The Stand-In Bride. Lucy Gordon

      

      “Don’t be stupid, Maggie. The answer must be as obvious to you as it is to me. I have arranged to be married on the sixteenth, and that’s what I mean to do.”

      “But you haven’t got a bride,” she said incredulously. “What are you going to do? Call in one of your conquests? Will any woman do?”

      The strange light was there in his eyes again. “Not any woman,” he said. “You.”

      Something caught in her throat and she forced herself to give a brief choking laugh.

      “I’m not laughing,” he said quietly.

      “You’re right. It’s the unfunniest joke I’ve ever heard.”

      “I was never further from making jokes in my life. You don’t understand Spanish honor. The one who does the injury is the one who makes reparation. You have injured me, and it is you, and nobody else who must make it right.”

      Lucy Gordon cut her writing teeth on magazine journalism, interviewing many of the world’s most interesting men, including Warren Beatty, Richard Chamberlain, Roger Moore, Sir Alec Guinness and Sir John Gielgud. She also camped out with lions in Africa, and had many other unusual experiences which have often provided the background for her books.

      She is married to a Venetian, whom she met while on holiday in Venice. They got engaged within two days, and have now been married for twenty-five years. They live in the Midlands with their three dogs.

      Two of her books, His Brother’s Child and Song of the Lorelei, won the Romance Writers of America RITA Award in the Best Traditional Romance category.

      The Stand-In Bride

      Lucy Gordon

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      CHAPTER TWELVE

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHRISTMAS weather had come early. Although it was only the first day of December there was already the promise of snow, making the air sparkle and the street decorations gleam. High over London’s West End they shone against the darkness, multi-coloured confections of angels with long golden trumpets, elves, fairies dancing with long streamers, silver bells hanging in clusters.

      But the two young women hurrying along the glittering street had no attention for the beauty overhead. They were arguing.

      ‘Catalina, please don’t be unreasonable,’ Maggie begged for the third time.

      ‘Unreasonable!’ Catalina snapped. ‘You want me to spend an evening looking at men wearing nighties and little skirts, and I’m unreasonable? Hah!’

      ‘Julius Caesar is a great play. It’s a classic.’

      Catalina made a sound that might have been a snort. She was eighteen, Spanish and looked magnificent in her blazing temper.

      ‘It’s Shakespeare,’ pleaded Maggie.

      ‘That to Shakespeare!’

      ‘And your fiancé wants you to see it.’

      Catalina said something deeply uncomplimentary about her fiancé.

      ‘Hush, be careful!’ Maggie urged, looking around hurriedly, as though Don Sebastian de Santiago might appear from thin air.

      ‘Pooh! I am here in London; he is in Spain. Soon I shall be his prisoner, and behave myself, and say, “Yes, Sebastian,” and “No, Sebastian,” and “Whatever you say, Sebastian.” But until then I do what I like, I say what I like, and I say I don’t like men with knobbles on their knees wearing skirts.’

      ‘They probably don’t all have knobbles on their knees,’ Maggie said, trying to lighten the atmosphere.

      Catalina let forth a torrent of Spanish and Maggie hastily seized her arm and steered her along the road, weaving in and out of the seething crowd. ‘It was supposed to be part of your English education,’ she said.

      ‘I am Spanish; he is Spanish. Why I need an English education?’

      ‘Why do I need—’ Maggie corrected her automatically.

      ‘Why do I need an English education?’ Catalina repeated in exasperation.

      ‘For the same reason you needed a French education, so that you can be a cultivated woman and host his dinner parties.’

      Before her rebellious charge could answer, Maggie steered her into a teashop, found a table and said, ‘Sit!’, much as she would have done to a recalcitrant puppy. The young Spanish girl was delightful but exhausting. Soon Maggie would see her off to Spain and retire to the peace of a nervous breakdown.

      For the last three months it had been Maggie’s job to perfect Catalina’s English and share chaperoning duties with Isabella, her middle-aged duenna. The two Spanish women lived in one of London’s most luxurious hotels, courtesy of Don Sebastian, who had also arranged the highlights of their schedule, and paid Maggie’s wages.

      The whole thing had been arranged at a distance. It was six months since Don Sebastian had last found time to see his fiancée, and that had been on a flying visit to Paris, during which he seemed to have checked the improvement in her French, and little else.

      Day-to-day decisions were in the hands of Donna Isabella, who hired teachers locally, communicated with Sebastian and relayed her employer’s wishes to her employer’s bride-to-be.

      He was in America at the moment, expected to arrive in London the following week, after which Catalina would accompany him back to Spain to begin preparing for her wedding. Or possibly he wouldn’t have time to come to London at all, in which case they would travel without him. Whatever else he could be accused of, Maggie thought, it wasn’t flaming ardour.

      She couldn’t imagine what he was thinking of to choose a wife so totally unsuitable. Catalina was ignorant and empty-headed—clothes-mad, pop music-mad, boy-mad. By no stretch of the imagination was she a proper consort for a serious man with a seat in the regional Andalucian government.

      Catalina’s efforts to master languages were halfhearted. She managed fairly well with English because she’d watched so many American television programs, but her French was dire, and her German had been a waste of everybody’s time.

      Yet Maggie was fond of her. Exasperating Catalina might be, but she was also kind, warm-hearted and fun. She needed a young husband who would be entranced by her beauty and high spirits, and care nothing for her lack of brains. Instead she would soon be imprisoned in a world of premature middle age.

      ‘All right,’ Maggie said as they ate tea and cakes. ‘What do you want to do this evening?’

      ‘Die!’ Catalina declared passionately.

      ‘Short of that,’ Maggie said, firmly dousing melodrama with common sense.

      ‘What does it matter? In a few weeks my life will be over anyway. I will be an old married woman with an old husband and a baby every year.’

      ‘Is Don Sebastian really old?’ Maggie asked.

      Catalina shrugged. ‘Old, middle-aged. So what?’

      ‘I wish you had a picture of him.’

      ‘Is