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.