Don't Tell the Groom

Book 1: Don't Tell the Groom

by Anna Bell

Genres: Humor & Satire; Contemporary Romance; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

Penny has big dreams for her wedding day. When Mark finally pops the question, it's the best moment of her life. Until Penny checks her wedding fund and is horrified to discover that she's somehow gambled away £10,000 playing online bingo! Working under the pretense of surprising Mark with her plans on their big day, operation ‘Don't Tell the Groom' rolls into action, with surprising, hilarious and moving results.
‘This is a real feel-good story with loads of laughs, twists, tears and miscommunications.' THE CHICKLIT CLUB

Release date: August 22, 2013

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 208

Sample

Every woman should feel like a princess on her wedding day; it’s practically the law. As I gaze down at myself in my sparkling dress, a dress that would make Mary Berry’s meringues weep with jealousy at how light and fluffy it is, that is exactly how I feel: like a princess.

My dad’s just about holding it together as we glide into the room to the wedding march. He’s choked up and I think there might even be a tiny glint of a tear in his eye. Walking down the aisle I see all of my friends and close family beaming at me. I know what they’re thinking: that I’m wearing the most beautiful dress they’ve ever seen. All except my aunt Dorian. Her face is full of thunder as I’ve quite possibly upstaged my precious cousin Dawn’s wedding.

And then I notice my handsome groom, my most favourite person in the whole wide world. He’s standing there in his bespoke suit looking sexy as hell. To think in mere minutes I’m going to be Mrs Mark Robinson. The Lemonheads’ song ‘Mrs Robinson’ is playing loudly in my head, drowning out the wedding march.

There’s my mum sitting in the front row looking like the cat that got the cream. I can almost imagine what she’ll be writing in this year’s Christmas-card round robin. All her friends’ kids will be made to feel inferior when they’re shown the photos of me and Mark looking absolutely stunning, at the most wonderful wedding in the world.

The room in the castle looks even more beautiful than I ever could have imagined. The candles flickering in the alcoves give off a dusky glow, and the simple vases of longstemmed white roses adorning the ends of the rows are like the icing on the cake.

Approaching the end of the aisle, I come to a halt alongside Mark. He leans over to me and whispers that I look beautiful, just like Prince William did to Kate. I smile back and gaze into his eyes, which are easier to see than usual because my to-die-for Jimmy Choos make me only an inch or two shorter than him.

I hand my bouquet back to my friend Lou, my maid of honour, who’s dressed in a simple purple empire-line dress, which I love almost as much as my own gown. My sister is standing next to her with my little niece clinging on to her leg and looking angelic and lovely.

This is the happiest day of my life. I. Am. A. Princess.

It is at that blissfully perfect moment that the computer makes the worst sound imaginable. The synthetic crowdcheering noise snaps me out of my daydream and back to my poky little bedroom. The strategic lighting of the candles is replaced by the dim light of an energy-saving lamp, and instead of Jimmy Choos and a Vera Wang wedding dress, I’m in my baggy boyfriend jeans, an oversized woolly jumper, and a pair of cartoon-character slippers.

The words on the screen are there in Day-Glo pink and yellow: Bingo. I was just about to call it. I only had one number to go. This was the game. The game I was going to win. The one which would have allowed me to actually buy the Jimmy Choos. The one that would have got me one step closer to the wedding of my dreams. The wedding in the castle where I’m the most beautiful bride that anyone has ever seen.

And now ‘LuckyLes11’ has won my £500. Goodbye, Jimmy Choos.

There’s a feeling of nausea that creeps over my body when I lose a game of bingo. But the feeling is so much worse when I’m so close to winning that I’m practically spending the money.

Not that I do this often, you understand. Just every now and then. It just happens to be now as while I was waiting for Mark to come home from work, I was flicking through the latest copy of Bridal Dreams and they had these top ten must-have wedding shoes. I fell in love with pair number two and at £550 I thought a cheeky little go of 90-ball bingo might just get me them; you know, if it was meant to be.

Turns out it wasn’t. I bet LuckyLes11 has fat ankles and wouldn’t look good in the Choos anyway. Not that I’m bitter.

‘Shit.’ That’s the sound of the front door slamming. Mark is home.

I log out of Fizzle Bingo quicker than you can say ‘goodbye, Jimmy Choos’ and switch off my private browsing. By the time Mark makes it over the threshold and I hear him kicking his shoes off, I’m idly surfing for books on Amazon. God, I’m quick, or well practised. Either way, I still feel like I’ve just cheated on my boyfriend.

