Buch lesen: «The Bride Ran Away»

“I promised I’d marry her, Jock. She’s carrying our baby. Backing out wasn’t an option.”

Ian, in decisive mode, usually turned Sophie’s legs to Jell-O and her mind to mush, but just now her brand-new groom sounded like a man who’d looked the executioner in the eye and gone under a blunt blade.

He’d lied to convince her to marry him.

She was nearly sick right there on the floor. As she slammed her hand over her mouth, Ian and Jock came around the corner. Unlike most of his overly buff colleagues, Ian was lean and long, agile and—right now—furious.

As if she’d lied to him. As if she’d married him under false pretenses.

“What are you doing?” Shock made his voice too harsh to recognize.

Swallowing, she said, “Hiding behind a marble column, listening to you end our twenty-minute marriage.”

Dear Reader,

Welcome back to Bardill’s Ridge, Tennessee, and to the Calvert family, whom you met in September’s The Secret Father. Are you ready to meet Sophie and her new husband, Ian?

Sophie’s not so sure she’s ready for Ian. She marries him because she believes they both want to create a family for their unborn child, but seconds after the wedding she hears him telling his best friend he had to marry her because she was carrying his child.

She confronts him. He admits “forever” sounds impossible to a bodyguard who’s never been home long enough to own a pet, but he’s determined to try. He’s so determined he follows Sophie to Tennessee, where he uses her family against her. They remind her how unhappy she was because of her own parents’ divorce, and Ian convinces her he cares enough to make their marriage real. But can she see forever now that he’s broken her trust?

I’d love to hear what you think. You can reach me at anna@annaadams.net. Come back to Bardill’s Ridge in March when Sophie’s cousin Molly Calvert falls in love with a man who couldn’t be more wrong for her.

Best wishes,

Anna

The Bride Ran Away
Anna Adams

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Steve, again, always—the sweetest love I’ve known

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

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

ICE TAPPED AT THE stained-glass windows like a million small fingers begging to come in as Ian Ridley fought an unfamiliar compulsion to run. On an unseasonably frigid Tuesday night in April, on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., he waited at the altar with his best man and a minister he hardly knew.

He licked his lips. They dried again immediately, despite the damp that seeped from the cold stone floor into his shoes and slowly climbed his body. This wedding was all wrong, a church even Sophie didn’t know and a minister who’d agreed to perform their hasty ceremony because the bride-to-be was pregnant.

Ian could have asked the minister he’d guarded a few years ago to marry them, but he’d been ashamed to admit he’d gotten Sophie pregnant. In a world where he made life-or-death decisions every working day, he hated to lose a friend’s respect.

His whole life had been an effort to prove he was tough enough, good enough. Even smart enough.

A professional bodyguard, he’d once been barely able to protect himself. As an eight-year-old, he’d been bullied at boarding school, where his parents had sent him to free up their time. Strength was a front he’d willed into existence the first time one of the older, bigger boys, had shoved his head in a toilet.

Sophie knew nothing of his past. They didn’t know each other well enough to commit to a regular dinner date, much less marriage.

Take their ceremony. He’d wanted to stand before a justice of the peace. She’d wanted the wedding to “feel real.” One of her friends had suggested this church, and Ian had gone along with the idea. A formal service in unfamiliar surroundings, performed by a minister who’d be grateful they were doing the right thing.

He’d asked Jock, his colleague on several jobs, to be his best man. Sophie had planned to have a maid of honor, but she’d uninvited her friend at the last minute as if she, too, was ashamed of their quick wedding. Ashamed she was marrying him?

Shame was no way to start a marriage, even if marrying Sophie Calvert was the worst mistake he’d made with her yet.

From the moment he’d first seen her, he’d wanted her, pure and simple. Maybe not so pure. He’d wanted her, knowing he was the wrong man for her. She believed in big, protective families like hers. He knew no such animal.

His folks had not only kept him away at boarding school, they’d lived a life quite separate from his. For him family meant Christmas break or brief summer holidays. Not every-day-in-the-same-house contact.

He’d wanted a different kind of family for himself. He’d even been engaged once. That woman—who’d wisely jilted him—was now the wife of an insurance salesman in Reading, Pennsylvania, and, last Ian heard, the proud mother of three. After she’d suggested he eat his engagement ring, he’d stopped pretending to be a man who could stay home long enough to own a cat.

