Scandalous Bride

Scandalous Bride
Diana Hamilton

Have you heard the latest? Don't tell anyone, but… . Nathan Monroe didn't know what to believe: he'd just heard that the woman he'd married wasn't all that she seemed. Olivia Monroe was apparently a ruthless woman who would do anything to get what she wanted… . But what did Nat actually know about his newfound wife?Theirs had been a whirlwind marriage - everything had moved so fast - and all Nat could see was that Olivia was hiding some deep, dark secret. Torn by jealousy and distrust, their marriage was heading for the rocks, and the only way to save it was for Nat to discover the truth about his scandalous bride… . Scandals!

“Olivia Monroe killed her first husband then jumped into bed with her boss, the richest married rat in town!” (#u9ce93070-26bc-5f7e-95f4-63a9e96bed30)About the Author (#ubca8deb4-3f9c-5b83-9a0a-962e02a7b9f6)Title Page (#u10e65e92-39c0-5f5c-a9df-067881d8a2af)CHAPTER ONE (#u295c8d2e-73dc-5a60-be65-a1eaae12d900)CHAPTER TWO (#u5b8ddabf-b0b5-501b-baf6-4a3e7abc2ec2)CHAPTER THREE (#ub0c78e13-e705-512a-a1c1-b1ec91cff4da)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)CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

“Olivia Monroe killed her first husband then jumped into bed with her boss, the richest married rat in town!”

Olivia and Nat stood behind the man as he continued to make the scandalous allegations. “Ask anyone—she’s been sleeping with my big brother for years, and it’s not going to stop just because she’s got herself a solid gold meal ticket for life, all legally tied up with wedding lines!”

DIANA HAMILTON is a true romantic at heart 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.

Scandalous Bride

Diana Hamilton

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

CHAPTER ONE

‘OLIVIA MONROE killed her first husband then jumped into bed with her boss, the richest married rat in town!’

The male voice, thick with alcohol, penetrated the smoochy dance music and the nightclub chatter. Olivia stiffened in Nathan’s arms, flinching as she heard a woman shriek, ‘You can’t be serious, Hughie!’

‘Ask anyone—she’s been sleeping with my big brother for years and it’s not going to stop just because she’s got herself a solid gold meal-ticket for life, all legally tied up with wedding lines!’

‘The Olivia who married that scrummy, rich as a plum-cake Nathan Monroe? Their wedding made the front pages a couple of months ago—good grief! Does he know he’s been taken for a sucker?’ The woman was obviously loving every minute of it and Olivia felt sick, her feet rooting themselves to the minute dance-floor. The elegant, glittering surroundings suddenly felt tawdry.

Had Nathan heard?

Nathan had.

His big, hard body went still. He took an incisive step back, his arms falling to his sides as his hands made dangerous fists. She looked up into his harsh and beautiful face and shuddered, her skin crawling with fire and then ice.

Sometimes the inescapable intensity of what she felt for him frightened her. The inadmissible knowledge that she couldn’t live without him, the way her blood turned to a burning torrent when he walked into a room, the reckless way she’d given every last scrap of her future happiness into his keeping when, years ago, she’d solemnly and sensibly vowed she would never fall in love again.

And now the anger frightened her. Savage, black anger blazing in those steel-grey eyes, pulling the tanned flesh tight against his strong and elegant bones.

Instinctively, her eyes sifted through the swaying bodies, homing in on Hugh Caldwell. Running to fat, he looked older than his thirty-four years. For a split second her eyes clashed with his, dark brown and malicious, before he led his dance partner off the floor with a smirk on his dissolute face.

Olivia held her breath, shocked by the vile gossip Hugh was spreading. The sound of the music had faded, the noise people made when they were enjoying themselves ebbing out of her consciousness, and all she could hear was the thunderous beat of her heart and Nathan’s ice-cold threat, ‘I’ll kill the son of a bitch!’

‘Don’t.’ Her hand on the black sleeve of his dinner jacket stayed him. He swung round to face her, his shoulders wide and hard, intimidating. She took a deep breath. One of them had to remain cool and collected. She felt anything but. However, she’d spent long, lonely years perfecting her act.

‘Make a scene and you’ll give credence to his foul lies,’ she advised quickly. ‘Think about it.’

Of all the exclusive nightclubs in London why had Hugh Caldwell chosen this one? He’d been born with a chip on his shoulder and for the past thirty-four years it had been growing heavier by the day. She had always suspected he could be dangerous but hadn’t imagined he could stoop so low. The cold premonition of disaster feathered over her skin, making her shiver, but—

‘Ignore him, or sue. Or both,’ she said calmly, her mind frantically willing him to agree. He looked capable of tearing Hugh Caldwell limb from limb and taking savage pleasure from every moment.

She hated violence in any form. For one terrible day, the last day of her first husband’s life, she had known what physical violence really was. She had known that it had fatally poisoned their already weakened relationship and had opened her eyes to the fact that violence of another form, emotional violence, had been eroding their marriage almost from day one. ‘Don’t put yourself down on his level.’

