Undertaking Love

Chapter Twenty-Four




‘Yoohoo! Marla, honey!’

The distinctive squawk assaulted Marla’s ears across the crowded arrivals hall. She held her arms out and her mother tumbled into them, all suntanned wrinkles and expensive jewellery that jangled every time she moved.

‘Let me look at you.’ She gripped Marla hard by the upper arms and leaned backwards.

‘Still too pale.’ She clucked her tongue then reached up and pinched a cheek. ‘Are you using that juicer I sent you?’

Marla laughed. It had taken all of forty seconds for her mother to find fault. She just couldn’t help herself. Moments later she noticed the short man a few steps behind her mother, locked in a battle with two trolleys piled high with coordinated luggage.

‘Honey, this is my fiancé, Brynn. Brynn, meet Marla. Isn’t she every bit as gorgeous as I said she was?’

Brynn shuffled forward, a vision in crumpled cream linen and an ivory fedora. Marla shook his outstretched hand and tried not to wonder where a taxidermist’s hand might spend the majority of its time.

And fiancé? Was it her mother’s life mission to reach double figures?

‘Good to meet you, Marla. Cecilia has told me so much about you.’

He had a thin voice, and when he fixed her with his gimlet eyes, Marla got the alarming feeling that she was being sized up for a glass display case.

She forced a smile, but her heart had well and truly sunk at the thought of her serene cottage being invaded by her mother, the lover and their luggage. She eyed the trolleys to double check Brynn hadn’t smuggled any dead foxes or such like through customs, before leading them outside to her car.

Neither of her passengers offered to help as Marla loaded the cases into the boot. Nor when she took them all out again because they wouldn’t fit. She heaved the largest case onto the backseat next to Brynn, and then shoe-horned the rest into the boot space.

‘Have you been to the UK before, Brynn?’

‘Only on a one-night stopover a couple of years back en route to the Austrian taxidermy championships.’

‘Oh.’ Great. He was a conversation killer as well as an animal stuffer.

Marla steered the car through the busy airport traffic onto the motorway and attempted to get the conversation with Brynn back on track.

‘So. How long are you visiting for?’

‘Oh, not long for me, I’m afraid. I’m a key note speaker at the London taxidermy exhibition, and then it’s on to Russia.’

‘Another lecture?’

‘No. I’m collecting a dead zebra from Moscow Zoo.’

Marla met his gaze in the rear view mirror and couldn’t decide whether or not he was joking. Terrific. Trust her mother to bring Hannibal bloody Lecter to visit.



‘Please Jonny! You owe me.’

Jonny pouted as Marla clutched his shirtsleeve in desperation.

‘How many more times are you going to use that line before we’re done?’

‘Oh, a lot more yet. You nearly closed us down. It’s a big debt.’ She gestured with her hands to demonstrate the size. ‘Huge. So you’ll come, then?’

‘Go on then.’ Jonny grumbled. ‘But only because I don’t happen to have made other plans.’

He hummed the Star Trek theme as he spun on his block-heeled cowboy boots and sashayed off down the aisle. They’d been preparing the chapel for a big Trekkie wedding all day, and short of actually being beamed up, they were more or less ready.

Marla grinned at his retreating back. He was a true friend, and would have come on Saturday evening just because she needed him there, but she knew he was dying to meet her mother. Actually Brynn, to be precise. He’d howled with laughter when she’d relayed the conversation from the car, but all the same he couldn’t possibly have accepted her invitation outright. That would have been far too straightforward for Jonny.

Marla counted up the dinner guests in her head. Jonny, Emily and Tom, Rupert and herself, and of course her mother and Brynn. Seven ought to be enough to dilute the effect her mother had. Cecilia had insisted on a swish dinner at Franco’s, but the last thing Marla felt like was a cosy double date with her mother, Brynn and Rupert. The two men would have absolutely no common ground, and Lord knows Brynn could be relied on to stop a conversation in its tracks with a random comment about a female hippopotamus’s enormous lady bits. He appeared to specialise in huge animals, and after two days under the same roof, Marla knew far more than she ever wanted to about the anatomical complexities of lions and tigers and bears.

What was her mother thinking? There was every possibility that she would end her days stuffed, mounted and on display in Brynn’s travelling freak show, probably wedged somewhere between a giant panda and a Palomino.

Maybe he was rich. But then that wasn’t something that usually turned her mother’s head; Cecelia had enough independent wealth to not need to lean on anyone else.

Oh, God. A hideous thought crept into her mind.

Maybe he was awesome in the sack.

Marla fought to keep her lunch down at the idea and tried to banish it from her head. There had to be something, though, and she was going to make it her business to find out what it was.