His work required him to live on the fringes of other people’s lives. A bodyguard since the age of twenty, when he’d been assigned to drive a Supreme Court Justice’s nanny to and from work, Ian had fought for fourteen years—with weapons and his bare hands. He’d avoided fights when walking away better served the people he protected, and he’d willingly stepped in front of almost every weapon smaller than a rocket launcher. To keep his clients safe, he’d shoved fear to the back of his mind where it couldn’t hurt anyone.

Tonight, the prospect of marriage to Sophie froze the blood in his veins.

She’d helped him forget who he was. Unable to resist the mutual, blinding desire, he still distrusted its staying power. He’d met Sophie in Bardill’s Ridge, Tennessee, when he’d accompanied a client, publishing tycoon James Kendall, to the town to visit his daughter, Olivia. When Ian had left with Kendall, Sophie had seemed almost relieved.

Back in Chicago, he hadn’t anticipated the hunger he felt—for the scent of Sophie’s hair, for the endearing curve of her joyful smile, for the need of him that glittered in her green eyes and made him feel as if he mattered to her more than anyone else.

He’d resisted that hunger for a month. On his first free weekend, he’d located Sophie at her town house in D.C. Two months after that, he’d shown up at her office, and they hadn’t gone very far before she’d parked her car on the side of a dark road.

Another month later, she’d come to Chicago, and they’d eaten, slept and made frantic love in his bedroom for the first three days of her weeklong stay. Two more months and he was waiting in front of an altar, trying to become a father to the baby he’d created with Sophie.

He cared for her. Whatever raged between them wasn’t just sex, but Sophie and he had changed too quickly from strangers to lovers to parents.

Jock nudged his arm. “Here she comes.”

Candlelight brought her out of the shadows at the back of the church. Ian’s gut tightened.

Her dress caressed each curve of a body that nearly brought him to tears. Her stomach already rounded by their baby’s growth, she made him want to be better than he was, capable of promising to be with her when their baby came. He wanted to give his family what he’d gone without all those lonely boarding-school nights—love that went deeper than providing practical necessities.

She met his gaze, her eyes anxious, and he felt again the emotional coil of desire. He’d wanted Sophie in her grandparents’ apple orchard. He’d wanted her in the reception area of her OB/GYN office, surrounded by at least six women in different uncomfortable stages of pregnancy. He wanted her now, as urgently as he needed his next breath.

“Ready?” Jock asked.

Hell no. As if she could hear Jock and sense her husband-to-be’s less-than-heroic response, she lowered her head. Ian nodded.

Love was supposed to last. Lust burned itself out. How could he tell which had him in its grip?

Sophie carried no flowers and, staring at her hands, clamped together yet shaking, she moved down the gray flagstone aisle without music. They’d skipped all the usual trimmings except her dress and his black suit. As he watched Sophie approach, Ian could almost taste her skin. He tilted his head to catch the memory of her nighttime whispers. What secrets curved her mouth now even as doubt shadowed her eyes?

They hadn’t discussed what would happen after they left this church. He couldn’t just quit the only job he’d ever known and take up knitting. They hadn’t talked about her medical practice either. He slid moist palms down his thighs.

Tonight’s wedding had been their only goal, another sign that two people who’d planned each step of their lives until they’d met were bad for each other. His mind ought to be on the vows he was seconds away from making, and that summed up his problem in a nutshell.

Sophie had robbed him of his ability to distinguish priorities. With her practice in D.C. and his job in Chicago, they’d lived too far apart to get serious. They’d both known it. Neither had said so out loud. He hadn’t explained that he’d learned to protect other people because he’d once been unable to protect himself. She needed roots. He had none.

He didn’t want to hurt her. The salient facts all ran through his head, months too late, as she stopped at his side.

“Take each other’s left hands,” the minister said.

Ian silently forced Sophie to meet his gaze again. As she stared at him, her eyes filled with a strange conflict of trust and reservation. Her warmth seduced him as he rubbed his thumb over the fragile bones of her hand. Lifeblood pulsed beneath her skin.

He was wrong for her, but he wasn’t capable of walking away. Even if they were about to ruin their lives, he’d make Sophie Calvert his wife.

“Shall we begin?” The minister searched Sophie’s pale face and then Ian’s. “I assume you’ve both soberly considered what you’re about to do.”

Ian nodded again.

SOPHIE HAD SEEN almost six hundred patients through pregnancies both easy and difficult, deliveries both simple and dangerously complicated. Not one of those women had prepared her for the horror of experiencing morning sickness in a silk wedding dress that had looked alluring three weeks ago. With her twentieth week of pregnancy straining the seams, she felt like a huge white balloon on the verge of exploding.

