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      CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      EPILOGUE

      CHAPTER ONE

      OH, SHE felt dodgy, she really did. Why, oh, why had she had that crab and prawn cocktail at the hotel last night, when she’d known at the first mouthful it didn’t taste quite right? Stupid, stupid, stupid!

      ‘And do you, Christine Harper, take Enoch Charles Brown…?’

      Enoch? For a moment, Essie’s thoughts lifted from the state of her stomach and swirling head and focused on the couple standing at the altar in front of her. Fancy old Charlie having Enoch for his first name! He’d kept that quiet all through veterinary college—but then she couldn’t really blame him. Had Chris known Charlie wasn’t really Charlie but an Enoch in disguise?

      It was just at that moment that Christine turned her head in its swathe of chiffon edged with sequins and gazed up adoringly into Charlie’s handsome face, and Essie reflected wryly that it wouldn’t have made any difference if Chris had known or not. Her friend was head over heels in love with her dashing veterinary surgeon and had been from the very second their eyes had met on the first morning of college. And now here they all were, a few short years later, in Christine’s quaint little parish church in Stafford.

      As the vicar’s voice droned on, Essie’s eyes wandered from the back of the frothy lace figure in front of her to her own pale lemon satin-bedecked shape. She wished this was over. The pills Christine’s mother had insisted she take that morning—‘The chief bridesmaid can’t go hopping off to the loo halfway through the service, now then, Essie. Take these and you’ll get through without any problems’—had seemed to stop the more unpleasant manifestations of the touch of food poisoning she was experiencing, but the fact that she had been up all night and hadn’t dared to eat a thing that morning was making her feel very peculiar.

      She wished she could slip these precariously high-heeled shoes off. They were pinching like mad. Essie surreptitiously tried to ease her aching toes but nearly overbalanced in the process, only the quick steadying hand of Janice— Christine’s cousin—at the side of her preventing her from catapulting into the pair in front.

      It was as Essie was giving a weak smile of thanks to the grinning Janice that she noticed him. He was staring, openly, from his vantage point in the pew adjoining the aisle, and he was a big man—but purely in the muscular sense; she doubted if there was an ounce of spare flesh anywhere on the lean, finely honed male frame. His hair was jet-black, almost a blue-black, and his skin was very tanned, emphasising the ice-blue of the narrowed eyes still more.

      And it was the eyes that caused Essie’s face to straighten with an abruptness born of shock. They were disapproving. No, more than that, she corrected herself silently; they were positively scathing.

      She tore her mesmerised gaze away, jerking her head to the front again as she forced herself to take a long deep breath and count to ten, but she couldn’t do anything about the tell-tale colour flooding her skin.

      How dared he look at her like that? she asked herself furiously, her cheeks burning. The cold eyes had been withering, his mouth quite literally curling at the edges with a scorn that was searing. And she had never seen him before in her life. She knew she hadn’t. Him, she would have remembered!

      Her agitation wasn’t helping either her stomach or her fuzzy head and Essie tried desperately to concentrate on nothing but the scene being enacted in front of her; then, as the minister indicated for the bride and groom and their respective parents—along with the best man—to follow him out into the little vestry at the rear of the church, she was able to move forward and sink down onto the front pew and ease her shaking legs, blessing the fact that the tiny room had been considered too small to take the bridesmaids.

      Who was he? Under cover of a very plump lady singing a solo spirited rendition of ‘Love Found a Way’ at a volume that made the eyeballs rattle, Essie whispered the thought to Janice. ‘Don’t look now, Jan, but there’s a man in the second pew from the front, a…tall man. Do you know who he is?’

      ‘You mean Xavier Grey.’ Janice didn’t even have to think about it and there was definite relish in her voice when she said, ‘He’s gorgeous, isn’t he? Not exactly handsome in the traditional sense—but he’s got something that makes the toes curl, all right.’

      ‘Gorgeous’ was not the adjective Essie would have chosen and her tone reflected this when she said, ‘You know him, then?’

      ‘I know of him.’ There was a definite note of wistful longing in Janice’s voice. ‘Apparently he’s Charlie’s—or should I say Enoch’s—’ Janice dug Essie in the ribs with a wicked chuckle ‘—second cousin twice removed or some such thing. Aunt June—’ Christine’s mother ‘—said there was some sort of family quarrel years ago, from what she can make out, and the feud’s continued right up until this wedding brought some sort of reconciliation.’

      ‘Oh, right.’ Essie nodded her blonde head and then bent a little closer as the warbling refrains of ‘Love lifted me from depths of woe to endless day’ drowned Janice’s next words.

      ‘What?’ she whispered enquiringly.

      ‘I said, I notice he’s got seated right at the front with the immediate family,’ Janice whispered back meaningfully. And then, at Essie’s puzzled frown she added cryptically, ‘He’s stinking rich.’

      ‘Stinking…?’

      ‘Well,