A Wedding Worth Waiting For

A Wedding Worth Waiting For
Jessica Steele

True love is worth waiting for…WHITE WEDDINGSThe boss hasfound his bride…Karrie has been instantly smitten by company executive Farne Maitland. His mesmerizing blue eyes and powerful masculinity have won her over, and she's been the envy of her colleagues since they found out just who she's been dating!But Farne is a man of the world and he's keen to take their relationship another step further–while Karrie isn't! Her upbringing has made her determined that she will be a virgin bride. So, as Farne sees it, there's one solution: marry–and quick!

“I can’t—not until I’m married!” (#u83f559a1-19c8-51c5-a6f0-d475e56c8741)Letter to Reader (#u122944f8-0215-51d3-8f09-13f9d1ac84db)Title Page (#ub81eae76-9beb-53bc-806e-dc335b55208c)CHAPTER ONE (#ufae1bae6-afce-5ccd-b345-d31381dd6262)CHAPTER TWO (#ufe6570a4-9db6-5541-9db0-aa45d3cc1a7a)CHAPTER THREE (#ub6abfa87-3b7e-5e6a-9b61-47e998ec3e6f)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)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

“I can’t—not until I’m married!”

Total and utter silence met her remark—and Karrie wanted to die.

“Not until you’re married,” Farne stated, not so much as a question, but more as though he was letting that message sink in.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized again, feeling dreadful. “it’s important to me.”

“Important?” He seemed to be having trouble taking it in. Then he cleared his throat. “Er—how important?” he asked slowly.

“Essential. I...” Her voice tailed off—and silence followed.

Astonishingly—and very nearly causing her to go into heart failure—she distinctly heard him state quietly, “In that case, Karrie, we’d better get married.”

True love is worth waiting for...

Dear Reader,

Welcome to our brand-new miniseries WHITE WEDDINGS. Everyone loves a wedding, with all the excitement of the big day: bedecked bridesmaids, festive flowers, a little champagne and all the emotions of the happy couple exchanging vows....

Some of your favorite Harlequin Romance

authors will be bringing you all this and more in a special selection of stories. You’ll meet blushing brides and gorgeous grooms, all with one thing in common: for better or worse, they are determined the bride should wear white on her wedding day...which means keeping passions in check!

Happy Reading!

The Editors

A Wedding Worth Waiting For

Jessica Steele

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

CHAPTER ONE

THAT Tuesday started just like any other. Karrie was showered dressed and ready for work. She had debated whether or not to tie her blonde, gold-streaked shoulder-length hair back in some kind of knot, but had decided against it, and had brushed it into its normal straight, but just curving under at the ends style. Just because Darren Jackson had yesterday warmly remarked ‘I’d love to walk barefoot through your delicately pale, ripening corn-coloured tresses’ there was no need to get paranoid.

‘Poetical—but I’m still not going out with you’ she’d replied with a laugh. Darren, who worked in the same office, had been trying to date her ever since she’d started work at Irving and Small three weeks ago.

Karrie checked her appearance in her full-length bedroom mirror and felt she looked neat and ready for work in her smart burnt orange two-piece. She cast a glance at her—what were they?—‘delicately pale ripening corn-coloured tresses’, and, with a hint of a smile on her sweetly curving mouth at Darren’s over the top description, she left her room and went downstairs.

Any hint of a smile, however, abruptly departed as she entered the breakfast room. The chill in the air was almost tangible—her parents weren’t speaking. To each other, that was. What else was new? Karrie had grown up in a household where warring glances and icy silences alternating with storming rows were the norm.

‘Good morning!’ she offered generally, brightly, striving hard not to take sides.

Bernard Dalton, her father, ignored her—he still hadn’t forgiven her for leaving his firm and for daring to go and take a job elsewhere. Her mother did not reply to her greeting, but straight away launched into a bitter tirade. ‘Your father was kind enough to telephone me at seven o’clock last night to say he was too busy to make the theatre, as promised!’

‘Oh, dear,’ Karrie murmured sympathetically. ‘Er—perhaps you’ll be able to go—um—another time.’

‘The play finishes this week. Though I suppose I should be grateful that he rang me personally. The last time he got Yvonne to ring.’

Yvonne Redding was Bernard Dalton’s hard-worked secretary. ‘Um...’ Karrie was still striving for something diplomatic with which to reply when her father, with never a moment to spare, finished his breakfast and, without a word, went from the room. Karrie had spotted his briefcase in the hall. It would take him but an instant to collect it on his way out.

