Buch lesen: «Falling for her Convenient Husband»

‘So tell me about this new Phelix Bradbury.’

‘There’s not a lot to tell,’ she replied. ‘I worked hard—and here I am.’

‘And that covers the last eight years?’ Nathan queried sceptically.

He halted, and she halted with him, and all at once they were facing each other, looking into each other’s eyes. And her heart suddenly started to go all fluttery, so that she had to turn from him to get herself together. She supposed she had always known that this—‘the day of reckoning’—would come.

She took a deep breath as she recognised that day was here.

Get ready to be swept off your feet by perfect English gentlemen!

Mills & Boon^® Romance brings you another fabulous, heart-warming read by bestselling author

Jessica Steele

Jessica’s classic love stories will whisk you into a world of pure romantic excitement…

Praise for the author:

‘…Jessica Steele pens an unforgettable tale filled with vivid, lively characters, fabulous dialogue and a touching conflict.’ —Romantic Times BOOKreviews

Jessica Steele lives in the county of Worcestershire, with her super husband, Peter, and their gorgeous Staffordshire bull terrier, Florence. Any spare time is spent enjoying her three main hobbies: reading espionage novels, gardening (she has a great love of flowers), and playing golf. Any time left over is celebrated with her fourth hobby: shopping. Jessica has a sister and two brothers, and they all, with their spouses, often go on golfing holidays together. Having travelled to various places on the globe, researching backgrounds for her stories, there are many countries that she would like to revisit. Her most recent trip abroad was to Portugal, where she stayed in a lovely hotel, close to her all-time favourite golf course. Jessica had no idea of being a writer until one day Peter suggested she write a book. So she did. She has now written over eighty novels.

FALLING FOR HER CONVENIENT HUSBAND

BY

JESSICA STEELE

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

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CHAPTER ONE

PHELIX had not wanted to come. Oh, she loved Switzerland, but her previous visits had always been in winter when the skiing was good.

Yet now it was September and, apart from the remains of winter’s snow on some of the highest peaks, there was no snow. In fact the weather was sunny and beautiful. And here she was in Davos Platz, having arrived last night—and still feeling very annoyed because, in her view, there was no earthly reason for her to be there.

It was ‘business’ her father said. What business? She was a corporate lawyer working for Edward Bradbury Systems, her father’s company. But she could not for the life of her see why any lawyer, corporate of otherwise, would need to attend a week-long scientific, electronic, electrical and mechanical engineering conference!

‘I can’t see why I have to go,’ she had protested when her father had informed her of the arrangements he had made.

‘Because I say so!’ Edward Bradbury had replied harshly.

At one time she would have accepted that. Would have had to accept it, she knew. But not any longer. Not blindly, and certainly not without question. In the past she had been forced to accept every edict her control-freak father uttered. But not now. So, ‘Why?’ she challenged. It had taken a long while for her to get where she was, to get to be the person she now was. There was nothing left now of the weak and pathetic creature she had been eight years ago. ‘If it’s work related, I could understand a need. But for me to spend a week in Switzerland with a load of scientists who—’

‘Networking!’ Edward Bradbury chopped her off, but unbent sufficiently to explain that there had been whispers for some while that JEPC Holdings, one of the biggest names in the industry, were about to outsource a vast amount of their engineering. He had now, personally, along with the top brass from other competing companies, been invited to make the same Swiss trip next week, when the top men from JEPC would be flying in for a round of exploratory talks, give a general outline, and chat with the various highest of executives. ‘It will mean millions to whichever company gets the contract,’ he stated, money signs flashing in his eyes. Phelix still did not see, since as yet there was not a sign of any contract, why she had to go. ‘I’m sending Ward and Watson with you. I want you all to keep an ear to the ground; listen for anything else going on that I need to know about.’

Duncan Ward and Christopher Watson were both scientists and wizards when it came to electronics. But Phelix doubted that there would be anything going on apart from a load of boring old speeches. It made her feel a little better, though, that the two scientists, both men she liked, would be there too.

‘I’ve booked you into one of the very best hotels,’ her father stated—as if that was an inducement!

