Bad Brides Read Free Page A

didn’t like a new girl at the best of times, let alone one who was pretty enough to be on the pageant circuit.
    And the rich, titled, twenty-something British women, led by some girl called the Honourable Araminta, were complete pushovers compared to the hardcore bitches from back home in Illinois, all
scrabbling to win the titles of Kewanee Pork Queen or Watseka Corn Queen. Those were girls who’d rub baby oil into your false lashes so they wouldn’t stick on, doctor your shampoo with
Kool-Aid to streak your hair, glue up the nozzle of your hairspray can and refuse to let you use theirs, even push you into a stinging-nettle patch or rub poison ivy into the inside of your
dress.
    Nope, the Honourable Araminta, aka ‘Minty’, and her girlfriends had no idea how to catfight as dirty as the Kendras, Taylors and Kymbers on the pageant circuit. In the US, Tamra had
done plenty of battling for her daughter, but here Brianna Jade was more than equal to the task. What had these Honourables and Ladies ever lacked in their life? Had they ever had to shop at
Goodwill or the Salvation Army, make a packet of ready-made grits last a couple of days between two of them, or hitch to school because they had two tyres bald as eagles and no money for gas? No
way.
    Brianna Jade didn’t understand half of what they said, anyway, because of their sharp clipped accents which made their words like stabby little knives thrown too short to reach the target.
And she wouldn’t have answered even if she had, because she’d figured out early on that what drove them really crazy was if she just smiled back at them with her perfect teeth, her best
‘I’m a Christian and I forgive you’ pageant smile. For some reason she couldn’t work out, they
hated
that smile. They actually recoiled when they saw it, like she
had a full water pitcher in her hand and they were the Wicked Witches from every compass point going.
    The Honourable Minty and her crew did have one thing in common with the girls back home, though: they were equally wary of Brianna Jade’s mom. Tamra provoked that reaction in women. It
wasn’t her fault; her God-given looks meant that she was catnip to every dad, male teacher and, frankly, a lot of those girls’ teenage boyfriends. That had been Tamra’s ultimate
threat to the really bad mean girls, that she’d flirt with their boyfriends and turn their heads around so they literally couldn’t even see their girlfriends any more, they were too
dazzled by Tamra Krantz.
    Because Tamra was the ultimate MILF. She’d had her only daughter at sixteen: when, at fifteen years old, Brianna Jade won the title of Pork Queen of Kewanee (a fact Tamra
never
wanted mentioned in later life), Tamra was thirty-one and looked twenty-four. She was the perfected version of what Brianna Jade would hopefully become, with her thick mane of strawberry-blonde
hair, her big luminous eyes, her skin lightly tanned and so smooth that even the haters couldn’t help calling her ‘Barbie’ as a grudging compliment.
    Brianna Jade regularly heard girls at school bitching that Tamra had better legs than they did, a flatter stomach and, for a while, bigger boobs: however, on marrying Ken, which took them up in
the world like an express penthouse elevator to Classy Town, Tamra had taken a good look around her, realized that D cups didn’t fit into the Armani or Carolina Herrera dresses worn to
fundraising Florida balls, and had the implants removed. Ken had bitched and moaned about it, but, as always, he went along with what Tamra wanted.
    Like we all do
, Brianna Jade thought now, smoothing down the pleated silk skirt of her Balenciaga dress with its exquisite chiffon pintucked sleeves. It was totally gorgeous, but she
still couldn’t pronounce most designer names right. She suspected Minty of guessing that fact and trying to catch out Brianna Jade by repeatedly asking her who had made her clothes, but
Brianna Jade just smiled seraphically in