She had known that Pearl Hudson was a hard woman, but it was difficult to believe that any woman could abandon her own children for the sake of money, using them in a vicious game even against each other. In the end, it had been her undoing.
Christabel could see now why the woman had fainted in Mr. Lewis’s office; seeing her boy for the first time in years had made even the hard-nosed Pearl weaken. Yet any feeling that remained for her sons was outshone by the promise of wealth from Edward Montgomery. Once Andrew had inherited Charles’ estate it would have been easy to kill Andrew and replace him with Albert. What Pearl and Edward hadn’t expected was the effect that the two boys meeting each other face to face would have.
Maybe, blood was thicker than water in the end?
There was a knock at the door and Stephens entered; his face solemn and perhaps a little wearier than before. The news of Mrs. Hudson had shaken him deeply and Christabel wondered if he had secretly carried a flame for the hard woman all these years.
“You have a visitor madam.”
Christabel winced at the possibility of Englebert. She had heard he had tried to see her many times while she had been kept ill by Edward. She was glad that his persistence in her had seemed to wan after he had found a new young thing to chase after. The marriage market was in full season and he was a wealthy man – though old – he would find a young miss for his bed. “Who is it Stevens?”
“Mr. Andrew Crawley, madam.”
Christabel smiled; at least one good thing had come of this whole affair. Smoothing down her dress, she stepped towards the door.
Andrew Crawley rushed into the room; some of the darkness and cloud now lifted from his brow. The same feeling of longing fluttered in her chest.
“Christabel, I have good news! Mr. Lewis has been in touch and I am due to sign the paperwork tomorrow, your home will be safe after all. You have no need to worry about the future.”
Almost on impulse she fled towards him, expecting his arms to open wide in greeting, but she had almost forgotten that he was not like the other men she knew and he looked awkwardly at the ground and she almost thought that she saw him blush.
She stopped in front of him, her arms quickly moving back to her side as she paused, embarrassed by her own presumptuous nature. It was not after all a ladylike way to act. “That is great news Mr. Crawley. I cannot thank you enough for your generosity.”
Shaking his head, he smiled wryly. “Please call me Andrew. This is your house now, Lady Montgomery and I am sure you would have been the main beneficiary of your late husband’s will had he not met such an untimely end. I am merely trying to address the balance, keep an order to such things.”
His eyes were clear and honest without a hint of malevolence or greed and her heart skipped a beat. Whereas she had been in lust with Charles, she had begun to fall in love with Mr. Crawley. Hopelessly and helplessly, and there seemed that there was nothing she could do about it. Other men seemed to throw themselves at her feet, or other parts of her anatomy, but the man she truly wanted was keeping himself at a distance. She wondered why.
“Please call me Christabel. I feel too young to be called Lady Montgomery. Perhaps you will call again, along with Mrs. Crawley?” Christabel held her breath. She had to find out his position and asking outright seemed the only way.
“There is no Mrs. Crawley. I am a bachelor I am afraid that up until now I haven’t had much to offer a prospective bride; perhaps that will change once I inherit Charles’ money?” His words caused a little stab of pain inside her chest. She had not thought of that. Mr. Crawley with his looks and money would be the toast of London society.
Christabel sighed, “Yes, I’m afraid half of London’s eligible young ladies will be beating a way to your door Mr. Crawley. You will be a popular young man and will have that pleasurable dilemma of deciding which woman will grace your arm.”
The man looked at his feet, a little uncomfortable. “I’m afraid that does not sound at all pleasurable to me. I have little experience with women in general and I am afraid that I have already lost my heart but it is a hopeless case.” His face reddened as he spoke the words and he stopped abruptly as if he had said too much.
So he was in love with another woman; that would account for his aloofness. Christabel let her shoulders sag a little; at least she would have her own income and wouldn’t be subject to the mercy of Englebert Williams.
“Nothing is hopeless Mr. Crawley. I think that your young lady can hardly resist an offer; especially now that you are due to inherit; go to her Andrew and be happy.”