‘Duncan Ward and Chris Watson too?’ she asked.

‘Of course,’ he replied stiffly. And that, as far as he was concerned, was that.

It was not that, as far as Phelix was concerned. The very next day she went to see Henry Scott, her friend and mentor, and who was also the company’s most senior corporate lawyer. Henry was nearing sixty and, through their various conversations over the years, she had learned he had been a very good friend to her mother.

He must have been an excellent friend, Phelix had long since realised. Because it had been Henry that her mother had called on the night she had died. The night she had taken all the cruelty she could take from her domineering husband and had attempted to run away from him.

Phelix’s thoughts drifted back to that dreadful time. Back to that awful night. It had been a foul night when, pausing only to make that phone call and to throw some clothes on, Felicity Bradbury had fled her home. When she pieced everything together afterwards, Phelix thought that her mother must have seen car headlights coming towards her in the storm thrashing about overhead, and had run out into the road in the blinding rain. It had not been Henry, and the car driver had stood no chance of not hitting her. Henry had been held up by a tree that had crashed over in the storm and which had blocked the road. By the time he had found another route and reached her home, he had been acquainted with the news he had arrived too late. The police had waved him on.

But while he had not been in time to help Felicity, he had made sure that her daughter would not ask for his help in vain.

It had been Henry who, almost eight years ago now, had aided Phelix when she had decided that she wanted a career of some sort. He had taken her seriously to suggest, ‘Being a corporate lawyer is really not as dull as it may sound.’

‘You think I could become a lawyer?’ she’d asked, for one of the few times in her listless life feeling a surge of excitement at the thought.

‘I know you could—if that is what you want. You’re bright, Phelix. It will mean a tremendous amount of hard work, but we’ll get you there, if indeed law is what you fancy doing.’

And she had rather thought she did fancy a career in law. She had recently—no thanks to her father—had quite a lot to do with lawyers. She had found them upright and trustworthy which, having discovered the duplicity of her father’s nature at first hand, was more than she could say for him.

He, needless to say, had not cared for the idea of her taking up legal training—most probably because it was not his idea. But by then she’d been on the way to receiving ten percent of the very substantial sum of money her grandfather—the same type of hard nut as her father—had left her.

‘I said no!’ Edward Bradbury Junior had declared vociferously. ‘I forbid it!’

She had still been in awe of her father in those days. But, having only a short while ago been party to the biggest untruth of all time, she had again felt the stirrings of breaking free from the chains of his life-long dictatorship over her.

‘Actually, Father, I’m eighteen now, and no longer require your permission,’ she had dared.

He had taken a step nearer and, purple with rage, had looked as though he might strike her. And it had taken every scrap of her courage not to cower back from him, but to stand her ground.

‘I’m not paying for your years of training!’ he had spat at her, enraged.

‘You don’t need to,” she had answered, still watching out for his clenching and unclenching fists at his side. ‘I’ve been to see Grandfather Bradbury’s solicitors. They tell me—’

‘You’ve done what?’

He had heard, she was not going to repeat it. ‘They were most surprised to learn that the letters they had sent me had gone astray.’ Not half as surprised as she had been to hear the full contents of her grandfather’s bequests to her—nor the conditions imposed. ‘But what happened to my private and confidential mail is no longer important. I now know I have sufficient money to fund my own studies.’

Edward Bradbury had thrown her an evil look. She’d always been aware that he had no love or liking for her, and in the days when it had mattered to her she had wondered if it would have been different had she been the son he had so desperately wanted. But his love and liking had never been there, and had he ever loved her mother that love had died stone cold dead when she had failed to produce the male heir he’d so badly wanted.

‘Would you like me to leave home?’ Phelix had been brave enough to volunteer, more than hoping he would say yes.

She supposed she had known in advance that he would say no—she was the buffer between him and their housekeeper, Grace Roberts. In actual fact Phelix knew that Grace had only stayed on after her mother, the gentle Felicity, had been killed, for her sake. Edward Bradbury was under no illusion that if his daughter left then Grace, who was only a few years away from retirement anyway, would leave too. He enjoyed Grace’s cooking, enjoyed the fact that his shirts were laundered exactly as he liked them, enjoyed that his home was run on oiled wheels—he had not the smallest interest in spending his time trying to find a new housekeeper who would only measure halfway up to Grace’s standards.

