The Millionaire Claims His Wife

by Sandra Marton

  A second chance to get your hands on this tempting millionaire from bestselling author Sandra Marton

  Return to the marriage bed…

  Millionaire Chase Cooper hasn’t seen his ex-wife Annie for years, but reunited at their daughter’s wedding, he unexpectedly finds her in his arms again on the dance floor. The embers of the intoxicating lust that led them down the aisle still burn brightly and Chase wants Annie in his bed again!

  When their daughter gets cold feet about embarking on her honeymoon, Chase decides that to show her that love can endure, he and Annie will pretend they are getting back together! As the rekindled passion sizzles between them, could this be the reconciliation of the year?

  Book two in The Wedding of the Year trilogy

  Originally published in 1997 as The Divorcee Said Yes!

  Dear Reader,

  I have a confession to make: I love weddings. Fancy ones, simple ones—it doesn’t matter. I end up happily sniffling into a tissue each time. What could be more fun, I thought, than writing about a wedding? Writhing about three weddings, that’s what! Welcome to the sexy, funny, tender and exciting tales of three brides and three grooms who all meet at—that’s right—a wedding! Three books, three couples...three terrific stories. Here’s the second in the series. You’ll enjoy it, even if you haven’t read the first, The Bride Said Never!—though I hope you have.

  Annie Bennett Cooper and her ex-husband, Chase, haven’t seen each other since their divorce five years ago. Now their daughter’s wedding brings them back together for an afternoon. I can manage it, each one thinks. But neither Annie nor Chase has figured on the things parents will do for the happiness of a child—or on the enduring passion that still sizzles between them in The Divorcee Said Yes!

  Sit down, relax and enjoy the book. And remember to look for The Groom Said Maybe! next month. If you want to drop me a line, I’d love to hear from you. Write to me at P.O. Box 295, Storrs, Connecticut 06268. Please enclose a SASE for a bookmark and a reply.

  With my warmest regards,

  Sandra Marton

  The Millionaire Claims His Wife

  SANDRA MARTON

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Epilogue

  CHAPTER ONE

  IT WAS HER DAUGHTER’S wedding day, and Annie Cooper couldn’t seem to stop crying.

  “I’m just going to check my makeup, darling,” she’d told Dawn a few minutes ago, when her eyes had begun to prickle again.

  And now here she was, locked inside a stall in the ladies’ room of a beautiful old Connecticut church, clutching a handful of soggy tissues and bawling her eyes out.

  “Promise me you won’t cry, Mom,” Dawn had said, only last night.

  The two of them had been sitting up over mugs of cinnamon-laced hot chocolate. Neither of them had felt sleepy. Dawn had been too excited; Annie had been unwilling to give up the last hours when her daughter would still be her little girl instead of Nick’s wife.

  “I promise,” Annie had said, swallowing hard, and then she’d burst into tears.

  “Oh, Moth-ther,” Dawn had said, “for goodness’ sake,” just as if she were still a teenager and Annie was giving her a hard time about coming in ten minutes after curfew on school nights.

  And that was just the trouble. She was still a teenager, Annie thought as she wiped her streaming eyes. Her baby was only eighteen years old, far too young to be getting married. Of course, when she’d tried telling that to Dawn the night she’d come home, smiling radiantly with Nick’s engagement ring on her finger, her daughter had countered with the ultimate rebuttal.

  “And how old were you when you got married?” she’d said, which had effectively ended the discussion because the whole answer—“Eighteen, the same as you, and look where it got me”—was not one you wanted to make to your own child.

  It certainly wasn’t Dawn’s fault her parents’ marriage had ended in divorce.

  “She’s too young,” Annie whispered into her handful of Kleenex, “she’s much, much too young.”

  “Annie?”

  Annie heard the door to the ladies’ room swing open. A murmur of voices and the soft strains of organ music floated toward her, then faded as the door thumped shut.

  “Annie? Are you in here?”