The ceremony had passed in a blur. She still couldn’t think as she made her way into the bride’s room.

Three weeks earlier she’d anticipated Ian’s lustful appreciation as he watched her float up the aisle. Instead, she’d avoided looking at him, half-fearful of his dismay as he contemplated marrying such a bloated pregnant woman. Her snug dress foretold a load of responsibility for both of them.

She’d glanced at him as the minister asked them to take each other’s hands. After one peek at his flat blue gaze, she’d avoided him until he’d tilted her chin to kiss her.

That chaste kiss continued to confuse her as she struggled out of the dress. Nothing about their short relationship had been chaste. He was a fever that constantly burned in her.

Bending over, she undulated to work the dress over her head. And nearly passed out.

Grabbing the nearest chair, she caught her breath and gripped handfuls of material to slowly inch the dress over her shoulders. This wasn’t the wedding she’d dreamed of.

She’d imagined arguments with her mom, who would have become uncharacteristically maternal and tried to control everything—the wedding dress, the catering, even the setting—Bardill’s Ridge where her father lived, instead of D.C., where her mother had moved after the divorce. None of these would have mattered to her dad and her grandparents, her aunts and the cousins who’d stood in as brothers and sisters all Sophie’s life. They’d only want the opportunity to surround her with the unconditional love she craved tonight.

She hadn’t invited any of them, even though she’d wanted her cousin Molly to be a bridesmaid.

She’d been concerned that her family’s presence would make Ian feel bad about his parents’ absence. Rachel and Alex Ridley had turned down their son’s invitation, claiming they couldn’t get home from Ireland—where they’d retired for the golf—on such short notice.

Sophie would pay for the slight to her own family. Her mother would assume she’d planned her “elopement” just to get back at her parents for their divorce. The Calvert side, her father’s family, just plain expected invitations to all big events.

She smiled to herself, remembering the day she’d met Ian at one of those occasions. She’d been home to celebrate her grandparents’ anniversary, and he was there as a bodyguard to her cousin Zach’s father-in-law.

The moment she’d met Ian, she’d wanted him. He’d felt the same. Their undeniable attraction frightened her, but it was all they had. Passion and good intentions and a marriage certificate now duly signed and witnessed.

Initially, she’d been reluctant to tell Ian about the baby, but he had a right to know, and when she couldn’t avoid telling him any longer, he’d immediately wanted their child. He’d assumed they’d make a life together, a family. Everything he’d said had persuaded her he’d live or die for the child, whose only outward signs of life were her thickening waistline and her inability to digest anything with more taste or aroma than water.

He’d understood she wanted commitment that might lead to real love. She had no interest in simply being rescued. They’d been honest. No one could get hurt.

She yanked her dress. With the sound of a tearing seam, it flew over her head and fell into her open hands. She peeled off her hose and turned to stuff them into her bag. Taking stock of her green face in the tiny mirror the church provided for its brides, she blamed the harsh lighting for her horror-movie pallor.

No amount of crackers, no wishing morning sickness was all in her head, ever slowed the spin cycle in her stomach. “Damn,” she said and then prayed she wouldn’t burn in hell for swearing in church.

She pulled on jeans she hadn’t worn in two months and stared down at the parted zipper that refused to fasten. Her sweatshirt covered the problem and made her decent enough to go hunt for a washroom—which would have made a handy accoutrement for the bride’s dressing room.

Shivering in the damp cold, she tried each door along the corridor. At the sanctuary’s arched entrance, the eerie silence made her feel as if she was trespassing. Feeling sicker by the second, she tiptoed inside and crossed in front of the altar. They’d put the groom’s room over here somewhere, and Ian probably hadn’t needed extra time to wrestle out of his suit. He’d be in street clothes by now, and she’d just as soon he not get another glimpse of his perennially sick bride.

Nothing a palette full of makeup couldn’t repair once her stomach settled.

She eased around a cool marble column, still fighting waves of nausea. She was a strong woman. She just had to be stronger than morning sickness.

“Man, you’re sweating like a marathon runner. You shouldn’t have gone through with the ceremony. Sophie’s going to kill you.”

Brought up short, she recognized the voice. Jock, who judging from that statement knew her better than Ian.

“I promised I’d marry her. She’s carrying our baby. Backing out wasn’t an option.”

Ian, in decisive mode, usually turned her legs to Jell-O and her mind to mush, but just now her brand-new groom sounded like a man who’d looked the executioner in the eye and gone under a blunt blade.