‘No, I wouldn’t!’ he had reported bluntly, and stormed out of the room.

Phelix came out of her reverie and supposed she ought to make tracks for the Kongresszentrum. But she had little enthusiasm for the day’s events: a general introduction and getting to know some of the people. ‘Networking’ as her father called it.

She was more than a little off him at the moment. Had she not made that phone call to Henry from the airport before she had left yesterday she would probably not have known until today exactly why her father was so insistent that she attend.

‘Do I really have to go, Henry?’ she had asked the senior lawyer.

‘Your father will play hell if you don’t,’ he’d answered gently. ‘Though…’ He’d paused.

‘What?’ Phelix had asked quickly, sensing something was coming that she might not be too happy about.

‘Um—you’re coming back a week tomorrow, right?’

‘I’ll come back as soon as I can. Though I suppose I’d better stick it out until then. My father and all the big chiefs will be there from a week Wednesday—thank goodness I don’t have to be!’

‘Er—not all the bigwigs are leaving it until next week,’ Henry informed her kindly—and suddenly her heart lurched.

There was a roaring in her ears. No, she definitely wasn’t going! Though, hold on a minute, her father would never send her on this mission if he thought for a single moment that he would be there.

‘Who?’ she asked faintly, wanting confirmation and urgently.

‘Ross Dawson,’ Henry supplied, and a whole welter of relief surged through her.

To be followed a few seconds later by a spurt of annoyance at yet another sign of her father’s underhandedness. Ross Dawson was a few years older that her own twenty-six years. He was the son of the chairman of Dawson and Cross and, it had to be said, had a ‘thing’ for her despite Phelix telling him frequently and often that he was wasting his time.

‘Do me a favour, Henry?’

‘I’ve already done it.’ He laughed, and she laughed too. All too plainly Henry Scott had known that she would check in with him before she left London.

‘Where am I staying?’ she asked, loving Henry that, without waiting to ask, he had transferred her hotel booking.

‘A lovely hotel half a mile or so from the conference centre,’ he replied. ‘You’ll be more than comfortable there.’

‘You’ve cancelled my other reservation?’

‘Everything’s taken care of,’ Henry assured her.

She rang off a few minutes later, knowing that her father would go up the wall if he ever found out. But she did not care. It went without saying that Ross Dawson would be staying at the hotel she had previously been booked into—her father would have got that piece of information to him somehow.

Deciding she had better be going, Phelix checked her appearance in the full length mirror. She’d had her usual early-morning swim, in the hotel’s swimming pool this time, and was glowing with health. She stared at the elegant and sophisticated unsmiling woman who looked back at her, with black shiny hair that curved inwards just below her dainty chin. She used little make-up, and did not need to. She wore an immaculate trouser suit of a shade of green that brought out to perfection the green of her eyes.

Phelix gave a small nod of approval to the female she had become. There was nothing about her now—outwardly, at any rate—of the shy, long hair all over the place, gauche apology for a woman she had been eight years ago. And she was glad of it—it had been a hard road.

Having hired a car in Zurich and driven to Davos, she opted to walk to the conference centre, and left her hotel quietly seething that her father so wanted an ‘in’ with Dawson and Cross that he was fully prepared to make full use of Ross Dawson’s interest in, not to say pursuit of her to that end. He was obviously hoping that by spending a week in close proximity of each other, with limited chance of her avoiding Ross, something might come of it!

She wouldn’t put it past her father to even have telephoned in the first instance on some business pretext, and then casually let Ross, a director of Dawson and Cross, know that his daughter would be in Davos for a whole week.

She felt hurt as well as angry that her father, having sold her once, cared so little for her he was fully prepared to do it again. Over her dead body!

