Tessa Radley - Reclaiming His Pregnant Widow

“Clea!”

That voice. She jerked around like a puppet on a string, eyes stretched wide, shock punching the air out of her lungs.

Breathless, she whispered, “Brand …?”

It couldn’t be. Disbelief made her blink. Brand was dead.

The man coming toward her was tall, dark, and very much alive.

The hands that came down on her shoulders were so intimately familiar … yet so painfully strange. He was dead. Yet the fingers cupping her shoulders were warm, strong, and very much alive.

This was no ghost.

This was a human. A man she knew too well.

Her husband was back.

Dear Reader,

Every now and then I get an idea that just won’t leave me alone. The characters come to life—I can hear them talking. And this was one of those ideas.

In fact, the opening scene of Reclaimed: His Pregnant Widow was so vivid in my mind, it took up permanent residence. A hero who comes back from the dead to find the woman he loves has had him declared dead. How would he respond? And what about his woman, who can’t bear to think that her trust has been misplaced? I knew from the first moment these characters would be in for a rocky ride.

When I discussed the idea with my first editor Melissa Jeglinski she loved it. But I wasn’t ready to write the story … yet … I still had too many unanswered questions. My next editor Krista Stroever also believed in the idea—but both of us still had questions. Finally Charles Griemsman came along and the story came to life.

So I’m truly thrilled you’ll at last have a chance to meet Brand and Clea after all the time that they’ve been living in my head!

Happy reading.

Tessa Radley

TESSA RADLEYloves traveling, reading and watching the world around her. As a teen Tessa wanted to be an intrepid foreign correspondent. But after completing a bachelor of arts degree and marrying her sweetheart, she became fascinated by law and ended up studying further and practicing as an attorney in a city firm.

A six-month break spent traveling through Australia with her family reawoke the yen to write. And life as a writer suits her perfectly—traveling and reading count as research, and as for analyzing the world … well, she can think “what if?” all day long. When she’s not reading, traveling or thinking about writing, she’s spending time with her husband, her two sons or her zany and wonderful friends. You can contact Tessa through her website, www.tessaradley.com.

Reclaiming His

Pregnant Widow

Tessa Radley

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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For Charles

All my life November has been special. It’s my birthday

month. It’s Prince Charming month. It’s the best

month ever!

So I’m dedicating this book to Charles with gratitude

and affection—Charles, you will forever make me

feel like Cinderella. And meeting you was a hundred

birthdays wrapped into one. A magic, never-to-be-

forgotten moment.

Thank you for your patience, for your grace and your

wonderful work.

The photograph sealed it.

The newspaper Brand Noble had bought at JFK International Airport on his return to the United States had carried a story about tonight’s black-tie museum exhibition opening. But it was the photo of Clea standing beside a statue of a stone tiger that had caused his heart to stop. It had been four years since he’d seen his wife, and she looked more beautiful than ever. Her raven hair unchanged, her eyes still wide and green.

Brand was not about to allow anything as insignificant as the lack of an embossed invitation to keep him from her. He’d waited long enough.

Now, two hours later, Brand slammed the door of the yellow-and-black cab that had ferried him to Manhattan’s Museum Mile. Turning his back on the midweek bustle of commuters hastening home in the fading light, he focused on the Museum of Ancient Antiquities towering ahead.

Clea was in there….

A uniformed guard, almost as wide as he was tall, blocked the entrance, and his scrutiny reminded Brand that in his haste to see Clea he had yet to don the rented tuxedo jacket still slung across his left arm.

Brand’s mouth slanted in a wry grimace. What would the man have thought of the battered fatigues he’d worn for the better part of four years?

Impatience and anticipation ratcheted up another notch, and the ache to see Clea—hold her, kiss her—consumed him.

Breaking into a lope, Brand headed for the glass doors, shrugging on the dinner jacket as he went. He pulled the collar straight and smoothed down the satin lapels with scarred and callused fingertips. As the security guard examined the invitations of the group in front, Brand tagged on behind the tail-enders. To his relief, the guard waved him through with the rest of the party.

He’d negotiated the first barrier.

Now to find Clea …

Brand would’ve loved the tiger.

As always, the sight of the stone figure transfixed Clea. The chatter and clinking of champagne glasses faded away as she studied the powerful feline. Crafted by a Sumerian stone carver eons ago, the leashed power of the piece was compelling, calling to her on a primal level that she could not explain.

Without question Brand would have loved it. That had been her very first thought when she’d spotted the half life-size cat eighteen months earlier—she’d had to have it. Convincing Alan Daley, the museum’s head curator, and the acquisition board to acquire it had taken some doing; the financial outlay had been considerable. But the statue had proved to be a crowd pleaser.

And it was inexorably linked in her mind to Brand, serving as a daily memorial to her husband.

Her late husband.

“Clea?”

The voice that broke into her thoughts was softer than Brand’s rough velvet tones. Not Brand, but Harry …

Brand was dead. Tossed without honor into some mass grave in the hot, dry desert of Iraq. Years of unending questions, desperate prayers and daily flashes of hope were finally over. Ended, irrevocably, in the most unwelcome manner nine months ago.

But he would never be forgotten. Clea had vowed to make certain of that.

Determinedly shrugging off the shroud of melancholy, she brushed a curl off her face and turned away from the statue to her father’s business associate and her oldest friend. “Yes, Harry?”

Harry Hall-Lewis set his hands on her shoulders and gazed down at her. “Yes? Now that’s the word I’ve been waiting a long time to hear you say.”

The playful note in his tone caused Clea to roll her eyes. How she wished he’d tire of the game he’d made of the arranged-marriage plan their fathers had hatched for them two decades ago. “Not now, Harry.” On cue her phone beeped.

Relieved, she extracted her cell phone from her clutch and glanced at it. “It’s Dad.” As chairman of the museum’s board of trustees, Donald Tomlinson had been giving prospective patrons a private tour of the exhibit.