My Fiancé Chose My Brother, So I Chose My Brother's Best Friend novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Three Hundred Guests
Twenty minutes before her wedding Estelle finds her fiancé in bed with her brother, is told to marry him anyway, walks out in front of everyone and tells a stranger at the bar to take her upstairs.
Three hundred guests were already seated when I opened the door to the groom's suite.
I was twenty minutes from being Mrs. Spencer Lyle.
My older brother had texted me at nine that morning.
"Stay calm. Today goes fine. Trust me."
I had read it twice and felt better both times.
Then I walked down the hotel corridor in my wedding dress with Spencer's vow card in my hand.
The best man had found it in the car and handed it to me instead of him.
The suite door was shut but not latched.
I heard a man's voice before I saw anything.
"Not here, Spence. Today of all days."
"Shh," Spencer said. "She's downstairs with the florist."
I pushed the door open.
Spencer was in the bed with his shirt off and his hand in the hair of my younger brother.
Teddy was twenty-three. He had taught me piano when we were kids, playing the wrong chords on purpose to make me laugh.
He saw me first.
"Estelle," he said, and then he started to cry.
Spencer didn't cry.
He sat up and reached for his shirt and smiled the same smile he had used on my mother for two years.
"This isn't what it looks like," he said.
"It looks like my brother."
"Teddy had a panic attack. I was helping him breathe."
I held up the vow card so he could see my hand shaking.
"You're lying very calmly," I said.
He stopped smiling.
Footsteps came fast down the corridor behind me.
My mother arrived first, in her silver dress, with the wedding planner at her elbow.
She looked at the bed.
She looked at me.
"Out," she told the planner.
The planner ran.
Then my older brother Hugh stepped into the doorway.
He was thirty-four, the head of our family's company since our father died, and the man who had driven me to my first job interview.
He came straight to me and put his hand on my arm.
He didn't ask what happened.
I assumed he could see.
"Who else has seen this?" Hugh asked, low. "I want to keep Teddy out of the papers."
"Just me," I said. "And Mom."
"Good." He shut the door behind him and took both my hands. "Nor, listen. I hate this too. It can be survived. In a month nobody will remember."
"He's in bed with Teddy."
"I know."
He rubbed his thumbs over my knuckles, the way he had in the car before my first job interview.
"I'm not saying forget it," he said. "I'm saying don't decide in this room."
My mother stepped in close and fixed my veil, which had slid crooked.
"The Lyles sign the merger on Friday," she said quietly. "Three hundred people are downstairs. You will walk down that aisle and you will say your vows."
"Mom, he's with Teddy."
"Teddy will be handled."
Teddy flinched at that.
I looked at him on the edge of the bed, shaking, still crying, and nobody in the room had said his name kindly.
"Did you know?" I asked my mother.
She smoothed my veil.
"Spencer is a good match," she said.
That was not an answer, and she knew it.
I looked at Hugh.
He looked back at me with his jaw set, waiting for me to be reasonable.
I had been reasonable since I was fifteen years old.
I took off my engagement ring and set it on the dresser beside Spencer's cufflinks.
"Estelle," Hugh said.
"No."
Spencer swung his legs off the bed.
"Don't be dramatic, babe. Everyone's waiting."
So I walked out.
I went down the corridor and past the florist and through the double doors of the ballroom.
The string quartet stopped in the middle of a bar.
Three hundred people turned in their chairs.
I stood at the top of the aisle in a dress that had cost forty thousand dollars and said it loud enough for the back row.
"The wedding is off. Spencer Lyle is upstairs with my brother Teddy. Ask Hugh why he wants me to marry him anyway."
Somebody dropped a glass.
My mother's voice came from the doorway behind me, thin and sharp.
"Estelle Elizabeth."
I didn't turn around.
I walked out through the lobby with my train over my arm and a hundred phones pointing at me.
The hotel bar was dark and almost empty.
I climbed onto a stool and told the bartender, "Whatever is strongest."
He poured it and didn't ask.
I drank it and asked for another.
My phone lit up on the bar with forty-one missed calls, and the top one said HUGH.
I turned it face down.
The man on the next stool had not looked at me once.
He wore a dark travel jacket with the collar still turned up, and a travel bag sat at his feet with the airline tag still on it.
His phone was dead on the bar beside a charging cable.
"Rough day?" he asked, still not looking.
"I'm not anybody's bride," I said.
"I didn't say you were."
"The dress said it for you."
Now he looked.
He had grey-green eyes and a tired face, and he took in the dress, the veil in my lap and my bare hand.
"There are three weddings in this hotel tonight," he said. "I'm guessing yours was the one that ended."
"It ended about forty minutes ago."
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"No," I said.
I finished the drink.
"I want to forget it," I said. "Do you have a room?"
He was quiet for a second.
"Eleven-twelve," he said.
I picked up my veil and stood.
"Take me upstairs."
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