But, thanks to Henry having got wind of what was going on, he had been able to forewarn her, and at least do a little something to limit the time she had to spend with Ross. Not that she didn’t like Ross. She did. She just had an extreme aversion to being manipulated. And, in the light of past events, who could blame her?

She knew that her father had been having a liaison with his PA, Anna Fry, for years. She wished he would concentrate his attentions more on Anna, and leave his daughter out of his scheming.

As Phelix neared the Kongresszentrum she saw other smartly dressed representatives making their way towards the entrance. She would be glad to see Chris and Duncan, she realised, and hoped nobody else would wonder, as she had before Henry had tipped her off, what possible reason she could have for being there. At least she had been spared the surprise of seeing Ross Dawson unexpectedly.

She made her way inside the building, hoping there were no other unexpected surprises waiting for her on this trip.

‘Where did you get to?’ She turned to find that Duncan Ward and Chris Watson had spotted her coming in and had come over to her. ‘We looked high and low for you last night. Reception said you hadn’t checked in.’

It was gratifying to know that they had been concerned about her. ‘I should have let you know,’ she apologised. ‘I’m sorry. I thought I’d prefer a hotel a bit further away.’

‘As in I might have to put up with you two talking shop during the day, but I want some rest from it in the evenings?’ Chris grinned.

‘Not at all.’ She laughed, and did not have a chance to say anything else because someone was calling her name.

‘Phelix!’ She looked over to where Ross Dawson was making his way over to her. ‘Phelix Bradbury!’ he exclaimed as he reached her.

‘Hello, Ross,’ she replied, and was about to make some comment with regard to his act of being surprised to see her there when, even as Ross kissed her on both cheeks, she caught a glimpse of a tall, dark-haired man standing with a blonde woman and another man. But it was the dark-haired man that held Phelix riveted. She felt a deafening silent thunder in her ears, but even as she tried to deny that he was here after all, it took everything she had to keep her expression composed. She glanced casually away, but not before she noticed that he had been looking at nowhere but her!

Her insides were all of a jangle. She had not seen him in eight years, and only twice before then, but she would know him anywhere! She had been just eighteen then, he twenty-eight. That would make him thirty-six now.

Phelix began to get herself more of one piece when she realised that, thankfully, he could not possibly have recognised her. She was nothing remotely like the awkward and, in her view, late-developing teenager she had been then. But that was it—she was out of here!

But, having grown a veneer of sophistication, even if her insides were now feeling like just so much jelly, Phelix knew she could not just simply cut and run. But she wasn’t staying, that was for sure! As soon as she possibly could, she would tell either Chris or Duncan that she had forgotten something, had a headache, a migraine, athlete’s foot—she didn’t care what—and was going back to her hotel. From there she would make arrangements to fly back to England.

Hoping against hope that he was a figment of her imagination, she found she was irresistibly drawn to glance over to him again. It was him! He was tall, but even so would have stood out from the crowd of people milling around.

She slid her glance from him to the other man standing with him, and on to the close to six feet tall glamorous blonde woman. His girlfriend? Certainly not his wife.

Oh, heavens, he was looking her way again. Phelix flicked her glance from him. She was not unused to men giving her a second look, so knew his second glance was no more than passing interest. But, apart from his female companion, herself and several other women, the conference seemed to be a predominantly male affair.

She tried to tune in to what Ross and the other two were babbling on about, but when she felt as much as surreptitiously glimpsed the man leaving his companions, so her wits seemed to desert her.

But—oh, help—he seemed to be making his way in her direction! Dying a thousand deaths, Phelix prayed that he was making his way elsewhere, or that if he was perhaps coming over to say hello to Ross, that Ross would not think he had to introduce them; the name Phelix was a dead give-away.

He halted as he reached them and her mouth dried and her heart raced like a wild thing. ‘Ross,’ she heard him greet Ross Dawson, and saw him nod to Duncan and Chris. And then he turned his cool grey eyes on her. How she remained outwardly calm as, for the longest second of her life, he studied her, she never knew. And then casually, every bit as if he had seen her every day of his life for the past eight years, ‘How are you, Phelix?’ he asked.

