The Virgin Bride

The Virgin Bride
Miranda Lee

He wanted…an innocent brideWhen handsome bachelor Dr. Jason Steel took up residence in the small Australian town of Tindley, he soon knew who he wanted as his wife. Though Emma Churchill hesitated when Jason proposed, he was prepared to wait a month before she gave him her answer. The thought of making love to his virgin wife on their wedding night appealed to a part of him he'd never known existed….

“Are you going to try to get me into bed afterward?”

“No,” Jason said with what he hoped was an honest-sounding conviction. “No, I wouldn’t do that.”

“Why not?” she posed in a puzzled tone. “You said you found me pretty and desirable. You also asked me to marry you. I imagined you fancied me, at least a little.”

“I do fancy you. And more than a little, Emma.”

“It’s perfectly all right, Jason. I’ve been brought up in a country town, not a convent. I just didn’t want to give you false hopes if I agreed to go out to dinner with you. You’re a very attractive, experienced man, and I’m sure you know how to get a girl. But I have no intention of sleeping with you, not this side of a wedding ring, anyway.”

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Emma Darcy…

Miranda Lee…

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He’s big, he’s brash, he’s brazen—he’s Australian!

The Virgin Bride

Miranda Lee

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

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

WHAT a glorious day, Jason thought as he stepped outside. Spring had finally come, and with it that delicious sunshine which encompassed just the right amount of warmth. The town had never looked better, nestled at the base of now lush green hills. The sky was clear and blue. Birds twittered happily in a nearby tree.

Impossible to feel discontent on such a day, Jason decided as he walked down the front path and out onto the pavement.

And yet…

You can’t have everything in life, son, he heard his mother say.

How right she was, that wise old mum of his.

His heart turned over at the thought of her, and of her wretched life: married at eighteen to a no-good drinker and gambler, the mother of seven boys by the time she was thirty, a deserted wife by thirty-one, worn out and white-haired by fifty, dead five years ago of a stroke.

She’d only been fifty-five.

He was her youngest, a bright and affectionate boy who’d grown into a discontented and fiercely ambitious teenager, determined to be rich one day. He’d gone to medical school not because of a love of medicine, but because of the love of money. His mother had worried about this, he knew. She’d argued that money wasn’t the right reason to become a doctor.

How he would like the opportunity to tell her that he’d finally become a good doctor, and that he was quite happy, despite not being rich at all.

Not perfectly happy, of course. He no longer expected that.

‘Morning, Dr Steel. Nice day, isn’t it?’

‘It surely is, Florrie.’ Florrie was one of his patients. She was around seventy and popped into the surgery practically every week to discuss one of her wide range of ailments.

‘Muriel’s having a busy morning, I see,’ Florrie said, pointing to the bakery across the street. A bus was parked outside, and people were streaming out from the shop’s door, their arms full.

Tindley’s bakery was famous for miles. It had almost single-handedly put the little country town back on the map a few years ago, when it had won first prize for the best meat pie in Australia. Travellers and tourists on their way from Sydney to Canberra had begun taking the turn-off from the main highway, just to buy a Tindley pie.