Page 20 of The Forever Match

Ash winced. She didn’t want to objectify her wife straight out of the blocks.

”Talk about her arse,” Beth said.

“Beth!” Jaz scolded.

“What? Have you seen her arse?”

Jaz waved her daughter’s comment away, then turned to Ash. “Don’t listen to any of them.” She reached over and placed her hand on Ash’s arm. “This speech is about the two of you that you know. Subtle nods, nothing too much, but it should be personal. Not about her arse.” Jaz gave Beth a pointed look.

”Talk about the moment you met. The moment you knew,” Jaz continued over the rim of her gin. “That’s what people want at a wedding. Not the jokes. They want moments. Magic. People want to believe in love again.”

The table went briefly quiet.

Ash looked down at her beer.

The moment. There’d been about a thousand of them. The morning she woke up at Balmoral, staring at Victoria in the morning light. The afternoon Ash had walked back into Victoria’s cottage on Boxing Day, when everything changed and they both knew. The morning she’d found Victoria asleep on the sofa in one of Ash’s Lionesses shirts, mouth open, snoring like a small industrial appliance. That smile she reserved just for her. How nobody knew what a pool shark she was.

And the one before all of them. The moment that started it all, when Victoria pinned her MBE onto her lapel, and the world had tilted on its axis. Ash had thought she was imagining it. It turned out, she wasn’t.

“Ash?” her mum said gently.

“Yeah.” Ash cleared her throat. She was, humiliatingly, blinking hard. “Yeah. I’ve got it.” On her napkin, she simply scribbled ‘moments’.

“You’ve got it?”

“Yes. I know what I’m going to say. I’m going to go with moments. Those snippets of time that only Victoria has ever given me.” She grinned at her aunt. “Thanks for putting it so simply.”

“You’re welcome,” Jaz replied with a grin. Her dad reached over and squeezed the back of her neck, the way he’d done since she was eight years old and had scored her first goal.

“Course you do, kid,” he said. “You always do, in the end.”

Cam grinned at her over the top of her beer. “Bullet points and vibes, my arse.”

Ash laughed then. Loud and proud. “Shut up, Cam.”

“Love you too, Captain. But I think you better finish that beer and write your speech, pronto.”

Chapter 9

Royal Wedding Day

When she was a little girl, Victoria never daydreamed about her wedding day like other girls did. No fantasies of white dresses, no Pinterest-worthy bouquets, no swooning over imaginary grooms.

Instead, she’d had a recurring nightmare. The one where she walked down a long, candlelit aisle towards a faceless man in a morning suit, the weight of the Crown bearing down on her shoulders. She always woke gasping into her pillow before she had to say “I do”.

It had haunted her well into adulthood. She’d lost count of the times she’d jolted awake, sheets damp with sweat, heart battering her ribs, only to sag into her mattress in dizzy, breathless relief that it wasn’t real.

This morning, she woke calm, rested. The grey London light was softer than it had been in days, the steady drum of rain against her windows finally easing into something gentler, almost apologetic. The forecast had promised a break in the weather by mid-morning. Victoria took it as a sign. The universe, finally, getting the memo. She hoped.

Which, frankly, was the least it could do, considering Astrid and Sofia had kept her up later than intended, trying to talk her into one last drink on her “final night of freedom”.

Victoria had heard the low murmur of their voices in the guest room well past midnight, that particular cadence of a married couple trading inside jokes in the dark, occasionally punctuated by Astrid’s filthy laugh.

She’d considered knocking, caving to their wishes and joining them for one last glass. But she hadn’t.

Instead, she’d decided that freedom was wildly overrated. Freedom was a cold side of the bed and eating dinner alone. Freedom was a lifetime of nightmares about faceless men and crushing duty.

She wanted the opposite. What Astrid and Sofia had. She wanted Ash, tangled up in the sheets, stealing the duvet, complaining about the temperature of the room. From tonight onwards, she was going to make damn sure that happened every single day for the rest of her life.