Stepping towards him she held out her hand in friendship. Her heart was aching, but there was little more she could do. If the man was in love, than best let him be. A true and honest man was hard to find and she envied the mysterious young lady.
Taking her hand gently in his, he paused, looking down at the slim fingers in his own. “I don’t believe it is as easy as you say Christabel. For you see the woman I have set my heart on does not even know of my intent and it would not seem proper in the circumstances.”
The young woman smiled at his earnest face. “Then tell her Andrew. Every woman wants to be loved and you must open up your heart, whatever the circumstances. If I were the young lady, then I would want to know.”
“Truly?” His face almost brightened for a moment as his blue eyes looked deeply into hers.
She smiled.
“Then I will try to do as you suggest Lady Montgomery-Christabel. You see the lady in question is still mourning the untimely death of her husband. How do you suggest that I approach the subject?”
The smile from Christabel’s lips slipped as he spoke, her eyes widening at his words. He was talking about her and she stood in shock for a few moments.
“You see, I knew it was not appropriate. Please forgive me.” Dropping her hand, he turned quickly and headed for the door.
“Andrew, please don’t go.” As he turned around she rushed into his arms, all protocol abandoned. He kissed her face with small, gentle kisses and she realized that she was crying. His arms wrapped strongly around her and a warmth spread across her heart.
“Oh Christabel, I have felt this way ever since I first saw you at the church. I never dreamed that you would feel the same way.”
He kissed her gently on the mouth and she almost swooned; her head lighter than air. So this was love; true love. Lust was one thing, but love was the thing she had been missing, and now she had finally found it.
A knock at the door interrupted their canoodling and as Stephens entered the couple moved apart. “I just wondered if you and Mr. Crawley would like tea, My Lady.”
Christabel could barely stifle a giggle as she nodded across to old Stephens.
“Will that be all, madam?”
The young girl grinned as she looked fondly on the old retainer. “I think that there will be two for dinner tonight Stephens.”
And before he left the room, Christabel thought she saw the old man smile.
THE END
Billionaire Romance
My New Holiday Billionaire
Pamela Avery
Copyright ©2016 by Pamela Avery. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic of mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
CHAPTER ONE
“I swear, Sage Tariq, if you shed one more tear over that loser… That’s it! Get up out of that bed!”
Sage looked up from puffy eyes at her friend of over ten years; Eden Carter was a force to be reckoned with. Eden was pretty, vivacious and knew her own mind with a confidence men seemed to find sexy. She was also one of Sage’s best friends, but right now, she was Sage’s least favorite person in the whole world.
Sage curled deeper into the fetal position; she wished heartily that she could disappear. She wished Eden would leave her alone; she
wished everyone would just leave her alone. It wasn’t every day one’s fiancé dumped them in front of their boss and other colleagues, was it? She was dealing the best way she knew how.
Okay, so Brent Davies had dropped the bombshell over two weeks ago, but it took longer than that to get over a three-year relationship. Her friends, Eden and Beth, had rallied and taken her on a vacation to ‘get her mind off things’, but considering that tomorrow was the last day of their vacation and she was still tucked up in bed with popcorn and Kleenex, she didn’t think their plan had worked so much.
“Eden’s right, Sage, you need to get out of bed,” Beth piped up in her lilting voice. “We leave Madrid tomorrow, and so far, you haven’t taken in the sights. Eden and I have certainly had more than our fair share of fun while you’ve been lying here moping at the ceiling all week. Why, the hotel maids are beginning to look at us funny because they obviously think you’re an addled cousin we stashed out of sight in the room while we stuff our faces with lobster and sangrias every night.”
“Yeah, they probably think we’re Cinderella’s step-sisters without the step-mother,” Eden grumbled under her breath.
“I bet they think Step-mother is locked in here with you to make certain you stay put,” Beth tossed in.
