The Bride He Stole for Christmas, page 1
“What can you possibly be thinking?” Timoney demanded, hardly able to hear her own voice over the clamor inside her, all of it spiraling around and around, blooming into sheer desire between her legs.
“The time for thinking is over, little one,” Crete told her, and if anything, his stride lengthened. “Now it is time for action.”
“This is an abduction! You are kidnapping me!”
And this time, the hand on her backside smoothed over her curves, just enough to make every nerve inside her seem to dance itself awake.
Then shudder, like she was on the very edge of shattering.
“It is,” Crete agreed, all dark male satisfaction. As if he knew. “You can thank me later.”
USA TODAY bestselling, RITA® Award–nominated and critically acclaimed author Caitlin Crews has written more than one hundred books and counting. She has a master’s and PhD in English literature, thinks everyone should read more category romance and is always available to discuss her beloved alpha heroes. Just ask. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her comic book artist husband, is always planning her next trip and will never, ever, read all the books in her to-be-read pile. Thank goodness.
Books by Caitlin Crews
Harlequin Presents
Chosen for His Desert Throne
The Sicilian’s Forgotten Wife
Once Upon a Temptation
Claimed in the Italian’s Castle
Royal Christmas Weddings
Christmas in the King’s Bed
His Scandalous Christmas Princess
Rich, Ruthless & Greek
The Secret That Can’t Be Hidden
Her Deal with the Greek Devil
Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.
Caitlin Crews
The Bride He Stole for Christmas
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
EXCERPT FROM BOUND BY HER SHOCKING SECRET BY ABBY GREEN
CHAPTER ONE
HAD TIMONEY GEORGE not felt dead inside, she might almost have enjoyed this lavish dinner the night before her farce of a wedding.
Almost.
It was merry enough, as suited a pre-wedding gathering on Christmas Eve. The guests were well-heeled and far too well-bred to speak directly of the many unfortunate undercurrents flowing up from the old stones all around them. The groom was well-liked in this particular circle, having considered himself a scion thereof for many decades. Two of his previous wives had been great favorites here as each had been part and parcel of this same crowd, as likely to claim power in Whitehall and international stock exchanges as in the titles so many had inherited.
Everything tonight was the height of sophistication, in deference to both her uncle’s self-regard and his bottomless ambition. To say nothing of the groom’s.
Too bad about the tart of a bride, Timoney thought from her position at her uncle’s right, with a glimmer of her former wry humor.
But she locked it away. Because she didn’t feel things anymore. She’d already had her fill.
Timoney looked around the hall instead. Her childhood home, entailed away to her uncle after her father’s death, was done up like a stately Christmas card. Aunt Hermione was renowned for her joylessness in all things, which Timoney suspected was directly related to her endless pursuit of the skeletal figure she liked to coldly tell her rather softer and rounder teen daughters was the height of elegance. True enough, as collarbones like hers essentially acted as clothes hangers for couture. And yet despite the iron self-control and what had to be a lifetime of gnawing hunger, the woman was possessed of an excellent eye for decoration.
If Timoney had been of a more poetic bent, she might have indulged herself with imagining that tricking out the old family hall was how Hermione expressed herself in ways otherwise unavailable to her as the thin-lipped, thinner-hipped, and much younger wife of Timoney’s loathsome uncle Oliver.
But poetry was far too emotional. Aunt Hermione was likely good at decorating because she was, herself, a decoration. And like all the other trophy wives here tonight, her true vocation was in making her husband happy—likely so he’d go off and be happy elsewhere and leave her to her poinsettias and evergreen boughs.
You would do well to learn a little something from Hermione, Timoney told herself, bracingly. After all, she was staring down a future as a trophy herself.
Though a rather tarnished one, as her uncle never hesitated to remind her.
She slid her gaze toward her groom and was pleased to find that even tonight, one more sleepless night before the wedding, she felt the same wealth of nothing she’d felt since her uncle had announced that Timoney’s choices were stark. Either marry his business associate, Julian Browning-Case, or be cut off from the family forever.
It wasn’t that Timoney liked her extended family all that much that the loss of them would be devastating in any way. But after losing her parents—and afterward, losing what was left of her heart so wholly and irrevocably—she didn’t have it in her to walk away from what she had left. She also knew that her parents would have hated it if she had. They had always told her that Oliver might have faults, but it was better to believe that he was doing the best he could.
Timoney had seen no evidence of that. But really, it was the least she could do after her scandalous behavior had, according to her uncle, blackened the family name forever.
She was well aware that her uncle’s real concern had nothing to do with the family’s reputation. It was her reputation, not the family’s, and why would anyone care what the orphaned daughter of the former heir got up to? The Georges had old money and unlike some, had held on to it. And every family with a drop of noble blood in England had at least one embarrassing member. Especially among the younger generations, who tended to perform for the pages of Tatler—especially if it horrified their parents. It was an excuse for her uncle to flex his power as the head of the family, that was all.
