Second-Best Bride. SARA WOOD
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adoring woman with a tempting dowry.’
Her father shrugged. ‘You get a lot out of this too. You share his half of the so-called dowry, after all. And I’m leaving you the other half when I die. You’re an heiress, you know.’
Claire noted with sadness that he wasn’t intending to leave anything to her mother. ‘I hope you’re not trying to buy my co-operation in this disgusting arrangement,’ she said unhappily.
‘You’d like to be rich,’ he said sullenly. ‘Everyone would.’
‘I want enough money so that Mother doesn’t have to work, that’s all.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Does Trader know that, in addition to the dowry, I will eventually inherit your portion as well?’ she asked slowly.
Her father nodded. ‘He gets the lot eventually, one way or another. The whole Trebisonne empire. So what? He loves you, you love him. That’s not so bad, is it?’
Claire groaned. ‘Yes, it is! How can I marry a scheming rat?’
‘Plenty of women do,’ grunted her father. ‘Why should you be so special?’
Because she wanted to fall in love and marry and be happy forever after. Because she wanted a husband who would walk over hot coals for her, cherish her in sickness and in health, forsaking all others till death them did part.
Not someone who’d put the screws on her father because he’d been fiddling his tax on a grand scale! Her father must be really desperate to give up half his wealth. He needed a lot of money for his extravagant lifestyle in Florida. The rejuvenating surgery alone must have cost thousands. And he’d let slip in a boast one day that he’d lost a million in Vegas. Expensive tastes.
‘Trader didn’t arrive in Ballymare by chance, did he?’ she said harshly. ‘It was no coincidence!’
‘Coincidence? Are you joking?’ scoffed her father incredulously.
Claire gave a little moan. She’d been set up. That meeting on the beach had been carefully planned. Trader was poor and he’d long coveted her father’s money—so badly that he’d sink to blackmail to marry it. She’d known from the first that he’d needed to count the pennies. He wore nothing but comfortable old clothes and their time had been spent walking, talking, eating simple picnic food.
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.