Last-Minute Bridegroom

Tasha turned the wedding ring on her finger About the Author Title Page CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN CHAPTER ELEVEN CHAPTER TWELVE Copyright

Tasha turned the wedding ring on her finger

“Real gold,” she said. “A real wedding. You’re really my husband. It feels so strange.”

Chase took her hand in his for a moment, his thumb stroking the ring on her finger. “The fact that you are wearing that piece of metal doesn’t mean I have any rights over you.”

“Legally you do,” said Tasha.

He smiled, and that unsettling look was back in his warm, dark eyes. “I could kiss you...”

Linda Miles was born in Kenya, spent her childhood in Argentina, Brazil and Peru, and completed her education in England. She is a keen rider, and wrote her first story at the age of ten when laid up with a broken leg after a fall. She considers three months a year the minimum acceptable holiday allowance but has never got an employer to see reason, and took up writing romances as a way to have adventures and see the world.

Last-Minute Bridegroom

Linda Miles

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

RAIN poured from a pitch-black sky. The wind howled through the woods. Not the best night for a two-mile walk up a bad country road, but at this point Natasha Merrill didn’t have much choice. The nearest taxi service was thirty miles away; she’d called the house, but there had been no reply.

Not for the first time she had glared from the station phone booth to the house at the top of the hill. All the lights were lit; her father was home, but the phone rang ten, twenty, thirty times and went unanswered. Her father was obviously in his study. The phone could not be heard from his study. Well-meaning people who did not know him well sometimes pointed out that he could easily put an extension through to the study.

‘I could,’ was the usual reply. ‘But in that case I would have to find some other room for my study where I would not be disturbed by the phone.’

Tasha sighed. She’d been trying desperately to call him all day, but now, perversely, she was almost glad she hadn’t been able to reach him. She didn’t want to tell him about it on the phone. She wanted to throw herself in his arms and cry until she couldn’t cry any more. There wouldn’t be anything he could do, but it wouldn’t matter. He would hold her, and talk about what had happened, and after a while it would remind him of something completely irrelevant but more interesting to a professor of philosophy. He would drift into a discussion of some obscure philosophical problem and insist that she try to discuss it too, and she would forget about Jeremy and what he had done.

Lightning flashed overhead. There was a crash of thunder two seconds later. She was soaked to the skin, but she almost welcomed the violence of the weather. For a few seconds at a time it knocked out of her head the catastrophe that was her life. Wouldn’t she ever learn? Because the worst of it was that it wasn’t just Jeremy. She’d neglected her work at university because she’d spent so much time being business manager of various student drama productions starring Malcolm, her boyfriend It hadn’t been an ideal relationship, but she’d tried hard to make it work; then Malcolm had met the sister of a famous producer and walked out.

Tasha had scraped through her finals somehow and found a job in the teeth of deservedly unenthusiastic references. She’d started at the bottom in the marketing department of a publishing house, working insanely hard to forget about Malcolm, and had soon had a promotion. Just when things had been beginning to look good she’d started going out with Colin, a struggling writer. Colin had moved in with her and forgotten to pay the rent for two years, and then he had married a well-known literary agent. Tasha did not really subscribe to the theory that men were scum, but why did she always end up with the kind of man who thought every relationship involved a certain amount of take and take? She’d found a new job in the marketing and promotions department of a well-known women’s magazine, had a short disastrous relationship for a change, and then she’d met Jeremy. And now she was twenty-six. Was it going to be like this for the rest of her life?

Blasts of rain battered her face. Tasha scowled. It was stupid dwelling on the past. Stupid to be miserable about things she could do nothing about. The only problem was that it was better than the alternative: being miserable about all the things she was somehow going to have to do something about. Finding a new job, for instance, because she’d given notice and her replacement was arriving this week. Finding a place to live at a week’s notice, to take another example, because the new tenant of her old flat was due to move in next week and Tasha certainly wasn’t going to be living with Jeremy. And last but not least, horror of horrors—no. She was not going to think about that. She was turning the last bend in the road. Another five minutes, and she would be there.