But none of that mattered any longer. Julian Browning-Case, while not what Timoney would describe as doting in any way, was not openly vicious. He was three times her age, had not insulted her even when her uncle did, and was shaped like a man who could look forward to future heart trouble. To that end, the kindest advice her aunt had ever given her—moments before entering the engagement party a month ago that Timoney had worked to pretend wasn’t happening as it did—was a pointed reminder that the Browning-Cases were not known for being particularly long-lived.
Hermione had seen Timoney balk, just outside the doors of the hall. And because Oliver had not, it had likely felt safe for her to lean in and offer a dollop of her own brand of wisdom.
For those of us who make practical instead of romantic marriages, Hermione had said with a curious expression on her face—as if, Timoney had reflected from the usual distance from which she observed anything these days, seeing her niece for the very first time. Perspective is everything. One must always weigh one’s—ah—expected future solitude against the manifold joys of one’s actual marriage while it exists in its current form. It is a delicate math.
That was the closest Hermione had ever come to any kind of surrogate maternal expression. That, too, was just as well.
Because Timoney did not wish to think too much about her parents—or her actual, horribly missed mother. It was too hard. Too painful, though it was nearly three years ago now. The two of them had been gone so quickly, so suddenly. And then everything had changed so rapidly. One terrible, irrevocable event after another so that Timoney rather thought that if she had the capacity to feel anything inside any longer, anything at all, a night like this might have wrecked her.
For surely it ought to be painful to be back here in this house where she had once been so happy. When joy had been at the heart of everything, waiting around every corner, filling all of these ancient rooms. Some of her fondest memories were of running through these halls that had seemed far lighter then, lit up with her parents’ love for each other. And their boundless delight in her.
She had been on the verge of her twentieth birthday when she’d gotten the call that an icy road on a cold March evening had taken away the two people dearest to her. Mere miles from this old manor house, hidden away in hedges and stone.
Uncle Oliver had wasted no time. As the new head of the family, he was in charge of the George fortune—and Timoney’s trust—until her twenty-eighth birthday. But he hadn’t wished to trouble himself with paying for her until then. He had yanked her out of her beloved finishing school in the French Alps two weeks after her parents’ funeral. Once she’d come back to the house he’d already claimed as his, he had informed her that for the next eight years she was to do as he bid her because, as far as he was concerned, she was a charity case. And it was too bad for Timoney that he was no fan of charity.
Even then, he had offered her choices, such as they were. She was to marry to suit him—because she would be a useless drain on him for nearly a decade aside from her ability to please hi
Timoney wet her lips with the wine on the table before her, an easy way to check to make sure her mouth was in the polite near-smile shape that was expected of her. And she nodded along, pretending to listen as the swell of conversation went on all around her.
Something in her shifted, almost unpleasantly, as she thought of the girl she’d been back then. Puffed up with outrage and grief. Filled with a deep loathing of her evil uncle and appalled at his demands. Did he really think he could treat her like a chattel? She was newly twenty then, and modern—not a medieval twelve.
She’d told him where he could go, she’d swanned off to London, and she’d taken the first job she could find. It turned out she was an excellent fit to do a bit of PR for a corporation she’d never heard of and didn’t care to learn much about. But that was the benefit of her brand of public relations. Timoney didn’t need to move the product—she threw the parties. She already had the kind of connections businessmen in suits were always gasping to exploit, so it mattered little that she knew nothing at all about the things they got up to in their endless meetings. All that mattered was that she was blonde and could get certain names to turn up, which guaranteed press.
And for a good eighteen months she’d had a lovely time. She’d shared a flat in Central London—it was more a house, really, but they all called it a flat because that felt more career-girls-in-the-Smoke—with a few girls she knew from school. All of them had been in the same sort of purgatory, cast out into the world by the heads of their families with vague expectations that they should prove they weren’t entirely useless—even though everyone knew that in five years or ten or so the trust funds would start kicking in and all the proof would be pointless. They’d all been playing the same sort of waiting game in those years, trading this party for that in all the trendiest corners of giddy London, all of them counting down the days until they could stop pretending.
It would be better, Timoney had often thought back then, not to know that there was a future, fixed date upon which one would never have to worry about paying a bill again. Especially when she couldn’t go beg Daddy to do it for her like her friends.
Then she’d met Crete Asgar and she’d stopped thinking of any future that didn’t involve him.
Even thinking his name here, now, at a table filled with the kind of braying toffs he disdained, made her fight back a deep shiver.
There was a straight line between that fateful night and this one. It had all been headed for disaster from the start—though she hadn’t known that then. She hadn’t known, or wanted to know, a thing but Crete.
