Helen Brooks - The Billionaire's Marriage Mission

‘This is lovely,’ she said a little grudgingly. Travis was clearly one of those men who would be good at anything he set his mind to. Like Keith. The thought brought her up sharp and she slammed shut that particular little door in her head and hung the ‘do not enter’ sign back in place.

‘Thank you.’

There was a slightly quizzical note in his voice. Too late Beth realised her words probably didn’t add up with the expression on her face. She smoothed out the frown and forced a smile. ‘I can’t cook for toffee,’ she said lightly, ‘and I’m always madly jealous of anyone who can.’

He nodded but said nothing. Beth got the distinct impression he hadn’t believed her. She opened her mouth to say more and then shut it again, conscious that the old maxim of least said, soonest mended might ring true here. Anyway, she had never been a good liar. Unlike Keith.

Reaching for her wine, she drained the glass, her knuckles tight round the stem. Relax, relax, she told herself silently.

Travis refilled it silently before leaning back in his chair and saying, ‘Is it me or are you always this jumpy when you spend the night in a strange man’s house?’

She smiled, more naturally this time. ‘Are you strange?’ she asked, falling in with his mood.

‘It has been said in the past.’ He grinned and the sexiness went up a few notches.

Beth told herself she had not noticed. ‘Then I’ll just have to watch my step.’ She smiled again and then applied herself to the food. The sooner she finished the meal and could disappear upstairs to her room, the better. She didn’t want to do friendly or flirty or anything else.

She ate quickly, keeping her eyes on her plate. It was great of him to step into the breach and offer her a bed for the night, she told herself silently, but she’d have been more than content to pay for the damage had he forced the cottage door or a window. And she would have much preferred that. Ungrateful, maybe, but that was how she felt.

‘So are you renting the cottage for a full six months?’

They’d finished the food in silence and now, as Travis put down his fork and picked up his wineglass, Beth nerved herself to meet the cool grey gaze. She nodded. ‘That was the minimum period possible,’ she said shortly.

‘It’s a very lonely location.’

‘That’s what I liked about it.’ He was looking at her in an uncomfortably speculative way and after a tense moment or two she added, ‘I haven’t been well recently. I wanted a complete change for a while.’

‘You can’t get more complete than Herb Cottage.’

Beth made no reply to this, finishing her wine and standing up quickly. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll turn in now,’ she said awkwardly. ‘It was an awful journey earlier and I’m tired.’ She sounded boorish even to her own ears.

‘I can’t tempt you to some pudding?’ Travis said mildly. ‘There’s hazelnut pie or apple crumble.’

She shook her head. ‘No, thanks.’ She glanced at Harvey, who hadn’t moved so much as a paw. ‘Where do you want him to sleep?’

‘Oh, he’ll bed down with the girls,’ Travis said easily. ‘He seems to have settled in just fine.’

Too fine in her opinion. Considering Harvey had been protective to the point where it could have been a problem over the last few months, he now seemed to have abandoned her. Feeling ridiculously put out, Beth said tensely, ‘Well, thanks again. We’ll be out of your hair as soon as possible in the morning.’

‘There’s no rush.’

Oh, yes there was. He had stood up when she’d risen and he looked very big and very male. And attractive. Definitely attractive. Appalled by the direction her thoughts were taking, Beth told herself she was overtired. ‘Goodnight,’ she mumbled hastily and fled the kitchen before he even had a chance to reply.

THE BED WAS supremely comfortable, it was quiet and peaceful and she was as warm as toast. Beth turned over for the umpteenth time and asked herself why she couldn’t sleep. She was exhausted, there was no doubt about that, but her mind was buzzing. She groaned softly and buried her face in the pillow, getting more annoyed with herself with each passing moment.

She didn’t want to think about Keith and normally she could keep him very firmly at bay these days, so why was she raking up old wounds tonight? She’d thought she was past all that.

It was him—Travis Black. He reminded her of Keith. If she was being honest, however, she couldn’t think why. Certainly the two men were not alike physically. Keith was blond and blue-eyed with a warm boyish smile and a totally unthreatening masculinity which had nevertheless been very engaging. She had fallen head over heels in love with him the first moment they had met when he’d walked into the office. And he’d said he’d felt the same—had said he adored her, worshipped her.

Stupid. Beth sat up abruptly and ran her fingers through her rumpled hair. Really, really stupid. She should have known that a successful, handsome entrepreneur like Keith Wright would have more strings to his bow than a company of concert violinists. But she had trusted him. She had loved him and she’d trusted him, it was as simple as that. Biggest mistake of her life.

Come on, stop this. You’re over the worst, you don’t do post mortems on Keith any more. The admonition was there in her mind but tonight she couldn’t stem the memories flooding in.

They’d had a low-key wedding. Keith had wanted it that way and she had been so gloriously happy she’d have got married in sackcloth and ashes if he’d asked her to. As it was, she’d worn a powder-blue suit and large hat, and everyone had said she looked radiant.

Keith had whisked her off to the Bahamas for two weeks and they had returned to live in his modern apartment on the outskirts of London. The original plan had been to start looking for a house straight away, but as the weeks and months had slipped by it had never happened. Keith had said there was plenty of time and she had agreed with him. When they decided to start trying for a baby in the future, they would think about a house. Until then they were happy as they were.

And then one terrible night her sister and brother-in-law, Michael, had turned up at their apartment. White-faced and trembling from head to foot, Catherine had told her their beloved parents had been killed in a head-on collision. Two eighteen-year-old joyriders in a stolen car had veered across the motorway, causing a lorry to swerve to avoid them. In doing so, the lorry driver had lost control of his vehicle and her parents had ploughed into it. The lorry driver had cuts and bruises and the joyriders not a scratch. Neither had they any remorse. The case had attracted nationwide publicity, as much because one of the joyriders had a famous rock star brother as anything else.

A day or two after she and Keith and Catherine and Michael had been interviewed by the press on the steps of the courthouse at the finish of the trial, the joyriders having received the maximum sentence possible, she had returned home from work to find a young woman waiting outside the apartment.

The recent past, as she and Catherine had battled to come to terms with the sudden loss of their parents, had been bad enough, but nothing could have prepared her for what had followed. The young woman was Keith’s long-term partner. They had two children and had been living together for seven years. On the nights he had been ‘away’ on business he had, in fact, been on the other side of London with Anna. And there were girlfriends too, Anna had told her in a bitter rage. There always had been. Anna had turned a blind eye to Keith’s women because she loved him and he was the father of her little girls, but when she had seen him on the news with a wife… Only the day before he had left them all with hugs and kisses after spending the night in her arms. She’d had no idea he had actually married someone else.