That, mercifully, appeared to have the desired effect. She actually saw the battle to rein in his flaring anger. And saw him win. But then nothing ever defeated him, did it? She fought her own impulse to sag with relief, simply dipping her head coolly as he commanded, tight-lipped, ‘We’re leaving.’

And she walked out at his side, five feet three inches of dignity, her glossy black hair whispering against the tanned skin of her back where the sweeping cut of the elegant white dress left it bare. Her amethyst eyes were staring straight ahead and her sultry mouth was caught tight against her teeth in case the tremor of her lips gave her away.

But distressed tremors plagued her on the taxi ride back to the Chelsea mews cottage and she couldn’t relax enough to make them stop.

‘It’s cute,’ he’d said when he’d snapped the cottage up just days before their wedding. ‘A London base for a time. I haven’t had a permanent home in England for years. A cute and private place to make memories before we move on. Like it, sweetheart?’

She’d loved it on sight. Loved the dolls’ house proportions, the cosy, secluded atmosphere, projecting that love into the wonderful memories they’d make together, not heeding the warnings about moving on, not even hearing them properly.

But now he wasn’t saying a thing. The distance between them was far more than a few feet of upholstery. The tension between them was making the small space a void.

He was a proud man with a streak of self-assurance a whole mile wide. A hard man. A brilliant wheeler-dealer, a key stock-market player, his mind had the cutting edge of a diamond.

No one took him for a ride, called him a sucker. That taunt would be eating up his mind. Perhaps even more than the evil slur on her character.

Olivia ached to touch him but didn’t dare. The dam would burst soon enough and the back of a London cab wasn’t the place to cope with it.

If only they’d stayed home tonight, she agonised futilely. But they’d been on the verge of their very first fight. One week back at work after their idyllic two-month honeymoon in the Bahamas, he had as good as demanded she hand in her resignation. He’d wanted to know why she hadn’t already done just that, and she had tried to explain her reluctance, put forward her own ideas, both of them getting more uptight by the moment until he’d pulled them away from the danger with that mind-shatteringly wicked grin of his.

‘Forget it, for now. We’ll eat out tonight, somewhere special. And go clubbing afterwards. Celebrate being married for two months and a week.’ His steely eyes had warmed in that special way, for her alone, and her insides had capered about, twisting with love for him as she’d hurried to change with no foreknowledge of how the evening would end...

After the taxi had drawn away the mews was quiet, the single street lamp accentuating the black shadows. Nathan opened the front door, de-activated the alarm system and stood aside, allowing her to walk through to the cottage-style sitting room in front of him. His silence and the tight cast of his features were ominous.

She switched on a parchment-shaded table lamp, dousing the main lights, preferring the subdued effect. The soft glow made the cottage antiques and the squashily upholstered twin sofas seem so safe and cosy—a much needed antidote to the arctic chill of the atmosphere Nathan was generating.

‘Were they foul lies?’ His voice abraded her.

A give-away flicker of pain darkened her eyes, but only a flicker; she had it under control even though she felt she was coming part, her flesh being painfully stripped from her bones by the knife-edge of his lack of trust

‘How can you even ask?’ Her voice was cool, masking her desperate hurt, her body in the understatedly sexy white dress taut and slim and proud. ‘Don’t you know me better than that—well enough to make the asking of such a question totally irrelevant and completely offensive?’

She lifted her chin higher, blanking out the shameful, hateful knowledge that not all of Hugh’s malicious gossip had been lies, and felt the deep ache of misery spread right through her as he answered tersely, ‘I only know what you choose to tell me.’

He turned his back on her, moving to a side table and sloshing two inches of malt whisky into a glass, draining it in one swallow, his mouth tight as he reminded her, ‘We saw each other, were poleaxed and were married three weeks later.’ He dragged in a sharp breath, his eyes holding hers, adding more slowly, ‘I never thought such a thing could happen to me.’

His lips curled wryly at the memory of that cataclysmic happening and her body leapt in ferocious response at the wonderful memories: the way they hadn’t been able to keep their hands off each other, the way they hadn’t been able to handle being apart, the glorious, fated inevitability of it all.

But then they were dragged back to the present, the brief bonding of shared and precious memories over.

‘Apart from the information that you are an only child and that your parents separated, I know two hard facts about your past,’ he stated. ‘First, you married when you were nineteen, his name was Max and he died six years later. Second, as a widow you became married to your career and that lasted for three years, until we met,’ he enumerated harshly.

‘Or am I wrong there? Does your career still come first? Is that why you won’t quit?’ His face tightened. ‘My work takes me all over the world—you know that. I want you with me, not stuck back here—you know that, too. Is being a PA to the head of Caldwell Engineering more important to you than being with me? Or does the attraction lie mainly with your boss, rather than the job itself?’

Olivia shivered uncontrollably, despising herself for that small betrayal. They had come full circle, right back to where the disastrous evening had started. But, worse than that, he had taken the gossip on board, beginning to question her relationship with her boss, James Caldwell.

She watched numbly as he dragged his black tie away from his shirt, tossing it onto one of the sofas, his jacket following a scant second later. And then he turned and met her wide and wounded eyes.