Part-time Marriage

Part-time Marriage
Jessica Steele

Could she become his part-time wife?How could Elexa stop her family bugging her about finding a "nice" man to marry? Right now, she wanted to concentrate on her career. The solution arrived in the shape of wealthy businessman Noah Peverelle, who wanted a son, but who had no time for emotional entanglements. Impulsively Elexa accepted when Noah proposed.But their convenient, part-time marriage wasn't working out as planned. For one thing, Elexa made the mistake of falling in love with her husband….

“Does that mean you’ve already decided what it is you want to do?”

He looked at her levelly, his gray eyes fixed on her. “I want a son,” he stated. “I would prefer not to marry, but since I need to protect my parental rights, I’m prepared to make a temporary marriage. You have reasons, too, for wanting a marriage certificate. A brief marriage to each other would, I believe, suit us both.”

Elexa swallowed. There it was. Noah Peverelle had just offered to marry her. She wasn’t ready to say yes, she knew she wasn’t. “You mentioned giving me time to think everything through.…”

He was already getting to his feet, prepared to leave, when he asked, “If there’s nothing further you want to know?”

“I wouldn’t have to live with you?” she blurted out.

To her astonishment, he stated, “Beautiful though you undoubtedly are, Elexa, I’d prefer that you didn’t.”

To have and to hold…

Their marriage was meant to last—and they have the gold rings to prove it!

To love and to cherish…

But what happens when their promise to love, honor and cherish is put to the test?

From this day forward…

Emotions run high as husbands and wives discover how precious—and fragile—their wedding vows are…. Will true love keep them together—forever?

Marriages meant to last!

Part-Time Marriage

Jessica Steele

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

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE (#u134ba5ff-8b4c-56c8-9af1-3950cbd00568)

CHAPTER TWO (#u52ad1520-e4c1-58b9-ad2b-b946f8441e30)

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)

CHAPTER ONE

THERE were too many complications in her life! Elexa’s mood to complete the work she’d brought home was sorely shattered as she stared at the phone after her mother’s call and felt on the brink of doing something drastic.

Life should have been something of a breeze, and would be, were it not for her ‘family’ and, to a lesser degree, ‘men’, well-meaning in the main though they meant to be—only she wished that they wouldn’t.

Why couldn’t they see that she was happy and contented with her lot? She had an excellent job with Colman and Fisher, a name well known in the marketing world, and at twenty-five she was already a team leader in the market planning division, with every chance of going higher. So who needed a boyfriend, a lover, a husband?

Jamie Hodges was forever hoping to fill the position of her steady boyfriend. She was running out of excuses not to go out with him. With Des Reynolds she hadn’t bothered making excuses when, in his sexiest voice, he’d suggested that one night with him and she’d never be the same again. ‘In your dreams!’ she’d told him bluntly—but that hadn’t stopped him.

But although she found both men’s persistence wearing, it was her mother’s dogged insistence that at ‘her age’ she should by now be ‘settled’ that was the most wearing of all.

‘I am settled!’ she’d attempted to get through to her mother. ‘I’ve got a good job, a job I love. A job with endless opportunities for promo—’

‘I’m not talking that kind of settled,’ her mother had interrupted.

Elexa knew exactly what kind of settled her mother meant. Married, nice house in the country, children—particularly children; even before her cousin Joanna had produced an offspring Elexa’s mother had been desperate to become a grandmother. Since the arrival of baby Betsy, Kaye Aston had been ten times worse. Elexa had tried explaining matters to her, explaining how she already had her own home. So, okay, it was a flat and not a house, and it was in London and not in the country, but, given that she rented her flat, she had made it her own. She had tried explaining that she was enjoying her career too much to even want to think of marriage, much less settle down to that state.