And Timoney was pleased that her heart had been ripped out and trampled, because it no longer beat too hard. It no longer threatened to burst. She could stand here, on the night before her wedding to another man she hardly knew, and congratulate herself on feeling very little at all.
Because after a whirlwind six months as Crete’s mistress, he had finished with her two months ago. Brutally.
She felt proud that she could think of it that way. Such a quiet little sentence. He had finished with her. Such bloodless words to describe that scene in that penthouse of his, all modern angles and cold lines set up there above the Thames, where he’d taken everything that Timoney was, shredded it, then set it all on fire.
It’s better this way, she assured herself. There’s nothing left to worry about losing.
She heard her uncle’s voice from beside her and snapped back into the here and now, at this holiday dinner party that was supposedly in her honor.
“I hope you aren’t lapsing off into any unfortunate second thoughts,” Uncle Oliver said coldly at her elbow. Timoney had no memory of the rest of the party rising from the banquet table, but they must have done. For now she could see straight across to her favorite tapestry on the far wall, though staring about the brightly lit, festive room didn’t warm her as it might have once. It could have been ash for all she cared.
Maybe it was.
“I don’t have thoughts, Uncle,” she replied coolly. “Second or otherwise. You have forbidden it.”
His hand was on her elbow then, and he squeezed far too hard, but she did not give him the satisfaction of wincing. No, indeed. She felt the pain of it, and some part of it thrilled her. That she could feel even a sensation like that, her uncle’s brand of quietly sadistic violence, and react not at all.
“Julian tells me that you declined his offer of a drink last night,” her uncle hissed into her ear. “I thought we were agreed on our course of action.” Meaning he’d ordered her to offer the groom a preview of what he was purchasing.
“I will be marrying Julian soon enough,” Timoney said, turning her gaze toward her uncle. And maybe it wasn’t entirely true to say she felt nothing. Only that she showed nothing. Because, she could admit, she took no little pleasure in the way she gazed dispassionately at this man whose distaste for her seemed to bounce off her now. Like rubber. She especially liked that it clearly enraged him. “So no reason to rush into it.”
“What sudden preciousness is this?” her uncle snarled. He leaned in closer, across the corner of the table they shared. “You’re damaged goods, Timoney. That cretin’s fingerprints are all over you. You flaunted yourself on his arm and he made no secret of the base physicality of your union in every photograph taken by the baying press. Yet you dare pull on a cloak of false modesty?”
Timoney pointedly tugged her elbow out of his grasp. “It’s not modesty, Uncle. It’s strategy. Why give myself away for free with the wedding so soon? What if he was disappointed?” She shrugged as if they were discussing livestock. Well. She supposed they were. “Damaged goods or not, why would a man pay full price for something when he’d already had it at a discount?”
If she wasn’t already ruined—and not in the way her uncle imagined—this would destroy her, she was sure. This cold, dispassionate discussion of the marital rights she’d be expected to perform tomorrow.
Said marital rights that were, she was well aware, something her elderly husband was eagerly awaiting. Julian had made his interest in her clear since the moment he’d laid eyes on her here at one of her uncle’s dreadful soirees not long after she’d slunk back to the ancestral pile in shame, still licking her wounds.
Though it was more accurate to say that she wasn’t so much licking wounds as she was attempting to...pretend that she was still a person. Instead of the tiny little pile of crushed-out cinders that Crete had left behind him that night.
It had taken her uncle only a few weeks to talk her into this marriage that benefited him the most. He had ranted on about the shame she’d brought on the family. About the stain of it that would cling to his own three daughters if Timoney was allowed to continue her downward spiral.
By his reckoning, having been sullied and discarded by the likes of Crete Asgar—as infamous for his entirely self-made wealth as for his contempt of the sort of hereditary riches that Oliver now possessed—Timoney was no better than the sorts of addicts one could find cluttering up the streets. Oliver did not view such addictions as diseases. They were choices, he liked to declare. For it was one thing to genteelly pop painkillers like all the women in Oliver’s circles did to survive their practical marriages. It was something else again to allow one’s weaknesses to be so visible, and Timoney was already on the wrong side of that equation.
For she had appeared in too many papers Oliver’s friends actually read, clearly in thrall to her unacceptable lover.
What next? he had thundered at a family dinner a week or so after she’d returned. Would she turn to modeling—which, in his mind, was merely prostitution by another name.
I will take that as a compliment, Uncle, Timoney had replied over her chilled soup with a flash of her former defiance. I had no idea you rated my looks so highly.
That had gotten her a slap.
More than that, it had gotten her uncle thinking about how best he could use her looks to his advantage.
You’re the spitting image of your mother, he had said not long after. Timoney knew this was true, and it was one more thing painful for her to try not to think about. She grew more like her mother every day. The blond hair, the wide smile, the pointed chin. So similar, and yet Crete had seen to it that there was nothing resembling the spark of joy in her that had always brightened her mother’s gaze.
