The Hostage Bride

The white silk dress Edward had insisted on fitted her perfectly, its softly flowing lines enhancing her slender height, the sleeveless, off the shoulder style revealing slim arms and smooth skin touched by the golden tint of the sun. Her pale blonde hair was pulled away from her face, and coiled at the back of her head, under the fall of the veil that cascaded down from the delicate tracery of a small tiara. The severe style emphasised the fine bones of her face, the high, slanting cheekbones and the wide, soft grey eyes.

But there was no colour in her skin under the carefully applied cosmetics; no light in the shadowed depths of her eyes.

Instead she looked like someone about to set out on the walk to the scaffold.

‘No one’s going to believe this for a second,’ she told her reflection fiercely. ‘Can’t you at least manage a smile?’

But no—that was much, much worse. The smile she switched on was so blatantly false it was almost a grimace and hastily she let it slide again, lifting her long skirts and heading for the door.

‘At last!’ Joe exclaimed as he saw her descending the stairs towards him. ‘We’re going to be late!’

‘Isn’t that a bride’s prerogative?’ Felicity returned, hiding her apprehension under a mask of insouciance. ‘And Edward will wait.’

Oh, yes, Edward would wait. He stood to gain so much from this travesty of a marriage. Much, much more than he had ever promised Felicity for her agreement.

Catching the blurred signs of movement through the frosted glass of the front door, Rico abandoned his apparently indolent pose and straightened up. Narrowed dark eyes took in his surroundings in a swift, appraising survey, and he nodded in grim satisfaction.

There was no one around. Everyone had been invited to the wedding of the year and even the staff had been given the day off to stand outside the cathedral and watch the guests arrive. If his luck held he should be able to manage this totally unobserved. As the door opened he slid out of the driver’s seat, one hand slipping unobtrusively into his pocket.

‘We’re just coming!’ Joe shouted to the waiting chauffeur as he waved his daughter out of the house. ‘Come on, come on, Fliss! You’ll have Sir Lionel thinking… Oh, what’s that now?’

Felicity turned her head in the direction of the phone which had started to ring back inside the house, suddenly a prey to a renewed rush of nerve-twisting uncertainty.

‘Leave it,’ she said. Now that they were on their way she wanted this over and done with.

But her father was incapable of ignoring the insistent summons.

‘You go on, darling,’ he said, already turning back. ‘I’ll just deal with this and then…’

Left alone, Felicity found herself unable to move. Her feet seemed frozen to the spot, her mind refusing to function. The intense wave of inexplicable fear was like a cold shadow chasing over her skin, making her shiver in spite of the heat of the July sun. She could see nothing, sense nothing that might have sparked it off, and yet…

‘Miss Hamilton?’

It was the chauffeur who had spoken, bringing her eyes to focus on him properly for the first time. Images bombarded her already sensitive nerves, giving her a confused impression of a very tall, impressive figure, not at all what she had expected of a professional driver.

He stood straight and proud by the gleaming silver-grey Rolls, an almost military discipline about his bearing. Straight shoulders under the black uniform jacket, a strong chest tapering to a narrow waist and long, long legs. Highly polished shoes, so elegant they looked almost hand-made, were set squarely on the ground, and one black leather-gloved hand held the rear door of the car open invitingly.

But his face was hidden underneath the peaked cap and, even squinting hard against the brightness of the sun, she couldn’t make out a single one of his features.

‘It is Miss Felicity Hamilton?’

He sounded almost surprised, as if she was not quite what he had expected, and the faint hint of an accent—Spanish, perhaps?—that she had caught as he first spoke was stronger now. Rich and husky, it turned the syllables of her name into a murmured enticement, one that curled seductively around her senses.

Fayleeseetay, he had said, and suddenly the shiver of apprehension she had felt earlier was transformed into a very different response. The tingle of pure excitement that zigzagged down her spine was totally inappropriate in a bride setting out to her wedding to another man. Or it would be, Felicity told herself, if she was marrying someone she truly cared about.

‘Felicity,’ she corrected crisply, hiding the pang of regret that twisted inside her behind the careful control of the English form of her name. ‘That’s right.’

She must look like a dithering fool, standing here in the middle of the drive, as if she couldn’t make up her mind where to go. And the way that the chauffeur was watching her only aggravated that feeling of discomfort, making her feel uncomfortably like something not too pleasant that he had dissected and examined under a microscope.

‘Felicity Jane Hamilton—soon to be Felicity Jane Venables.’

Gathering her distracted thoughts hastily, she caught up her skirts in a grip that was far too tight, crushing the beautiful silk impossibly, as she marched down the path towards him.

‘But you knew that, didn’t you? After all, that’s why you’re here.’

His silence was just a heartbeat too long, tugging at already tightly drawn nerves, stretching them out to the point of discomfort.

‘Yes, Miss Hamilton,’ he said softly. ‘That is exactly why I am here.’

His eyes were dark, such a deep, ebony brown that they were almost black, and his skin had a smooth olive tone that made her fingers itch to reach out and touch it. A straight slash of a nose combined with a squared, determined jaw to speak of a strength that bordered on ruthlessness, but the mouth told a very different story. Beautifully shaped and surprisingly soft, it made her long to see him smile, to feel the caress of those lips on her skin, to…

‘Won’t you get into the car, Miss Hamilton?’

‘I—oh—yes…’

Distracted from the wantonly sensual path her thoughts had been drifting along, Felicity could only blink in confusion and embarrassment, a wave of hot colour flooding her cheeks. That intent, probing gaze was so powerful, so unwavering, she almost felt that he could see into her mind, read the fantasies she wanted to keep hidden from him.

The fantasies she shouldn’t have been allowing herself to have! She might not love Edward, but she had promised to behave as his wife, and there was to be no hint that the marriage was anything other than a real one. That promise was going to be impossible to keep if she was already fantasising about other men and she hadn’t even got the ring on her finger!

‘Get into the car…’

Something had changed. Suddenly, subtly his tone had altered. A new note in it scraped uncomfortably over Felicity’s unsettled nerves.

‘I’m waiting for my father…’

‘You can wait for him in the car.’

The note that had disturbed her was stronger now, worryingly so. In an attempt to disguise the way it had made her feel, to ignore the slow creeping of cold pins and needles over her skin, she lifted her chin and met that ebony gaze head on.

‘I prefer to stay out here. I don’t want to crush my dress.’

The flashing glance of those dark eyes downwards over the dress in question was a look of pure scorn, and the shrug that lifted those broad shoulders dismissed her comment as purely feminine trivia.

‘We’re running late. Please get into the car, Miss Hamilton.’

It was that ‘please’ that did it. Something in the way it was enunciated, a dark edge that crept into his voice, moved it light years away from the common courtesy and turned it into a sound that sent something cold and unpleasant slithering down her spine.

But from inside the hall she could hear her father struggling to end the call.

‘I really have to go—can we talk about this later…?’

He would be with her any moment and that knowledge restored something of the confidence that the chauffeur’s disturbing attitude had chipped away at. She would get into the car, but because she wanted to, not because of his insistence.

She hadn’t realised just how difficult it would be. Hadn’t anticipated the problems of getting onto the high, soft leather seat while managing her long skirts, the enveloping veil, the silk train. She had one foot in the car when the struggle to avoid crumpling the dress resulted in an awkward loss of balance that drove a cry of shock from her lips.

‘Oh!’

He was there at her side in a second. One gloved hand came out, caught the fingers that waved in panic, searching for assistance. Caught and held them, the powerful muscles in his hand and arm tensing iron-hard to support her full weight.