Marriage In Mind

“Making love to a virgin could have complications I’d prefer to avoid.”

Astra stared at him uncomprehendingly for a moment or two, and then went pink when she thought she saw what he was getting at. “I might get pregnant?” she questioned coolly, if a touch self-consciously.

“I was thinking more that, not knowing the rules, the way these things work, you might be the clinging type,” he corrected her.

“Clinging!” She was furious on the instant. “From gratitude, obviously,” she hurled at him.

She saw his lips twitch. Pleasantly he enlightened her. “You might want marriage.”

Marriage? Never! How dared he? “To you? Don’t flatter yourself, Baxendale.”

“You’re too splendid for words when you’re angry.”

For three cousins it has to be marriage—pure and simple!

Yancie, Fennia and Astra are cousins—exceedingly close cousins, who’ve grown up together and shared the same experiences. For all of them, one thing is certain—they’ll never be like their mothers, having serial, meaningless affairs; they’ve pledged that, for them, it has to be marriage or nothing!

Only, things are about to change when three eligible bachelors walk into their lives—and each cousin finds herself with a new boss…and a potential husband?

But will each of their stories end at the altar?

This month it’s Astra’s turn!

The Marriage Pledge by Jessica Steele

HARLEQUIN ROMANCE®

3588—THE FEISTY FIANCÉE

3615—BACHELOR IN NEED

3627—MARRIAGE IN MIND

Marriage in Mind

Jessica Steele

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER ONE

ASTRA stared incredulously at her immediate boss. ‘You’re saying he wants us, Yarroll Finance, to work out some sort of financial package for him?’ she questioned disbelievingly.

‘It hasn’t got that far,’ Norman Davis cautioned. ‘Mr Baxendale made contact this morning while you were out. Apparently word has reached him of our dynamic financial adviser, and he wants to see you.’

‘Me!’ she exclaimed. ‘Mr Baxendale wants to see me?’

‘You,’ Norman Davis confirmed.

Astra was stunned. She knew, without false modesty, that she was good at her job. But that Sayre Baxendale, a board member of Blyth Whitaker International—and a man to be reckoned with, according to a report she had read in some financial paper only last week—should consult them was astounding. That he should approach Yarroll Finance when it came to matters of personal finance was staggering enough—and it had to be personal finance if she was involved, because that was the area in which she excelled. But that he should ask for her, in particular, to talk facts and figures with was astonishing.

‘You’re sure it’s me he wants to see?’ she questioned, her habit of double-checking everything to do with her work starting to kick in.

‘If you’re Miss Astra Northcott,’ Norman Davis beamed. Yarroll Finance was a highly respected company; to have a director of Blyth Whitaker International on their books was yet another indication of their first-class reputation in the world of finance.

Astra stared solemnly at him. She was twenty-two and was young, she knew, to hold the position she did in a firm of such superior standing. But she had studied hard for her qualifications. Had worked hard and, given that she seemed to have a natural flair for figures and hard work, this—to be asked for personally by such an esteemed client, and client he would be if she had to work twenty-five hours a day to get him the package he wanted—seemed to her to be the very ultimate of success in the finance world.

Then she allowed herself a smile. Her lovely lips parted to reveal beautiful white, perfectly even teeth, her happiness showing in the large green depths of her beautiful eyes. ‘I’d better ring him to make an appointment,’ she suggested. ‘Do you have his home number?’

‘The appointment’s already made,’ her boss informed her cheerfully. ‘Sayre Baxendale’s a very busy man. He’ll see you at his office at two-thirty tomorrow afternoon.’

Astra would have liked to have fixed a mutually convenient time—she knew she was scheduled to be busy elsewhere at two-thirty tomorrow, and hated breaking appointments. But he who paid the piper called the tune, and apparently what Mr Baxendale wanted Mr Baxendale got. Two-thirty tomorrow was convenient for him—end of story.

Her flicker of irritation with Sayre Baxendale at what to her seemed to be a mite high-handed had long since gone by the time she arrived home that night. She’d had a busy day, and it wasn’t over yet.

