Most of us would agree: Liquid courage gives many new relationships a helpful nudge. But not so for Alexandra Alston, who met her future husband, James Deagle, at his Denver rugby game in 2007. Yes, she'd had a bit of bubbly—it was her 21st birthday—yet it didn't embolden her to chat James up. In fact, she recalls barely talking to him. Days later, she returned to Yale University as a junior, but James, an interactive developer, couldn't stop thinking about the "pretty girl running around with Champagne." When she was back home in Colorado for the summer, he asked her out, and a relationship blossomed.
Once she graduated, they moved to Los Angeles together, and in 2010, Alexandra took James to Las Vegas for his birthday. But he had a different celebration in mind. On their last night, he took her to the Palms Place Hotel. After dinner, they went to the top floor, where—you guessed it—chilled Champagne and a suite covered in rose petals were waiting. "I had absolutely no idea it was coming," she says. "I started tearing up, and he proposed."
For their wedding three years later, Alexandra, an event production manager, dreamed up an affair that would combine James's Italian heritage with her love of French culture, using Italian food, toile fabric, the woodwork at Versailles, and the flora of Provence as inspiration. The duo wed on June 8, 2013 in front of 120 guests on the lakefront lawn of Colorado Springs's historic Broadmoor resort, which Alexandra had visited as a child.
