His Diamond Bride Read Free Page B

out of the front door and down the small garden to the gate.
    â€˜Not a sign,’ she said, returning to the house and hurriedly closing the door.
    Her mother appeared, frowning. ‘Have you been out without a coat, in this weather?’
    â€˜Just for a moment.’
    â€˜You’ll catch your death of cold. You’re a nurse; you should have more sense.’
    Dee chuckled good-humouredly. ‘It’s a bit soon to call me a nurse. I’ve barely started my training.’
    â€˜Don’t tell your father that. He’s dead proud of you. He tells everyone that his daughter became a nurse because she’s the bright one of the family.’
    The bright one, Dee thought wryly. Her older sister, Sylvia, was the beautiful one, and she was the bright one.
    â€˜Now, don’t start that again,’ her mother said, reading her face without trouble.
    â€˜It’s just that sometimes I’d like to be gorgeous, like Sylvia,’ Dee said wistfully.
    â€˜Nonsense, you’re pretty enough.’ She bustled back to the kitchen, leaving Dee to gaze into the mirror.
    She had pleasant, regular features under short brown hair, with dark brown expressive eyes. Pretty enough. That was about the best anyone could say and, if it hadn’t been for Sylvia, Dee might have been content with it. But when she compared Sylvia’s luscious features with her own, which were pleasant but not spectacular, she knew she could never be content.
    Her figure was slender, almost too much so, which would have pleased many girls. But they didn’t have the constant comparison with Sylvia’s ripe curves. Dee didn’t appreciate her own shape—with all the yearning of seventeen, she wanted Sylvia’s.
    She wanted to be beautiful, she wanted boyfriends trailing after her, and a throaty, seductive voice. Instead, she was ‘the bright one’ and ‘pretty enough’. As though that was any comfort. Honestly! Older people just didn’t understand.
    â€˜I wonder what this one’s like,’ her mother said, returning with a duster that she put into Dee’s hand.
    No need to ask who ‘this one’ was. Yet another of Sylvia’s conquests. There were so many.
    â€˜She’ll get a bad name, having a new young man every week,’ Helen observed.
    â€˜But at least she’s got some choice,’ Dee observed wistfully. ‘Not like being stuck with Charlie Whatsit down the road, or the man who comes round with the pies every week.’
    â€˜I don’t want this family being talked about,’ Helen said firmly. ‘It isn’t nice. Anyway, what about all those doctors you meet at the hospital?’
    â€˜They don’t look at student nurses. We’re the lowest of the low.’
    â€˜The patients, then. You wait, you’ll meet a millionaire. He’ll take one look at you and fall madly in love.’
    They laughed together and Dee said, ‘Mum, you’ve been reading those romantic novels again. That’s just dreaming. Real life isn’t like that—unless you’re Sylvia, of course. I wish she’d hurry up and get here. I’m longing to see her latest.’
    Sylvia worked in an elegant dress shop on the far side of London. As Christmas neared, business was booming and her hours were longer. Today she was arriving home late, along with her new young man.
    Mark Sellon was a mechanic, newly out of work because his employer had lost all his money. Sylvia was bringing him home for Christmas in the hope that her father could offer him a job in the tiny garage he owned beside the house in Crimea Street. In that shabby corner of London, Joe Parsons counted as a prosperous man.
    â€˜Of course, he might simply be a good mechanic, and she’s bringing him for Dad’s sake,’ Dee mused.
    â€˜Then why would she want us to invite him to stay the night? By the way, have you finished putting the spare bed into her