  It was Deborah Kent, her best friend.

  “No,” Annie said miserably, choking back a sob.

  “Annie,” Deb said gently, “come out of there.”

  “No.”

  “Annie.” Deb’s tone became the sort she probably used with her third-graders. “This is nonsense. You can’t hide in there forever.”

  “Give me one good reason why I can’t,” Annie said, sniffling.

  “Well, you’ve got seventy-five guests waiting.”

  “A hundred,” Annie sobbed. “Let ’em wait.”

  “The minister’s starting to look impatient.”

  “Patience is a virtue,” Annie said, and dumped the wet tissues into the toilet.

  “And I think your aunt Jeanne just propositioned one of the groomsmen.”

  There was a long silence, and then Annie groaned. “Tell me you’re joking.”

  “All I know is what I saw. She got this look on her face—you know the look.”

  Annie clamped her eyes shut. “And?”

  “And, she went sashaying over to that big blond kid.” Deborah’s voice turned dreamy. “Actually I couldn’t much blame her. Did you see the build on that boy?”

  “Deb! Honestly!” Annie flushed the tissues down the toilet, unlocked the stall door and marched to the sink. “Aunt Jeanne’s eighty years old. There’s some excuse for her. But you—”

  “Listen, just because I’m forty doesn’t mean I’m dead. You may want to pretend you’ve forgotten what men are good for, but I certainly haven’t.”

  “Forty-three,” Annie said, rummaging in her purse. “You can’t lie about your age to me, Deb, not when we share a birthday. As for what men are good for—believe me, I know what they’re good for. Not much. Not one damn thing, actually, except for making babies and that’s just the trouble, Dawn is still just a baby. She’s too young to be getting married.”

  “That’s the other thing I came in to tell you.” Deb cleared her throat. “He’s here.”

  “Who’s here?”

  “Your ex.”

  Annie went still. “No.”

  “Yes. He came in maybe five minutes ago.”

  “No, he couldn’t have. He’s in Georgia or Florida, someplace like that.” Annie looked at her friend in the mirror. “You’re sure it was Chase?”

  “Six-two, dirty-blond hair, that gorgeous face with its slightly off-center nose and muscles up the yin-yang...” Deb blushed. “Well, I notice these things.”

  “So I see.”

  “It’s Chase, all right. I don’t know why you’re so surprised. He said he’d be here for Dawn’s wedding, that he wouldn’t let anyone else give his daughter away.”

  Annie’s mouth twisted. She wrenched on the water, lathered her hands with soap and scrubbed furiously.

  “Chase was always good at promises. It’s the follow-through he can’t manage.” She shut off the faucet and yanked a paper towel from the dispenser. “This whole thing is his fault.”

  “Annie...”

  “Did he tell Dawn she was making a mistake? No. He most certainly did not. The jerk gave her his blessing. His blessing, Deb, can you imagine?” Annie
balled up the paper towel and hurled it into the trash can. “I put my foot down, told her to wait, to finish her education. He gave her a kiss and told her to do what she thought best. Well, that’s typical. Typical! He could never do anything that wasn’t just the opposite of what I wanted.”

  “Annie, calm down.”

  “I really figured, when he didn’t show up for the rehearsal last night, that we’d gotten lucky.”

  “Dawn wouldn’t have thought so,” Deb said quietly. “And you know that she never doubted him, for a minute. ‘Daddy will be here,’ she kept saying.”

  “All the more proof that she’s too young to know what’s good for her,” Annie muttered. “What about my sister? Has she shown up yet?”

  “Not yet, no.”

  Annie frowned. “I hope Laurel’s okay. It’s not like her to be late.”

  “I already phoned the railroad station. The train came in late, or something. It’s the minister you’ve got to worry about. He’s got another wedding to perform in a couple of hours, over in Easton.”

  Annie sighed and smoothed down the skirt of her knee-length, pale green chiffon dress. “I suppose there’s no getting out of it. Okay, let’s do it... What?”

