Redhead On The Run (RedHeads #1) - Rebecca Royce Page 0,2

feeling. If I pretended to feel nothing bad, I never did. Why feel bad? I was young. Rich. Gorgeous. After today, I’d get on with getting on. Anything I wanted I’d have. Kit wouldn’t care what I did as long as I was discreet, and when it was time for us to have a baby, I was sure Laura would let me know.

“You sure?” Hope squeezed my hand again, pressing at my unspoken answer. She understood what I hadn’t said.

We were triplets. We’d shared a womb. Hope and Bridget were my first friends. We’d done everything together, and it used to be because we wanted to and not because my father’s PR company told us to be somewhere at a specific time for a photograph. The three redheads. If you added our older brother, four. But Justin was a different story. He’d always been separate, and these days, he was Kit’s favorite partner in crime when it came to partying.

The two bored men together.

And now I was going to be sister to one and wife to the other.

The woman who had been plucking my eyebrows—when had she stopped?—held out my dress to me, and I stared at it as I rose from my seat.

“Layla?” Bridget said my name. “Do you need some water or something?”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t want to have to pee.”

Laura smiled. “Good thinking. I hope you didn’t eat anything this morning either. We need to make sure it zips up.”

It was going to be fine. I weighed myself twice a day. Once in the morning, once in the evening before dinner so I could judge how much to eat at any time. The scale hadn’t moved in the upward direction in the last two years. Down, yes. Up, no. I was always, constantly hungry.

I smiled at Laura. “It’ll fit.”

The dress was beautiful but not my style. It had been designed by Daniella Lareine, whose real name was Danielle Gordan. I guessed that wasn’t hip enough. She was the ‘it’ designer of the moment. The Allards wanted to seem trendy while maintaining some tradition by having the wedding in Paris. It was a romantic dress. A-lined. What they would call a sweetheart dress with an open back, except for one piece of fabric that ran down the center of it.

I looked like Cinderella waiting for her prince, just as Amanda Hill had said on her vlog. This would not have been the dress I’d have chosen if I’d been allowed to pick. Not even close to what I’d wear, which was funny because the one thing I’d done in my life, the one real accomplishment I had was a book I’d written about fashion. About getting to your true look. Well, I hadn’t written it. I’d had a ghostwriter for that. But I’d dictated information and worked on it.

I knew and understood fashion, how to make people look great in what they had.

I stepped into the dress and nearly fainted as they zipped me. Could a dress feel like a coffin? Was it covered in poison seeping into my skin? Killing me slowly?

I smiled. God, I was so good at playing pretend.

Hope narrowed her gaze. “Something wrong with the dress?”

“No, of course not. This is gorgeous.”

“And you look stunning in it.” Bridget walked toward me. “But of course, you would. You are so beautiful, Layla. The most beautiful bride there ever was.”

I supposed that was something a mother would say to their daughter on their wedding day. Ours had died when we were only a year old. She’d taken one too many sleeping pills and not woken up the next day. Leaving a two-year-old boy and a set of triplets for her emotionless husband to not raise himself. No mother meant Bridget got to play the role today. My father certainly wouldn’t.

That was okay. I wasn’t marrying a man with no feelings. He had plenty of them, that was why he did so many drugs—so he didn’t have to think about any of them at all.

“You look beautiful.” It wasn’t hard to tell my almost mother-in-law and sisters that. They were gorgeous. In violet, even though I wouldn’t have picked the dress, their eyes really popped out. Everyone who said we were practically identical hadn’t taken a good look at our eyes. Mine were blue. Hope’s were brown, and Bridget’s a deep green. Our faces weren’t the same either, although we did have the same high cheekbones, and if someone really looked, our red hair