Two Weddings and a Baby Read Online Free Page A

for even one second that her fondness for kissing Bernard had advanced her career before she had earned it.
    ‘We made it,’ Jed said eventually over the thunderous rain, pushing open the door of the pub for her, and for precisely one moment Tamsyn was glad to be out of the wet and in the steamy fug of beery warmth provided by the pub. And then she heard the cheers, and then she saw the banner ‘W ELCOME H OME T AMSYN! ’
    And then she wanted to throw herself into the swollen river and try and hitch a lift back to France on the next passing boat.
    ‘Oh God,’ she said to a room full of smiling, familiar faces, ‘please tell me this isn’t a party.’
    ‘Tamsyn!’ It was her mother who came and dragged her from the door, nodding politely to Reverend Jed as she hugged her rather wet daughter and unbuttoned her coat while she was at it.
    ‘You’re soaked through, you poor thing.’ Tamsyn submitted as her mum dragged the sodden coat off her shoulders. ‘You look like a drowned rat, and you’re thinner. You are too thin, you know. I do hope that fashion isn’t giving you body disorders.’
    ‘What’s a body disorder, if it isn’t your mother always telling you that the body you were born with isn’t too thin?’ Tamsyn asked Laura, hugging her anyway.
    ‘Mother, let the poor woman get in the door!’ Her sister Keira grabbed her hand and pulled her over to a long table that had been made up from several separate ones, and was lined with people, most of whom Tamsyn recognised, such as professional busybody and local aristocrat Sue Montaigne and her husband, Rory, with their children. There was Vicky Carmichael, whom she’d known since childhood and who – she knew from her mother, who despite not living in Poldore for decades still had a hotline on whatever anyone was up to – was now a vet, and even old Jago and Mr Figg the chemist, still hanging in there, neither one of them looking older than the last time she’d seen them, almost as if they had been a hundred years old for all of her life. Of course, her sister Cordelia was there, knocking back shorts at the bar; and Eddie Godolphin, the town’s mayor and landlord of the Silent Man, and his wife Rosie behind the bar. Despite the horrible weather outside the pub, inside it was warm, festive and friendly, almost as if they’d decided to hold the wedding breakfast a few days early, only with a great many packets of salt and vinegar crisps in place of canapés. Smiling and waving at everyone, Tamsyn took a seat, while at exactly the same time wondering if she’d be able to wriggle out of the window of the ladies’ loo and sneak back up to the hotel in time to order room service.
    ‘Boys! Look who’s here!’ Keira called to her sons.
    Tamsyn braced herself for the onslaught of her nephews, twin four-year-olds, bundles of pure energy and noise, whom Tamsyn always secretly thought were a bit like cats, in that they seemed to seek out the people least fond of children and stick to them like glue. She had been there, at her sister’s side, well, actually in the cafeteria a couple of floors down, when they had been born, and usually saw them just at Christmas and sometimes in the summer, if she popped over to Suffolk. The pair of them laboured cheerfully under the misapprehension that she liked them.
    ‘Aunty Tam!’ Jamie was the first to hit, closely followed by Joe, the force of the pair of them propelling her back into a chair.
    ‘What?’ Tamsyn asked as Jamie hung off her neck and Joe climbed onto her lap. ‘What do you want from me? I’ve got no sweets, no toys, no money, nothing. I’m no good to you.’
    ‘Say something in those funny gobbledygook words,’ Joe asked.
    ‘What, you mean French?’ Tamsyn asked him, amused despite herself. When Keira had brought them to visit her in Paris, she had taken them to the Louvre to see the art, and they had giggled a lot about the Venus de Milo’s bottom. They had also found the French, speaking