He’d lied to her to convince her to marry him.

She was nearly sick right there on the floor. As she slammed her hand over her mouth, Ian came around the corner, his expression wary. He knew he’d screwed up. Unlike most of his overly buff, iron-pumping colleagues, Ian was lean and long, agile and—right now—furious.

As if she’d lied to him. As if she’d married him under false pretenses.

“What are you doing?” Shock made his voice too harsh to recognize.

She eased her hand just beneath her lips. “Hiding behind a marble column, listening to you end our twenty-minute marriage.”

“I don’t want to end—”

“I need a bathroom. I’m gonna be sick.”

He pointed down the hall, and she ran, her feet smacking the marble. Just in time, she flung open the door and bolted into a stall. Thank God Ian wasn’t chivalrous enough to follow.

At last, with her stomach as empty as her heart, she braced her hands on the stall and stared at the tile through watery eyes. Longing to sink to the floor, she plucked up enough pride to stay on her feet.

Her idiotic tears were a side effect of being ill and pregnant and hormone ridden. Nothing more. It wasn’t as if she loved Ian.

She stumbled to the pedestal sink and twirled a squeaking handle imprinted with an old-fashioned H for hot. Nothing happened, but C for cold worked.

The hinges on the washroom door squeaked in a long, low protest as someone slowly entered. Someone. Who was she kidding? Ian couldn’t pass up a chance to lope to the rescue.

Bending farther into the sink, she splashed cold water on her face. Long legs in black gabardine appeared in her peripheral vision. Straightening, she turned off the water and met his I-dare-you-to-face-the-truth stare.

“This is the women’s room.”

“Men’s, actually.” He jerked a thumb toward the far wall where three urinals hung in a row. “I’ll bet the faucets work in the women’s room.”

His dry sense of humor had seduced her from day one. Not tonight.

She grabbed a paper towel that protruded from a black plastic holder, jumping as she glimpsed her mascara-streaked face in the mirror. “Where’s Jock?” She wiped her hands and concentrated on sounding as if she didn’t care, as if nothing too terrible had happened.

“He went home.”

She took refuge in patting water off her cheeks. “Ian, I won’t stay with you.”

“You heard something I never would have said to you.”

She considered pulling the sink off its pedestal and throwing it at him.

He licked his lips as if he couldn’t get enough saliva and went on, “I have to protect you and my child, and I agreed to something I actually didn’t believe in, but I am committed.”

“You don’t get it.” She had believed they might come to love each other, and she’d only married him because she’d thought he’d felt the same.

Turning away from him, she ended up in front of the mirror, facing their reflections. Neither of them looked familiar.

He was clearly scared. She was too furious to think straight. And whacking him with a bathroom sink might not help.

She held on to the anger, a nourishing, healthy rage that would keep her on her feet and make her a strong mother for her child. Since her own mother had left home, Sophie had vowed never to need anyone. “I didn’t ask you to marry me. I don’t want your pity, and I despise your sense of duty.”

He reached for her, his long fingers curling into nothing as she moved away. “I protect people. Why wouldn’t I protect you?”

She grabbed the edge of the sink. Unfortunately, it didn’t budge. Misunderstanding her urge to brain him, he moved closer and pressed his palm against the small of her back.

“Are you still sick?” he asked.

She shook her head, unable to speak over a lump in the back of her throat. Who knew the truth could hurt this much? She wanted—no, she needed to be far away from Ian Ridley. She danced out of his reach again.

“You only had to admit you didn’t want the baby. I’m twenty-nine years old, and I’ll take care of myself and my child.”

“We’ll take care of our baby,” Ian said. A sound from outside the rest room turned his head toward the door. On the alert, twenty-four hours a day.

Even so, she had a nasty surprise for him. “We’re not staying together,” she said as she wadded the paper towel into a ball and shoved it through the flap of the waste container. “If you’d told me the truth an hour ago, instead of telling Jock after we were married, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Now we’re going to have to find a way to annul our marriage when I look pretty damn consummated.”

“Sophie, don’t swear in church.” He smiled, no doubt to persuade her he was teasing, but the twist of his mouth looked more like a bloodless threat.

“I’d like to commit murder in a church. I’m only holding back on the off chance that killing you here would make you eligible for sainthood.”

She had to run before she started to reconsider. Start saying things like. We can try to make the best of this. We care about each other. Our child matters most. We can be parents. We can make marriage work.

Claptrap. He’d only married her because she was pregnant. She refused to be rescued. “I’ll never thank you for doing the right thing.”

