Daphne Clair - Claiming His Bride

His eyes were diamond-hard, his fingers inflexible on her waist.

Owed him what? The chance to show the world she hadn’t broken his heart? That he didn’t care how she’d trampled his pride? “You should be thanking me,” she said. “Our marriage would have been a mistake.”

“I thank heaven daily.” His hands tightened on her as he moved them into a turn, and she had to clutch at his shoulder to keep her balance.

He whirled her around a couple of times, making her giddy, his arms hauling her close. This time he didn’t slacken his hold. His lips close to her temple, he murmured, “Relax. I can’t do to you here what I’d like to do. You’re perfectly safe.”

“What you’d like to do?” she echoed, a shiver of apprehension mingled with strange excitement traveling down her spine.

He tilted his head back, allowing a few inches of space between their bodies as he looked down at her, shocking her with the animosity glittering in his eyes. “Wring your pretty, damned spoiled little neck,” he said, almost matter-of-factly.

DAPHNE CLAIR lives in subtropical New Zealand with her Dutch-born husband. They have five children. At eight years old she embarked on her first novel, about taming a tiger. This epic never reached a publisher, but metamorphosed male tigers still prowl the pages of her romances, of which she has written over thirty for Harlequin ®and over fifty all told. Her other writing includes nonfiction, poetry and short stories, and she has won literary prizes in New Zealand and the United States.

Readers are invited to visit Daphne Clair’s Web site at www.daphneclair.com.

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CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

SORREL should have known that Blaize Tarnower would be at her cousin’s wedding.

Subconsciously she might have hoped that Elena and her parents wouldn’t invite him, or that he’d have the grace to decline.

But then he probably hadn’t expected her to be here. Possibly no one had told him that after four years Sorrel Kenyon had come home to New Zealand.

She hadn’t seen him inside the church, but while the bridal party posed on the steps for photographs, she turned to make her way to her parents’ car, and there he was, directly in her path.

Tall, dark, and not exactly handsome but certainly striking with his jutting cheekbones, commanding nose and firm mouth, he surveyed her with dispassionate steel-grey eyes.

The woman clinging to his arm looked inquiringly up at him. Peripherally Sorrel noticed her blue eyes, milk-and-roses complexion and perfect features, shaded from the summer sun by an elegant broad-brimmed hat that matched her eyes.

‘Sorrel,’ Blaize said, his deep voice even and almost bored. ‘So you actually made it to a wedding.’

Disconcerted at the subtle sting in his words, she didn’t immediately react.

The woman said, ‘Sorrel?’ Her blue gaze was curious beneath finely shaped brows, and maybe Sorrel imagined that the pink-tipped fingers tightened on the expensive cloth of Blaize’s suit. ‘Like a horse? For the colour of your hair?’

‘It’s a herb,’ Sorrel said mechanically, accustomed to people querying the origin of her name. Her jade-green eyes were still held by the enigmatic male gaze that she sensed was hiding animosity.

‘A bitter herb,’ Blaize’s voice was laced with underlying mockery, ‘though the flowers look sweet.’ Then, as if remembering the manners instilled in him by a meticulous mother and the most prestigious school in Wellington, he introduced her to his companion. ‘Sorrel Kenyon, Cherie. And this is Cherie Watson.’

For a moment Sorrel had thought he was using the French endearment, and an unwelcome pang attacked her heart.

Cherie placed a languid hand in the one Sorrel extended to her, almost immediately withdrawing it. ‘Nice to meet you.’

Sorrel smiled, her manners every bit as ingrained and practised as Blaize’s. ‘You too,’ she lied politely.

Blaize’s glance flicked her, a small movement at the corner of his mouth doubting her sincerity. He knew her far too well.

Cherie said suddenly, as if making a discovery, ‘You must be Blaize’s business partner’s daughter?’

Blaize answered for her. ‘Yes, Sorrel is Ian’s daughter.’ The grey gaze inspected her again, from the untameable auburn curls, over the amber silk suit with a nipped waist, and all the way to the high-heeled shoes she seldom wore now because most men didn’t equal Blaize’s height. ‘You’re looking…well.’

The faintest spark briefly lit his eyes, a tiny ember of desire, but it was enough to stop both Sorrel’s breathing and her heartbeat for a moment, until the blood came rushing back to her body and weakened her limbs. She took a secret, deliberately controlled breath to steady herself. ‘So are you.’

She couldn’t help looking her fill, taking in the small changes.

His cheeks looked leaner; perhaps he had lost a little weight, although he appeared fitter than ever, his body lithe and toned in the formal clothes that conformed to it superbly. His thick black hair was shorter, very disciplined, and his mouth was firmer than she remembered, uncompromising, but perhaps that and the coldness in his eyes were due to her presence.

He hadn’t forgiven her.

Again she felt that shaft of dismay. No more than she deserved, she supposed. A man who’d been left at the altar wasn’t likely to regard the woman who had done it in a charitable light, even after four years. Her own parents had not stopped blaming her for the embarrassment she’d caused all of them.

Cherie said, ‘I heard you were living overseas—Australia?’

She sounded almost accusing.

You’ve no need to worry, Sorrel could have told her. If Blaize had ever loved Sorrel at all, she had effectively put paid to any chance of a future with him. Instead she said, ‘I have been. But Elena is my favourite cousin.’

‘So you’re just visiting?’ Cherie persisted.

Sorrel hesitated. Her job in Melbourne was interesting and she liked the city, liked Australia, but always there was the tug of home.

When her plane had taken a sweeping turn over Cook Strait, giving a breathtaking view of the rugged Marlborough Sounds with the bush growing down to the water, and then honed in between the hills to the notoriously tricky runway at Wellington, she’d felt tears prickling at her eyes, a rush of memories entering her mind. Bush walks without fear of snakes; beaches where sharks seldom bothered the swimmers, and children ran barefoot in the sand; steep, winding streets with houses perched on impossible slopes in crazy tiers, looking down on the white wakes of the inter-island ferries as they headed out of the harbour.

‘I may stay,’ she said now, possessed by a perverse impulse, ‘if I can get a job.’ Hearing her own words, she realised that in the back of her mind she’d been considering the move ever since she’d landed, shaken by that wave of homesickness.