Читать книгу: «The Heiress Takes A Husband»

Chapter One

Two months later…

“Just a minute,” Brittany called, when the knock came on her apartment door, again. She looked in the full-length mirror in her bedroom, oblivious to the unmade bed, the scattered clothing, the open makeup pots.

“I look awful,” she wailed. “Awful.”

The knock came again, firm, unrelenting. She ignored it.

It was hopeless. The bridesmaid’s dress was peach chiffon. Sleeveless, it fit her like a dream, swirled around her trim figure, showed off the slender length of her legs, the swell of her bosom, the curve of sun-kissed shoulders. The dress was perfect.

And her makeup was perfect, too. Her high cheekbones accentuated, the blue-gold of her eyes shown off, her lips looking dewy and wet, her skin golden peach.

Her long hair, expertly highlighted so that it glittered with threads of gold and wheat and honey, was piled up on top of her head, just the odd wild tendril allowed to escape.

She looked absolutely stunning, in every way, and it was spoiled, totally ruined by one disastrous detail. Paint.

Pink paint.

A thick stripe of it ran through the gold strands of her hair, and speckles of the same shade were scattered over her bare arms from wrists to shoulders. Nothing would convince it to go. And she knew, because she had tried everything from paint thinner to nail polish remover.

It was the result of repainting the interior of her bakery, without question the most grueling labor she had ever done. She had chosen an absolutely posh shade of pink. Okay, after four whole days of doing nothing but working with it, it was not nearly as appealing as she found it at first, but that was perfectly understandable.

And she really didn’t care for it as a fashion accessory, but she reminded herself firmly, no sacrifice was too great to make for her bakery, and for her successful entrance into the Miracle Harbor business community. She had been given a brand-new chance. A brand-new life, really, and what was a little pink paint in the face of that?

Bang, bang, bang.

If whoever that was didn’t quit knocking on the door, she was going to scream. Except maybe successful business people weren’t allowed to scream.

She’d settle for leveling them with a look, whoever was at her door, impertinently ignoring her request for just a little more time. No doubt it was the escort, rounded up for her by her sister, Abby. With the bakery reopening next week, Brit simply never had enough time anymore for anything.

So, how had Abby found time between her seamstress job, and raising a baby, and getting married to find a date for her sister for the wedding?

Given Abby’s schedule, Brit thought it would be unreasonable on her part to expect much for an escort. How humiliating, at the ripe old age of twenty-seven, being subjected to her first blind date. How dreadful that for her first Miracle Harbor social outing her companion for the evening might be less than stellar. Old. Ugly. What if he was wrinkled?

On the other hand, this was Miracle Harbor.

Look what had happened to Abby.

What if the very same thing happened to her? What if, within a week of arriving here, Brit met him. The one. Her very own Prince Charming to escort her to the ball, and through life ever after.

With one last resigned glance in the mirror, and one more sigh about the paint, she whirled and moved determinedly in the direction of her front door. She tried not to notice how humble the furnishings of her apartment were, tried not to see them through the eyes of her escort. Her place was an apartment above the bakery and it had come furnished. On her best days she could see that as a blessing, on her worst she hated to think about the rump that had left that worn dent on the fading sofa.

“Oh,” she muttered to herself, “he’ll probably be too decrepit and wrinkled to even notice anything beyond me.” And my pink paint, she added wryly to herself.

He banged again. The click of her high heels might have conveyed just a touch of her impatience, but she pasted a cool smile on her face before she flung open her front door.

“I said just a min—” her voice stopped in her throat. “You.”

Was he going to show up every single time she contemplated wedded bliss? Did that mean something?

It meant the pink paint, and the furniture mattered.

She stepped out onto the narrow wooden landing with the delightful view of Main Street’s back alley, and pulled the door mostly closed behind her.

He looked down at her, and for a moment she was so mesmerized by his eyes that she was frozen. They were a shade of blue that reminded her of a sleepy ocean on a hot day.

“I’m Mitch Hamilton,” he said, in that voice, a voice that could make a perfectly proper girl like her think very naughty thoughts of exactly what being married meant.

It meant his lips and his hands claiming her, holding her, owning her. It meant that deep voice in her ear growling incredible endearments. It meant waking up to his face every single morning, the sharp hollows of his cheeks shadowed with whiskers.

“Mitch Hamilton,” he said again, faintly bemused.

She drew herself up short, stunned at where her thoughts had gone, stunned by the force of the attraction, stunned to see nothing reciprocated in those ocean eyes.

Miracle Harbor or not, she decided, she was not making a fool of herself over any man.

“Pleased to meet you,” she said formally, diamond-edged ice in her voice.

Still, despite the small victory over her voice, she could not look away. It wasn’t just that he was compellingly handsome, or that he, of course, looked unnervingly perfect, in a navy blue suit with a fine pinstripe. Custom tailored, she guessed, to encompass the immense broadness of those shoulders. He had on a crisp white silk shirt, that made his skin look bronze and sun-warmed, a dark tie, the knot perfect and square. His legs were long, the slacks just hinted at the ridged cut of a very muscular thigh.