Oh yes, that’s right, my boyfriend. You were expecting me to say my fiancé, right? Seeing as I’ve planned the most wonderful wedding in the world and that I was trying to win myself the money for the perfect shoes.

The truth is we aren’t engaged. But that’s not to say we’re not getting married, as we are. We just haven’t got engaged yet, but we will. We have a wedding fund and everything. Mark, my hopefully soon-to-be-fiancé, is very sensible like that. He has our life planned out in stages and everything.

‘Penny?’

‘Up here.’

‘Are you ready to go?’ he says as he opens the door.

He’s staring at me with a look of horror.

‘Yes,’ I say, peeling back the covers of the bed to reveal I am fully clothed and not half in pyjamas. ‘What?’

Mark sent me a text at work earlier to tell me he’s taking me out for dinner. Which can only mean one thing on a Monday: the all-you-can-eat buffet at our local Indian. For some reason they always have the air-con on, even in winter, and so I’m dressed appropriately, in layers that would give the Michelin man a run for his money.

‘That’s what you pick to wear when I’m taking you out for dinner?’

‘Yes, but I was thinking why don’t we just get a takeaway and watch a movie in instead? We could eat in bed?’

I should probably stress at this point that I detest eating in bed. But there are some things you should know: a) it’s January, b) our little Victorian terrace does not have good central heating, and c) our bed is the comfiest bed on the planet. Pretty much nothing could drag me from my bed at this point. Not even the thought of unlimited poppadoms.

‘In bed? Are you feeling all right? No, come on, I fancy going out. We haven’t been out in ages. And now I’m not revising for my exams I fancy being spontaneous. You know going out on a work night feels slightly naughty.’

‘I could think of other things to do to you if you want to feel naughty.’ I’ll do anything he wants at this point if I can stay in bed. Well, almost anything – I’m no fan of Fifty Shades of Grey.

‘Penelope, get out of that bed and put on a dress. We’re going out.’

Uh-oh. He’s played the Penelope card. I must be in trouble. Before I know it Mark is pulling me off the bed.

‘So if I need to put a dress on, where are we going?’ I say, sighing. If we’re not having curry, I quite fancy pizza, maybe Pizza Express or Ask.

‘I’ve made us reservations at Chez Vivant.’

‘Chez Vivant? How on earth did you get us reservations there?’

My voice has gone up an octave. Chez Vivant, for those not in the know, is the restaurant around the area where I live. It’s the kind of place that the fancy people, who fly in and out of Farnborough in their private jets, eat at before they jet off to their exotic destinations. It has a waiting list as long as your arm and it’s got a number of Michelin stars. Mark and I have never graced it with our presence before.

It is the place I’d always imagined that Mark would take me to pop the question. Suddenly The Lemonheads’ song is playing up-tempo in my head. I’ve started to have palpitations and I’m sure that I’m breaking out in a cold sweat. This is what I’ve been waiting for.

‘I’ve just been assigned their account and in return for sorting out their rather bungled tax return from their previous accountants they’ve offered us a complimentary meal there.’

The Lemonheads on loop comes to a dramatic halt. Suddenly it makes sense. Mark wasn’t about to shell out part of the mortgage on our house to pop the question. He was clearly treating me to a freebie from work.

‘Great,’ I say. I need to keep the disappointment out of my voice. I am still getting to go to Chez Vivant. I can still make my friends weep with jealousy. And a few months ago Posh and Becks were spotted there, so at the very least I can hope to see a Z-list celebrity like someone from TOWIE.

‘Come on. Table’s booked for seven thirty, so we should get a wriggle on.’

‘OK,’ I say. Seven-thirty? I’ve got less than an hour. An hour before we have to leave! Clearly Mark doesn’t understand that you book to have your hair done before you go to a place like Chez Vivant. Less than an hour to get ready is an impossibility.



Exactly one hour later and we’re walking through the doors of Chez Vivant. It just shows that my teachers at school were right: I would be able to succeed in life if I actually put my mind to it.

For once my frizzy hair allowed itself to be blow-dried straight to within an inch of its life, and so far, thanks to a whole can of hairspray, it is staying up in a chignon.

