Mistress Of The Groom

“If anyone can show any just cause why Ava and Ryan may not lawfully be joined together, let them now speak...” About the Author Scandals! Title Page CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN Copyright

“If anyone can show any just cause why Ava and Ryan may not lawfully be joined together, let them now speak...”

Jane leapt to her feet. “Stop! I know of an impediment to this marriage.”

Stunned silence. The wedding party turned as one.

Jane ventured boldly down the aisle, her gaze fixed on the minister. “You can’t marry this couple. You’re going to ask them to promise to love and honor and forsake all others—but one of them is already committed to someone else!”

SUSAN NAPIER was born on St. Valentine’s Day, so it’s not surprising she has developed an enduring love of romantic stories. She started her writing career as a journalist in Auckland, New Zealand, trying her hand at romance fiction only after she had married her handsome boss! Numerous books later she still lives with her most enduring hero, two future heroes—her sons!—two cats and a computer. When she’s not writing she likes to read and cook, often simultaneously!

Scandals!

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Get ready for the next outrageous Scandal

THE RANCHER’S MISTRESS

by

Kay Thorpe (#1924)

All will be revealed in December 1997

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Mistress of the Groom

Susan Napier

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

THE tall, statuesque brunette wound her way sinuously through the glittering throng. Her formal black gown, cut low across her voluptuous breasts and deep to the base of her spine, flared out from her hips as she walked, the thin fabric shimmering as it slipped and slid against her long legs. Her hair was braided into a glossy black knot on the top of her head, adding to her already considerable height and emphasising the stark bareness of her white throat and shoulders.

The colour of her dress and her total lack of jewellery were in dramatic contrast to the rest of the women in the crowded hotel restaurant. The sought-after invitations from Spectrum Developments had placed an emphasis on glitz and glamour, and the female guests had taken the ‘rainbow’ theme to heart in order to flaunt their social and financial status at what was already being called Auckland’s party of the year.

The woman in black didn’t appear to be aware of her social solecism. Her head was held high, her pale, sharp features a mask of haughty calm as she ignored the whispers gathering in her wake, her icy blue gaze fixed on the small group of important men and vivacious women clustered around a towering figure at the far end of the room.

She was almost there when the tall man at the centre of all the sycophantic attention turned to pick up his half-full glass from the elegantly set dining-table beside him and caught sight of her.

His dark head lifted sharply, his nostrils flaring, his powerful muscles bunching within the sleek confines of his black-tie regalia as he shouldered through the mass of hangers-on to confront her approach. He looked like a stallion rearing at an unexpected intrusion into his territory—a massive black stallion, standing aggressively tall, radiating a restless antagonism, his spiky, short-cropped hair the same midnight colour as his superbly tailored jacket, his cobalt-blue eyes wild with untamed spirit, his blunt, masculine features hard and hostile.

Her stride briefly faltered and his expression changed to one of smouldering anticipation. His broad, flat cheekbones gave him a primitive look, the dark bloom on the smooth-shaven jaw adding to the impression of unbridled masculinity. She knew he had only just turned thirty-three but he looked older, with ruthless lines of experience etched around his eyes and mouth.

‘Well, well, well...’ he drawled in a darkly insolent voice as she came to a halt in front of him. ‘If it isn’t Miss Sherwood. I didn’t realise you were on my invitation list. How tasteless of me to ask you to celebrate the man and the deal which sent your ailing little company to the wall.’

Jane Sherwood tilted her chin to an even more imperious angle, bitterly regretting that her three-inch heels still didn’t give her nearly six-foot frame a height advantage over the sneering giant. They both knew damned well that she hadn’t received one of the prized, hand-blown glass rainbows which had accompanied the engraved invitations.

‘I wasn’t invited, Mr Blair.’ She echoed his parody of politeness with the full force of her loathing. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the white-jacketed hotel employee she had evaded at the door pointing her out to one of the guests, a wiry, hatchet-faced blond man whose grim alertness stamped ‘security’ all over him. Jane recognised him as the trouble-shooter who was never far from his boss’s side, and as he began to forge towards them her nerves tightened another notch.