She took her briefcase into her study, but before she started work again she went and took a shower, put a delicious-looking lasagne in the microwave to defrost and spent an hour unwinding from the demands of the day.

If, that was, thinking about tomorrow’s appointments could be called unwinding. Thankfully, in order to accommodate Sayre Baxendale, she had been able to re-schedule tomorrow’s original two-thirty appointment; things had worked out well, as it happened, because the alternative time now suited her client better.

Astra went over again all she had been able to glean that day about the man she was to see tomorrow. Though what she had found out did not amount to very much, she realised. She had known already that he was on the board of Blyth Whitaker, a company with many subsidiary companies but dealing for the most part in manufacturing industries. Today’s trawl had revealed he was thirty-six—younger than she had supposed a man of his business repute to be. She had learned that, while never lacking some sensational-looking female to squire around, he was unmarried.

So what was this bachelor director, presumably without children, doing looking to Yarroll Finance for some sort of financial package? Astra stepped from her shower, donned a robe, fixed herself a salad to go with the lasagne and continued to question.

Without a doubt, Blyth Whitaker fielded their own finance department—so why was he coming to Yarroll Finance? Astra was munching her way through her meal when she settled for the only logical answer—Sayre Baxendale must want to keep his personal business separate from the company he worked for. Yes, that must be it. He wanted to keep his personal dealings totally private from his own people.

So why, if he wanted to keep it so private, had he asked that she should call and see him at his place of business? She was used to visiting clients in their own homes—she’d have thought he would have instructed that she call and see him at his home.

But perhaps he was too busy dating sensational-looking females to have any spare time! Astra grinned at the sourness of that thought—good luck to him.

She wished, though, that he had given Norman Davis some sort of hint about what kind of package he was after. Surely it couldn’t be some kind of a pension plan? Laughable! He’d have stocks and shares by the thousands, endless funds salted away to cover any eventuality; of that she was certain.

Astra liked to be well prepared before she saw any of her clients, but had just resigned herself to hoping she would have the answers to any questions Sayre Baxendale threw at her, without having to call back to base, when her telephone rang. It was her cousin, Yancie.

‘I’ve interrupted you and you hate me?’ Yancie apologised in advance.

‘You didn’t and I don’t.’

‘You’re in your study.’

‘I’m not—I’m in the kitchen and I’ve just finished eating a lasagne Fennia made some time ago.’

‘Have you heard from her?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Neither have I—which isn’t at all surprising. Now—what am I going to do about you?’

‘Don’t you dare!’ Astra threatened, recalling again her horror when, at Fennia’s wedding a couple of weeks ago, Yancie had said ‘And then there was one’ with such a meaningful gleam in her eye—Astra now the only one of the three cousins remaining unmarried. Astra had had to tell her cousin to scrap at once any embryo notion she might have of seeing to it that she met ‘Mr Right’.

Yancie laughed at her fierce ‘Don’t you dare’. ‘I wouldn’t, love,’ she promised. ‘But with both Fen and me finding such utter bliss it doesn’t seem right that you haven’t. I know, I know,’ she went on quickly before Astra could butt in, ‘you’re a career woman, happy as you are and absolutely, positively, have no interest in getting married. But, honestly, Astra, if it does happen, and you do fall in love, please—let it happen. Promise me!’

In Astra’s view the possibility that she, like her two cousins, might fall head over heels in love was so remote as to be extinct. It was, therefore, no hardship to give Yancie the promise she wanted.

‘Oh, I will,’ she answered lightly, and changed the subject. ‘How are things with you?’ she asked. ‘Don’t answer—it’s there in your voice. You’re still on cloud nine.’

‘Fly in the ointment,’ Yancie confessed.

At once Astra wanted to do anything she could for her cousin. Yancie had been married to Thomson Wakefield only three months—nothing should be allowed to mar her happiness. ‘Your mother?’ she guessed.

