I Do (Hate You) by Sienna Blake

Shell

24 hours ago…

 

 

I paused at the top of the steps on my family’s private plane to take in the view. I’d seen the Skye luxury resort and island dozens of times, but it still took my breath away. I stared at the ocean water that ran from the palest shade of turquoise to a deep, almost green shade, the waves barely touching the beach with the tiniest of waves.

We were just 900 kilometers north of Brisbane and bordered on all sides by sea, but we were protected from Australia’s unpredictable ocean currents by the reefs around the seventy-four islands that sat just to the east of the mainland.

The sand was so fine, it was almost clear, giving way to a dense forest of green trees and shrubs and vegetation. It had been carved out in a few places for a handful of hotels and bars and places to pull up your yacht, the perfect combination of nature and luxury.

My family owned the hotel on Skye Island, so it was my favorite, but if I was being honest, almost every hotel on the island chain was spectacular. For such a remote location, there was plenty to do, from snorkeling to sailing to playing on the secluded bays and hidden beaches.

My mission this weekend would be a bit different than all that—getting married with as little drama as possible. It was actually a long weekend of events. The hen party was that night, then we had a day to relax and hang out, and on Day 3, I would marry Rupert.

I took a deep breath of the warm island air and tried to calm my pre-wedding jitters. It was working until someone came up behind me at the top of the stairs and whopped me on the ass.

I would have tumbled down the stairs and onto the tarmac if it weren’t for the ass-smacker, who wrapped his arms around my middle to steady me.

I smiled as Miguel whispered in my ear, “Don’t you fall down these stairs and mess up that gorgeous dress, Shell Skye. Who is the designer? Chanel?”

“No.”

“Gucci?”

“Nope.”

“Some new and undiscovered Australian designer I haven’t heard of yet?”

“Um, yes, sort of. Well, I mean, you know her…”

I never got to finish that sentence because Talia and Vina stuck their heads next to ours while Vina held out her cell phone and shouted, “Claire, get on in here for our first official selfie of Shell’s wedding weekend!”

“I’m coming!” she yelled back from somewhere inside the plane. “I just need to get one more thing!”

“All you need is yourself!” Talia said in a voice that was a few notches past tipsy. “That’s why they call it a selfie and not a one more thingie!”

Then she started giggling at her own bad joke and I knew she was past tipsy and closer to sloshed.

“Got it!”

Talia peered back into the dark interior of the plane. “What was that pop? Claire, is that what I think it is?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I hope you’re just going to chug it.”

“Nuh-uh.”

Talia quickly stepped back as Claire popped out, shook an excellent bottle of champagne and sprayed it all over us as Vina took picture after picture while Miguel rapped the lyrics to a song called “Spray That Bubbly on Your Bootie.”

Claire’s signature move was hosing us down with bottled beverages, and I was ready for her this time. I went straight down in a squat position with my arms over my head while she sprayed it directly in everyone else's mouths and probably up their noses. It was extreme but at least it stopped Miguel from rapping anymore.

It’s not that I wasn’t here to have a good time. But that “new and undiscovered Australian designer” that Miguel had been talking about was actually me. I had designed this dress myself, then sewed it with my nana’s old sewing machine, so I was trying to keep it looking good.

It was aqua-colored silk that made my blue eyes look exactly the color of the ocean and contrasted with my auburn hair. At least that’s what Rupert had said when I showed him the fabric. He could be a little, um, stingy with his compliments so I was definitely going to run with this one. The dress had a simple scoop neckline and a little tie at the waist to cover up any flaws or bumps, or in my case, to try to add some curves to my slim hips.

Rupert’s own plane was supposed to arrive any minute and I didn’t want his first sight of me to be with wet hair and stinking of alcohol.

“Is the town car here to take us to the hotel yet?” Talia asked.

Talia was my sister-in-law, married to my brother, Logan. He was the CEO and majority shareholder of Skye hotels, the family business started by our father. Talia was also one of my best friends, crazy gorgeous, and she put up with my brother’s shit, so she was definitely a saint!

“The pilot called ahead to let them know, but I don’t see it yet,” I said, shading my eyes so I could look in the sky for more planes. “Rupert was supposed to arrive within ten minutes of us so I was hoping we could wait for him.”

I pretended I didn’t notice the eyeroll that Talia and Claire gave each other, but it was hard to ignore Miguel, who started yelling, “Boo! No boys! Unless they are hot, gay and want to sleep with me.”

I gave Miguel a smack on the bum like he had given me. “I could ask Rupert, I guess, but that could make the honeymoon awfully awkward.”

“Ooh, ooh. I see a big black car cruising this way. Is that our car?” Claire asked, magically pulling another bottle of champagne out of her large leather purse.

“That’s it,” Talia said. “Hey, we can still wait for Rupert, but let’s go hang out by the car while they load up our luggage.”

