Second-Best Bride

She gave a bitter smile. Because according to her aunts, her father had acquired the vast Le Trebisonne fitness centres by a cold-blooded and calculating second marriage to the widow of Philippe Le Trebisonne. And now the empire was being wrested from him by a man of equal cunning—ironically, also by marriage.

Trader and her father were unnervingly alike. And that horrified her. Two irresistible charmers. Both liars.

She winced. So much for being swept off her feet. Next time she’d apply Superglue.

‘Marry him!’ pleaded her father.

‘You’re asking me to sacrifice my future for you?’ she asked with quiet dignity. ‘You’ve only seen me twice in my life before this week. It’s been fourteen years since you last came to Ballymare for a brief visit—and yet you’re expecting my unquestioning loyalty!’

Her father’s hand closed around her shoulder like a vice. ‘If you don’t marry him, Trader will bring the Revenue men down on me and the police and I’ll lose everything. I want to be reconciled with your mother. She loves me——’

‘Yes,’ she said bitterly. ‘Even though you walked out when she was pregnant with me, twenty-three years ago!’ Her mother had loved her father through thick and thin, through infidelity, deceit, callousness. Inexplicable. But she knew that a reunion would make her mother overjoyed. Unfortunately, her father held the key to her mother’s happiness.

More blackmail. And she was being drawn into it whether she liked it or not.

‘We’re here. Again,’ grunted her father, leaping out. ‘Get ready. Remember how ill your mother is.’

Pain sliced through her like a knife through butter. The door opened and the chauffeur’s gloved hand stretched towards her. She stared at it blankly. But her father came around the car, pushed the concerned driver aside and grabbed Claire’s slender wrist with a flash of chunky gold rings, hauling her out with an impatient, ‘Too many people need this marriage. Get a hold on yourself and do your duty!’

Stunned by his lack of compassion, by his cruelty, she stumbled numbly a few yards down the church path through the crowds of friends and well-wishers. Words like ‘fragile’ and ‘beautiful’ and ‘ethereal’ came to her ears. For ethereal read shocked, she thought weakly.

Someone turned her around to pose for photographs. Hating to create a scene in public, she let herself be manhandled into position, silently enduring the embarrassment of the friendly compliments from everyone. Everyone loved a bride, she thought soberly. But…did the groom?

Trader was corrupt and grasping and he would change into a monster—as her father had—the minute she became his wife. Her mother had been fooled by Jack Jardine’s easy charm. Why shouldn’t she have inherited that blindness?

‘Smile!’ urged the photographer.

She did her best but her lips kept quivering. This was a farce! But it gave her time to think. ‘A few more,’ she suggested huskily.

Her hand fretted with a hairpin in her marmalade hair. Trader had likened it to a sheet of flamed water at sunset and said he loved it straight and hanging loose. But that morning Phoenix had organised it into alien curls heaped on her head and fixed with an arc of brutal grips. Claire felt like a prisoner, starting a gaol sentence. If only she’d waited and got to know Trader properly! But he could coax a polar bear to part with its fur…

‘OK, that’ll do.’ Jack took her arm and squeezed it. ‘This is it, sweetie,’ he said shakily. ‘Remember, I’d be no good to your mother in prison!’

Her face paled and she swallowed hard. Jack was her father, whatever his faults, and she couldn’t blithely ignore his distress. All her life she’d longed to win her father’s love. She’d tried, heaven knew, but he’d always found her irritating and she’d got in the way. Yet he needed her now and she couldn’t let him down. And she did love Trader. Life without him was unthinkable.

Claire walked from the sun into the shade of the porch. She shivered apprehensively. Butterflies and gremlins were scurrying around her body, making her feel faint. She was afraid to go ahead with the wedding—and horror-struck at the idea of stopping it.

Silent and nervous, trying to find the right thing to do, she waited while her friend Sue adjusted the Southern-belle neckline and fussed with the huge puff sleeves so that the material lay in beguiling folds off the shoulder. Suddenly feeling very naked with so much creamy skin gleaming in the half-light, Claire twitched them up. They slid down again.

‘Leave them!’ teased Sue fondly. ‘You’re marrying a passionate man, you idiot, not a monk!’

‘Passionate!’ she repeated faintly.

Yes, he was. It lay in the darkness of his eyes, the intensity of his words and the hunger in his mouth. Violent emotions lay behind that courteous exterior. Phoenix had said, ‘You’ll have great sex, darling!’ and had made her blush. It had been something she’d blocked out of her mind.

Claire shivered as terror gripped her slim body with its iron hand. Passion meant male lust, passion meant anger: the two things she was scared of facing. And she recoiled from the thought of animal lust and anger entering her life, because she’d seen her mother destroyed by both.

