A Husband's Price

A Husband's Price
Diana Hamilton

The betrayal Six years ago, Claudia believed Adam betrayed her love, and she'd ended their passionate affair little knowing that she was expecting his baby. The marriage Now, Claudia is on the verge of bankruptcy and desperately needs Adam's help. Adam agrees - but for a price.He wants Claudia back in his life… as his wife. Marriage to the man who broke her heart seems almost too much to bear, but, for the sake of their little daughter, it's a price she can't refuse to pay… .

“Claudia and I have something to tell you, don’t we, my love?” (#ub1bd4af4-b201-524a-838d-fb1f865add66)About the Author (#u0efbdaef-d74f-5d03-b46a-63047345cf1b)Title Page (#uf5190307-d7e9-5588-a027-52bdc006a2f9)CHAPTER ONE (#u722e250f-c2ed-5751-8a92-7427202432dd)CHAPTER TWO (#ue744bd26-bfc2-5f7e-a299-806b75447a42)CHAPTER THREE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

“Claudia and I have something to tell you, don’t we, my love?”

Adam slid a possessive arm around her waist, his hand warm against her silk-clad flesh, making it tingle with unwanted awareness.

“I know it’s early days after the loss of her first husband, but when we met again we realized that what we felt for each other, all those years ago, was still there, and important to us. So we plan to marry just as soon as it can be arranged and we hope, sir, that you will understand, give us your blessing and be happy for us.”

Claudia felt her father’s questioning eyes on her and flinched. The silence wrapped her like a shroud. She shivered with tension. What could she possibly do or say? Adam’s bombshell had left her shell-shocked.

DIANA HAMILTON

is a true romantic and fell in love with her husband at first sight. They still live in the fairy-tale Tudor house where they raised their three children. Now the idyll is shared with eight rescued cats and a puppy. But despite an often chaotic life-style, ever since she learned to read and write Diana has had her nose in a book—either reading or writing one—and plans to go on doing just that for a very long time to come.

A Husband’s Price

Diana Hamilton

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

CHAPTER ONE

CLAUDIA passed an uncertain hand over the photograph album. She hadn’t looked at it in years; hadn’t wanted to set eyes on it even. She tried to walk away and out of the room but somehow couldn’t, then, her teeth biting into the warm flesh of her full lower lip, she gave into temptation and knew she’d regret it.

Sitting abruptly at the table beneath the library’s stone mullioned window, she hooked a strand of soft brown, deadly straight, shoulder-length hair behind one ear and tentatively opened the album. Here they all were. All the people; all the memories. All the shattered dreams and broken trust.

Her fingertips shakily grazed the glossy surface of the prints. She had put the album away on the top shelf out of sight a long time ago. Her father must have glanced through it then abandoned it here on the library table. Had he, in his grief, been searching for that lost summer, desperately straining to catch an echo of vanished, happier times?

And here he was. Guy Sullivan, her father. Six years ago, he would have been fifty-two, a big man, in his prime then, his arm around his blonde and beautiful bride of three months. Her stepmother, Helen.

Twenty years her father’s junior, recently divorced, the sizzling blonde could have turned into the stepmother from hell, but hadn’t. From the day Helen had applied for the position as a relief receptionist here at Farthings Hall, Claudia had seen how attracted her father was. Guy Sullivan had been a widower for eight years, Claudia’s mother dying of a rare viral infection when her only child was ten years old.

Three months after their first meeting, Guy and Helen had married. Claudia had been happy for them both; her initial fears that Helen might resent her, or that she might resent the woman who had taken her mother’s place in her father’s affections, had been unfounded. Helen couldn’t have tried harder to charm her new stepdaughter.

And here she herself was: the Claudia of six years ago. Hair much longer then—almost reaching down to her waist—her curves lusher, her smile wide, open, untouched in those long-gone innocent days by the betrayal that was to come later.