The driver pulled up almost under the wing of the parked plane and stepped out, bending deep at the waist and bowing. “Ladies, would you prefer to be whisked to the hotel or would you like what Madame Talia calls a little ‘tarmac party?’”

“Tarmac party!” they all boomed at once, except Vina, who asked, “What the hell is a ‘tarmac party?’”

The driver walked to the trunk, took out something that looked like a bed roll and dramatically unfurled it, revealing dozens of high-end mini liquor bottles. “I’ve also got mixers, ice and glasses in a built-in cooler Madame Talia had installed in the front seat.”

Claire pointed to the Grey Goose bottle and said, “Vodka tonic with twist, please! Easy on the tonic. Talia, you’re a genius. Why don’t you go work for your husband and his fancy hotel chain instead of slaving away for this ridiculous man?”

Talia dropped a kiss on Miguel’s cheek. “I love my work and I have the world’s best boss already.”

“Damn right, you do,” he said with obvious affection.

Talia was a marketing executive for Silent Brook Preserve, an environmental nonprofit in Sydney. She and Miguel did some amazing work for various endangered species and the forests that had been so hard-hit by the wildfires in recent years. I’d met Miguel through Talia one day at happy hour and except for the penis, we were practically the same person. We both loved partying, hot boys and shopping.

I watched as the four of them debated the merits of shots versus mixed drinks versus both. I was glad to see that the cocktails won out. If we kept up this pace, we’d all be hungover by lunchtime.

Claire walked up to me and made me take a sip of her excellent G&T. “Want one?”

“Yes, please.”

She scurried back off to Tim, the driver and apparently bartender, who was making little lime peels and putting them on swizzle sticks. I’d also met Claire through Talia, and she was probably one of the most fun, supportive, genuine women I’d ever known. And she could hold her liquor.

I’d known Talia, Miguel and Claire for years but had only met Vina a few months ago. She was married to one of my brother’s best friends, Rhys Carmichael. She was fierce and sassy, and I knew almost immediately that we’d be great friends. Rhys was flying here with my brother, but I probably wouldn’t see him until tomorrow since tonight was all about the hens.

“I hear a plane coming in for a landing,” Vina said, and we all looked up to see a sleek little jet cutting through the clouds and headed for the runway next to where we had landed.

“Must be Rupert,” Miguel said and if I’d looked, I was pretty sure I would have seen him flipping the plane the bird.

“I know you were born into this life and I just married into it,” Vina said. “But you do realize how crazy it is that you guys grew up taking private planes the same way the rest of us took the bus, right?”

“I know. But we all offset our carbon footprint every time we take a flight with that app Talia and Miguel’s nonprofit made,” I said in a rush, a feeling of guilt wafting over me.

“You know that’s not what I’m getting at,” Vina said, slipping her arm through mine. “Luxury hotels, private planes. I bet your family has a yacht, right?”

“It’s moored on the other side of the island,” I admitted. “In case anyone wants to take a spontaneous cruise.”

Vina laughed so hard that she had to cross her legs to keep from wetting her white linen pants. After a few seconds, I joined in her laughter and we sat there hooting and snorting as Rupert’s plane touched down. It whooshed to a stop a few hundred meters away on the next runway, sending our hair flying in our faces.

“Are there any groomsmen on that plane with him?” Claire asked me.

“I don’t think so. It will just be Rupert at the altar.”

“Dammit! I am determined to get laid at this wedding and Tim just told me he was married,” she said, trying to take a drink but instead getting the swizzle stick caught up her left nostril.

“Did you proposition him?” Talia asked, more amused than scandalized.

Claire made a raspberry sound with her mouth and waved her hand. “What? Of course not.”

While she spoke, the swizzle stick had been merrily bobbing up and down out of her nose until Miguel gently removed it.

As he pulled out the lime peel and swizzle, he said, “You literally just told him, ‘Hi, my name is Claire, I haven’t had sex in six months and I’m the last single girl in this group.’”

“Then you came up and told him that you were the last single ‘girl’ in the group!” she accused.

“What did he say?” Vina whispered, keeping one eye on Tim, who was at the front of the car making another round of drinks.

“The cheeky fellow asked me if it had been six months for me too and of course I told him ‘yes!’”

We all snorted at the idea of Miguel going celibate for six months. Talia asked, “Did you say six months or six hours?”

“I haven’t had sex since Tuesday!” Miguel shouted. “But I am looking for a relationship and I haven’t had one of those in almost two years! My sex life is top notch, but my love life is terrible!”

Miguel and Claire clinked their glasses in solidarity as I waved to Rupert, who I could see through one of the side windows in his plane. He waved back at me with one hand while holding his phone to his ear with the other. Rupert had promised me that he wouldn’t conduct any business over the weekend, but he sure looked like he was hammering out a deal. He tended to scowl when he was playing hardball and he looked like he wanted to murder someone right now.