I’m also dressed in a hideously expensive, I’ll wear it one day, I really will, Mark, dress. And look, here I am wearing it! It has only taken three years, and I don’t know if you’d call that value for money, but it looks amazing. And I’m even wearing a proper cheese-wire thong and a sexy lace strapless bra. Of course both are killing me, but the overall effect is worth it.

It’s just a shame that the shoes I’ve got on are from Next and not the Jimmy Choos that I could have owned if it weren’t for LuckyLes11. I close my eyes. I’m not allowing myself to think about that now. Besides, even if I had won, it isn’t like there is a Jimmy Choo shop in Farnborough I could have raced to tonight to get them.

‘You look so good,’ says Mark as we deposit our coats in the cloakroom, ‘I almost thought about throwing you on the bed and changing my mind about going out.’

Now he tells me! If I’d known all it would have taken was for me to put this dress on to get him to stay in bed, then I would have put it on two hours ago. What am I saying? I’m standing in Chez Vivant!

Inside it is exactly like I’d imagined it would be. Huge glass chandeliers dangling from the ceiling. There are thick red heavy velvet curtains hanging around the outside of the room. There is even a black-and-white movie being projected onto the ceiling. It just screams expensive.

‘We’ve got a reservation, under Robinson,’ Mark says to the maître d’.

I can’t believe how grown-up and confident he sounds in this place. There’s something about walking in here that has made me suddenly feel like I’m a child at an adults’ party. I’m hit with narcissistic thoughts that everyone in the whole restaurant is going to be looking at me as if they know we’re getting our food for free and that we can’t normally afford to eat here.

So much for my celebrity spotting. I’m terrified to even look at anyone for fear they’ll be pricing up my outfit and thinking that my dress is far too many seasons ago to wear.

The maitre d’ nods at us in that discreet posh way, and he leads us across the restaurant. It’s at this moment that I notice the floor. It’s super-shiny black tiling with diamantes buried in it. The lights keep catching the sparkles and they’re twinkling like stars in the night sky. I’d usually be dead impressed, but as well as being super shiny it’s also super slippy, and it seems that I might as well be wearing heels with soles made of ice, as I appear to have absolutely no resistance.

Gone is the panic that people are going to be judging me on my looks. They’re now going to be judging me on the fact that I’m waddling like a duck and doing windmill arms like I’m walking a tightrope. I manage to grab hold of Mark’s arm just as I’m about to do the splits. Not only would I have ripped my amazing dress on its first outing, but with the cheese-wire thong I’m wearing, I’m sure I would have put a lot of diners off their dinner.

‘Here you are,’ says the maître d’, unaware of the Bambion-ice impression I’ve being doing behind his back. He points towards some curtains in the corner and I’m wondering just where he’s taking us. He pulls them open to reveal a velvet-covered booth. Maybe they keep the curtains closed when it’s not in use to make the restaurant seem fuller. I shimmy into the booth. It is almost as comfortable as my bed; maybe it was worth getting out of it after all. As Mark slides in opposite me, the maître d’ shuts the curtains around the booth.

Oh, my God, they really are embarrassed to have us here.

‘Are we like the poor relations?’ I ask. I think it best to make a joke out of it before Mark gets embarrassed.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, he shut the curtains.’

‘Pen, that’s to give us privacy. These booths are for their guests who want their dining to be a bit more discreet.’

‘Oh. Right,’ I say, nodding. ‘I knew that.’

I did not know that. Now we’re going to spend the entire night starving as we’ll never get the attention of the waiter.

Mark presses what looks like a doorbell and seconds later a waiter appears from behind our curtains.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘We’ll have a bottle of the Châteauneuf-du-Pape to start with,’ says Mark.

Having the wine list in front of me at that particular moment makes me gawp at the price. Thank God this is a freebie.

‘An excellent choice, sir. I’ll bring it straightaway.’

Minutes later the waiter is as good as his word and he’s poured me the best wine I’ve ever tasted. Oh, how the other half live! I could get used to this.

‘Here’s to the start of an excellent night,’ says Mark, as he raises his glass.

I chink his glass with mine, making sure we have strong eye contact. The more intense the eye contact the more intense the sex, or so my friend Lou always says.



By the time my trio of desserts arrives I am full, but there’s no way I am going to leave here without three courses. Especially when someone other than me or Mark is paying. Why is it that food always tastes better when someone else picks up the bill?

Mark presses the little buzzer.

‘I can’t eat another thing, Mark,’ I say, groaning under the weight of my belly.

‘We’ll have a bottle of the Möet,’ says Mark to the waiter.