The house was blazing with lights. If her father couldn’t hear the phone, though, chances were he wouldn’t hear a knock or doorbell either, and Tasha was too wet and cold to wait to find out. Like all the professor’s children, stepchildren, nieces, nephews and third cousins twice removed Tasha had a key. She turned it in the front door, and stepped inside.

She glanced, ruefully, in the hall mirror—she actually looked as bad as she felt, which was saying something.

She would never be conventionally beautiful—her large, misty grey-green eyes were her best feature, but they were set in a face which combined high, broad cheekbones with a pointed chin. Her eyes slanted up slightly under flyaway brows, and on a good day they gave her oddly shaped face a haunting, almost elfin look. On a good day there was something almost other-worldly about her colouring, hair like silver gilt cut along the jaw as a brilliant frame for the misty eyes and pale skin.

Today, however, was emphatically not a good day. Her wet hair clung to her head like dirty, sodden straw; her skin was deathly pale, her small chin just made her face look pinched. Her eyes weren’t red from crying because she hadn’t been able to cry; they just stared blankly out from the pale, pinched face. It was stupid to care about how she looked at a time like this, except that seeing herself in the mirror, plain, wet, miserable, she could hardly blame Jeremy for walking away from someone a little rain could turn into a drowned rat.

She grimaced, and headed automatically for the stairs to the top of the house, where her father was no doubt wrestling with a recalcitrant footnote.

There are fathers who deal with a crisis in a daughter’s love life by offering to beat her boyfriend to a pulp, or to send her on a package holiday to Hawaii. Then there are fathers who talk thoughtfully about the seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza, who analysed the emotions according to the rules of geometry. The professor belonged to this smaller category of father, with the result that the emotions he talked about always seemed to exist somewhere off on Planet Philosophy, and to have nothing whatsoever to do with anything anyone might feel in the real world. Tasha’s mother had always found this attitude intensely irritating, but Tasha liked it: it made her feel as though nothing in the real world mattered that much. The more unspeakably horrible things were, the more desperately it mattered to be told that they weren’t really all that important. Another minute and—well, nothing would be any different, but her father would put an arm around her and say something about his hero and maybe she would feel a little bit better.

She’d already put her foot on the first step when she heard the unmistakable sound of a glass being set on a table.

‘Daddy!’ she exclaimed, and rushed into the sitting room. ‘Daddy, it’s me—’

A man was standing by the fireplace with his back to the door.

‘I’m afraid he’s not here,’ he said. ‘I got here this morning and there was no sign of him.’

Tasha stared speechlessly as the man turned to face her and give her a familiar sardonic smile. She’d come four miles by bike, two hundred and twenty miles by train and two miles on foot in the pouring rain to be all alone with Bad Cousin Chaz.

Chase Adam Zachary Taggart looked as though he’d stepped out of the kind of ad where tall, loose-limbed, impossibly handsome men run through the streets of Paris at dawn with a good-looking double bass. He was standing with his weight on one leg, hands in his pockets, with loose-limbed easy grace; he was wearing a suit which managed, for all its ravishing dark elegance, to look like a careless afterthought, something to throw on if you had to open a West End show or pick up an Oscar or improvise jazz in a backroom bar—he’d done all three. Black hair swept back from a sardonic face; black eyes looked cynically out at the world from under hooked black brows; a finely carved yet sensuous mouth curved in a faint, cynical smile. He was instinctively graceful, terrifyingly elegant, impossibly handsome and, unlike her bedraggled self, dry.

He was also, Tasha thought resentfully, supposed to be several thousand miles away. She’d done the decent thing and sent him an invitation six months ago to the wedding. Bad Cousin Chaz had replied that, much as he’d love to come, business commitments would make it impossible to get away from New York at that particular time. Company A was going to be taking over Company B, or Company C was launching a flotation of shares, or maybe Chaz had just scheduled the assassination of the director of Company D for the day of the wedding—Tasha couldn’t remember precisely which flimsy excuse had formed the substance of the calculated rudeness of the reply. She’d been too relieved. The wedding was to be her special day; it had been wonderful to know for sure that, on that day of all days, Bad Cousin Chaz would not be there.

Except that he was here, now, of all impossible times—

‘What are you doing here?’ she managed to say at last. ‘I thought you were in New York.’

