How To Marry A Millionaire

My plans had paid off, but was it too early to relax?

- WENDY HOLDEN

The sun shone, the tropical birds sang in the bright-green foliage and an impossibly azure sea glittered at the edge of the golden sand.

My cherry-tomato-sized diamond engagement ring flashed on my newly manicured hand.

The minister stepped forward, smiling, the breeze from the sea tugging at his black-and-white robes.

"Do you, Stephen Jameson Carter III, take this woman..." I almost jumped up and down. I never got used to hearing Steve's name, loaded as it was with generations of blue-blood American privilege. It had sent an electric shock of excitement through me the first time I heard it; many months later it was still a thrill.

And now it would be my name too. I would be Mrs Stephen Jameson Carter III, wife of a one hundred per cent, copper-bottomed, rootin'-tootin', Harvard-educated American aristocrat whose family went all the way back to the Pilgrim Fathers.

Even more excitingly, I'd be mistress of the penthouse flat in New York we'd stayed in during our first date - and of the green acres stretching out before the white-painted mansion in Vermont. I hadn't visited the latter yet, but Steve had shown me pictures on his phone.

The minister turned to me now.

"Do you, Diana..." he began.

Diana, yes. My real name, Dawn, was the first thing I'd gotten rid of that day two years ago, when I'd decided I wanted more out of life.

The second had been the surplus two stone that encased, I had always felt, the person I really was. Three gym sessions a week and a strict diet had slowly shifted it. As my collarbones and waistline had slowly emerged, so had the confidence to shop for the sort of clothes I should be wearing.