Yet Trader had controlled himself, for her sake. Her chin lifted decisively. She would marry Trader without protest and make it all come out well. Love conquered all. ‘Love reforms Blackmailer’. Her hopes rose again. She could show him what love could do; how it could heal and soften even the most desperate of men, the most power-hungry person who walked God’s earth. She winced. It was a tall order. Her mother hadn’t had much success with her father to date.

But if she could succeed, she’d save her mother the inevitable shock. Claire grimly shut her mind to the memory of her mother’s last angina attack. It had been frightening, terribly harrowing. If anything should happen to the woman who’d devoted her life to her…

‘I’m ready, Jack,’ she said to her father, and was proud of the way her voice remained steady despite her nerves.

‘About time!’ he grumbled, jerking her into motion.

The ‘Bridal March’ began, silencing her giggling bridesmaids. Claire glided into the body of the church in a soft, rich rustle of her huge skirts. At the top of the aisle, she paused, deathly white beneath the softly falling veil, her fingers digging hard into her father’s sleeve.

Curious faces turned towards her. To her left, the lovely, homely faces of many of her Ballymare friends who were chattering excitedly, their affection reaching out and wrapping her in a welcome warmth. Many were from the hotel where she and her mother worked—and where she and Trader had met when he’d come to stay.

But to the right swirled an alien clutch of salon-smooth complexions, exclusive clothes, designer hats and discreetly wafting perfumes that denoted Trader’s few guests. Her solemn eyes swept over them in astonishment because she’d never expected such affluence. But Phoenix had said Trader courted the rich, like her father used to. Did Trader also live beyond his means, toadying to the wealthy? She didn’t know. God help her, she didn’t know.

‘By Jiminy, there’s a few million pounds represented there!’ gloated her father triumphantly in her ear. ‘Clever girl!’

‘Jack!’ Claire’s cheeks burned with mortification. One of Trader’s guests had flinched at her father’s remark.

Miserably she walked at a funeral pace down the long aisle, between the stunning displays of blue and cream flowers that adorned each pew and which drowned her in heavy perfume.

And finally she found the courage to look at Trader. Seeing the heart-stopping spread of his broad back in the beautifully tailored morning coat, she felt the tension in her fingers miraculously ease. Slowly her hand uncurled, longing to touch that neat, dark curve of hair above his tanned neck and to relax the unnatural stiffness of his head.

Oh, God, how she loved him! Her anguished eyes burned into his back. If he’d turn round, she reasoned, everything would be all right. Even at this eleventh hour it would be a joy to find her worries wiped away. She didn’t want to hurt anyone today; not her mother, her father, her friends, Trader…herself.

Turn, Trader! she pleaded. He must know she was there! Her satin-clad feet were tapping on the grating, her many petticoats were rustling. Everyone else was looking! Didn’t he care?

‘Oh, Trader!’ she breathed plaintively.

‘Claire, darling!’ whispered someone close by. With a start, Claire recognised the warm tones of the woman Trader had lived with for most of his life. Phoenix’s beautiful, exotic face swam into focus. ‘You look ill! Should you be here?’

Claire went limp with gratitude. Someone cared. ‘No,’ she husked. Her tongue flickered nervously over pale, dry lips and she gazed at the raven-haired Phoenix, pleading to be saved from her nightmare.

Before that could happen, her father’s strong, expensively tanned hand reached out and patted hers and even he—insensitive to the condition of other people—could see that it was pale and trembling where it lay against the cascades of cream and pastel blue flowers that were appliquéd on to the fabric.

‘Pull yourself together, sweetie!’ he growled.

She was together. That was the trouble. Her rational mind had woken up and it was discovering all the flaws in her dream. Her love had been too unconditional, too trusting. She was an unsophisticated chambermaid. Trader was handsome and desirable.

Like her father! And he’d never been faithful…

Quite suddenly, Trader turned, jerking around with a sharp, impatient movement. She gave a small gasp of hope and her heart quickened its beat. But there was a frown instead of the usual look of adoration on his dark and handsome face; a frown that was replaced by a chilling stare as his eyes swung between her and her tense father. And the hatred between the two men blasted down the aisle with a shockingly tangible force.

‘Oh, no!’ she moaned, panicking.

Blindly, consumed by an unspeakable dismay, Claire tugged her hand from her father’s arm and half-whirled around, hampered by the trailing material and the weight of the long, flower-strewn train. She would run! She’d get into her car, leave Ballymare and never come back!

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_25ce51d1-dc1c-5029-9ffa-198ae5269230)

CLAIRE heard murmurs of consternation from all around her as she gathered her skirts up for the dash to the door. Then her father caught her hand and jerked her roughly back to his side.

‘You want to humiliate both your parents?’ he hissed furiously.