A Husband's Price. Diana Hamilton

      “Claudia and I have something to tell you, don’t we, my love?” About the Author Title Page CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE Copyright

      “Claudia and I have something to tell you, don’t we, my love?”

      Adam slid a possessive arm around her waist, his hand warm against her silk-clad flesh, making it tingle with unwanted awareness.

      

      “I know it’s early days after the loss of her first husband, but when we met again we realized that what we felt for each other, all those years ago, was still there, and important to us. So we plan to marry just as soon as it can be arranged and we hope, sir, that you will understand, give us your blessing and be happy for us.”

      

      Claudia felt her father’s questioning eyes on her and flinched. The silence wrapped her like a shroud. She shivered with tension. What could she possibly do or say? Adam’s bombshell had left her shell-shocked.

      DIANA HAMILTON

      

      is a true romantic and fell in love with her husband at first sight. They still live in the fairy-tale Tudor house where they raised their three children. Now the idyll is shared with eight rescued cats and a puppy. But despite an often chaotic life-style, ever since she learned to read and write Diana has had her nose in a book—either reading or writing one—and plans to go on doing just that for a very long time to come.

      A Husband’s Price

      Diana Hamilton

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      CHAPTER ONE

      CLAUDIA passed an uncertain hand over the photograph album. She hadn’t looked at it in years; hadn’t wanted to set eyes on it even. She tried to walk away and out of the room but somehow couldn’t, then, her teeth biting into the warm flesh of her full lower lip, she gave into temptation and knew she’d regret it.

      Sitting abruptly at the table beneath the library’s stone mullioned window, she hooked a strand of soft brown, deadly straight, shoulder-length hair behind one ear and tentatively opened the album. Here they all were. All the people; all the memories. All the shattered dreams and broken trust.

      Her fingertips shakily grazed the glossy surface of the prints. She had put the album away on the top shelf out of sight a long time ago. Her father must have glanced through it then abandoned it here on the library table. Had he, in his grief, been searching for that lost summer, desperately straining to catch an echo of vanished, happier times?

      And here he was. Guy Sullivan, her father. Six years ago, he would have been fifty-two, a big man, in his prime then, his arm around his blonde and beautiful bride of three months. Her stepmother, Helen.

      Twenty years her father’s junior, recently divorced, the sizzling blonde could have turned into the stepmother from hell, but hadn’t. From the day Helen had applied for the position as a relief receptionist here at Farthings Hall, Claudia had seen how attracted her father was. Guy Sullivan had been a widower for eight years, Claudia’s mother dying of a rare viral infection when her only child was ten years old.

      Three months after their first meeting, Guy and Helen had married. Claudia had been happy for them both; her initial fears that Helen might resent her, or that she might resent the woman who had taken her mother’s place in her father’s affections, had been unfounded. Helen couldn’t have tried harder to charm her new stepdaughter.

      And here she herself was: the Claudia of six years ago. Hair much longer then—almost reaching down to her waist—her curves lusher, her smile wide, open, untouched in those long-gone innocent days by the betrayal that was to come later.

      Her eyes misted as she looked at the photograph. She’d been eighteen years old and happy to be spending the summer at home before going to teacher training college. She’d been glad to help out around Farthings Hall, the exclusive country house hotel and restaurant that was both home and livelihood not only for her father now, but for his father before him.

      And there in the background, prophetically perhaps, Tony Favel had been caught by the camera leaning against the stone parapet that bordered the terrace that ran along the west façade of the wonderful old Tudor house.

      Tony Favel, her father’s accountant, the man who had brought Helen into their lives, introducing her as some kind of distant cousin, keen to make a new life for herself after a messy divorce. Even now she could hear the echo of his following words. ‘And haven’t you said, Guy, you’re looking for a part-time receptionist for when Sandy packs it in to have that baby she’s expecting?’

      Tony Favel. At the time the photograph had been taken, he would have been thirty. Even then, his lint-blond hair was beginning to recede, his waistline to thicken. Claudia swallowed hard, her vivid blue eyes clouding as they rested on the grainy, slightly out-of-focus image of her husband. Tony Favel, whom she had married at the end of that summer six years ago.

      Slowly, not wanting to, yet driven by something too dark for her to understand, Claudia turned the page and found what she had known she would find. And feared. All those pictures of Adam.

      At the end of that summer, she’d vowed to destroy every last one of them, to rip them to shreds and burn them. But, when it had come down to it, she hadn’t been able to bring herself to touch them. Or, at least, that was what she had told herself at the time. Love and hate: different sides of the same coin. She had told herself she hated him but obviously she must have still been in love with him. Why else would she have found it impossible to destroy his likenesses?

      She had taken all but one of the photographs of Adam herself and, looking at them now, she couldn’t deny that fatal male beauty. Or deny that those smoky grey eyes, that rumpled, over-long black hair, those pagan-god good looks and body to match hid a black, black heart.

      The odd picture out was the one of her and Adam together. Adam’s arm was placed possessively around her waist, pulling her close into the side of his lithely powerful body, and she was gazing adoringly up into his face. So there they were, the two of them, eternally smiling, caught for posterity looking as if they were walking confidently through the best, the most blissfully happy, the most wonderful summer of their lives...

      She never looked back into the past because it hurt too much, but now she couldn’t seem to help herself and the memories came crowding in. She could clearly see her younger self running lightly down the service stairs on that sunny, early summer day six years ago.

      She’d spent the best part of the morning helping the housekeeper, Amy, to ready the guest suites. There were only four of them; by country house hotel standards Farthings Hall was small. But very, very exclusive. There was a waiting list as long as your arm both for accommodation and for the restaurant tables.

      And,