‘How well we all know one another!’ And, to show that she wasn’t too distressed, Yancie laughed. ‘Mother’s broken up with Henry and…’

‘That didn’t last long!’

‘Does it ever? Anyhow, for some unknown reason, my mother wants to come and stay with me for a while.’

‘Grief!’ Astra exclaimed; it was relatively unheard of for any of their mothers to want very much to do with their daughters, much less ask to come and stay for a while.

‘My sentiments exactly!’

‘What does Thomson say?’

‘He says to invite her—and he’ll invite his mother to come at the same time. I think he’s thinking that they’ll both be such ghastly company for each other that neither of them will stay long.’

Astra remembered Thomson’s sour-looking mother at his wedding—she had no trouble at all remembering Yancie’s mother, her aunt Ursula. She, like her two sisters—Astra’s mother and Fennia’s mother—was completely flighty, man and money mad.

But, as irrepressible as ever, Yancie was laughing again as she stated, ‘I think I might just do that.’ And Astra burst out laughing too.

She was not laughing a little while later when she put down the phone. Memories were surfacing, memories which she had thought no longer haunted her, but all too plainly, and painfully, still did.

Her parents had divorced when she was three years old. Her mother, according to her aunts, had not particularly wanted a child but had conceived her as a ploy to get wealthy Carleton Northcott to marry her.

Astra’s aunt Ursula and aunt Portia had seen nothing at all wrong in revealing to Astra when she had been in her early teens that their sister Imogen had declined Carleton Northcott’s offer of a handsome maintenance settlement for her and the child. Instead, obviously knowing something of the integrity of the man—for all it seemed he’d balked at having to actually marry her—Imogen Jolliffe, as she was then, had horrified him by telling him it was marriage—or an abortion.

So Imogen had got what she wanted. It hadn’t been enough for her. Whether the marriage would have worked had she kept to her marriage promises was difficult to tell, but her baby had been barely six months old when Mrs Carleton Northcott started playing in pastures new.

Astra remembered little of those early years. What she did remember was that, for all her father no longer lived with them, she saw more of him than she saw of her mother.

In her early years Astra grew used to being banished to her room on the occasions when her mother brought ‘a friend’ home. As it happened, Astra, a quiet, reserved child, was quite happy not to have to stay and be talked at by the succession of men who filed through the house.

Had she stayed at home, however, she might—while shying away from it—have formed the opinion over her growing years that her mother’s promiscuity was normal behaviour. Though her father had been ready to put a stop to any chance of that.

She was just coming up to her seventh birthday and had spent a very pleasant weekend with him when, according to her aunt Delia, her mother’s elder half-sister, her father had been disturbed by Astra’s innocent chatter about the story book she’d been reading in her bedroom while her mother had talked to ‘Uncle’ William in her bedroom.

Instead of returning Astra to her home at the end of her weekend stay with him, it was to her aunt Delia’s house that he took her. ‘Stay here with Aunt Delia, poppet; I just want to go and have a private word with Mummy,’ he explained, having had a discussion with her aunt while Astra went to chatter to Mollie, Aunt Delia’s mongrel dog.

Astra loved her aunt Delia; everything was so calm around her, and with one arm around Mollie Astra waved her father off with the other. She had no inkling then of the almighty row that had taken place between her parents. Which, pieced together many years later, started with her father saying he had merely called to inform her mother personally that Astra wasn’t coming back, and that he was taking her to live with him.

Apparently, for all it was plain that Imogen Northcott had little interest in her child, she cared not at all to have her ex-husband laying down the law. ‘No, you are not!’ Imogen told him bluntly, and in the ensuing ‘Yes I am, no, you’re not’ argument his ex-wife informed him she had made arrangements—without consulting him—for Astra to go to boarding-school.

Carleton Northcott might have argued, but immediately saw that, while he still followed his business interests and much though he had grown to love his daughter, he would not be able to be a full-time father to her. Since his main objective was to get her from under her mother’s roof—perhaps boarding-school might be the answer.

