The Bridesmaid Pact
One for all and all for one…As children, Sarah, Dorrie, Beth and Caz were inseparable and vowed to one day be each others bridesmaids. But life got complicated. Now they have one last chance to fulfil their promise.Dorrie is planning her ultimate Disney wedding to the delicious Darren and is determined to have her friends back together for the Big Day. But Dorrie's fairytale is not all that it seems…Beth is desperate for a baby and is starting to resent her more fertile friends. Is a mistake from her past about to destroy her future?Caz’s wild streak has tested her friendships over the years. One by one she has let her friends down, not least when she commits the ultimate betrayal to Susan. Can she change her ways and more to the point, does she really want to?Married to Steve, Sarah is plagued by doubts that she went down the wrong path. Does Sarah have the strength to make a change and will she ever be able to forgive Caz?As Dorrie's big day dawns, all eyes are on whether the ultimate act of friendship will be honoured and obeyed…Praise for The Bridesmaid Pact‘ It will have you laughing one moment and in tears the next… It is very moving and very warm which is why I enjoyed it so much.’ – The Bookbag‘Just a fantastic read.’ – Chloe’s Chick Lit Reviews
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The Bridesmaid Pact
Julia Williams
Published by AVON
A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2010 This eBook edition published 2018
Copyright © Julia Williams 2010
Cover design © Lizzie Gardiner Designs 2018 Cover illustration © Shutterstock
Julia Williams asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9781847560872
Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780007371730
Version: 2018-05-18
For Karen, who was as bright and beautiful
Contents
Part Two For Better, for Worse
Part Three In Sickness and in Health
Part Four Till Death do Us Part
July 1981
It was Doris’s idea of course. Back then, everything tended to emanate from Doris. Beautiful, dappy, gorgeous Doris, with her brown ringlets, blue eyes, infectious giggle, and cute American accent. She was the glue that bound us all together. Like Sid the sloth in Ice Age, Dorrie was the sticky stuff that kept us together. Without Doris we were nothing. And even then we knew it.
‘It’s on, it’s on,’ she said, proudly brandishing the control of her parents’ state of the art Beta Max video machine. Though of course we didn’t say state of the art then. Nor did we realize that Doris’s parents, ahead of the trends as ever, had invested in a bit of technology that was going to be obsolete in a few short years. At eight years old, we were still marvelling at the idea of being able to watch our favourite TV moment of the year, again and again. And I was still pinching myself that I had been allowed to enter the inner sanctum of Dorrie’s vast mansion. Ever since she’d arrived at our school from America, like some exotic creature from another planet, Dorrie had fascinated me. I had longed to be welcomed into her life and now here I was.
‘Go straight to the kiss,’ Caz demanded, her dark eyes bright and concentrated, her hands thrust into her pointy chin, while her dark scrappy hair flopped over her face. She was always the most impatient one.
‘No, we have to watch it all,’ Beth was most emphatic on that point. Her serious, pale little face peeped up between two dark plaits. ‘I didn’t get to see it because my mum and dad are anti-royalsomething.’
‘Royalist,’ interjected Doris.
‘They don’t like the Queen,’ said Beth. ‘So I wasn’t allowed to watch any of it.’
Silently we were all amazed at this. All term we’d talked about nothing but the wedding, about what she’d wear and who the bridesmaids would be. We’d even had a day off school to watch it – Doris’s mum and dad had taken her up to London and they’d camped outside St Paul’s Cathedral and seen her go into the church and everything – and poor Beth hadn’t seen any of it.
‘Lucky Mom and Dad videoed it then, isn’t it?’ said Doris. ‘Now sssshhh.’
We all settled down on the beanbags and cushions, stifling giggles as we passed popcorn to one another in the room that Doris’s American professor dad called the den. Doris’s house was like nothing the rest of us had ever seen. We all lived in the suburban centre of Northfields, near our school, whereas Doris lived on the more countrified and posher side of town. Her parents had money but believed in state education, and as our school had the best reputation in the area, they’d sent her there.
You had to walk down a gravelly drive before you arrived at a massive house with ornate pillars, and a vast oak front door. The lounge was so big it could have fitted the whole of the downstairs of my house in, and the dining room had a table that seated twenty. And Doris’s dad had his own games room in the basement as well as a study, from where he would absentmindedly emerge from time to time to ask us how we were doing. Upstairs were five or six bedrooms and en suite bathrooms for