Möet? There is no way that they are going to give us Möet on a free meal. They’re not that bloody stupid, are they? Or else my boyfriend Mark is the best accountant in the whole world.

‘What did you do that for?’ I hiss over the table.

‘Because, Penny, we are celebrating.’

‘We are?’ I ask. ‘What are we celebrating?’

Maybe we’re celebrating the fact that he has been crowned world’s best accountant. Maybe this will be the start of more amazing free dinners.

‘This,’ says Mark.

Oh. My. God. There it is, in his hands. Stage four of the life plan Mark’s mapped out for us. Aka an engagement ring. A small, perfectly formed, princess-cut diamond that seems to tick all the four Cs, (colour, cut, clarity and carat,) and is by far the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.

‘So will you marry me, Penelope?’

Thank God for the curtains, is all I can say. As the next thing I know I’ve thrown myself at Mark like a desperate woman who thought this day would never come.

‘Of course I bloody will!’

‘Ahem.’

I stop snogging the face off Mark and wipe my mouth, embarrassed, as the waiter is standing next to us, popping open our champagne.

‘Here’s to you, the future Mrs Robinson,’ says Mark, as he raises his glass.

We chink glasses, and this time there is no Lemonheads, only the wedding march ringing in my ears.

I glance down at the ring on my finger. It’s perfectly weighted so that I know I have something ever so special and precious on my left hand. It’s like my whole life my left ring finger has been lacking something, and finally it’s lost its virginity and it feels complete.

I’m just starting to drift into a wedding fantasy where I’m shopping for the perfect dress to match my ring, when I realise Mark is talking to me.

‘We’ll have to get out the bank statements for the wedding fund to see just how spectacular our wedding can be.’

Uh-oh. My cheeks suddenly feel heavy as I push every muscle I can to hold my fake smile in place. Mark can’t see the bank statements, as that’s linked to my bingo account. He’d be able to see all my bingo win payments going in. Even though I’ve probably topped up the account with thousands of pounds of winnings by now, he would never approve of me playing bingo.

‘How about I plan the wedding, honey? I can make it my present to you? Then all you have to do is turn up. It will be like that TV programme, Don’t Tell the Bride, only I won’t tell the groom.’

‘Sounds even better. To us,’ he says, taking a sip of champagne.

‘To us,’ I echo. Oh, bloody hell. There suddenly seems a lot already that I can’t tell the groom.

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather just go straight to bed?’ I ask. ‘I mean, aren’t we supposed to consummate our engagement? Won’t it not be binding if we haven’t done it?

I look up at Mark in the hope that the lure of getting me naked will be stronger than the urges of the accountant inside him.

‘Come on, we didn’t open them yet so that we could have the big surprise when we got engaged. I want to know just how big this wedding you’re going to plan will be.’

I fail to correct Mark, that we didn’t open the statements because I didn’t want him to see my bingo winnings going in.

‘OK,’ I say reluctantly.

This is not how I imagined the night of our engagement ending up. I imagined we’d spend the time after the proposal screaming down the phone at our nearest and dearest, but as it was after ten o’clock on a Monday night we thought we’d save that pleasure until the next day. Then after shouting from the rooftops, I’d envisaged that we’d probably be so amorous when we got over the threshold that we’d end up having sex on the stairs. Not that I imagine it would be a) very comfortable on our wooden staircase or b) very warm in our poorly heated house. But surely when you get engaged you’re supposed to have acts of passion like that. Checking bank statements did not appear in any of my fantasies. I guess that’s what happens when you’re going to marry an accountant.

I sit on the bed in the spare room in my sexy dress, holdups and Mark’s dressing gown, as he hands me the envelopes for our bank statements.

I take a deep breath. You see, with weddings the difference of five hundred pounds is mammoth. It’s the difference between having, or not having, luxuries like a magician to entertain the guests, or a candyfloss machine and sweetshop stand at the evening reception.

I find the most recent statement from the franked date on the envelope, and I almost wince at it through closed eyes. Does that say fifteen thousand three hundred and fifty-five pounds? A smile breaks out over my face. Fifteen thousand is OK, although I was expecting it to be around twenty thousand. But fifteen thousand will still get me my Vera Wang dress, right?

‘So how much are we talking?’ asks Mark.

I’d almost forgotten he was in the room. I’d been imagining how I was going to eat candyfloss without getting it on my Vera Wang gown.