A hush had descended over the immediate vicinity as Ryan Blair’s eyes crawled over the expensive designer dress.

‘Ah, so you’re the one being tasteless...although I must say you dress extremely well for someone on the brink of bankruptcy,’ he said in the same insultingly condescending tone. ‘I thought that the bailiffs would have been more rigorous in the performance of their duties—that dress alone would pay off a few of your numerous creditors...’

He raised his black eyebrows, his eyes reflecting the malice of his contemptuous smile. ‘Considering the trouble you’ve taken to gatecrash, I’m surprised you haven’t attempted to blend in with the colourful spirit of the occasion, but I suppose the black is supposed to be symbolic. I buried your company and now you’re in mourning.

‘Or is this martyred, monochrome look supposed to make me feel sorry for you? Have you come to beg for the crumbs from my table? I’m sorry, but as you can see—’ he gestured mockingly towards the tables glittering with crystal and silverware ‘—we haven’t dined yet. Why don’t you call my secretary and arrange to see me at the office? If you’re lucky I might be able to dredge up a few odd scraps to throw your way. I can’t guarantee anything, of course, but then I’m sure you’ve discovered that beggars can’t be choosers, can they, Miss Sherwood...?’

There were several titters in the background and a questioning buzz, but the protagonists were too intent on each other to be aware of the distraction.

‘I didn’t come here to ask for any favours,’ denied Jane coldly, her stomach turning at the thought of being forced to beg before this sadistic swine. That was what he wanted, she realised sickly. Having stripped Jane of her family inheritance, her bright career and practically every material possession, he was now intent on exposing her nakedness to ridicule and contempt. As far as he was concerned this unexpected encounter was just another opportunity to grind her pride into the dust. Well, if she had to go down, the would go down fighting!

‘No? Then perhaps you’re here to do me one,’ he taunted as their eyes clashed, two hostile shades of blue. ‘It is my birthday, after all, and everyone else seems to be in a gifting mood. Have you come to give me something too, Miss Sherwood?’

‘As a matter of fact, I have,’ she said, stepping closer, her left hand momentarily concealed by the folds of her skirt.

Hatchet-face, who had glided silently up to his employer’s side, stiffened and began to lunge forward, but he was halted by an out-flung arm.

‘Really?’ Ryan Blair dropped his arm as his would-be protector settled obediently back. ‘I wonder what you could conceivably have to give me that I don’t already possess?’ The drawl was more pronounced than ever as he sipped from his glass of champagne, a picture of contemptuous relaxation, a man who was supremely confident of his enemy’s impotence. And, no doubt because she was a woman, he was doubly certain of his superiority!

She realised she still possessed the element of surprise.

‘This...!’

Even as she half turned away, dropping her left shoulder in a classic fighting gesture, he didn’t seem to recognise his danger, and when her clenched fist came shooting up and out it was too late to duck.

The full weight of her feminine strength and fury was behind the punch which smashed squarely into his insolent jaw with a deeply gratifying crunch.

A jolt of excruciating pain exploded up Jane’s arm and flashes of white light briefly dazzled her vision, but her smothered cry of agony was lost in the concerted gasp of the crowd and the female shrieks of dismay. Ryan Blair’s head snapped back and the abrupt shift of his centre of gravity sent him crashing back against the round table behind him, his powerful bulk tipping it over and toppling him flat on the floor amidst a rain of crystal and cutlery.

The sight of him lying there cradling his bruised jaw, cursing like a navvy into the stunned silence, his façade of polished sophistication in ruins, was balm to Jane’s lacerated spirit.

As the hotel events manager swooped down on the scene, gabbling horrified apologies, and the guests began to surge forward to help the man of honour to his feet, Jane turned her back on the chaos and walked out with the same calm, unhurried dignity with which she had arrived. She looked neither to left nor right, conscious of the path opening up before her as people drew back, afraid that their proximity to a social and business pariah might be interpreted as support. Ryan Blair had made it clear that whoever was not wholeheartedly with him was against him. And, as Jane had already discovered to her cost, he made a bitter enemy.