‘She’s only seven.’ He wasn’t ready to give in easily. ‘She’ll be lonely—I’m not having her…’

‘She won’t be lonely. Her two cousins are going with her.’

Cold dislike had been in the air as Carleton Northcott looked at the woman he’d been forced to marry. ‘How long have you and your harpy sisters been planning this?’ he had wanted to know.

Imogen had smiled a triumphant smile as she informed him, ‘From the day she was born. Unfortunately, the boarding-school we’ve chosen wouldn’t take them younger than the age of seven.’

Astra had been happy at boarding-school. All three cousins were born within a month of each other, and, rooming together as they did, Astra, Yancie and Fennia became as close as sisters. Apart from school holidays, they were inseparable.

Astra considered herself the lucky one in that both Fennia and Yancie’s fathers had died, and while Astra, too, sometimes had an ‘uncle’ come to collect her at the end of school term more often than not it was her father who came for her.

Though, because he was busy a lot of the time, her mother demanded that she spend her school holidays at home with her. This, Astra soon discovered, was more to spite her father than from any deep-rooted maternal instinct. For Imogen, married again and now Imogen Kirby, was still carrying on as though she had never said ‘I do’ to Robert Kirby.

Holidays, apart from the time Astra spent at her father’s smart apartment, were in the main fairly awful. She couldn’t wait to get back to school—the same went for her two cousins. Astra clearly remembered how the three of them had met up again after a lengthy summer break and Yancie, having gone through a shocking time, had fervently declared, ‘No, no, no, no way am I going to be like my mother.’

‘That goes double for me and my mother!’ Fennia, having gone through a dreadful traumatic time too, unhappily asserted.

‘And that’s triple for me!’ Astra had chipped in, having been aghast at the way her mother had barely waited for the door to close on husband number two, whenever he left for his office, before she was on the phone to some other man.

Having spent weeks in the same close confines with their female parents, each cousin—aware enough by then, educated enough by then—had been absolutely appalled by what they had seen and heard going on. Absolutely appalled and—afraid!

‘What if we’ve inherited something?’ Fennia exclaimed, aghast. ‘A gene, or something—some promiscuous part of our mothers that makes them the way they are when any likely-looking man pokes his head above the parapet!’

They had gasped in dismayed consternation—it was truly a terrifying thought. And it was there and then, after a lengthy and fearful discussion, that the cousins vowed that they would defy any such wayward gene should it rear its ugly head. They would not be permissive, promiscuous or free-moralled. They would, they pledged, be alert and ready to stamp on any wayward urge that showed itself.

There had been no need to renew that vow two years later when, at the age of eighteen, they had left boarding-school for the last time. It was by then as if written in stone. There would be no string of lovers. Only one man would do. The right man. If they didn’t find him, they would give themselves to no man.

Yancie and Fennia’s ‘right’ men had come along, and they had married them. Astra, having undergone further extensive and in-depth business training, was career-minded and dedicated to her job. She had hopes of going higher and yet higher up the professional ladder. Marriage simply had no place in her plans.

She worked hard, evenings and weekends, and had no time for any kind of a relationship. Which was fine by her—she’d seen enough of her mother’s ‘relationships’ to know that that route wasn’t for her.

Not that Astra was lacking for offers. She had rich red hair, green eyes and, though naturally pale, a dream of a perfect skin. Her figure, while slender, curved in all the right places. And, according to Sukey Lloyd—a girl the three cousins had been at school with—Astra had legs to die for.

While feeling quite friendly on the inside to her fellow man, Astra found she could do little about her cool, aloof-looking exterior. Indeed, she had been completely unaware of her cool and aloof look until a couple of months ago when she’d turned down yet another invitation out from a newcomer to Yarroll Finance, who, peeved at her crisp thank-you-but-no, went away muttering, ‘Now I know why they call you North Pole Northcott!’

She hadn’t thought that had bothered her but, friendly with one of the secretaries who sometimes did some work for her, Astra found herself one day asking her if everybody at Yarroll’s had a nickname.