It was too much, Sage burst into laughter, releasing the tension that had been binding her chest as she laughed and laughed and laughed. Beth was a jewel! She was really Elizabeth Adams, but everyone called her Beth. Sage had known her for just five years, but in all that time, she had seen Beth get angry only once; when someone had insisted on calling her Elizabeth despite her stated preference for Beth.
Beth’s platinum blond hair and big blue eyes, as well as her petite frame and tiny voice, often made people assume she could be pushed around; she usually corrected anyone foolish enough to assume that in her own inimitable style. She also had a dry sense of humor that showed itself at the most unexpected moments; like now.
Even Eden was convulsed with laughter, her heavy red hair swaying around her face as she doubled over with hilarity; tears of mirth standing in her liquid green eyes.
As their laughter died, Sage rose to a sitting position, drawing her knees up to her chest as she looked up at her friends. Her blond hair fell around her face in lumpy strings, some of it falling into her big brown eyes.
“You’re right, guys. I haven’t been much fun, have I?” Sage asked, looking from one to the other.
“No, you haven’t,” Eden said honestly. “You’ve bawled your eyes out and memorized the ceiling for six days straight. Tonight is our last night here, since our flight back to the States is for tomorrow night. Why don’t we make it fun?”
Sage nodded, throwing off the duvet. She had dreamed of being in Spain for as long as she could remember, and now that she was, she had wasted the entire vacation. Anger roiled through her as she caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. She was pretty with a heart-shaped face, big brown doe eyes, long blond hair that hung to her waist, the cutest set of dimples, and huge breasts that had always driven men wild. Her eyes sparkled as she examined her figure. She was very chubby, especially with the extra flesh on her hips, thighs and arms, but she loved her figure and she wouldn’t trade it for anything. She was voluptuous and perhaps slightly over-weight for her height of five foot seven, but she had a perfect hour-glass figure and an amazing carriage, and she was damned if she was going to let any man make her question her own femininity and attractiveness. She only had to walk into a bar sometimes and half the guys went crazy; Eden called her the ‘guy magnet.’
“Brent Davies was a jerk!” she declared suddenly.
She saw her friends exchange glances in the mirror.
“Well, he was,” she insisted. “He broke up with me in the middle of the damn Christmas party, with my boss standing right at my elbow and listening to every word!”
“And with Jessamine clinging to Brent’s arm!” Eden chipped in.
Sage’s cheeks darkened with anger. Jessamine was Brent’s best friend who had never made any bones of the fact that she thought she was a better fit for Brent. She had been after the man for all the three years Sage had known him, even though Brent was too wrapped up in his research to notice. When Brent had proposed to Sage a year ago, Jessamine had almost choked on the insincere congratulations she had managed to force out of her throat.
Then she had slowly gone to work on Brent, planting seeds of doubt and dissatisfaction until nothing Sage did could ever please him anymore. He had begun to find faults with everything; her generous curves, which had driven him crazy in the past, were suddenly ‘excess fat that needed to come off in the gym’; her cooking, which he had always loved, was suddenly ‘too spicy’; her hair was suddenly too blond.
Sage’s fists clenched, now, in anger as she recalled how Brent had had the temerity to tell her at that Christmas party that her weight was a turn-off for him, with Jess and her perfect size zero hanging on his arm at the time.
It had taken all of Sage’s strength of character and maturity to keep from collapsing in an ignoble heap at his feet after he spoke those unkind words to her. She had simply kept smiling as though they were discussing the weather, offered him a distracted nod, and then excused herself to her boss before disappearing into the ladies’ room. She had remained there until everyone had left and then she had slowly crept out and staggered to the curb for a taxi to take her home, knowing she would never be able to drive in that state. The tears she had fought so hard to hold in check had immediately started falling when she’d gotten outside and seen Eden and Beth waiting patiently for her on the curb as though they had nowhere else to be. It was four hours after everyone else had left and yet, they had waited. She had been so devastated that night, she just knew she would never have gotten through it if they had not been there.
