The Substitute Bride's Secret Lover

CHAPTER TWO : NO WAS NEVER AN OPTION

Sandra POV

“No.”

The word was out of my mouth before I’d even fully understood what my father was asking me.

He’d said it plainly, standing in Vivian’s doorway with his phone still in his hand, like he was reading off a business memo instead of asking his daughter to marry a stranger in two hours. You’ll take her place. You’ll marry Alexander Ashford.

“No,” I said again, louder this time, because the first one hadn’t seemed to register. “I can’t. I don’t even know him. I’ve never spoken to him in my life.”

My mother’s head snapped up from her hands. “What did you just say?”

“I said no.” My voice was shaking, but the word itself came out clean. “You can’t just…a new morning doesn’t just become my wedding day, Mom. To a man I’ve never met. That’s insane. That’s not a plan, that’s…”

“You dare say no?” My father’s voice had gone very quiet, which by now I understood was worse than shouting. “You are the only alternative standing in this room, Sandra. There is no version of the next two hours that doesn’t run through you. And you’re going to stand there and tell me no?”

“I’m telling you I can’t.” My hands had curled into fists at my sides, nails biting into my palms. “You’re asking me to just — hand my whole life to someone whose face I only know from a magazine. What if he’s cruel? What if I hate him? What if…”

I didn’t get to finish the sentence.

My mother crossed the room faster than I’d ever seen her move, and her hand caught me across the same cheek that was still faintly warm from an hour before. The second slap landed harder than the first, or maybe it just felt that way because I hadn’t braced for it a second time either.

“You selfish, ungrateful girl.” She grabbed my arm, her nails digging in, and shook me once, hard. “Your sister has already destroyed this family. Are you going to finish the job? Is that what you want? To watch your father go to prison for fraud, to watch me lose this house, to watch thirty years of staff lose their jobs, because you have a bad feeling about a man you’ve never met?”

“Mom, stop…”

“I will not stop!” Her voice cracked into something raw and ugly. “You have spent your whole life being the easy one, the quiet one, the one who never asked for anything — don’t you dare become difficult now. Not today. Not when it actually matters.”

She shoved me back against the dresser, the same one from before, and I caught myself on the edge of it this time, my palms flat against the wood, and I stood there with my cheek burning and my arm throbbing where her nails had caught skin, and I said nothing, because there was nothing left in me to say.

My father hadn’t moved from the doorway. He watched the whole thing the way he might watch weather — something happening, something he had no particular stake in stopping.

“Sandra.” His voice was almost gentle now, which somehow frightened me more than his coldness had. “I’m not going to pretend this is fair. It isn’t. But fair is not a luxury we have this morning. You either put on that dress, or you watch everything your family has built for three generations disappear in the next two hours, and you decide right now whether you can live with that.”

I looked at my mother’s face, still furious, still wet with tears she hadn’t bothered to wipe. I looked at my father’s face, calm and closed and waiting.

I thought about the word no still sitting in my mouth, and how small it suddenly felt against the size of the room, against the size of everything they were asking me to hold.

“Okay,” I heard myself say. The fight had gone out of my voice entirely. “I’ll… I’ll… I’ll do it.”

Neither of them said thank you. My mother simply straightened, wiped beneath her eyes with one finger, and said, “Good. Now get dressed,” like the last five minutes hadn’t happened at all.

The dress did not fit.

Vivian was two inches taller than me and built like she had been designed by someone with a particular aesthetic in mind — long-limbed and effortless. I was none of those things, and the seamstresses were currently making that very clear with their silence and their pins and the way they kept exchanging small looks over my shoulders that they thought I couldn’t see.

“Hold still,” the older one said, not unkindly, and I held still and stared at my reflection and tried to recognize the woman looking back at me.

I did not look like a bride. I looked like someone playing dress-up in her sister’s life, with a fresh handprint still shadowing one cheek that no amount of powder was quite covering.

The bedroom door swung open hard enough to hit the wall, and Sophie walked in with the expression she wore when she was about three seconds away from saying something she had fully rehearsed. I had already texted her about what was going on.

“Tell me you’re not actually doing this,” Sophie said, stopping in the middle of the room, her eyes going straight to the dress — and then to my cheek, and going very still.

“I’m doing it.” I met her gaze in the mirror. “Can you let them finish?”

“Sandra.” She stepped closer, lowering her voice just enough that the seamstresses could still absolutely hear every word. “You are about to marry a man you have never spoken to. A man who’s already agreed to take you as a substitution for your sister like you’re… like you’re a replacement part.”

“I know what I am.” The words came out flat. The seamstress with the pins paused for half a second and then kept working.

“Then stop.” Sophie moved around until she was standing in front of me, blocking the mirror, forcing me to look at her face instead of my reflection. “You are worth more than being someone’s second choice. You have always been worth more than that.”

Something in my throat pulled tight. “You don’t understand what’s at stake. I already said no, Sophie. It didn’t matter.”

Her face changed. “What do you mean it didn’t matter?”

I didn’t answer that. I didn’t need to. She looked at my cheek again, and understanding moved across her face like a shadow, and her jaw went tight in a way that told me she was furious on my behalf and had nowhere to put it.

“He’s going to be awful to you,” she finally said, quieter now.

“Maybe.” I turned back to the mirror. “Step aside, Sophie. Please.”

She stepped aside. She didn’t leave, though. She sat down in the chair by the window and watched the seamstresses work with her hands folded tight in her lap, and I was grateful for that — grateful she stayed even when she disapproved — because I had exactly forty-five minutes before I needed to walk down an aisle, and I did not want to do any of this alone.

My parents came in together not long after, my father straightening his cuffs, my mother holding a bouquet meant for someone else entirely.

“I called the Ashford family attorney,” my father said, as though the last hour hadn’t happened, as though I hadn’t said no once already and paid for it. “Herald Bent. He’s going to take the proposal to Alexander directly before the ceremony begins.”