‘Furniture. Just part of the furniture, that’s all we are,’ her mother complained in the silence that followed the reverberating sound of the front door being slammed shut after him.

‘Er—Jan was looking well.’ Karrie sought to change the subject. Her cousin Jan was newly out of the hospital after an operation to remove her appendix, and, because Jan’s flat was in an opposite direction from her own home, Karrie had driven straight from work last night to see her. Hence, she had not been around when her father had phoned. She and Jan were the best of friends, and it had been going on for ten when Karrie had eventually returned home. She had thought her parents were at the theatre, but her workaholic father had not been in from work yet and her mother—clearly not at her happiest—had gone to bed early.

Mrs Dalton it seemed, was too embittered that morning by this latest lack of consideration on the part of her husband to be very much interested in her niece’s progress. And Karrie eventually left her home to go to her office reflecting that never, ever was she going to marry a man of the workaholic variety.

The further she drove away from her home, however, the more her more natural sunny humour began to reassert itself. Chance would be a fine thing! Well, there was Travis Watson, of course—he was always asking her to marry him. But he knew that marry him she never would. It was true that she hadn’t reached twenty-two without a few possible candidates moving into her orbit—but she had always moved out of theirs. It was a fact too, though, that since she intended to be two hundred per cent sure—and with her parents’ example before her, why wouldn’t she?—that the man she said yes to was going to have to be extremely special in more ways than one.

She drew up in the car park that belonged to the giant firm of Irving and Small with a hint of a smile back on her lips, glad to be part of the purchase and supply team. With new contracts being secured all the time, it meant her section was often at full stretch, but she enjoyed working there far more than she had ever enjoyed working for her father.

She had previously worked for her father at Dalton Manufacturing for a pittance. And, though money had never been a problem, she had started to resent that he expected her to put in similar hours to himself, something that had caused a great deal of friction at home—her mother loudly complaining that she was losing her daughter to the firm too. Which had led Karrie to suggest to her father that she wouldn’t mind leaving work at six most evenings, only to be told by him to go and find another job elsewhere if she didn’t like it.

So she had, and some stubbornness she hadn’t known she possessed had refused to make her budge and retract her resignation when her father had exploded in fury at her nerve.

‘You’d give up your chance to ultimately have a seat on the board!’ he’d ranted.

Ultimately! She wasn’t falling for that carrot being dangled in front of her. He’d promised her her own department in two years if she joined him from college and learned the business. She’d been there four years and it hadn’t happened yet.

Leaving her car, she headed for Irving and Small’s main building. ‘Karrie!’ She turned—where had Darren Jackson sprung from?

‘Morning, Darren,’ she smiled; she didn’t want to go out with him, but she liked him.

‘I still can’t believe your flaxen hair is natural!’

Flaxen! Yesterday, according to him, it had been ‘delicately pale ripening corn’. Her hair colour was natural, and had never seen a chemical dye, but she had no intention of discussing that with him.

‘Looks like being a nice day,’ she commented pleasantly as they entered the building.

‘Every day since you joined the firm has been nice,’ he replied.

She still wasn’t going out with him. ‘Concentrate on your computer,’ she tossed at him, and as they entered the open-plan office they shared with a dozen or so others she parted from him and went to her own desk.

The work was interesting but not so complicated that it did not leave space for private thought, and in one such moment Karrie fell to thinking of her father, who loved his work more than his home. Countless were the meals that were cooked for him and which, because he didn’t come home, were thrown away. And, thinking back to last night, countless were the times he and her mother had arranged to go out somewhere, only for his secretary to ring and say he would be delayed. Countless were the times Karrie had seen the excited light go from her mother’s eyes.

Kate knew that her mother had at one time adored her father. She probably still did—or he wouldn’t have the power to hurt her. But, while it upset Karrie when she thought of her mother’s hurt and unhappiness, she knew better now than to try to interfere. She had once tried to talk to her father about his neglect of her mother, and, aside from earning his deep displeasure, had done her mother no favours either when her husband had treated her even more badly than before, the end result being that her mother had become ever more bitter.

‘Have you got...?’ Celia, a colleague from across the aisle, interrupted Karrie just as she was mentally writing in indelible ink that, if she knew nothing else, there was no way she was going to have the kind of marriage her parents endured.

Breaking away from what she was doing, she felt no end of pleasure that, having worked in purchase and supply for so short a time, she was immediately able to answer Celia’s in-depth query.