He looked every inch the successful man. Still, for all that sophistication, for all the obvious expense of the suit, she still saw it there. A glint in those amazing eyes that hinted at a part of him untamed. Perhaps even untamable?

Inwardly, she wondered how Abby could do this to her. She suddenly found herself wishing for what had moments ago seemed like it would be her worst nightmare. Someone old and wrinkled and ugly.

A man she could handle with one arm tied behind her back, and several gallons of paint splashed over herself.

But this man…he was a man out of a dream. Handsome. Well-made. Oozing male confidence and subtle sensuality. He was the kind of man who simply took a woman’s breath away, made her go weak with strange and forbidden longings.

And she had pink paint in her hair, and reptilian spots all over her arms. Which, to give her credit, Abby didn’t know about.

Yet.

“How could she do this to me?” she murmured, to herself, but out loud this time. She gave her head a rueful shake, hoping to clear the spell she was floundering under and become herself. Cosmopolitan. Sophisticated. Witty. In control.

“Pardon?” He took a step back and glanced hopefully for an apartment number, as if he were suddenly wishing he was in the wrong place.

There was no number. Hers was just one set of stairs in a long line of them that came up from the back lane to the stuffy little apartments located over the main street businesses.

“Are you Brittany? Brittany Patterson?”

“Unfortunately.”

“I’m sorry. Who did what to you?” He cocked an eyebrow at her, tilted his head.

“My sister. You.”

“My father, Jordan Hamilton, asked me if I would escort you to your sister’s wedding,” he said with a certain stiff dignity.

She realized he had been roped into the task of escorting her to Abby’s wedding. And that he obviously was not nearly as swayed by her, as she was by him.

Adjectives kept running through her head, as she gazed helplessly at him. Gorgeous. Stunning. Dazzling.

Because she wanted more than anything else for him to want to take her to her sister’s wedding. And because that made her feel weak and silly, and the way she least liked to feel—vulnerable—she said, “I’m sure everyone’s intentions were great, but I certainly don’t need an escort. I’m quite happy to go by myself.”

His eyes narrowed and she felt a funny shiver go down her spine as she recognized that his will was at least as strong as hers. Perhaps, heaven forbid, stronger.

“My orders are to get you to the church on time.” He slid back an impeccable sleeve and glanced at a watch. A Rolex watch. “Which means we have to leave. Now.”

She noticed again his voice, deep-timbred, even more sensual with that note of implacable sternness in it. But for all the smooth confidence of his voice that same hint of something wild ran at the edges of it.

Of course, the autocratic note she could do without.

With incredible effort she pulled herself together. That would be the day when she ever let a man like this get the upper hand, let him think she would allow herself to be bossed around like an errant child!

“Well, we can’t leave right now,” she said firmly. “I can’t. I’m not ready.”

This invited his inspection. He looked at her closely, his gaze suddenly uncomfortably intense, nothing in it suggesting he was coming up with a lovely list of adjectives to describe her.

“You look fine to me.”

Fine?

“Except you seem to have,” he reached out a tentative hand, and touched, “something in your hair. Bubble gum?”

She jerked away from his hand, appalled by the ridiculous sensation that electricity had shot from his fingertips.

“Paint! It’s on my arms, too. This is unbelievable.” That she was standing here talking to this ravishing man about this. “It will not come off. How can they manufacture something like that? Aren’t there laws?”

“I’m afraid laws concerning paint products are not my specialty.” His amusement was reluctant.

“What am I going to do?” she asked, more to herself than him.

“Hope for dim lighting,” he suggested, without an appropriate amount of sympathy. “We have to go now.”

“I can’t. You don’t understand.” He really didn’t understand, how important it was that today, of all days, she be absolutely faultless. And not for herself and not so he could see her at her ravishing best, though certainly that would have been a bonus.

“It’s Abby’s day,” she whispered, “and it needs to be perfect. I’m a bridesmaid. I’ll be in all the pictures. I can’t wreck her pictures.”

She had the funniest feeling that she had just revealed something more of herself than she was prepared to have rejected by his Royal Handsomeness, because he was looking at her closely as if he was seeing something he hadn’t seen before.

“The pictures will probably be in that horrible little paper,” she said swiftly. “I can’t be seen like this.”

His eyes became impatient, but his voice did not. “It doesn’t look that bad. Bubble gum is obviously not your shade, but I really don’t think it’s that noticeable. Not like, say, neon green.”

“Please stop calling it bubble gum. It’s frosted dawn,” she informed him regally.

“And how did, er, frosted dawn, end up on bleached blond?”

Bleached blond? She wasn’t even going to dignify that by responding to it. This man knew how to make an enemy.

“I happen to be painting,” she informed him in a chilled tone.