Her throat was so dry she didn’t think she would be able to utter a word. But the poise she had learned since she had last seen him stood her in good stead. ‘Fine, Nathan,’ she murmured. ‘You?’

‘You know each other?’ Ross asked.

‘From way back,’ Nathan Mallory drawled, his eyes still on her. She guessed he couldn’t believe the evidence of his vision; the change in her from the frightened timid mouse she had been eight years previously to the cool, collected and polished woman who stood before him now.

‘You’re here for the conference?’ she enquired, and could have bitten out her tongue for having asked so obvious a question.

‘One of our speakers had to drop out. As I intended coming this way, I thought I might as well come early and fill in for him.’

She smiled, nodded—she knew darn well his name had not been down on the programme as one of the speakers. She, knowing he was likely to be in Davos next week with the other heads of businesses, had scrutinised the list of speakers very thoroughly before at last bowing to her father’s insistence that she come this week as part of the Edward Bradbury Systems entourage.

‘If you’ll excuse me,’ she managed, striving with all she had to hold down the dreadful feelings of anxiety that were trying to get a hold—she hadn’t felt like this in years! ‘I think I have to register in.’

Somehow or other she was able to make her legs take her in the direction she wanted them to go. And later, having had no intention of still being there but somehow having been swept along, she was in a seat, listening without taking in a word of what the introductory speaker was droning on about.

She had by then started to recover from seeing Nathan Mallory again after all those years. As well as being tall with dark hair, Nathan was handsome—quite devastatingly so. A man who could have any woman he chose. But Nathan Mallory—she drew a shaky breath—was her husband! She, for all she went by the name Phelix Bradbury, was in actual fact Mrs Nathan Mallory. Phelix Mallory. Oh, my word!

As she twisted her wedding ring on her finger—the marriage band he had put there—her thoughts flew back to more than eight years ago. She ceased to hear the speaker’s voice and was back in the cold, cheerless home she shared with her father in Berkshire. She was no longer in the conference hall, but was in her father’s study, back before she had met Nathan.

Her grandfather, cold and forbidding Edward Bradbury Senior, had died shortly after her mother. Phelix had missed her warm and loving mother so much, and later realised that, perhaps needing warmth and comfort at that time, she had been ready to imagine herself in love when Lee Thompson, their gardener’s son, home on vacation from university.

It seemed as though she had always known Lee. She had always been shy with people, but he’d seemed to understand that as their romance blossomed.

Though he’d left it to her to seek her father out in his study and tell him that she and Lee were going to marry.

‘Marry!’ her father had roared, utterly astounded.

‘We love each other,’ she had explained.

‘You might love him—we’ll see how much he thinks of you!’ Edward Bradbury had retorted dismissively. And that had been the end of the conversation —and the end of her romance.

She had seen neither Lee nor his father again. When Lee had not phoned as he had said he would she had telephoned him, and had learned that his father had been dismissed from his job and that Lee had been bribed—for that was what it amounted to—to sever all contact with her.

She had been too shocked to fully take in what Lee was saying. ‘What do you mean—my father will pay off all your student loans?’ she had protested.

‘Look, Phelix, I’m in hock up to my ears. I was mad to think we could marry and make a go of it. We’d be broke for years! You’re not working and—’

‘I’ll get a job,’ she’d said eagerly.

‘What could you do? You’re trained for nothing. Any money you’d be able to bring in would be nothing at all like as much as we’d need to keep us afloat.’

That was when a pride she hadn’t known she had started to bite, and she had taken a deep breath. ‘So, for money you’d forget all our plans, all we ever said? All—’

‘I have no choice. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be talking to you now. I’m risking the bonus your old man promised me if I—’

‘Goodbye, Lee,’ she had cut in, and had put down the phone.

After that she hadn’t cared very much what happened. But a few days later she had been able to accept that, her pride feeling more bruised than her heart, that she had been more fond of Lee than in love with him. And that in fact what lay at the base of her wanting to marry him was more an urgent desire for change of some sort. More a need for some kind of escape from this—nothingness. For the chance to leave home, the chance to get away from her intimidating father.

