The Wedding Dress (short stories)

By Milly Johnson

THE QUEEN OF FEEL-GOOD FICTION!

'Every time you discover a new Milly book, it’s like finding a pot of gold' Heat

From the Sunday Times bestseller Milly Johnson - three short stories, exclusive to ebook, along with a sneak peek at her wonderful novel, A Winter Flame.

If you have not yet had the pleasure of reading White Wedding, beware that the title story, The Wedding Dress, is a mini sequel and contains spoilers!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Release date: Aug 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781471111785

Milly Johnson

Milly Johnson was born, raised and still lives in Barnsley, South Yorkshire. A Sunday Times bestseller, she is one of the Top 10 Female Fiction authors in the UK, and has sold millions of copies of her books sold across the world. The Happiest Ever After is her twenty-first novel.    Milly’s writing highlights the importance of community spirit and the magic of kindness. Her books inspire and uplift but she packs a punch and never shies away from the hard realities of life and the complexities of relationships in her stories. Her books champion women, their strength and resilience, and celebrate love, friendship and the possibility and joy of second chances and renaissances. She writes stories about ordinary women and the extraordinary things that happen in their ordinary lives.

Book preview

Also by Milly Johnson

The Yorkshire Pudding Club

The Birds & the Bees

A Spring Affair

A Summer Fling

Here Come the Girls

An Autumn Crush

White Wedding

titlepage

First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2012

A CBS COMPANY

Copyright © Milly Johnson, 2012

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

No reproduction without permission.

® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

The right of Milly Johnson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

1st Floor

222 Gray’s Inn Road

London WC1X 8HB

Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

www.simonandschuster.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-47111-178-5

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

Contents

Note to the Reader

The Wedding Dress

The Dressmaker

The Never Ageing Heart

Extract from A Winter Flame

Note to the Reader

In this exclusive ebook you will find three brand-new short stories from bestselling author Milly Johnson, and a sneak peek at her new novel, A Winter Flame, out in October 2012.

The title story, ‘The Wedding Dress’ is a mini sequel from Milly’s last novel, White Wedding, following Max’s story as she finds happiness. If you haven’t yet enjoyed White Wedding, please bear this in mind before reading ‘The Wedding Dress’.

The Wedding Dress

Max McBride drove past the small shop with the bay window in Maltstone and smiled sadly. It was an eighty-five pence shop now; full of plastic rubbish, cut-price toiletries, batteries only strong enough to power a clock and bargain-basement books. Once upon a time it had been the most beautiful bridal shop ever, run by a strange but lovely woman who had a magical air of mystery about her. She had disappeared into the ether eighteen months ago leaving no forwarding address, which was a bummer really because Max was getting married and she needed a dress as special as the man she was going to be meeting at the end of the aisle. She knew that the shop’s owner, Freya, would have stocked, found or made her the perfect dress for the occasion – but she was gone and so Max just had to find another bridal shop.

And so she ended up at Love and Marriage, a shop that believed its own hype. Situated on the remote Holmfirth Road, it attracted the sort of clientele who wouldn’t have got a bus there. The front window was decorated with incredibly impressive designer names with off-the-scale price tags to put off those who didn’t earn six-figure salaries. But Max wasn’t about to be deterred – she was a self-made woman with a Coutt’s bank account and so she swanned into the shop as if she was about to make an offer on all the stock.

The owner of the shop had a nose for money and the length of her smile was directly proportionate to the strength of the smell of it. And her smile when Max walked in could almost have been knotted at the top of her head.

‘Good morning. Can I help you?’ she said.

‘Just browsing,’ Max replied.

‘Well, please let me know if you should need anything,’ said the shop owner. Her eyes didn’t smile like Freya’s had; it was quite obvious to Max that Mrs Love and Marriage had had so much Botox pumped into her face, the next step would have been rigor mortis.

As Max moved down the rails, the shop owner secretly studied her, running her eyes from her dark red hair piled up into a bun down to her long legs. The suit she wore wasn’t off the peg – the customer had a big bosom and a small waist: a very non-standard fitting. She