‘I was.’

‘I thought you couldn’t leave New York,’ Tasha said pointedly. ‘I thought the reason you couldn’t come to the wedding was that you were going to be expectedly detained on urgent business that couldn’t spare you for two hours let alone two days.’

Chaz shrugged. ‘Deal’s off. Something I wanted to discuss with the professor. I’ll have to get back soon, though; ’fraid I can’t stay for the wedding.’

He raised a sardonic black eyebrow in a gesture she knew and loathed. ‘Speaking of which, what are you doing here? You should be ticking off items on “101 Things Every Bride Should Do For a Perfect Wedding”, not gallivanting around the countryside.’

Tasha gritted her teeth. He was going to have to know sooner or later; no point fighting off the inevitable.

‘Deal’s off,’ she said curtly.

Chaz had never made any secret of despising Jeremy; she braced herself for some acerbic remark.

He was frowning. ‘Off? You mean as in bridesmaids dismissed, cancel the cake?’

‘That’s right,’ said Tasha.

Chaz whistled softly, then grinned. ‘Well, let me be the first to congratulate you, Tash, I couldn’t be more pleased. What exactly made you change your mind?’

Tasha gritted her teeth again.

‘I didn’t,’ she said.

An astonished swoop of eyebrow met this new development. ‘You mean it was Jeremy’s idea?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, don’t stop there,’ said her abominable cousin. ‘Tell me all about it, or, no, wait, let me get you a drink and then tell me all about it. What are you having?’

‘Scotch,’ said Tasha. ‘And it’s none of your business.’

Chaz crossed the room to the drinks cupboard. ‘Just as you like,’ he said, filling two glasses. ‘Depends whether you want me to hear your version or someone else’s.’ He put the drink in her hand, then gestured towards the sofa. ‘Come and get dry.’

Tasha sank wearily to the sofa. Chaz sat down beside her, one leg crossed over the other, an arm along the back of the sofa.

‘Well, you may as well know,’ she said dully. ‘You know how Daddy has all those investments?’

‘Yes?’

‘But he’s not one of those rich men people have heard of, and I didn’t realise Jeremy knew.’

‘Yes?’

‘But he did, only he didn’t realise—what I mean is, I told him Daddy had decided to give each of us now the money he would have left to us in his will, but I never said he was going to give most of it to that educational trust because it didn’t seem relevant. I didn’t know Jeremy knew how much Daddy had so I didn’t know how much he thought I’d be getting.’

‘So he’d done his homework and thought he’d be on first name terms with five or six million pounds instead of a couple of hundred grand?’

‘And he said he needed the money to do what he wanted to do, it wasn’t for him it was for us, if he couldn’t do the things he’d dreamed of accomplishing he wouldn’t be the man I thought I was marrying and we’d both be diminished—’

She turned her head away. She wasn’t going to cry in front of Chaz.

When her voice was steady again she said, ‘It’s stupid. I feel ashamed even though I didn’t do anything wrong. I feel sick inside. It’s as if I’ve lost someone who never even existed, and I keep seeing his face and hearing his voice saying those things and they won’t go away and nothing makes it any better. I don’t know what would make it better.’

As long as her head was turned away she could say the things she would have said to her father. Her father would have said something philosophical.

Chaz said, ‘Well, I know what I’d do, but it probably isn’t your style.’

‘What’s that?’ said Tasha drearily. ‘Puncture his tyres?’

‘I was thinking more in terms of violent physical exercise,’ said Chaz.

‘I’ve already ridden four miles by bicycle and walked two miles in the rain,’ said Tasha.

‘That wasn’t quite the kind of exercise I had in mind,’ said Chaz.

Something in his tone of voice made Tasha lift her head. There was a lurking spark of mischief in her cousin’s eyes.

‘Oh, you mean sleep with someone,’ she said baldly. ‘I should have known—when do you ever think of anything else?’

‘Once in a while,’ said Chaz. ‘I did say I thought it wasn’t your style.’

‘It’s just that it’s such a stupid idea,’ said Tasha. ‘What am I supposed to do? Walk into a pub or a wine bar or something and proposition the first man I see? Why on earth would that make me feel better?’