He looked confused, but that was because he knew next to nothing about her. She’d caused her own parents’ divorce because she’d come home early from school one day and walked in on her mom making love with a stranger, and then she’d asked her father who her mother had been wrestling. When he’d confronted her mom, Nita had tried to lie. She’d accused Sophie of making up a story, and her father had tried to believe his wife. Wanting to believe lies was her family’s flaw.

They’d failed, of course, and her parents’ split had been unbearable for Sophie. She’d felt abandoned.

She’d never been vulnerable in another relationship until she’d let herself care for Ian. If he’d only married her because she was pregnant, he didn’t care as deeply, and she couldn’t allow herself to be the one with the most to lose. Better to leave Ian before he left her.

She clasped the mound of her belly with both hands. God help her, she was willing to sacrifice her child’s chance at a family to save her own soul.

“My feet are cold.” She pointed at her cranberry toenails as if she had no deeper care. She pulled open the door. “Get in touch if you want to know about the baby,” she said over her shoulder. “E-mail me, or call my office.”

She reached the hall before he caught a handful of her sweatshirt. “Wait a minute. I made a mistake, okay?”

“Several.” She tugged, but he held on tighter.

“Tell me you’re more sure than I am,” he said. “You only looked twice at me because your aunt wanted time to talk to James Kendall alone. Otherwise, I was, probably still am, just a big dumb ox to you.”

“I don’t care about your job.” Now she was stretching the truth. She had assumed bodyguards were all brawn, no brains. She freed herself from his grip and shook her shirt back into place. “It’s true. At the anniversary party Aunt Beth wanted me to occupy you for an hour, so she could talk to James Kendall alone, but I’ve wasted a lot longer than an hour on you.” What more did he want from her? She’d reshuffled her life and her patient schedules to see him in Chicago. “I meant what we said in that ceremony.” Honesty forced her to expand. “Maybe I thought for a second that I didn’t know you well enough to marry you, but I planned to work at our marriage. It wasn’t some temporary penance.”

“Like it was for me?” He tried to catch her hand, but once more she slipped away. He obviously didn’t know how to handle an antagonist he couldn’t drop like a bag of fertilizer. “I don’t care what you heard me tell Jock. I’m serious about our marriage, too. I wish we’d done things the right way, but—”

“You mean with a string of dates and a proposal and a virginal wedding and eventually a baby? You can’t have that with me. I don’t know what happened between us, and I must have been in a daze until tonight, but I’m not binding myself to a man who’s doing me a favor.”

He curved his hands around her shoulders, his grip tight but not painful—as if he knew just how much strength to use. “What you overheard was panic. I want you and our baby.”

She shrugged, and he tightened his fingers instinctively to hold her. She gripped his wrists and pushed him away. “I—don’t—need—you.”

Something shattered behind his eyes. She’d managed to hurt him, but she couldn’t afford to care and she didn’t look back.

The rest room door swished closed behind her and this time Ian stayed put. She made straight for the bride’s room and finished dressing, though her arms and legs seemed to refuse input from her brain.

She gritted her teeth, determined not to cry. Weeping over a bodyguard who’d simply done his job would be ludicrous and humiliating.

Yanking the zipper on her jeans as high as it would go, she wrapped herself in her coat, wadded her wedding dress underneath her arm and fled through the nearest marked exit. The frigid night reminded her of Tennessee. The mountains that held Bardill’s Ridge in their safe embrace would be full of mist in the morning.

She yearned to be there.

Because she was sliding on the icy sidewalk, she crunched through the frozen grass, hurrying around the church to her car. She opened the door, tossed in her dress, hitched up her jeans and climbed in.

How many times had Gran asked her to work at the “baby farm,” a clinic and spa for pregnant women who wanted time out and pampering before they delivered their babies? Sophie had always resisted. Though she loved her family, she’d wanted to be the only Calvert she knew, not a minor member of the teeming crowd.

What had she been trying to prove? She shivered, planting one frozen hand between her thighs as she used the other to insert the key in the car’s ignition. Her baby needed family—not a dutiful father, but a family whose special gift was unstinting love.

She stared at the church doors as her car shuddered to life and her breath hung in the icy air. She could deliver a baby one-handed in the middle of a typhoon. She always carried a well-stocked medical bag in her car, but she knew nothing about raising a child. Maybe she needed family, too.

Time to see if Gran still wanted an OB/GYN who had no idea how she’d managed to get herself pregnant.