The result of this heart-to-heart had been that, ignoring the possibility that any daughter of hers—even as academically bright as her daughter had shown herself to be—could be so totally dedicated to a career, her mother had grown terribly anxious and was now certain that Elexa must have suffered some extremely painful experience. An experience which she had kept quiet about, but which must have put her off men. Kaye Aston had refused to believe otherwise and had since taken to introducing Elexa to ‘gentle’ men—who invariably turned out to be ‘drippy’ men!

Elexa had moved from her old home and into her present flat a few years ago. But, apart from some family gathering or other—more frequent of late—she was expected to return and visit her parents on average every three weeks. Because she loved her parents, Elexa willingly complied, and had been happy to do so.

But that had been then, before her cousin Joanna had firstly become engaged and subsequently had married; that Elexa’s younger cousin had married first had not gone down well. Kaye Aston had not lost the opportunity to tell Elexa of her disappointment, and since Joanna and David had produced baby Betsy Elexa’s mother seemed to have only one topic of conversation.

Elexa had started to dread her mother’s phone calls. But she had begun to dread even more her once-every-three-weeks visits to her old home, never knowing what man it would be this time. Where her mother found them from was a mystery to Elexa—she must have her scouts out searching!

Kaye Aston’s phone call just now had been to remind her, at length, that it was baby Betsy’s christening this coming Sunday. ‘You remember Thomas Fielding?’ her mother had asked. ‘Now isn’t it kind?’ she’d rushed on. ‘Joanna has invited him to the party afterwards.’

Tommy Fielding was a man Elexa had known for years, a man who was about the same age as herself and was another ‘gentle’ soul. No need to ask why her mother had wangled an invitation for him. Worse, Elexa saw Aunt Celia’s hand in this. Aunt Celia, one of her mother’s two sisters, was Joanna’s mother. Quite clearly Aunt Celia had been roped in to cajole Joanna into issuing the invitation. Which, in turn, Elexa suddenly realised, must mean that Joanna as well as Aunt Celia had joined in the ‘Let’s get Elexa married’ campaign.

Feeling at her wits’ end, Elexa knew all too well that to try again to explain that she had not endured any painful experience would be like banging her head against a brick wall. Countless were the times she had tried to get through that she found her work far more interesting than any man she had come across. She had lost count of the times she had explained that she just did not want to be married, and that she had no desire to leave her well-paid career to set up home with some gentle soul like Tommy Fielding who, nice, sweet as he was—as they all were—would want her to play ‘wife’, and would be unbearably hurt to discover that she had a career she preferred to staying home and playing house.

Suddenly, and as abruptly, Elexa all at once knew she had had enough. She was aware that her mother worried about her, but, feeling backed into a corner with no way out, Elexa just knew she could not take any more of it. She had tried, endlessly tried, explaining to her mother that she was not interested in ‘settling down’, and that her career had priority over everything. What had been the result? Even more pressure, and with back-up forces.

Well, she wasn’t having it. Elexa pushed distraught fingers through her pale gold-lit blonde hair. But what could she do about it? All she craved was a year free of the relentless pressure—there was chance of promotion in the not-too-distant future. She just wanted time to concentrate all her spare energies on that.

She sighed and stared unseeing across the room, and then—perhaps born of utter desperation, but entirely un-bidden—she was suddenly recalling again the conversation she had overheard about a month ago. It had been one lunchtime and she had been waiting for her friend Lois Crosby to join her. Lois was always late.

She and Lois were meeting to have lunch at the Montgomery, and, as busy as Elexa always was, she had been first there. The head waiter had led her to a series of sectioned-off booths, designed so that business people could lunch in the smart restaurant and be able to converse in relative privacy to discuss their business.

Elexa sometimes entertained clients at the Montgomery and, her name—or possibly her face—recognised, she had been left with a menu and the drink she had ordered to wait for her guest.

She’d had her back to the adjoining booth, but whatever she had been thinking about—either work, or Lois and, it was not unlikely, family pressures—had gone from her head when she had become aware that the previous lone occupant of the booth behind had company.