‘I wasn’t suggesting you should sleep with just anyone,’ said Chaz.

‘Well, what did you have in mind?’ said Tasha in exasperation.

A black eyebrow swooped up mockingly. ‘You could spend the night with me.’

Tasha stared at him for a moment—then, to her astonishment, burst out laughing. ‘Chaz, you’re impossible. Of all the times to be making stupid jokes—’

‘It wasn’t a joke,’ said Chaz. ‘It’s a serious suggestion in that it would probably make you feel better. Of course it’s true I wouldn’t expect you to try it, but that doesn’t make it a joke.’

Tasha stared at her mad, bad cousin. Except, of course, that he wasn’t her cousin. Chase Taggart was the son of the first wife of the second husband, or was it the second wife of the first husband—? No. Tasha’s parents had got divorced when she was ten. Her mother, leaving her first husband, had gone to stay briefly with her sister, then on her third. Tasha’s Aunt Monica had had a glamorous new husband; the husband had had a son. That son, who was absolutely no relation of Tasha’s of any kind, was Chaz: five years older and five thousand years more sophisticated, black-haired, black-eyed, black-browed, with a razor-sharp wit used unsparingly on whichever of his four or five families he happened to visit.

Her mad, bad not-really-cousin stared back at her, eyes brilliant with amusement. ‘Well?’

‘Well what?’ said Tasha.

‘Well, what’s the answer?’

‘The answer is I think you’re completely despicable,’ snapped Tasha. ‘I suppose this is something that’s worked for you in the past? You find some woman whose world has fallen apart and who’s completely devastated and instead of showing even an iota of sympathy you take advantage of her vulnerable state to seduce her.’

A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. ‘There are different ways of showing sympathy,’ said Chaz unrepentantly. ‘Anyway, there’s a limit to how much sympathy I can feel for you when you’ve just escaped being sentenced to life with a complete and utter prat. Look on the bright side, at least you’ll never have to sleep with Jeremy again, or for that matter with that other idiot—what was his name? Oh, yes, Martin, or with the one before that—Malcolm, was it? No, I’m getting mixed up, aren’t I? Malcolm was your first, then there was Colin, then the man like a piece of damp felt—where in God’s name do you find them all, Tash? If you’ve got to fall for a complete loser, why can’t you at least pick one who’s good in bed?’

Tasha had had plenty of arguments with Chaz over the years, but she hadn’t realised how angry it was possible to be. She felt as if the blood in her veins was foaming with fury. ‘I’m certainly not going to discuss them with you,’ she said coldly. ‘I’d just like to point out, though, that you can’t possibly know what any of them were like in bed—’

‘Sure I can,’ Chaz said cheerfully. ‘If you think it’s selfish to seduce someone, as you put it, it must be because you think the man is the only one who can enjoy it, which means, sweet coz, that they can’t have been doing it right.’

Tasha realised that she was actually grinding her teeth. ‘I don’t want to discuss it,’ she said again, in a tone that had moved from the refrigerator to the freezer.

‘Poor darling, was it that bad?’ said Chaz, with the same lurking smile. ‘Mind you, I had my suspicions—’

‘I don’t want to discuss it,’ Tasha said furiously.

‘Of course you don’t,’ said Chaz. ‘You’d like to hit me for being right. Completely unfair, if you ask me. After all, I’m not the one who left you bored and frustrated through lack of imagination and sheer technical incompetence—’

Tasha didn’t even think. Rage snapped her hand back and sent it slicing through the air at the handsome, taunting face.

A hand shot up and caught her wrist.

‘I know you’d like to hit me, Natasha,’ Chaz said softly, his deep, slow voice dragging over her name like a caress. ‘But don’t be too hasty.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘Here’s the deal. Let me kiss you, and if you don’t like it you can hit me and I won’t hit you back.’

Tasha tried to pull her hand away, but his grip tightened on her wrist.

‘Come on, Tash,’ he said, the smile lighting his eyes. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve never wondered. And it’s just a kiss, after all. What are you afraid of? That you might like it too much?’

Tasha glared at him speechlessly.

