The Marriage Agreement

The Marriage Agreement
Christine Rimmer

YOU'RE GOING TO LOVE IT–THE REDHEAD'S SURPRISE.His dying father's wickedly whispered words sent memories spinning in Marsh Bravo's mind…. He and Victoria Winningham learning about love in the back seat of his old Plymouth Duster. The final bout with his old man that left him hell-bent on leaving Oklahoma–and his sweetheart–behind. Now he'd returned home to hear his father's final wish. Yet in the years he'd been away, his only regret was a redhead. A woman whose secret, he soon discovered, was of Bravo blood. A woman and child who would bear the Bravo name….

“I’m offering you what you said you wanted.”

“You’re a few years too late, and that situation was nothing like this one.”

“No, it wasn’t. Now I have a life to offer you. Now we have a daughter together. Now we just might have another—”

“I think we need to stop talking about what might be and think about what is.”

Marsh leaned in on her again, so close that Tory felt his warm breath on her face, so close that the pull of attraction between them seemed a magnetic force, charging the air around them. “What might be is what matters. You had my baby once without me. I hate that it happened that way. I’m not going to let it happen that way again. Damn it, I will be what I never had—a good father. If you’re pregnant, you will marry me….”

The Marriage Agreement

Christine Rimmer

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

For Barbara Ferris, my e-mail pal, who loves a good romance, sends me great jokes and is always checking in just to see how I’m doing.

Thanks, Barb.

CHRISTINE RIMMER

came to her profession the long way around. Before settling down to write about the magic of romance, she’d been an actress, a salesclerk, a janitor, a model, a phone sales representative, a teacher, a waitress, a playwright and an office manager. She insists she never had a problem keeping a job—she was merely gaining “life experience” for her future as a novelist. Christine is grateful not only for the joy she finds in writing, but for what waits when the day’s work is through: a man she loves, who loves her right back, and the privilege of watching their children grow and change day to day. She lives with her family in Oklahoma.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Epilogue

Chapter One

Summoned.

There was no other word for it.

Marsh Bravo had been summoned—by the father he hadn’t set eyes on in ten full years, the father he’d thought he’d put behind him as surely and completely as he had the Oklahoma town of his birth. As surely as he had turned his back on Tory.

Tory.

He’d trained himself not to think of her. And he rarely did anymore. There was no point. And besides, even after all these years, just thinking her name caused a tightness in his chest, a pained echo of longing in the vicinity of his heart. Putting Victoria Winningham behind him had not been easy. In fact, it had been the hardest thing he’d ever done.

Leaving his father behind? Well, that had been a relief, pure and simple. It had been walking away from murder before it had a chance to happen.

On the hospital bed, Blake Bravo stirred. He turned his head, opened sunken, unfocused eyes. Eyes of a gray so pale they seemed otherworldly. Eyes that would have looked just right staring out of the head of a mad wolf.

Marsh had his mother’s dark-brown eyes. He’d always been glad of that. The last thing he needed was to see his father’s eyes staring back at him every time he looked in the mirror.

The old man on the bed sucked in a wheezing breath. They had him on oxygen. He raised a veined, mottled hand with IV lines taped to the back of it and batted at the plastic tubing attached to his nose, letting his hand drop to the sheet again before he’d managed to dislodge anything.

The old man…

It was more than a figure of speech now. Blake Bravo was only fifty-eight, but he looked much older. He could have been seventy. Or even eighty.

The pale eyes narrowed as they focused on Marsh. “You came.” The voice was low, a whispered rasp, like the hiss of a snake.

“Hello, Dad.”

“Nice suit.”

“I like it.”

Blake grinned a grin to match his eyes—feral, wolfish. “Made it big after all, up there in the windy city. Didn’t you?”

“I’ve done all right.”