Misleading Engagement
Very good friends…Getting a fledgling wedding video business off the ground just when people were buying their own camcorders was not easy, so Anne Grey was pleased to stand in for a friend recording an interview in Cornwall with crime writer Francis Gardiner. It was a shock to discover that the writer was really Mark Rayne, the man she had only recently crossed swords with at a wedding!As they continued to work together, Anne knew she was falling in love. Meeting Mark's young son, Matthew, was a delight. But Mark thought she was engaged to someone else, and Anne found it almost impossible to tell him the truth….
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“I suppose we’re friends now, aren’t we?”About the AuthorTitle PageCHAPTER ONECHAPTER TWOCHAPTER THREECHAPTER FOURCHAPTER FIVECHAPTER SIXCHAPTER SEVENCHAPTER EIGHTCHAPTER NINECHAPTER TENEPILOGUECopyright
“I suppose we’re friends now, aren’t we?”
“Of course we are,” Mark said quickly, but she had a strange feeling that a wary look had come over his face. “And a very good friend you are, too,” he added.
That defined their relationship perfectly, Anne thought with amusement. She mustn’t read anything into that kiss. Well, she didn’t intend to, did she?
Marjorie Lewty was born in Cheshire, England, and grew up between there and the Isle of Man. She moved to Liverpool and married there. Now widowed, she has a son, who is an artist, and a married daughter. She has always been drawn to writing and started with magazine short stories, then serials and finally book-length romances, which are the most satisfying of all. Her hobbies include knitting, music and lying in the garden thinking of plots!
CHAPTER ONE
‘ONE video camera, four cassettes, six batteries, one tripod, off-camera mike and stand, headphones, on-camera light...’ Anne counted each item aloud as she arranged them on the worktop in her editing suite—or what she preferred to call the pantry. It had always been the pantry, since she’d been a little girl raiding it for biscuits when she’d got home from school.
She reached down into the cupboard for her holdall and, as usual, her glasses slipped down her nose and fell onto the vinyl-tiled floor. Cursing roundly, she picked them up, examined them for damage and, when reassured, stuck them back on her straight little nose. Roll on contact lenses! She’d promised herself if this wedding job today went well and the clients paid up promptly, to get rid of the hated glasses for ever.
As she finished packing all her gear into the holdall she heard a faint plop in the hall and walked swiftly through the old-fashioned kitchen to the front door, hoping that it was a reply to her advertisement. But it was only the local paper. Picking it up, she carried it to the kitchen table and spread it out at the small ads page. She always checked carefully on her advertisement. There had once been a mistake in the phone number and she had worried about the jobs she might have lost.
She looked down the columns. Yes, here it was:
Anne Grey—videos. Weddings, parties, all social occasions captured on video to show in your own home. Top-class work guaranteed. Artistic presentation. Moderate fees.
Her phone number—correct!—followed.
Breakfast now. She made coffee and sat down to enjoy a leisurely breakfast of toast and Marmite. The wedding was timed for one o’clock and she planned to be at the church a full hour before the guests started to arrive. She had paid a preliminary visit to the church, which was situated in a village about twenty miles away from her home in a south Warwickshire spa town, to take shots of the architecture and get the vicar’s permission to set up her gear inside the church. There were a lot of roadworks going on, and it had taken her nearly an hour to drive there yesterday, but there was plenty of time before she needed to start out today.
She picked up the paper and folded it back at page six, where announcements of forthcoming weddings and social events appeared. This was Anne’s happy hunting-ground. At first she had had to nerve herself to approach possible clients direct—it had taken a good deal of courage to ring a doorbell and announce herself and practise what amounted to touting for business—but she found that most people were polite, and some even interested in her sales spiel.
She didn’t realise that they were perhaps more interested in the neat young woman herself, with her slender figure, her thick mane of pale gold hair, more often than not scraped back in a bunch at her neck, and her brilliant, dark blue eyes smiling behind glasses which seemed too large for her small face. In time she had conquered her natural diffidence and had picked up several jobs by this method. If she was going to make a success of running her own business she would have to learn to be setf-assured—she had soon found that out.
There were no weddings announced for the week to come, but on the next page she found something which interested her even more. Under the heading WEDDING OF THE WEEK appeared a piece about the wedding she was booked to video today.
The wedding of Sir William Brent’s daughter, Elizabeth, to Mr Andrew Foulkes of London will take place on Saturday June 9th at St John’s Church, Offleigh. The photograph on the left shows the happy young couple at their engagement party last December. Also in the picture is Mr Mark Rayne, who is to be the best man. Mr Rayne is a writer and has recently become engaged to Miss Trudi King, the well-known model, who is seen here with him.
There was more about the reception for two hundred guests, which would be held at Sir William’s residence, and about the bridesmaids and the names of some of the important guests, but Anne was studying the photograph.