‘I’m not telling you, Mark. We said we were going to do this “Don’t Tell the Groom” thing, and I think we should take it seriously. Besides, you’d probably do a spreadsheet, and it would be like the whole household expenses fiasco.’

Mark makes an all-singing, all-dancing spreadsheet for our household budget every year. It was depressing enough to discover that we spent £3.50 on toilet rolls every two weeks, but then he manipulated the data into a graph that showed me that it cost £91 a year, and that it literally went down the toilet. That’s a pair of boots!

‘OK,’ says Mark sulkily.

I look down at the statement again and I’m about to drift off into a wedding fantasy once more when I look at the total. I’m sure it said £15, 436.50 the last time I looked, only now it seems to be missing ten thousand pounds. That can’t be right.

‘What’s wrong, Pen?’

In the horror of realising that I’d read the total wrong, a look of panic has replaced my smile.

‘Oh, nothing, I was just feeling a little sad as I realised that my gran wouldn’t be able to see the wedding,’ I say, lying. I’m definitely going to hell after that. Dragging my poor dead gran into things.

Mark supportively rubs my feet in comfort and I try to force a fake smile on to my face again. It’s the kind of face you pull when you’re opening a present that you can just tell you’re going to hate in front of the person who gave it to you. A smile on the face that grows wider and faker, and gets an accompanying head-bob as you pull out the microwavable slippers that smell like your great-aunt.

£5,345.50. How can that be? Our combined bonuses last year came to eight thousand pounds. Why is there only just over half of that amount in there?

Surely Mark hasn’t been helping himself to the wedding fund? What would he have spent the money on? My eyes fall on my beautiful, perfect, sparkly ring. No. Surely not? He wouldn’t have used the wedding fund to pay for the engagement ring, would he? He must know that that was not what the fund was for and that he was supposed to pay for it out of his own account.

Of course he would know that, and besides, I’ve got the debit card for the account. We just thought that when the time came to it I’d be the one spending the money. Which means there has to be some other explanation for where the money has gone to.

I start trying to focus on the payments going out and going in, but there are just so many of them.

Inside I’m freaking out, wondering where the hell my money is, but outwardly I’ve got this painted smile on my face which seems to be making Mark look deliriously happy.

I slowly open some of the other statements, and read them over, doing a head-nod and a smile as I do. I can clearly see the payments made in from both Mark and my bank accounts, but there are all these other debits made to Carnivore Services. That doesn’t ring any bells with me in the slightest. It sounds like some weird male-blooded dating agency or an upmarket butchers. It does not, however, sound like something that should appear on my wedding bank account.

And where are all my payments in from my winnings from Fizzle Bingo?

These are not my transactions. Someone has clearly been stealing from my account and paying this Carnivore company for whatever they do.

What I need to do is march to the bank and demand they sort out the problem for me, only I’ve got nine hours to wait before it opens, and then there’s the small matter that I have to go to work tomorrow. Somehow, showing up late with an engagement ring on my finger, I’m not going to be able to convince anyone I had an emergency doctor’s appointment, or at least without the rumour mill starting that it’s going to be a shotgun wedding.

‘Well, now that we know we’re going to have one great big party, I think we should go and consummate this engagement after all,’ Mark says.

I look up at him, careful to keep up the fake smile. Sex is now the last thing on my mind. Why couldn’t he have just been like any normal, red-blooded male and we could have had the sex in the first place instead of looking at bank statements?

I stuff the statements back into their folder just as Mark begins to run his hands up my thighs. While on the one hand I want to go all Nancy Drew and solve the mystery of the meat-eater and the missing money from our account, another part of my brain is telling me that the bank is going to sort the little mix-up out in no time, and that really I should concentrate on the fact that my fiancé is taking my hold-ups off with his teeth. Yes, I really shouldn’t be worrying. Who knows, the bank might even give us extra money – you know, to compensate for the trauma of what went on. Maybe it will be enough so that I can even have doves released at the wedding.



It’s depressing enough going to the bank at lunchtime, but it’s even more so when you’ve had to turn down the offer of going to the pub with your work colleagues. They wanted to help celebrate my engagement. Instead I’m having to celebrate it by standing in a queue, along with the whole town of Farnborough, at the bank. I glance at my watch. I’m going to be lucky if I make it to the counter this century, let alone before the end of my lunch break.

I haven’t really given the bank statements much thought since last night. I went to sleep pretty quickly, thank. . .