“An artist,” he said, as if that explained all kinds of eccentricities. “The last show the museum brought in was done by a dog. Seriously. He had had his tail dipped in paint, and wagged it over the canvas.”

The most handsome man she had ever, ever laid eyes on, had casually grouped her, the bleached blonde, in the same category as a dog that painted with its tail.

She sighed. She had looked forward to this day with eagerness and delight. It was the day of her sister’s wedding, a day that confirmed miracles really did happen to the most ordinary of people, a day that celebrated love. A day that filled her with this wistful, secret hope that maybe one day, in the not too distant future, she too would be a bride.

Now, she could tell things were just not going to go exactly as per her plan. Anything close to her plan. For today. And that probably included the rest of her life, too.

“I’m not an artist!” she told him coldly. “I’m painting the walls. In my business.”

He looked at the shade in her hair incredulously. “Really?”

“This shade looks much better on the walls.”

“Really?” he said again. A slow smile was spreading across those firm lips, slow and warm and sexy.

How could Abby do this to her?

“It’s not funny,” she told him desperately.

“Of course not,” he said, in a voice that could easily have tacked “Your Honor” on the end of his response. The smile disappeared. “But do you know what really wouldn’t be amusing? Being late for the wedding. That could spoil the occasion. This, on the other hand,” he gestured at her hair, “will probably be a source of great amusement every time everyone looks at the pictures for years to come.”

“A source of amusement,” she muttered unhappily. “For years to come.”

Still she looked at her watch, and with a little cry of dismay knew he was right. She had to leave.

Apparently with him.

Giving him a look of regal dislike, as if he were responsible for the fact she had paint on her head, she swept by him and down her creaky steps.

“Why do I have the awful feeling this is going to be the worst evening of my life?” she murmured as he had to reach out and grab her elbow when her ankle turned on the step.

“Ditto,” he responded dryly, letting go of her arm with extreme and unnecessary haste.

She let him open the car door for her, a jet-black Mercedes 600SL, a car she had personally always considered more conceited than sporty.

He slid into his seat, and started the powerful engine, looking straight ahead, not even attempting conversation.

A soldier carrying out orders.

“You didn’t want to do this, did you?”

He glanced at her, looked ahead again, and did not look the least uncomfortable. “I did it as a favor to my father.”

“You must care a great deal about your father since its obvious you’d rather be eating raw jalapeño peppers chased down with chili sauce.”

He smiled slightly. “I have great respect for my father, but it’s true that given an option, I wouldn’t exactly jump at an opportunity to spend an awkward evening with a total stranger.”

“It seems to me it could have been much worse,” she snapped.

“Oh?”

“I could have been old. And wrinkled. And ugly.”

He didn’t say anything, his silence far more insulting than if he had responded.

“And you did have an option. I told you I was capable of going by myself.”

“I didn’t have an option,” he said grimly. “I told my father I’d take you. And I will.”

“I suspect you have hopelessly old-fashioned notions about honor and integrity,” she said as if that were a bad thing.

When really it seemed to her she had discovered the most amazing of men.

Wasn’t it just her luck that he was a man who had no intention of being “discovered”? Or at least not on a blind date, by a woman with pink hair, who lived at the top of a flight of rickety stairs. If only she could have made that all-important first impression count.

Brittany decided life was unbearably cruel.

Despite the melodrama of that thought, she found the wedding was beautiful once she got there, even with the paint in her hair, which nobody noticed, and the unwilling escort at her side, whom everybody did. Abby and Shane looked gloriously happy as they exchanged vows.

But the rest of the evening lived up to her dismal expectations.

Throughout dinner, Mitch Hamilton was a disapproving, humorless presence who defied her every effort to ignore him. She could still feel the sting of his disapproval over the story with which she’d entertained the other guests at their table.

A really funny story, about the one hundred and thirty-two packages of red food color she had put in her parents’ pool at their home in Highwoods in California when she was a kid.

Mr. High-and-Mighty hadn’t even laughed. He’d looked bored and then looked at his watch as if counting the minutes he’d have to put up with her.

Still, he had a certain physical allure—that same almost electrical sensation she had felt when he touched her hair—exuding from him, that made it impossible to pretend he did not exist.

Not that he was ever going to know it from her.

Now, the dance had started, and Brittany focused more intently on the couple who held center stage. Brittany was not sure she had ever seen such a beautiful sight.

Her sister, Abby, the train of her long ivory wedding dress held up from sweeping the floor by a lace loop attached to her wrist, was dancing her first dance as Mrs. McCall. She and her husband, Shane, moved around the room with the grace of two people who had been born to dance together.

There was something in the way they were looking at each other that made Brit want to believe all over again in possibility. Fairy tales. Happy endings. True love.

Her sister and her new husband danced as if they were alone in the room. The light that shone from their eyes combined wonder and tenderness and passion to such a degree it made a lump rise in Brittany’s throat.