Last-Minute Bridegroom. Linda Miles

      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