‘Only the favoured few,’ Cindy had replied. And, on a gasp as she realised what lay behind the question, she exclaimed, ‘You’ve heard?’

‘North Pole Northcott?’

‘Oh!’ Cindy murmured—and, obviously trying to make light of it, added, ‘Never mind—your mum loves you.’

That, Astra considered, was extremely doubtful. She had returned to live with her mother when she had finished school, but that arrangement had never been going to work. Her mother lived an idle life of socialising and greed. Astra—to her mother’s shame—wanted to work for her living.

It was a constant bone of contention between them that Astra, while living at home, was taking a full-time course which involved taking further exams for her chosen career. So that by the time Carleton Northcott decided to retire and move to his second home in the Windward Islands, and suggested that if Astra didn’t want to go to Barbados with him she could move into his London apartment and keep an eye on the place for him, Astra thought it the best idea she’d heard in a long while. Her mother must have thought so too, for this time she raised no objection.

All of which had worked out for the best, Astra reflected as she washed her used dishes at the kitchen sink. Over the last few years, what with being so busy with her job, and Imogen having a full social calendar, Astra rarely saw her mother. Though, dutifully, she would telephone and occasionally her mother—usually when she was having some kind of disaster with her current male, and both her sisters were engaged elsewhere—would pay her a visit.

Which, Astra thought, dragging her mind back to the present, her briefcase as yet still unopened in her study, wasn’t getting the work done. She dried her hands, and ten minutes later she was totally absorbed in her work.

Strangely, though, after all the multitude of thoughts that had gone through her head that evening, when later she turned off her computer and went to bed it wasn’t of her family that she thought. For quite some while she lay sleepless, her mind not on any member of her family, but on the tough-sounding board member of Blyth Whitaker International, a man she had yet to meet.

Next day, Astra arrived at the Blyth Whitaker building in good time. Incongruously, when she would have said she knew her business inside out, she suddenly started to feel a little nervous. What nonsense! she scoffed, but couldn’t deny that she was glad the mirror in the lift she had been directed to showed her looking cool and immaculate in her black suit and white silk shirt.

Briefcase in hand and in her smart plain black, two-and-a-half-inch-heeled shoes, Astra stepped out of the lift determined to keep looking outwardly composed. On the face of it, there was no reason why she should lose the tiniest bit of composure—even if it was Mr Sayre Baxendale himself that she was there to see.

Even if it seemed too incredible to be true that Sayre Baxendale had asked for her personally, she was good at her job. Why did she feel the need to keep reminding herself of that? Good grief—she couldn’t remember the last time, or any time for that matter, when she’d had the jitters about meeting a client. For heaven’s sake, he was expecting her; she wouldn’t have got past Reception had that not been so.

Astra found the door she was looking for, and, since she was expected, tapped on it only lightly, and went in. A tall black-haired man was at another door with a woman in her late twenties who was on her way out so that Astra caught only a glimpse of her. The woman seemed vaguely familiar. But Astra met so many people in her job that it didn’t surprise her that the woman, his PA, most probably, could be someone she had already met.

However, she was here to see Sayre Baxendale, who had closed the door after the woman and was coming back into his office. ‘Astra Northcott, Yarroll Finance,’ she introduced herself. She was softly spoken, her voice unaccented, with a hint of friendliness—otherwise her appearance and everything else about her was totally businesslike.

She extended her right hand—he ignored it. ‘Take a seat,’ he instructed shortly.

Astra didn’t know what it was about this man; he was good-looking certainly, was broad-shouldered, without fat, had dark eyes, and she could well imagine that sensational-looking females would come chasing after him rather than him having to exert himself. But she felt more niggled by him than anything else. No one had ever declined to shake hands with her before.

Astra was aware that his dark glance was giving her a thorough going over, as if to note every detail—her figure, her thick red hair, worn as she usually wore it in a sophisticated chignon, her green eyes, her pale skin. She felt herself dissected—and put back together again—and that too annoyed her.