She reached the heavy glass door to the hotel foyer without hindrance, but as she reached for the brass bar a masculine hand was there before her, pushing it open. She turned her head in a bare acknowledgement and was startled to see that it was Ryan Blair’s blond hatchet-man assisting her passage to freedom. She half expected him to try to detain her, or at least warn her that she was going to be sued for full damages, but instead he merely inclined his head as she passed through the door, a peculiar glint of sardonic admiration in his silver-grey eyes.

When she stepped out into the street, the summer night enfolded her like a warm and humid blanket. The footpath was still slick with the light rain which had fallen earlier in the evening and she had to walk slowly and carefully in her spiky heels, acutely conscious that the glass wall of the hotel restaurant fronted the street, allowing everyone inside a clear view of her progress.

She was almost to the corner, where she would turn blessedly out of sight into the side-street where she had parked her car, when she heard a scuff of sound behind her.

Before she could react she was whirled fiercely round, her arms held in a steely grip.

‘Oh, no you don’t!’

She looked up into Ryan Blair’s blazing blue eyes.

‘You didn’t think you were going to walk off scot-free, did you? Nobody throws a punch at me and gets away with it!’

His voice was thick with rage and her eyes fell to his battered mouth, where a trickle of blood revealed a split in his swollen lower lip. The reddened puffiness ran down the left side of his jaw; by morning it would probably be black and blue. Jane had always shunned violence, in her whole twenty-six years she had never seriously sought to injure anyone, but now she felt a hot burst of pleasure at the sight of the damage she had caused to Ryan Blair’s handsome face.

‘I don’t see what you can do about it,’ she told him, riding a brave surge of adrenalin, struggling to wrench herself out of his iron fists. ‘Unless you want to make yourself a laughing stock by having me arrested for assault!’

‘You don’t think people are laughing at me now?’ he snarled, his fingers tightening on her bare arms.

‘Whose fault is that?’ she choked, giving up the unequal fight and standing straight and tall within his punishing grasp, her eyes icy with scorn. ‘You may be rich enough to buy loyalty but you still have to earn respect. Your campaign to drive Sherwood Properties out of business was vicious and underhanded and commercially questionable. I bet a lot of those toadies in there that you bribed or intimidated into your circle of influence secretly enjoyed seeing you get a punch in the face. They’re just too scared to admit it!’

She had reminded him of their curious audience behind the glass wall of the restaurant, but instead of looking their way he glanced over his shoulder. ‘So you did it because you think you have nothing left to lose?’ he grated. ‘Think again, sweetheart.’

And he jerked her against his chest, crushing her hands between them, lowering his head and forcing her shocked cry back down her throat with his plundering mouth. One large hand burrowed up into her immaculate coiffure, dislodging the pins, the other arm wrapped diagonally across her back, his fingers sinking into the swell of her buttocks as he arched her into a classic clinch. His foot thrust between her teetering heels, his knees squeezing her trapped thigh, and when she tried to push him away with her fists a burst of pain in her left hand made her gasp, opening herself even wider to the rough intrusion of his tongue. She felt the sting of his teeth against her tender lip and, tasting blood, didn’t know whether it was his or her own.

He made no pretence of passion—it was an exercise in pure male dominance—but there was no pretence about the kiss, either. It was no chaste theatrical illusion, it was deep, hard and shatteringly real. Strange waves of heat and cold battered Jane’s senses, and she thought she was fainting when a white light like the one that had dazzled her in the restaurant suddenly began pulsing and whirring around her head.

Just as suddenly Ryan Blair let her go and, staggering slightly, Jane saw a grinning photographer backing away, flashing off a few more shots as he went. She shuddered to think of the images he had captured on film.