Her eyes misted as she looked at the photograph. She’d been eighteen years old and happy to be spending the summer at home before going to teacher training college. She’d been glad to help out around Farthings Hall, the exclusive country house hotel and restaurant that was both home and livelihood not only for her father now, but for his father before him.

And there in the background, prophetically perhaps, Tony Favel had been caught by the camera leaning against the stone parapet that bordered the terrace that ran along the west façade of the wonderful old Tudor house.

Tony Favel, her father’s accountant, the man who had brought Helen into their lives, introducing her as some kind of distant cousin, keen to make a new life for herself after a messy divorce. Even now she could hear the echo of his following words. ‘And haven’t you said, Guy, you’re looking for a part-time receptionist for when Sandy packs it in to have that baby she’s expecting?’

Tony Favel. At the time the photograph had been taken, he would have been thirty. Even then, his lint-blond hair was beginning to recede, his waistline to thicken. Claudia swallowed hard, her vivid blue eyes clouding as they rested on the grainy, slightly out-of-focus image of her husband. Tony Favel, whom she had married at the end of that summer six years ago.

Slowly, not wanting to, yet driven by something too dark for her to understand, Claudia turned the page and found what she had known she would find. And feared. All those pictures of Adam.

At the end of that summer, she’d vowed to destroy every last one of them, to rip them to shreds and burn them. But, when it had come down to it, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to touch them. Or, at least, that was what she had told herself at the time. Love and hate: different sides of the same coin. She had told herself she hated him but obviously she must have still been in love with him. Why else would she have found it impossible to destroy his likenesses?

She had taken all but one of the photographs of Adam herself and, looking at them now, she couldn’t deny that fatal male beauty. Or deny that those smoky grey eyes, that rumpled, over-long black hair, those pagan-god good looks and body to match hid a black, black heart.

The odd picture out was the one of her and Adam together. Adam’s arm was placed possessively around her waist, pulling her close into the side of his lithely powerful body, and she was gazing adoringly up into his face. So there they were, the two of them, eternally smiling, caught for posterity looking as if they were walking confidently through the best, the most blissfully happy, the most wonderful summer of their lives...

She never looked back into the past because it hurt too much, but now she couldn’t seem to help herself and the memories came crowding in. She could clearly see her younger self running lightly down the service stairs on that sunny, early summer day six years ago.

She’d spent the best part of the morning helping the housekeeper, Amy, to ready the guest suites. There were only four of them; by country house hotel standards Farthings Hall was small. But very, very exclusive. There was a waiting list as long as your arm both for accommodation and for the restaurant tables.

And, after all that hoovering, polishing and dusting, she’d been good and ready for a dose of that glorious sunshine she’d only so far yearned for through the spotless, glittering upstairs windows. She’d been just eighteen years old, was at the very beginning of the long summer holiday, had done her duty by helping Amy and now smelt freedom.

‘Oops!’ She skidded to an abrupt halt before she knocked her new stepmother to kingdom come. ‘Sorry—didn’t see you!’

Small and willowy with hair like spun sunlight, Helen always made Claudia feel large and clumsy and, just recently, awkward and a bit in the way. Oh, Helen had never, ever, given her an unkind word or look either before her marriage to Guy or after, but for the past few days there’d been an edginess about her, a brittleness that went hand in hand with discontent.

But thankfully not today. Claudia felt her muscles relax as Helen’s narrow green eyes gleamed at her. ‘Such energy! Oh, to be young and full of bounce again!’

‘You’re not old.’ Claudia grinned, falling in step beside her stepmother who was heading down the passage to the courtyard entrance. At eighteen, just, she regarded the thirties—even the early thirties as she knew Helen to be—as knocking on the door of middle age. But there was something timeless about Helen’s sexy little body, golden hair and perfect features.

‘Thanks.’ Helen’s voice was dry. She reached the door first and pushed it open. The sunlight streamed through and made her a dazzling, glittering figure in her lemon-yellow sheath dress and all that chunky gold jewellery she seemed to favour. ‘Coming?’