And, since it was for sure Lee had not been in love with her either, she’d realised that any marriage they’d made would probably not have lasted. Not that she had seen her father’s actions as doing her a favour. She had not. She’d still wanted to get away. But she supposed then that she must have been living in some kind of rose-tinted never-land, because when she’d got down to thinking about leaving and striking out on her own, she had known that she just could not afford to leave. She could not afford to live in even the cheapest hostel. And as Lee had more or less stated—who would employ her?

Another week went by, but just when she had started to feel even more depressed, her father summoned her to his study. ‘Take a seat,’ he invited, his tone a shade warmer than she was used to. Obediently, she obliged. ‘I’ve just been advised of the contents of your grandfather’s will,’ he went on.

‘Oh, yes,’ she murmured politely, wondering why he was bothering to tell her. Grandfather Bradbury had been as miserly as his son, so probably had a lot to leave—but not to her. In any event, she was sure that anything he left was bound to have some ghastly condition attached to it.

‘Your grandfather has been very generous to you,’ her father went on.

‘Really?’ she exclaimed, surprised, Grandfather Bradbury had never shown any sign that he knew she existed when he had been alive.

‘But I’m afraid you are unable to claim your quite considerable inheritance until you are twenty-five,’ he enlightened her. The hope that had suddenly sprung up in her, died an instant death. Bang went her sudden joy at the thought that she could leave home and perhaps buy a place of her own. ‘That is, unless…’ her father murmured thoughtfully.

‘Unless?’ she took up eagerly.

‘Well, you know he had a thing about the sanctity of marriage?’

To her mind he’d had more of a thing about the iniquities of divorce. He’d had a fixation about it ever since his own wife had walked out on him and, despite all his best efforts, had ultimately divorced him. He had passed his loathing of women breaking their wedding vows down to his son. Phelix’s mother had confided in her one time when Edward Bradbury had been particularly foul to her how she had wanted to divorce him years ago. He had gone apoplectic when she’d had the nerve to tell him—delighting in telling her that if she left him she could not take their daughter with her. ‘When you’re eighteen,’ she had promised, ‘we’ll both go.’ And, until that last desperate bid when Phelix had been seventeen, she had stayed.

‘Er—yes.’ Phelix came out of her reverie to see her father drumming his fingers on his desk as he waited for her to agree that his father had had a thing about the sanctity of marriage.

‘So—he obviously wanted you to be happy.’ Her father almost smiled.

‘Ye-es,’ she agreed, knowing no such thing.

‘Which is why a clause was inserted in his will…’ Naturally there was a clause—possibly some snag to prevent her claiming her inheritance even when she was twenty-five, ‘…to the effect that if you marry before you are twenty-five you will be eligible to receive ten percent of the considerable sum he has left you.’

‘Honestly?’ she gasped, her spirits going from low to high, then back down to positive zero. Oh, if only this had happened a couple of weeks ago. She could have married Lee and claimed that ten percent and have been free! Well, not entirely free. Only now did she fully accept that she was glad her romance with Lee had gone no further. Marriage to him would have been a big mistake.

‘Your grandfather plainly did not want you to suffer financial hardship in any early marriage you made.’

‘I—see,’ she answered quietly.

‘And how do you feel about that?’

Her father was actually inviting her opinion about something? That was a first. ‘Well, I wouldn’t have minded having a little money of my own,’ she dared. With her father forbidding her to take any lowly job which would shame him, he made her a tiny allowance that, at best, was parsimonious.

‘We’ll have to see if we can’t find you a suitable husband,’ he, having paid off her one chance of marriage, had the nerve to state.

It was the end of that particular discussion, but less than forty-eight hours later he had again called her into his study and invited her to take a seat.

‘That little problem,’ he began.

‘Problem?’

He gave her an impatient look that she hadn’t caught on to what he was talking about. ‘The husband I said I’d find for you.’

‘I don’t want a husband!’ she’d exclaimed, appalled.

‘Of course you do.’ He overrode her initial protest. ‘You want your inheritance, don’t you?’ he demanded. ‘Ten percent of it represents a considerable amount of money.’