Sandra Marton - A Bride For The Taking

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

DORIAN had barely settled into the back of the taxi, silently thanking whatever gods were responsible for finding her an empty cab during a rainy evening rush-hour in mid-Manhattan, when traffic came to a sudden halt.

She sat forward, looked out at the press of buses, cars, and trucks, then rapped sharply on the smeared glass partition that separated her from the driver.

‘I’ve got a plane to make,’ she said in the cool, don’t-fool-with-me voice she’d learned worked best during the five years she’d lived in New York City.

The cabbie looked into his rear-view mirror and lifted his shoulders in an eloquent shrug.

‘Is a mess, lady,’ he said agreeably. ‘I do best I can.’

Dorian sank back into the cracked vinyl seat. His best, she thought glumly, would not be good enough if they didn’t get to Kennedy Airport within the next hour. The chartered flight to Barovnia would take off, leaving her behind.

The thought made her shudder. She was on the first decent assignment WorldWeek magazine had given her and, after almost two years of doing research for other reporters and little filler pieces without the coveted ‘byline’ every journalist dreamed of, she wasn’t about to lose her chance of becoming a correspondent.

A horn blared behind them, the single sound immediately taken up by what seemed to be every other vehicle caught in the tangled snarl that filled Fifty-Seventh Street. Even Dorian’s driver began to pound his fist on the horn, all the while muttering to himself in a tongue that bore no resemblance whatsoever to English.

Dorian muttered something too, short and succinct and not at all ladylike. The cabbie glanced into the mirror as if he’d heard her. We’re in this together, the look on his face said, but that wasn’t true at all. The meter was running, adding dollars to her growing frustration. He could sit here all night if he had to; at least he was earning his pay. Dorian wouldn’t really begin to earn hers until she’d boarded that damned charter flight.

It would be on the apron by now, hatches open as the personal luggage of the entire Barovnian entourage was loaded aboard. The reporters themselves would travel light, but Dorian was sure the delegation would not—especially the man at the centre of it.

Jack Alexander, the wealthy and powerful head of the giant corporation that controlled Barovnian exports, would expect to travel in style—even though his destination was an isolated kingdom with one foot still planted in the ignorance and poverty of the Middle Ages. And now—now, if the newly crowned abdhan of Barovnia died...

Dorian slid backwards as the taxi shot into a sudden opening in the traffic. Good! They were moving again—but only as far as the next corner. She groaned and rapped once more on the partition.

‘I absolutely, positively must get to Kennedy by seven,’ she said. ‘Please. Can’t you do something?’

The driver threw up his hands. ‘Is no my fault, miss.’

That was the motto of the day, Dorian thought glumly as she sank back in her seat. Her boss had used the same words when he’d dumped her into the middle of this situation.

She had been intent on the story she was writing, her fingers doing their usual hunt-and-peck across her computer keyboard while she tried to stretch a forty-word filler piece about the Florida citrus crop into one hundred words of journalistic brilliance, when a bulky shadow loomed across her desk. She looked up and saw Walt Hemple standing beside her.

‘Got to see you, babe,’ he said around the cigar that was, as always, clamped between his teeth.

Dorian nodded and got to her feet, biting back the desire to tell him for what would probably be the thousandth time that her name wasn’t ‘babe’. There was no point to it—’babe’ was Hemple’s standard form of address for all the women staffers, a not-so-subtle reminder that, even if the law and a changed society required that WorldWeek employ female reporters, Walt Hemple didn’t have to like it.

She followed him through the crowded newsroom to his office—a narrow cubicle perfumed with the noxious fumes of his cigar. Hemple elbowed past her, grunting as he settled into the old-fashioned swivel-chair behind his desk.

‘Sit,’ he said, but, as usual, there was no place to sit. Files, papers and old copies of WorldWeek were piled on the only other chair in the room.

Hemple folded his hands across his ample belly and looked at her.

‘So,’ he said after a moment, ‘how’s it going?’

She blinked. What kind of question was that? Hemple was not a man given to making small talk, especially not with staffers as far down the ladder as she.

‘All right,’ Dorian said cautiously. ‘I’m just about done with—’

‘What do you know about Barovnia?’

She blinked again. Barovnia. Barovnia. She knew the name, of course. It had been in the papers weeks before. WorldWeek had even done a piece on it.

‘Not much,’ she said, still cautiously. ‘It’s a country near the Black Sea—’

‘A kingdom. A mountain kingdom in the Carpathians.’

She nodded. ‘Right. I remember now. The Barovnian king died a couple of months ago, and—’

‘They don’t have a king. They have an abdhan .’ Hemple grinned around his cigar. ‘He’s like a cross between God and Emperor of the World—an absolute monarch with the power of life and death over his people.’

Dorian nodded again. ‘This is all very interesting,’ she said carefully, ‘but what—?’

‘Read,’ he said, shoving a sheet of paper across the desk.

She started to do as instructed, but Hemple clucked his tongue impatiently and snatched back the paper.

‘It’s an announcement from the Barovnian embassy,’ he said. ‘It just came over the wire. The abdhan may die. If he does, they’ll be crowning a new one.’

‘But it’s a mistake. You just said the king died last month—’

‘Jeez, babe, get it straight, will you? He’s called an abdhan . How many times I got to tell you that?’

Dorian’s eyes narrowed beneath their veil of dark lashes. Count to ten, she told herself, and don’t say anything you’ll regret.

‘What I’m saying, Walt, is that this is old news. The abdhan had an accident a couple of months ago—’

‘Having a massive coronary in your sleep after eighty-five years of being one of the world’s last absolute rulers can hardly be classified as an accident, babe.’

‘The bottom line is that the old man died and they replaced him, which means the wire-service story is wrong. Do you want me to phone them and—?’

‘The story is one hundred per cent on the money. The old guy died, they crowned his successor—’

‘Seref Baldov. Wasn’t that his name?’

‘Right. And yesterday there was some kind of tribal ceremony, something to do with horses. A mock battle, who the hell knows—?’

‘A tribal ceremony?’ Dorian couldn’t quite keep the scorn from her voice. ‘Hasn’t anyone told these people we’re on the threshold of the twenty-first century?’

Hemple’s teeth showed in a smile. ‘Exactly. Americans are planning a mission to Mars and the Barovnians still play at being Cossacks. Interesting point, isn’t it?’

Dorian sighed. Now she knew where this was going. A heading danced before her eyes. COSSACKS AND COSMONAUTS. Well, something like that. It didn’t matter because the piece she’d write wouldn’t rate a title. Walt would want a filler, some human interest thing that could be tucked in to fill space on the bottom of a page.