‘What did you do that for?’ she panted furiously, putting a hand up to the heavy fall of hair which he had wrenched adrift. His gloating smirk told her that he had known the photographer was approaching when he had grabbed her.

His gaze fell to the lush, creamy-white breasts, heaving with outrage above her deep, square-cut neckline. ‘Why, to show the good people of this city that that punch had nothing to do with my business practices and everything to do with our private relationship.’

‘We don’t have a private relationship,’ she ground out, giving up and wrenching out the rest of the hairpins, tossing her head so that the raven-black waves rippled down her back. She knew she looked nothing like the cool, controlled, fearless woman who had confronted him in the restaurant a few minutes ago. Now she was flushed and crumpled and thoroughly kissed, demoted to the rank of a frivolous sexual object.

‘Tell that to them.’ He nodded towards the press of fascinated faces on the other side of the glass wall. ‘By tomorrow morning it’ll be all over town that you and I conducted a messy lover’s quarrel in public. The gossip columns’ll be speculating as to how long our secret affair has been going on, and whether we’re as competitive in bed as out. They might start wondering whether our business rivalry was a smokescreen that only turned into the real thing when the relationship started going sour.

‘Some people might even suggest that the real reason Sherwood Properties crashed was because its managing director fell in love and lost all sense of perspective, a classic case of a female letting her hormones rule her brain...’

Oh, yes, the creaking male chauvinists who inhabited the upper echelons of the business establishment would be only too delighted to bandy that theory around their executive men’s rooms, Jane thought furiously. Because she was young and a woman she had had to work long and hard for her success. Her driving determination to show everyone that she was more than capable of filling her father’s shoes had made her a formidable competitor in the field of commercial property dealing in the past five years...and put many older and more experienced masculine noses out of joint. The old boy network would enjoy the chance to dismiss her past achievements by turning her into a washroom joke.

‘You bastard,’ she hissed, stricken anew by the savage injustice of his actions. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’

He gave a bitter, incredulous laugh. ‘You know why. Because it’s pay-back time...’

Jane wrapped her arms around her waist, shaking her head in bewilderment. ‘Isn’t what you’ve already done to me payment enough? Thanks to you, I’ve lost everything. How long are you going to keep on hounding me like this?’

He thrust his face close to hers, his voice as smooth as exposed steel as he unsheathed his malice and gutted her of any expectation of mercy.

‘Oh, you haven’t lost quite everything, my dear; that comes later... You wrecked my marriage—now I’m going to wreck your life just as thoroughly. So say goodbye to all your hopes and dreams, Jane Sherwood, because your future is going to be very different from the one you had planned!’

CHAPTER TWO

JANE slumped in the driver’s seat of her two-door car, her forehead resting on the steering wheel. The keys were in the ignition but she wanted to get control of herself before she drove home. She knew changing gear was going to be wretchedly difficult.

The agony in her left hand had settled down to a dull throbbing that flared into hot needles of pain whenever she flexed her fingers. It was probably going to be as swollen and bruised tomorrow as Ryan Blair’s jaw. But it was worth it, she thought bitterly.

She had wrecked his marriage?

He had never even been married!

Halting a wedding ceremony was not the same thing as splitting up a husband and wife. When Jane had stepped in to prevent Ryan Blair and Ava Brandon from taking their final vows she had truly believed that the dramatic, last-minute intervention was the only way to save the bride and groom from making a miserable mistake.

A dynamic, self-made man like Ryan Blair wouldn’t have been happy with someone as passive and retiring as Ava, and her gentle, sensitive friend would have had her quiet individuality crushed by his dominating personality. If Ava had been madly in love with her future husband Jane would have wholeheartedly supported the match, despite her own serious doubts about the couple’s compatibility, but she knew that, far from being in love, Ava was intimidated by the man her ambitious, old fashioned, overbearing parents had pushed her into agreeing to marry.

Ava had said that Ryan claimed to love her when he had swept into her life and proposed, but the announcement, shortly after their engagement, of a Brandon/Blair financial joint venture and his hectic work schedule, which allowed them little time together during their six month engagement, had deepened Ava’s misgivings.