Claudia had promised herself a walk to the rocky little cove that could only be reached via the deep valley that bisected the Hall’s extensive grounds, but if Helen wanted her company she would gladly tag along. She usually fell in with other people’s wishes because she liked those around her to be happy and, perhaps just as importantly, she liked people to be pleased with her.

Like a big, exuberant puppy, she thought with wry, self-mocking humour. She could almost hear herself panting, feel her tongue hanging out!

‘Sure. Where to?’

‘To find Old Ron. He hasn’t sent the fruit and veg up to the kitchens yet. Chef’s furious. Lunches will be starting in an hour. I said I’d chase him up. Besides—’ green eyes gleamed up into the speedwell-blue of Claudia’s ‘—Guy hired a dogsbody to help Ron through the summer.’ Her sudden giggle was infectious. ‘He may be some kind of a drop-out of no fixed abode, but he sure is gorgeous! Worth the trek down to the kitchen gardens any time of the day!’ She paused significantly. ‘Or night!’

Claudia giggled right back. She knew Helen didn’t mean it; she had been married only for a couple of months or so, and she wouldn’t have eyes for any other man. ‘I didn’t know Dad had been hiring,’ she commented, striding along the raked gravel path.

She wasn’t surprised that this was the first she’d heard of a new employee. Recently she’d overheard her father and his new wife tersely arguing over Helen’s apparently sudden decision to give up her post. She had seemed to be saying that now she was married to the owner she shouldn’t have to work like a hired skivvy—though she would be happy to continue to do the flowers. Claudia had kept well out of the way of both of them, waiting until they’d sorted out their differences. She could imagine only one thing more embarrassing than overhearing them squabbling and that would be overhearing them making love.

Firmly squashing that thought, she asked, ‘So when did Adonis join the crew? Is he really a homeless drop-out?’ Claudia knew she was very lucky to have somewhere like Farthings Hall to call home. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have nowhere.

Helen shrugged slim, lightly tanned shoulders. ‘Goodness knows. He turned up on a clapped-out old motorbike a couple of days ago, looking for work. He admitted he was “just drifting” and apparently seemed happy enough to have the use of that old caravan at the back of the glasshouses for the summer, plus his food and pin money, in exchange for helping Old Rob around the grounds. His name’s Adam, by the way. Adam Weston.’

But Claudia wasn’t really listening as she followed Helen through into the walled kitchen garden, her thoughts exclusively for Old Ron now. The ancient groundsman couldn’t cope. Everyone knew it except him, which was obviously why her father had decided to hire someone to help out for the summer. How would Old Ron feel when he had to make way permanently for someone fit and young, someone who could actually walk faster than a snail?

Old Ron had worked here forever. Her grandfather had hired him initially, before Farthings Hall had been converted into the now exclusive country house hotel with what was reputed to be the best restaurant in Cornwall. He’d been here ever since, never marrying, inhabiting a flat conversion above the old stable block. Of course, Dad would never ask him to vacate his home, or pay rent, and, knowing her father, he would probably find him a token something or other to do, just so the old man wouldn’t feel entirely useless...

Then, for the second time in thirty minutes, Claudia almost ran her stepmother down. Helen had stopped without warning in the centre of the path, just inside the arched doorway in the high, ivy-clad, red-brick wall—the heated summer air was suddenly and unexpectedly thrumming with a tension so sharply intense that Claudia found herself instinctively holding her breath.

She expelled it slowly when she saw what Helen was staring at, her stepmother’s green eyes laughing, maybe even teasing just a little.

The new hired help was enough to bring a smile of glowing pleasure to any woman’s eyes.

Adam Weston was just as magnificent as Helen had implied, only more so. Leaning against a garden fork, dressed only in frayed denim cut-offs and scuffed working boots, he blew Claudia’s mind.