana,’ Marji repeated, practically whispering, as if afraid that her line might be bugged. If it was, whispering wouldn’t help. ‘I called Sylvie. I had hoped…’ Her voice trailed off.

      ‘Yes?’ Josie prompted as she used one finger to tap ‘Botswana’ into the search engine of her computer. Silly question. She knew exactly what Marji had hoped. That the aristocratic Sylvie Duchamps Smith would rush to pick up the pieces of the most talked about wedding of the year. Sylvie, however, was too busy enjoying her new baby daughter to pull Marji’s wedding irons out of the fire.

      ‘I realise that she’s still officially on maternity leave, but I had hoped that for something this big…’

      Josie waited, well aware that not even a royal wedding would have tempted Sylvie away from her new husband, her new baby. Trying to contain a frisson of excitement as she realised what this call actually meant.

      ‘When I called, she explained that she’s made you her partner. That weddings are now solely your responsibility.’ She couldn’t quite keep the disbelief out of her voice.

      Marji was not alone in that. There had been an absolute forest of raised eyebrows in the business when Sylvie had employed a girl she’d found working in a hotel scullery as her assistant.

      They’d got over it. After all, she was just a gofer. Someone to run around, do the dirty work. And she’d proved herself, become accepted as a capable coordinator, someone who could be relied on, who didn’t flap in a crisis. A couple of bigger events organisers had even tried to tempt her away from Sylvie with more money, a fancy title.

      But clearly the idea of her delivering a design from start to finish was going to take some swallowing.

      She’d warned Sylvie how it would be and she’d been right. She’d been a partner for three months now and while they had plenty of work to keep them busy, all of it pre-dated her partnership.

      ‘You’re very young for such responsibility, Josie,’ Marji suggested, with just enough suggestion of laughter to let her know that she wasn’t supposed to take offence. ‘So very…eccentric in your appearance.’

      She didn’t deny it. She was twenty-five. Young in years to be a partner in an events company but as old as the hills in other ways. And if her clothes, the purple streaks in her lion’s mane hair, were not conventional, they were as much a part of her image as Sylvie’s classic suits and pearls.

      ‘Sylvie was nineteen when she launched SDS Events,’ she reminded Marji. Alone, with no money, nowhere to live. All she’d known was how to throw a damn good party.

      Despite their very different backgrounds, they’d had that nothingness in common and Sylvie had given her a chance when most people would have taken one look and taken a step back. Two steps if they’d known what Sylvie knew about her.

      But they had worked well together. Sylvie had wooed clients with her aristocratic background, her elegance, while she was the tough working class girl who knew how to get things done on the ground. An asset who could cope with difficult locations, drunken guests—and staff; capable of stopping a potential fight with a look. And in the process she’d absorbed Sylvie’s sense of style almost by osmosis. On the outside she might still look like the girl Sylvie had, against all the odds, given a chance. But she’d grabbed that opportunity with all her heart, studied design, business, marketing, and on the inside she was a different woman.

      ‘And if I changed my appearance no one would recognise me,’ she added, and earned herself another of those patronising little laughs.

      ‘Well, yes.’ Then, ‘Of course there’s no design involved in this job. All that was done weeks ago and at this late stage…’

      In other words it was a skivvy job and no one with a ‘name’ was prepared to take it on. The wretched woman couldn’t have tried any harder to make her feel like the scrapings at the bottom of the barrel and Josie had to fight the urge to tell her to take her wedding and stick it.

      Catching her lower lip between her teeth, she took a deep breath; she still had quite a way to go to attain Sylvie’s style and grace, but this was too important to mess up.

      With this wedding under her belt—even in the skivvy role—she could paint herself purple to match her hair and clients would still be scrambling to book her to plan their weddings.

      Not as a stand-in for Sylvie, but for herself.

      But she’d had enough with the I-really-wish-I-didn’t-have-to-do-this delaying tactics.

      ‘Can we get on, Marji? I have a client appointment in ten minutes,’ she said and Emma, her newly appointed assistant, who was busy filling in details on one of the event plans that lined the walls of her small office, glanced up in surprise, as well she might since her diary was empty.

      ‘Of course.’ Then, ‘I’m sure I don’t have to impress upon you the need for the utmost confidentiality,’ she said, making it absolutely clear in her lemon-sucking voice that she did.

      Not true.

      Josie had seen the build-up to the wedding of Tal Newman, one of the world’s most highly paid footballers, to Crystal Blaize. The ferocious bidding war against all-comers had cost Celebrity a fortune—money that the couple were using to set up a charitable trust—and the magazine was milking it for all it was worth. Hyping up the secrecy of the location was all part of that. It also helped keep rival publications from planting someone on the inside to deliver the skinny on who behaved badly and grab illicit photos so that they could run spoilers.

      If she let slip the location, SDS might as well shut up shop.

      ‘My lips are sealed,’ she said. ‘I’m not even sure where Botswana is,’ she lied. According to the screen in front of her, it was a ‘tranquil’ and ‘peaceful’ landlocked country in southern Africa.

      Marji clucked at her ignorance. ‘It’s a very now destination, Josie.’

      ‘Is it? That information seems to have passed me by.’ But then she didn’t spend her life obsessing over the latest fads of celebrities.

      ‘And Crystal is such an animal-lover.’

      Animals? In Africa?

      ‘So that would be…Elephants? Lions?’ No, smaller…‘Monkeys?’

      ‘All of those, of course. But the real stars will be the leopards.’

      Even with his underdeveloped human sense of smell, Gideon McGrath knew Leopard Tree Lodge was close long before the four-by-four pulled into the compound. There was a sweet, fresh green scent from the grass that reached out across the sparse bush that drew the animals from across the Kalahari, especially now as they neared the end of the dry season.

      Once his pace had quickened too, his heart