Anna Adams - The Bride Ran Away

Ian, in decisive mode, usually turned Sophie’s legs to Jell-O and her mind to mush, but just now her brand-new groom sounded like a man who’d looked the executioner in the eye and gone under a blunt blade.

He’d lied to convince her to marry him.

She was nearly sick right there on the floor. As she slammed her hand over her mouth, Ian and Jock came around the corner. Unlike most of his overly buff colleagues, Ian was lean and long, agile and—right now—furious.

As if she’d lied to him. As if she’d married him under false pretenses.

“What are you doing?” Shock made his voice too harsh to recognize.

Swallowing, she said, “Hiding behind a marble column, listening to you end our twenty-minute marriage.”

Dear Reader,

Welcome back to Bardill’s Ridge, Tennessee, and to the Calvert family, whom you met in September’s The Secret Father. Are you ready to meet Sophie and her new husband, Ian?

Sophie’s not so sure she’s ready for Ian. She marries him because she believes they both want to create a family for their unborn child, but seconds after the wedding she hears him telling his best friend he had to marry her because she was carrying his child.

She confronts him. He admits “forever” sounds impossible to a bodyguard who’s never been home long enough to own a pet, but he’s determined to try. He’s so determined he follows Sophie to Tennessee, where he uses her family against her. They remind her how unhappy she was because of her own parents’ divorce, and Ian convinces her he cares enough to make their marriage real. But can she see forever now that he’s broken her trust?

I’d love to hear what you think. You can reach me at anna@annaadams.net. Come back to Bardill’s Ridge in March when Sophie’s cousin Molly Calvert falls in love with a man who couldn’t be more wrong for her.

Best wishes,

Anna

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Steve, again, always—the sweetest love I’ve known

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

EPILOGUE

ICE TAPPED AT THE stained-glass windows like a million small fingers begging to come in as Ian Ridley fought an unfamiliar compulsion to run. On an unseasonably frigid Tuesday night in April, on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., he waited at the altar with his best man and a minister he hardly knew.

He licked his lips. They dried again immediately, despite the damp that seeped from the cold stone floor into his shoes and slowly climbed his body. This wedding was all wrong, a church even Sophie didn’t know and a minister who’d agreed to perform their hasty ceremony because the bride-to-be was pregnant.

Ian could have asked the minister he’d guarded a few years ago to marry them, but he’d been ashamed to admit he’d gotten Sophie pregnant. In a world where he made life-or-death decisions every working day, he hated to lose a friend’s respect.

His whole life had been an effort to prove he was tough enough, good enough. Even smart enough.

A professional bodyguard, he’d once been barely able to protect himself. As an eight-year-old, he’d been bullied at boarding school, where his parents had sent him to free up their time. Strength was a front he’d willed into existence the first time one of the older, bigger boys, had shoved his head in a toilet.

Sophie knew nothing of his past. They didn’t know each other well enough to commit to a regular dinner date, much less marriage.

Take their ceremony. He’d wanted to stand before a justice of the peace. She’d wanted the wedding to “feel real.” One of her friends had suggested this church, and Ian had gone along with the idea. A formal service in unfamiliar surroundings, performed by a minister who’d be grateful they were doing the right thing.

He’d asked Jock, his colleague on several jobs, to be his best man. Sophie had planned to have a maid of honor, but she’d uninvited her friend at the last minute as if she, too, was ashamed of their quick wedding. Ashamed she was marrying him?

Shame was no way to start a marriage, even if marrying Sophie Calvert was the worst mistake he’d made with her yet.

From the moment he’d first seen her, he’d wanted her, pure and simple. Maybe not so pure. He’d wanted her, knowing he was the wrong man for her. She believed in big, protective families like hers. He knew no such animal.

His folks had not only kept him away at boarding school, they’d lived a life quite separate from his. For him family meant Christmas break or brief summer holidays. Not every-day-in-the-same-house contact.

He’d wanted a different kind of family for himself. He’d even been engaged once. That woman—who’d wisely jilted him—was now the wife of an insurance salesman in Reading, Pennsylvania, and, last Ian heard, the proud mother of three. After she’d suggested he eat his engagement ring, he’d stopped pretending to be a man who could stay home long enough to own a cat.

His work required him to live on the fringes of other people’s lives. A bodyguard since the age of twenty, when he’d been assigned to drive a Supreme Court Justice’s nanny to and from work, Ian had fought for fourteen years—with weapons and his bare hands. He’d avoided fights when walking away better served the people he protected, and he’d willingly stepped in front of almost every weapon smaller than a rocket launcher. To keep his clients safe, he’d shoved fear to the back of his mind where it couldn’t hurt anyone.

Tonight, the prospect of marriage to Sophie froze the blood in his veins.

She’d helped him forget who he was. Unable to resist the mutual, blinding desire, he still distrusted its staying power. He’d met Sophie in Bardill’s Ridge, Tennessee, when he’d accompanied a client, publishing tycoon James Kendall, to the town to visit his daughter, Olivia. When Ian had left with Kendall, Sophie had seemed almost relieved.

Back in Chicago, he hadn’t anticipated the hunger he felt—for the scent of Sophie’s hair, for the endearing curve of her joyful smile, for the need of him that glittered in her green eyes and made him feel as if he mattered to her more than anyone else.

He’d resisted that hunger for a month. On his first free weekend, he’d located Sophie at her town house in D.C. Two months after that, he’d shown up at her office, and they hadn’t gone very far before she’d parked her car on the side of a dark road.

Another month later, she’d come to Chicago, and they’d eaten, slept and made frantic love in his bedroom for the first three days of her weeklong stay. Two more months and he was waiting in front of an altar, trying to become a father to the baby he’d created with Sophie.

He cared for her. Whatever raged between them wasn’t just sex, but Sophie and he had changed too quickly from strangers to lovers to parents.

Jock nudged his arm. “Here she comes.”

Candlelight brought her out of the shadows at the back of the church. Ian’s gut tightened.

Her dress caressed each curve of a body that nearly brought him to tears. Her stomach already rounded by their baby’s growth, she made him want to be better than he was, capable of promising to be with her when their baby came. He wanted to give his family what he’d gone without all those lonely boarding-school nights—love that went deeper than providing practical necessities.