  “You might want to take a look in the mirror first.”

  Annie frowned, swung toward the sink again and blanched. Her mascara had run and rimmed her green eyes. Her small, slightly upturned nose was bright pink, and her strawberry blond hair, so lovingly arranged in a smooth, sophisticated cap by Pierre himself just this morning, was standing up as if she’d stuck her finger into an electric outlet.

  “Deb, look at me!”

  “I’m looking,” Deb said. “We could always ask the organist if he knows the music from Bride of Frankenstein.”

  “Will you be serious? I’ve got a hundred people waiting out there.” And Chase, she thought, so quickly and so senselessly that it made her blink.

  “What’s the matter now?”

  “Nothing,” Annie said quickly. “I mean...just help me figure out how to repair some of this damage.”

  Deb opened her purse. “Wash your face,” she said, taking out enough cosmetics to start her own shop, “and leave the rest to me.”

  * * *

  Chase Cooper stood on the steps of the little New England church, trying to look as if he belonged there.

  It wasn’t easy. He’d never felt more like an outsider in his life.

  He was a city person. He’d spent his life in apartments. When Annie sold the condo after their divorce and told him she was moving to Connecticut, with Dawn, it had damn near killed him.

  “Stratham?” he’d said, his voice a strangled roar. “Where the hell is that? I can’t even find it on a map.”

  “Try one of those big atlases you’re so fond of,” Annie had said coldly, “the ones you look in when you’re trying to figure out what part of the country you’ll disappear into next.”

  “I’ve told you a million times,” Chase had snapped, “I have no choice. If I don’t do things myself, they get screwed up. A man can’t afford that, when he’s got a wife and family to support.”

  “Well, now you don’t have to support me at all,” Annie had replied, with a toss of her head. “I refused your alimony, remember?”

  “Because you were pigheaded, as usual. Dammit, Annie, you can’t sell this place. Dawn grew up here.”

  “I can do what I like,” Annie had said. “The condo’s mine. It was part of the settlement.”

  “Because it’s our home, dammit!”

  “Don’t you dare shout at me,” Annie had yelled, although he hadn’t shouted. Not him. Never him. “And it’s not our home, not anymore. It’s just a bunch of rooms inside a pile of bricks, and I hate it.”

  “Hate it?” Chase had repeated. “You hate this house, that I built with my own two hands?”

  “You built a twenty-four story building that just happens to contain our particular seven rooms, and you made a million trillion bucks doing it. And, if you must know, yes, I hate it. I despise it, and I can hardly wait to get out of it.”

  Oh, yeah, Chase thought, shuffling uneasily from one foot to the other and wishing, for the first time in years, that he hadn’t given up smoking, oh, yeah, she’d gotten out of the condo, all right. Fast. And then she’d moved herself and Dawn up to this—this pinprick on the map, figuring, no doubt, that it would be the end of his weekly visits with his daughter.

  Wrong. He’d driven the hundred-and-fifty-plus miles each way every weekend, like clockwork. He loved his little girl and she loved him, and nothing that had happened between Annie and him could change that. Week after week, he’d come up to Stratham and renewed his bond with his daughter. And week after week, he’d seen that his wife—his former wife—had built herself a happy new life.

  She had friends. A small, successful business. And there were men in her life, Dawn said. Well, that was fine. Hell, there were women in his, weren’t there? As many as he wanted, all of them knockouts. That was one of the perks of bachelorhood, especially when you were the CEO of a construction company that had moved onto the national scene and prospered.

  Eventually, though, he’d stopped going to Stratham. It was simpler that way. Dawn got old enough so she could take a train or a plane to wherever he was. And every time he saw her, she was lovelier. She’d seemed to grow up, right before his eyes.

  Chase’s mouth thinned. But she hadn’t grown up enough to get married. Hell, no. Eighteen? And she was going to be some guy’s wife?

