Malone's Vow. Sandra Marton

      

      Award-winning author Sandra Marton wrote her first novel while still at school. Her doting parents told her she’d be a writer someday and Sandra believed them. At high school and college, she wrote dark poetry nobody but her boyfriend understood. As a wife and mother, she devoted the little free time she had to writing murky short stories. Not even her boyfriend-turned-husband understood those. At last, Sandra decided she wanted to write about real people. That didn’t actually happen because the heroes she created – and still creates – are larger than life, but both she and her readers around the world love them exactly that way. When she isn’t at her computer, Sandra loves to bird-watch, walk in the woods and the desert, and travel. She can be as happy people-watching from a pavement café in Paris as she can be animal-watching in the forest behind her home in northeastern Connecticut. Her love for both worlds, the urban and the natural, is often reflected in her books.

      You can visit Sandra Marton at her website at www. sandramarton.com

      Malone’s Vow

      by

      Sandra Marton

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      MILLS & BOON

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      CHAPTER ONE

      SHE WAS A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN, but not the kind a man should even consider marrying.

      Not a man like Bill Thornton.

      Liam Malone knew it the minute he saw her.

      Bill wasn’t her type. He was too good, too gentle, too trusting. He didn’t stand a chance at being able to handle a woman like Jessica Warren. She was all quicksilver heat, while Bill was a glowing ember.

      Hell, Liam thought as he stared out the window of Bill’s study, past the rolling green lawn to Lake Washington glittering in the distance. He wasn’t much given to thinking in metaphors, but that was what he’d thought of last night, at the rehearsal dinner. One look at his oldest friend’s fiancée and he’d known Bill was making a big mistake.

      Bill, of course, was clueless. He’d never been able to read women worth a damn. Liam always could. Jet-lagged as he’d been after the flight from Singapore to Seattle, one glance at his old friend’s bride-to-be had told him everything he really didn’t want to know.

      “Wait until you meet Jessica,” Bill had written in the letter that had followed Liam halfway around the world. “This is like a fairy tale, Liam, with me as the frog the beautiful princess turns into a prince. I still can’t believe Jessica is going to be my wife.”

      Liam could. He’d spent enough years on the fringes of what most people called polite society to know that men and women married for lots of reasons, and hardly any had much connection to anything as banal as love.

      More than one woman had called him a cynic, but Liam didn’t agree. He was simply a realist. He understood that “love” was a catchall word people used instead of less poetic terms, especially in the rarefied strata of the very rich. Successful men married beautiful women as a balm to their egos. Beautiful women married successful men for the security of their wealth. He’d never sat in judgment on such arrangements. The trade-off was fair enough. It could work, assuming both parties to the deal were still willing to settle for those things a year or two into the marriage.

      The men usually were. Arm candy was arm candy, after all. But the women often became restless. They wanted both jewels on their fingers and pleasure in their beds, and they went looking for it. One glance at Jessica Warren and Liam had known that Bill wouldn’t satisfy her for very long. She’d need more than his kindness and money to keep her happy.

      It would take more than that to keep her at all.

      But the poor bastard didn’t know it. He was marrying for love, and in his case, “love” really did mean a bucketful of syrupy clichés. One man, one woman. Forever after. Until death do us part. Bill was ready to swallow all of it, hook, line and sinker.

      And that was the problem.

      Give it a couple of years and Bill would still be crazy about his wife but she’d be bored to tears and looking for greener pastures. For all Liam knew, she was bored already. The flash in her eyes last night, when she’d caught him watching her, had said it all. She’d managed a nice girlish blush and a quick downward sweep of her lashes, but that hadn’t changed anything. She’d been interested. His best friend’s bride-to-be, interested in another man, the night before her wedding.

      Interested in him.

      Liam’s mouth thinned.

      It wasn’t the first time a woman with a rich man in her life had given him that kind of look. Not all that long ago, he’d been the guy with the looks that turned women on and the empty pockets that turned them off. He’d lived by a combination of luck and his wits, but even so, he’d refused those invitations. He wasn’t into playing games with women who belonged to other men. At best, he’d found that kind of come-on amusing.

      Not this time. A single glance from Bill’s fiancée, and he’d felt himself respond.

      “Damn,” Liam muttered. He swung away from the window, tucked his hands into his pockets and paced the length of Bill’s study.

      Of course, he’d responded. What man wouldn’t? The message in those eyes had been clear, a promise of satin sheets and silken skin, of heated whispers and sizzling caresses. In one swift instant, his brain had stripped away the expensive suit, undone the classically styled hair…

      Well, why not? He wasn’t a saint. He was a healthy, heterosexual, thirty-four-year-old male. Yes, she was Bill’s fiancée but a man’s hormones had a way of ignoring the niceties. He knew that just as surely as he knew that a woman who was signing on for a happy ending with one man shouldn’t look at another the way Jessica Warren had looked at him.

      The trouble was, he had no idea what to do about it. He couldn’t collar Bill and say, “You can’t go through with the wedding this morning. The marriage won’t work.”

      Bill would laugh in his face. As far as he was concerned, Jessica was the only woman in the world. As soon as she’d gone to the powder room, he’d leaned in close and confided that he’d never been this happy in his life. Jessica was all the things he’d ever wanted. She was beautiful and good-natured; she was bright and charming. And when Liam had cautiously hinted that she was getting a good deal, too, that marrying a guy with an old family name and money wasn’t exactly a bad thing for a woman, Bill had happily agreed.

      “Everything Jessica has, Liam—her education, her career—she got on her own.” His smile had turned soft and loving. “It’s going to be a joy to spoil her—if she lets me.”

      She’d let him, Liam knew. She was, already. The rock on her finger, the expensive watch on her wrist…oh, yes, Jessica Warren would let her husband spoil her. The sad part, or maybe the good part, depending on your point of view, was that Bill’s gifts would make both of them happy, he to give them and she to receive them. The question was, would the jewels, the furs, the cars, be enough to keep the lady faithful?

      Liam doubted it. He knew how