Revenge of the Wedding Planner Read Online Free Page A

pad.
    ‘I’m going away tomorrow morning for two weeks so he won’t be able to find me,’ Julie said. ‘I’ll tell you the location but no one else is to know. I don’t care what happens, you mustn’t reveal to Gary where I am. I’ve thought about this from every angle and it’s definitely what I want to do. As for my clothes, most of them have been spirited out of the wardrobe already, allegedly taken to the dry-cleaner’s. What’s left, he’ll probably throw in the bin. Along with my fancy blender, my chrome shoe-racks, my nice shower gels and so on. I wouldn’t blame him.’
    ‘Oh, Julie. Are you sure about this?’
    ‘I am, yes. Thank my lucky stars I still have my apartment.I was tempted to sell it last year and buy a holiday home in Italy but then there was that scaremongering about the cheap flights coming to an end. So I changed my mind. And to be honest with you, somehow I just knew I’d be needing it again.’
    Julie kept her pristine all-mod-cons apartment in a converted flourmill in Saintfield when she moved in with Gary three years before but he didn’t know that. She doesn’t have a lot of faith in love everlasting, I’m sorry to say. Yes, I realize that does sound strange coming from a wedding planner but there’s a lot of money to be made in this game and Julie is nothing if not financially astute. And as I said before, we are very good at what we do.
    ‘So, I’m leaving Gary tomorrow,’ she said again, just like that.
    I was deeply unsettled. I don’t like change, not even in the lives of other people.
    Then Julie poured another cup of tea and drank it slowly, gazing up at the red-glass chandeliers and with only the hint of a tear in her eye. What a trooper Julie is, I thought. At the time I supposed she had her reasons but I couldn’t figure out why she would want to break up with her lovely boyfriend. I was sure he would have liked the chance to discuss things and maybe they could have reached some sort of compromise.
    Gary Devine was the best-looking man I had ever seen in real life. Conventionally handsome, if you know what I mean. The living image of Andy Garcia. Big honest eyes, thighs rounded and hard like telegraph poles, thick head of glossy black hair. (And it’s not even dyed, like mine is.) Great lover too, according to Julie. She never went into details.She just laughed once and said Gary definitely knew what he was doing in the bedroom. Nicely spoken, he was. Never used to swear in the company of ladies.
    What does Gary do for a living, I hear you ask?
    Says a lot about a man, doesn’t it?
    Well, Gary’s a riding instructor with his own stables in Crawfordsburn. Julie met him in 2002 when she was learning to ride a horse. She was seeing this older man called Bert at the time and she was tinkering with the idea of getting married. Only tinkering, now, she hadn’t set a date or anything. She was talking about a Robin Hood theme, hence the horse-riding lessons. Bert was a paper products (loo-roll) millionaire and a very keen rider himself. Julie didn’t love Bert but he was filthy rich, as it were. ‘People will always need toilet tissue.’ That was Bert’s motto.
    We had quite a few laughs over it. Until Julie fell off the horse into a deep puddle of sticky black mud and Bert laughed his head off. Big mistake. Nobody laughs at Julie twice. She swiftly dumped Bert for Gary Devine, just as soon as she’d washed off the mud in the stables’ showers. Julie moved in with Gary that evening, actually.
    ‘I’m going to stay in a new spa in Galway.’ That was Julie’s follow-up nugget of news. She took a thick gold-edged business card out of her handbag and laid it gingerly on my knee. ‘That’s the name of the place, there. They’ve got shocking-pink armchairs in the foyer.’
    So they had. There was a picture of the foyer on the business card. Shocking-pink armchairs, all present and correct. Lots of glass walls and exotic flowers in tall vases. An indoor stream