He laughed. ‘Well, let’s try unilateral disarmament.’ He released her wrist, allowing his hand to fall to his side. ‘Come on, Tash,’ he said even more softly, an eyebrow quirking up. ‘Close your eyes.’

Later she would never know why she did it. Instead of slapping him across the face the moment her hand was free, she let her hand drop harmlessly to her lap and closed her eyes.

At first she thought he’d been teasing her, that it was just a joke to see if she’d do it. Then something brushed her mouth as lightly as the wing of a butterfly, and was gone. It brushed her mouth again; it was as if someone had held a lighted match just short of her mouth, grazing her lips with the scorched air just outside the flame. Then it was gone, but her mouth stung from the fleeting contact. Then it was back, but this time it lingered just the fraction of a second longer before dropping away.

Tasha found that she was holding her breath. The featherlight touch seemed to have nothing to do with her horrible cousin Chaz, who was always so knowing, so arrogant, so convinced that he was a super-stud. Something touched her mouth again, long enough for her to feel the warmth of his breath before it was gone. Her lips parted involuntarily, and now his mouth was on hers and she could taste him, something as smooth and golden as her Scotch, with wickedness lurking in its amber depths. It warmed her like the Scotch, melting a little of the cold, hard core of misery that was like an icy rock in her chest; she breathed in, opening her mouth wider.

The tip of his tongue traced the sensitive skin of her upper lip, leaving it tingling as if from an electric shock—and the inside of the lip tingled too, as if in anticipation. But the tongue was gone, leaving only the memory of the thrill, a longing to feel it again. Now he ran the tip of his tongue just inside her lips, and the reality was better than imagination, intoxicating in its intensity, as if someone had doubled the strength of her drink behind her back. Tasha breathed out on a long sigh, relaxing into the kiss; the lovely honeyed warmth spread through her body, dissolving the wretchedness—or maybe just shielding her for the moment from its bitter cold. But even if it was just for the moment what did it matter? She let her mouth melt against his, savouring the heady taste of it.

He drew his mouth away, and she waited to feel his mouth on hers again, but this time it did not come back.

‘You can open your eyes now, Tasha,’ Chaz said softly.

She opened her eyes. It was a shock to see Chaz looking just as he always did; she might have thought she’d imagined those butterfly kisses, but his mouth was still moist. It was smiling slightly; if she put her mouth on his she would feel the smile on her lips.

She felt slightly sick. The warmth, the lovely sense that nothing mattered except the here and now, had gone with the kiss; the hard, cold rock was back inside.

She stared at Chaz as if she were seeing him for the first time, taking in the humorous, supple mouth, the brilliant black eyes under the black slash of brow, the hawk-like nose and hard jaw.

‘So how was it for you, darling?’ he asked, one of the eyebrows quirking up.

‘It was—’ Tasha began. She was still staring at him. ‘You were right,’ she said. ‘I was completely wrong. It has nothing to do with feelings; it’s just a question of technique. You must have practised a lot to be so good.’

Chaz started to say something and then stopped. He said slowly, ‘So you don’t want to hit me, Tash?’

Tasha was still staring at him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I want to sleep with you.’

Chaz stared at her. ‘You what?’

‘It was your idea,’ Tasha reminded him. ‘And you’re right. It’s just a physical thing, after all. We can enjoy it for what it is and forget about it. It will help me to forget about all this.’

An odd, rueful expression crept onto the supremely self-confident face of the man beside her. ‘Oh, Lord,’ he said.

‘Daddy won’t be back for ages. I’m still on the pill. We can just go upstairs now,’ said Tasha. ‘Or would you rather have another drink first?’

Chaz took her hand in his, running his thumb over her palm. The honeyed warmth pooled in the palm of her hand and spread up her arm; she drew in a sharp breath.

‘Tash, darling,’ said Chaz, ‘I know it was my idea, but it probably wasn’t a very good one.’

‘Why not?’ said Tasha. ‘Don’t you think you’d enjoy it?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Don’t you think I’d enjoy it?’

‘Yes. butt—’

‘Then what’s the problem?’ Tasha said impatiently.

He smiled at her wryly. ‘I think you’d hate yourself and me afterwards. You probably can’t hate me any more than you do already, but—’