  It was Annie’s fault. If she’d paid a little less attention to her own life and a little more to their daughter’s, he wouldn’t be standing here in a monkey suit, waiting to give his little girl away to a boy hardly old enough to shave.

  Well, that wasn’t quite true. Nick was twenty-one. And it wasn’t as if he didn’t like the kid. Nick—Nicholas, to be precise—was a nice enough young man, from a good family and with a solid future ahead of him. He’d met the boy when he’d flown Dawn and her fiancé to Florida to spend a week with him on his latest job site. The kids had spent the time looking at each other as if the rest of the world didn’t exist, and that was just the trouble. It did exist, and his daughter hadn’t seen enough of it yet to know what she was doing.

  Chase had tried to tell her that, but Dawn had been resolute. In the end, he had no choice. Dawn was legally of age. She didn’t need his consent. And, as his daughter quickly told him, Annie had already said she thought the marriage was a fine idea.

  So he’d swallowed his objections, kissed Dawn, shaken Nick’s hand and given them his blessing—as if it were worth a damn.

  You could bless the union of two people all you wanted, but it didn’t mean a thing. Marriage—especially for the young—was nothing but a legitimate excuse for hormonal insanity.

  He could only hope his daughter, and her groom, proved the exception to the rule.

  “sir?”

  Chase looked around. A boy who looked barely old enough to shave was standing in the doorway of the church.

  “They sent me out to tell you they’re about ready to begin, sir.”

  Sir, Chase thought. He could remember when he’d called older men “sir.” It hadn’t been so much a mark of respect as it had been a euphemism for “old man.” That was how he felt, suddenly. Like an old, old man.

  “Sir?”

  “I heard you the first time,” Chase said irritably and then, because none of what he was feeling was the fault of the pink-cheeked groomsman, he forced a smile to his lips. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve got the father-of-the-bride jitters, I guess.”

  Still smiling, or grimacing, whichever the hell it was, he clapped the boy on the back and stepped past him, into the cool darkness of the church.

  * * *

  Annie sniffled her way through the ceremony.

  Dawn was beautiful, a fairy-tale princess come to life. Nick was handsome enough to bring tears to whatever eyes weren’t already streaming, though not to his former guardian�
��s, who stood beside him wearing a look that spoke volumes on his handsome face.

  Chase was wearing the same look. Her ex was not just dry-eyed but stony-faced. He’d smiled only once, at Dawn, as he’d handed her over to her waiting groom.

  Then he’d taken his place beside Annie.

  “I hope you know what in hell you’re doing,” he’d muttered, as he’d slipped in next to her.

  Annie had felt every muscle in her body clench. How like him, to talk like that here, of all places. And to blame her for—what? The fact that the wedding wasn’t being held in a church the size of a cathedral? That there wasn’t room for him to invite all his big-shot clients and turn a family event into a networking opportunity?

  Maybe he thought Dawn’s gown was too old-fashioned, or the flower arrangements—which she, herself, had done—too provincial. It wouldn’t have surprised her. As far as Chase was concerned, nothing she’d ever done was right. She could see him out of the corner of her eye, standing beside her, straight and tall and unmistakably masculine.

  “Isn’t Daddy gorgeous in formal wear?” Dawn had gushed.

  A muscle twitched in Annie’s cheek. If you liked the type, she supposed he was. But she wasn’t a dumb kid anymore, to have her little heart sent into overtime beats by the sight of a man’s hard body or equally hard, handsome face.

  There had been a time, though. Oh, yes, there’d been a time that just standing next to him this way, feeling his arm brush lightly against her shoulder, smelling the faint scent of his cologne, would have been enough to—would have been enough to—

  Bang!

  Annie jumped. The doors at the rear of the church had flown open. A buzz of surprise traveled among the guests. The minister fell silent and peered up the aisle, along with everybody else, including Dawn and Nick.

  Somebody was standing in the open doorway. After a moment, a man got up and shut the door, and the figure moved forward.