However, as usual, instead of confronting the problem, Ava had taken the path of least resistance until the last possible moment, only to have her belated attempts to assert herself ruthlessly dismissed as bridal jitters.

The first Jane had known of the depths of despair to which her friend had sunk was the day before the wedding, when Ava had invaded her office in tears. In between her friend’s savage draughts of Mr Sherwood’s eight-year-old Scotch, which still stocked the office drinks cabinet, Jane had dragged out the sorry details, realising with a shock that it had been months since she and Ava had sat down and talked together. No...since she had taken time to really listen to what her friend was saying.

Although she had ostensibly taken over Sherwood Properties when her father had been forced into premature retirement by a heart attack, Jane had only been a figurehead. Mark Sherwood had remained the real power behind the throne, as ruthless, demanding and critical as ever, constantly questioning her performance and countermanding her decisions, never letting her forget who was in ultimate charge. His sudden death when she had been still only twenty-two had made it critical that Jane prove as quickly as possible to competitors, clients and employees alike that she was as good—if not better—than her father.

So she had started putting in twelve-hour days at Sherwood Properties’ downtown office, constantly pushing to improve the business, and had felt vindicated when the company’s profits had begun to burgeon in response to her ambitious plans. Vindicated but not satisfied. Success had been like a drug. The more she achieved, the higher the goals she set herself.

In the process, Jane’s social life had dwindled to virtually nil. It had given her a strange chill to realise that Ava was not only her best friend, she was virtually her only real friend—the rest qualifying merely as acquaintances or colleagues. The guilt over her neglect of their friendship had made Jane boldly assure her sobbing friend that of course she’d help her think of a way to escape the imminent marriage, a way that wouldn’t result in an irrevocable family breach.

Secretly, Jane had thought Ava’s self-confidence might improve if she were temporarily estranged from her manipulative parents, but she had known that her insecure friend would go through with a marriage she didn’t want rather than risk permanently alienating herself from her mother. Having lost her own mother at six, Jane had no wish to be responsible for depriving anyone else of their maternal bond.

Jane cradled her injured hand in her lap, swamped by the memory of that awful wedding.

It had been almost exactly three years ago, on a beautiful, sunny spring afternoon. The graceful old inner-city church had been bursting at the seams with society guests when Jane had squeezed nervously onto the end of the back pew on the groom’s side, resisting the usher’s attempt to seat her further forward. She had had the feeling she might need the fast getaway, whether her hastily conceived plan worked or not.

Although, as giggling schoolgirls, she and Ava had vowed to be bridesmaids at each other’s weddings, Jane hadn’t been surprised when Kirstie Brandon had excluded Jane from the official wedding party by insisting that family take precedence. Ava had been upset but, as usual, quite incapable of standing up for herself. Mrs Brandon was an extremely possessive mother and had never liked the influence that strong-minded Jane had exerted over her precious only child during their time at school together. Not that she had been overtly rude; she had merely made it clear, whenever Jane visited, that she was a guest rather than a family friend.

Mrs Brandon set great store by appearances, and Jane was too tall, too plain, too outspokenly intelligent to conform to her view of a proper lady. If her father hadn’t been a wealthy businessman Jane suspected that the friendship would have been squelched altogether, rather than merely tolerated, but Kirstie Brandon’s mercenary streak was almost as wide as her snobbish one. It had always seemed a miracle to Jane that the Brandons had produced such a kind, generous-hearted offspring.

So, two petite teenaged Brandon cousins had been selected to serve as Ava’s bridesmaids along with her fiancé’s younger sister, and three excited little flower-girls and two sulky page-boys had completed the entourage. When Jane had seen the extravagantly flounced pale peach-coloured bridesmaids’ dresses coming down the aisle she had had one more reason to be glad not to be part of the fateful wedding party. With her height and colouring she would have looked disastrously overdecorated in all those pallid ruffles.