Chapter 4: Vows

I got married on Thursday at four in the Harrow House chapel, in an ivory suit borrowed from my sister.

"It's two sizes too big in the shoulders," Phoebe said, pinning the jacket in the mirror. "You look like a very expensive lawyer."

"That's the idea."

"Is it? Because the groom is going to see a bride."

"The groom is going to see a signature."

She stuck a pin in the hem and looked up at me.

"You're shaking."

"I'm cold."

"It's July."

My mother came in without knocking, in her good blue dress, with her bad hip and a bouquet cut from her own garden.

She set it in my hands and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, and neither of us said what we were thinking.

"Your father would have hated this," she said.

"I know."

"Then why are you doing it?"

"Because the cottage is yours, and Phoebe finishes school in two years, and nobody is selling me to a stranger."

"He isn't a stranger," my mother said.

I looked at her.

"Phoebe told me," she said. "She tells me everything. Go, before you talk yourself out of it."

The chapel was small and full of cousins I barely knew.

They sat on the old pews in their summer suits, whispering, and they stopped when I came in.

Edmund waited at the front with a prayer book open.

Harrison stood to one side with his hands clasped.

Santino stood at the altar rail in a black suit and no tie.

His six men lined the side walls with their hands folded in front of them, and nobody in the family would meet their eyes.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Arranged to the Don, Freed from the Lie from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.