Catherine Spencer - Three Times A Bride

Cover Page

Excerpt “So, do you love Stevenor don’t you?” “Of course I love him!” “Well, that’s one of the things I came back to find out. Now that I know, I guess you and I have nothing more to say to each other.” Adam rose and zipped up his jacket. “Have a happy life, Georgia.” “That’s just what you did when we broke up. Just turned and walked away without even kissing me goodbye!”

About The Author CATHERINE SPENCER, once an English teacher, fell into writing through eavesdropping on a conversation about Harlequin romances. Within two months she’d changed careers and sold her first book to Harlequin’s British arm, Mills & Boon. She moved to Canada from England thirty years ago and now lives in Vancouver. She is married to a Canadian and has four grown children—two daughters and two sons—plus three dogs and a cat. In her spare time she plays the piano, collects antiques and grows tropical shrubs.

Title Page Three Times A Bride Catherine Spencer www.millsandboon.co.uk

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Copyright

“Of course I love him!”

“Well, that’s one of the things I came back to find out. Now that I know, I guess you and I have nothing more to say to each other.” Adam rose and zipped up his jacket. “Have a happy life, Georgia.”

“That’s just what you did when we broke up. Just turned and walked away without even kissing me goodbye!”

CATHERINE SPENCER,once an English teacher, fell into writing through eavesdropping on a conversation about Harlequin romances. Within two months she’d changed careers and sold her first book to Harlequin’s British arm, Mills & Boon. She moved to Canada from England thirty years ago and now lives in Vancouver. She is married to a Canadian and has four grown children—two daughters and two sons—plus three dogs and a cat. In her spare time she plays the piano, collects antiques and grows tropical shrubs.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

IF SHE hadn’t been so preoccupied with entering the security code and locking the door to the studio before she stepped out into the quiet square, she might have realized sooner that he was waiting just for her. But she was too busy making a mental checklist of all the things she had to do before her wedding day to give much attention to the street.

He emerged from the shadow of the building, a dark and stealthy smudge superimposed on the deeper blackness of the night. Georgia felt his presence before she saw him and knew the raw November wind had nothing to do with the chill of awareness that inched past the fur collar of her coat and shimmied the length of her spine.

Belatedly, she noticed that the moon had disappeared behind rain-filled clouds, offering him anonymity. But she, halfway between the building and her car parked at the curb, was fully revealed in the light spilling from the wrought-iron street lamp. With her high heels and slender build, she was unmistakably a woman, unmistakably alone.

She was not afraid, however. Mildly curious, perhaps, but definitely not afraid. She refused to admit to such a possibility. To do so would negate everything she’d struggled to achieve in the last fifteen months. Like passion and rage and wild, obsessive love, fear shredded a person’s soul beyond redemption.

She knew. She was a survivor—but only just, and only because she had divorced herself, firmly and irrevocably, from all those raw emotions capable of inflicting pain with supreme indifference to a person’s capacity to bear it.

Refusing to acknowledge him by so much as a glance, she continued toward her car. Whoever he was, the man could not touch her. She was too well-defended, cocooned in the pleasant, fuzzy limbo she had built around herself. If he was a panhandler, he would be very disappointed to learn that she had only about ten dollars in her purse. If he was a mugger after her personal jewelry, he’d get her engagement ring, which was insured. But he could not touch her. Nothing could violate her inner self like that, not anymore.

Or so she believed. But five yards from her car, he closed in. She could hear the rustle of his clothing, see the condensed puff of his breath.

It was not his hand reaching out to touch her, or the feel of his fingers closing softly around the nape of her neck that taught her differently. It was the supernatural premonition, as his aura collided with hers, that sent the terror shooting through her veins.

Her breath stopped and so did her heart, albeit briefly. She opened her mouth, praying for the wherewithal to cry for help.

And a voice from the grave said softly, “Don’t scream, sweet pea. It’s just me.”

…THEY HAD MET three years before, at the Dog Days of August Dance at the Riverside Club. He’d looked up as she came in from the terrace, brought his smoky-blue gaze to bear on her, and suddenly those corny lyrics from South Pacific had made perfect sense. He was a stranger, lounging with narrow-hipped grace against the bar on the other side of the room, chatting with Steven Drake, the most eligible bachelor in town, but when he’d seen Georgia, he’d let the conversation lapse, straightened to his full height, and shrugged his black, open-necked shirt into place on his fabulous shoulders.

Just then, the band switched from a classic 1950’s foxtrot to the pulsing beat of Time of Your Life from Dirty Dancing, and she’d known with fatal certainty that he was going to saunter over, take her hand, and lead her out onto the floor. And that the way he’d dance with her would set staid old Piper Landing on its ear, and that she’d never be the same again.

“How could you?” her sister, Samantha, had squawked the next day.“Everybody’s talking about the exhibition you made of yourself with the grandson of that crazy old hippie, Bev Walsh.”

“Hardly a hippie, dear,” their mother had said with somewhat less vehemence, “But Bohemian, certainly, and eccentric, too. Definitely not someone we care to cultivate.”

It couldn’t have mattered less to Georgia if he’d been related to Lucrezia Borgia. They’d spent the rest of that first evening together, danced—disgracefully, no doubt— until dawn, barely been able to tear themselves away from each other, and continued to shock local society for the remainder of the time he was in town.

It had been instant romance, complete with every timeless cliche, the only flaw being that he belonged to the United States Air Force and was on leave in Piper Landing for only a week or two.

“You cannot possibly intend to pursue this relationship?” her mother had gasped when Georgia made it plain that her affair with the dashing Lieutenant Colonel Adam Cabot was no passing fancy.“Dear Heaven, Georgia, isn’t it time you settled down and remembered who you are?”

That had been yet one more round in an ongoing volley of disapproval over the fact that Georgia had turned up her nose at the chance of a university education, and opted instead to don a leather apron and learn the jewelry business from the bottom up.