They really were the best friends in the whole wide world and she really couldn’t bear to be the reason their vacation was anything but amazing. Eden was a divorce attorney and she rarely got any time off; Beth was a psychologist and the story was much the same. She had to shake off the blues for their sake, she thought.
“If Brent can move on, so can I,” she whispered softly to her reflection.
Eden nodded approvingly and whipped out a list, waving it happily in the air.
“What’s that?” Sage asked, eyeing the paper suspiciously.
“A list of things to do before the end of the vacation,” Beth laughed, her blue eyes twinkling.
Sage shut her eyes in despair; she’d been had!
“What’s on the list?” she asked, reaching for it.
“No, no, no,” Eden sang, thrusting the paper out of her reach. “First things first, you need to take a shower and then we’ll play it by ear.”
Two hours later, she was waxed, plucked, and dressed in a leopard print, backless dress her friends had picked out. The dress clung sinfully to every last line of her body and made her feel very much like a femme fatale.
Eden’s list had fifteen crazy things to do on it and since her friends insisted they had already done all fifteen themselves without her, tonight was her night. She groaned when she saw the first item on the list; great!
Flash a handsome stranger in the lobby... then make a run for it.
CHAPTER TWO
“Okay, you’re both crazy,” Sage laughed, almost doubling over with hilarity as they stood just outside the hotel, waiting for their limousine.
She had already done six of the fifteen things on the damn list, including ordering for a limousine, drinking an entire bottle of chardonnay before dinner, going without any underwear, flirting with a bell boy, flashing the cameras in the lift, and hiding her shoes in her bag and coming downstairs barefoot.
She hadn’t done the first thing, though, and Eden insisted they would not leave the hotel until she had flashed some handsome stranger. So far, all the men she had seen had been with their wives or girlfriends, and while she was here to have fun, she didn’t want to cause troub
le for some hapless man. If there was one thing she knew, her breasts were show-stoppers. They were large and round, and men tended to stare at the girls even when they were covered up, never mind when they were exposed. Why, one time, she had gone to the beach with Brent and he had gotten so jealous of all the glances men kept stealing her way that he had whipped out his sweatshirt and demanded she wear it. That was the first and last time he had ever taken her to the beach, even though he knew she loved swimming. If she flashed some man now, and he stopped to stare, she didn’t think his lady would be particularly amused.
“Don’t be a wuss, Sage. Come on, flash that elderly man and his wife,” Eden suggested, pointing at a pious-looking elderly couple sitting a few feet away.
Sage shook her head, dimples flashing as she smiled at her friends. “And what would happen if they keel over from the sheer shock of it? I can’t have that on my conscience.”
Beth laughed throatily, flinging back her blond head as she did so. “Okay, flash that super model’s boyfriend,” she suggested mischievously, pointing at a tattooed couple necking in the lobby of the hotel. They were trying so hard to appear romantic and in love, it was almost painful to watch.
“No, her breasts are the size of mosquito bites; I don’t want her to develop a complex,” Sage overruled. “Two years from now, she’d be telling Oprah how she developed a drug use problem because some blond woman flashed her guy in a hotel lobby in Spain.”
Beth snorted with laughter at that one, but Eden sighed and began to complain about the passing time. Sage rolled her eyes, opened her mouth and started to tell Eden that this had all been her idea so she could well wait until she saw whoever she was supposed to shock with her breasts and that was when she saw him.
He was tall, very tall, with a height of at least six-two; his hair was coal-black and in artful disarray around his head. It was sexily mussed, as though he had just gotten out of bed after rolling around for hours in said bed. His brows were dark, bushy and defined the sheer masculinity of his face, and even from this distance, she could see his eyes were also black as night. He had a pair of firmly chiseled lips, a firm masculine jaw, high cheekbones that strangely defined his masculinity, and a long aristocratic nose that gave his face character. His shoulders were so wide they tempted a woman to just lay her head on them and his chest strained with the promise of raw strength with every step he took.
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