“I just realized something!” Talia announced as she jumped off the edge of the car’s trunk so Tim and the male flight attendant could load our bags. I could tell by the way she said it that it would be a drunken revelation that the rest of the planet already knew.

“In just three days, my new sister—that’s you,” she pointed to me with an index finger that had a nail painted a lovey shade of lavender, “my new sister will be a grown-up married lady! Three days!”

“I know,” I said, giving her a hug and smelling the gin on her breath and the champagne on her multi-colored maxi dress. “But we’ll still be sisters and you can still boss me around.”

“Yeah, but can I swing you around?”

“Can you what? Oh, come on! Put me down, Talia!”

She had turned our hug into a spin, turning in a tight circle while I hopelessly swung limply around her. “Put me down!”

“Okay.”

I landed with a thud but then Vina picked me up and swung me the other way. “She’s blitzed, what’s your excuse?” I hissed at Vina as she spun faster.

“Oh, I’m getting there. Oh boy. That’s not good. Champagne, cocktails and spinning are a bad combination. This is my first super fancy hen party. How do you guys manage not to get bombed the first day and spend the next two in bed?”

“Pacing,” I said. “You don’t want to peak too early.”

“And experience,” Miguel added. “Aw, this is a mirror of Talia’s hen night before her fake wedding. We were all there for that one too, but tonight, it’s Shell’s turn.”

He said “fake” wedding because my brother and Talia had originally gotten married so that Logan could inherit our father’s hotel business. Dad had put it in the will that Logan had to get married before his thirtieth birthday, so he and Talia had faked being in love before they accidentally fell in love for real. We tried to keep the weird level as high as possible in my family.

“Thank you, guys, for coming all this way,” I said on the verge of happy tears, suddenly overwhelmed with love for these amazing humans.

Then my phone blasted an AC/DC song.

“Aunt Tillie?” Talia asked.

“Aunt Tillie. She put that as her text tone, and I don’t know how to change it back to the little ding everyone else has.”

“What’s her ring tone?”

“‘WAP’ by Nicki Minaj.”

“I love Aunt Tillie! Love!” Miguel screamed. “Read the text out loud!”

I looked at the screen and did as Miguel ordered.

 

Aunt Tillie: Running a little late, love, but will be there tonight for the hen party, so go get ready.

 

That put a smile on my face. Aunt Tillie was my godmother, and practically a stand-in mother after my own mum had died. Tillie was Mum’s younger sister and almost twenty years older than me, but she felt more like my own sibling.

I looked up from my phone as the stairs on Rupert’s jet flopped out and he appeared at the door, still on his phone. When he saw me staring, he slid the phone into an inner pocket of his suit. Even after a day of business deals and a plane ride, he looked impeccably turned out and polished. Miguel had once called him “good-looking in a prim, posh, private schoolboy way.”

Rupert turned to talk to someone behind him before descending the stairs, and I saw it was his bodyguard, followed by his personal assistant Natazia. She was Russian-Australian, with white-blonde hair and a banging body. They were together almost constantly but I trusted Rupert. Partly because I knew he had a thing for redheads and partly because he had never seemed to give her a second look.

The bodyguard I just couldn’t figure out. I knew almost nothing about him other than he was tall, dark and scary as shit.

The three of them walked across the empty tarmac, and I was grateful that his jet still had its engine on and it was too loud for him to hear what we were saying. Rupert was doing that thing where he flared his nostrils, and I knew he disapproved of our impromptu little party.

“Shell, did you hear me?” Miguel shouted, and I realized that he must have asked me something, but it was drowned out by the plane’s engine.

“No! Sorry! What did you say?”

He put his hands on either side of his mouth and screamed. “I said, you know it’s bad luck to fuck the groom before the wedding, right? You’re better off getting laid by anyone but the man you’ll be legally bound to for the rest of your life!”

In an unfortunate incident of timing, just as Miguel bellowed, the jet cut its engines and Rupert heard every crude word.

“Shit,” Vina whispered.

“Fuck!” Miguel shrieked.

“Hi, sweetheart,” I said, then gave Rupert the tiniest of kisses on his cheek. He hated public displays of affection.

“Hello, darling,” he responded, then glanced at the rest of the crew. “Greetings, ladies. I trust your flight was uneventful.”

They all mumbled various versions of “yes” except Miguel, who just looked like a naughty schoolboy who’d been busted making photocopies of his ass. I smiled nervously, wishing everyone would just get along.

This was already shaping up to be one unique wedding. I was usually the loudest, drunkest and wildest of us friends, but now I was kissing my fiancé on the cheek like he was my elderly grandmother while Miguel was screaming about me screwing some other guy.

We’d only been on the ground fifteen minutes and I already felt like this weekend was about to go off the rails.