Marco's Convenient Wife. PENNY JORDAN

their sakes.

      There was a considerable amount of discreet family pressure on him to marry. He was after all the head of the family, but as yet…

      Marriage. Now why on earth had thinking about Alice Walsingham sent his thoughts in that direction?

      He belonged to the modern century and there was no way he could ever feel comfortable in any kind of ‘arranged’ marriage, but, on the other hand, at thirty-five he had seen enough marriages and relationships go wrong to feel a certain cynical wariness about the permanence of what his contemporaries called ‘love’.

      Against his will he suddenly found himself thinking that his mother would have liked Alice.

      He could hear the soft sucking noises Angelina was making as Alice fed her, and with shocking, nerve-wrenching immediacy he was suddenly once again visualising her holding a baby in her arms, her face soft with maternal love, her breasts bare…

      Grimly he banished the image. That was not the way he wanted to see her, not even in the privacy of his own thoughts, and it was most certainly not the way he wanted or intended to think of her.

      He was a man, he reminded himself, and it was a long time since he had had a sexual relationship with a woman. Maybe so, but that had not bothered him until now.