Chapter One
MAYBE I’LL FAINT AGAIN, Jade Denison thought with dark hope. Maybe then she wouldn’t have to go through with this wedding.
Based on how her father had been railroading her, however, it was more likely he would insist the vows be spoken over her unconscious body. He wanted Jade to be Somebody Else’s Problem once and for all.
She tentatively set her hand on his arm, wishing she could lean on him and feel bolstered. Her stomach was sloshing and she was bathed in the clammy sweat of morning sickness.
Maybe if she hadn’t been feeling like a wet dishrag, she would have had the strength to walk away from him for good.
Her mother had trained her through childhood to stay on her father’s good side, though.
First it had been her mother’s job on the line, then her health.
Her father had supported Mum when she was unable to work and paid for all of Jade’s schooling.
Of course, he then held that over both of them, pressuring Jade into working for his friend’s daughter when she might have struck out on her own.
Now she was pregnant and didn’t have much fight in her.
Mum had had some setbacks recently so, when her father said Jade had to marry the man he’d picked out for her, Jade had capitulated.
At least Mum was here to see her wedding day—not the happiest day of Jade’s life.
In fact, possibly the worst, but after she had fulfilled a full year of marriage, the pre-nuptial agreement stipulated Jade could divorce her husband and she would have a lot more freedom by then, financial and otherwise.
All she had to do was get through this ceremony without humiliating herself.
At least it wasn’t a big production in front of a lot of people.
Her mother, Patricia, was in her wheelchair near the front pew, shedding emotional tears.
Her mother’s caregiver, Kandili, stood beside her, beaming the way most people did at a wedding—even though she knew as well as everyone else that this was more of a chess match than a love match.
Jade’s father, Noel Atbridge, Earl of Beaston, could pass for somber with his unsmiling profile, but Jade knew that expression of underlying grimness.
She couldn’t remember a time he’d worn anything else around her.
He was highly inconvenienced and was only here to ensure she went through with what he had arranged for her.
The groom waited at the altar. He looked hungover, as did his best man.
The vicar looked bored.
Jade looked for salvation because, despite all she stood to gain, she had an urge to run out the door she’d just come in.
Look where impulse had gotten her, though. Three months ago, she’d thrown away her sense of consequence for one hour and allowed self-indulgence to flare. Now she had more than her mother’s welfare to worry about.
How ironic to secretly judge her mother all these years for falling pregnant by a married man, then getting duped by false charm herself. At least Jade’s mother had known her lover’s full name and how to contact him.
The father of Jade’s unborn baby hadn’t even gone through the motion of leaving his number. He’d said, “Meet me out front,” and disappeared before Jade got there.
When Jade inevitably had the difficult conversation with her child, trying to explain why their father wasn’t a part of their lives, all she could say about Luca was that he lived in Italy, he dressed well, and he carried faulty condoms.
Or she could lie and allow her baby to believe Reggie was their father.
The aisle of this tiny country church wasn’t nearly long enough. She had arrived before her groom and was forced to watch his bleary gaze light up as he took in the way her breasts—which seemed to have doubled in size overnight—were trying to overflow the top of her strapless bodice.
Reggie was three years younger than her twenty-five. He was infinitely less mature, based on the gambling debts her father was covering in exchange for Reggie’s father’s help in “cleaning up” Jade’s “mess.”
“Ready?” the vicar murmured.
Jade’s father stepped away without another look at her. Definitely no affectionate kiss on her cheek or glint of pride in his eyes.
Jade ignored the pinching ache in her chest. It had been there most of her life, never subsiding, but squeezing more sharply at times like this, when he was particularly displeased by her. It was so much like that first time.
She’s embarrassing my family. She’s going away to school and that’s final.
“Friends and loved ones,” the vicar began. “We’re gathered here today…”
Her mother had wanted a church wedding. Aside from attending chapel at school, Jade didn’t spend much time in them. Her prayers had never been answered. She was very much a skeptic.
Nevertheless, the words Please God resounded in her head.
She didn’t know what she was praying for. This marriage was a practical choice, one that would ensure the best future for herself, her mum and her baby. She’d come too far to back out. Only an act of God could change the trajectory now.
The heavy door at the back of the church swung open with a screech of rusty metal hinges. Daylight flashed before the door clapped closed again.
There had been a sign outside warning that a wedding service was in progress. Everyone twisted to see who had come in. All the guests were here, weren’t they?
Jade gasped as her eyeballs were struck by a pristine gray suit cut perfectly to wide shoulders and a smooth, long gait.
Luca?!
Despite his sexual hit-and-run back in March, joyful recognition lifted her heart. Was it really him striding toward her like a possessive lover?
It was! That was his short thick black hair that might have curled if he allowed it to grow.
Those were his imposing eyebrows with the winged angle that gave his expression extra intensity as he homed in on her.
His nose was hawkish in a narrow face. His jaw was clean-shaven, his mouth a displeased line.
Her heart lurched at that condemnation, prompting a squirming sensation in her. It made her feel the way her father made her feel: bothersome. Unwanted. Bad.
Luca halted between the two front pews.
“Is it mine?” His voice wasn’t overloud, but it filled the silent church.
Shock drained all her blood into her ankles. Her vision began to sparkle around the edges.
No. She was going to faint now? When she needed every single one of her wits? Now?
It had been almost three months since Luca left Kent to rush to his grandmother’s side in Sicily, fearful he wouldn’t make it there in time.
Thankfully, Nonna was recovering from her stroke, so he had returned to London for the policy talks he had abandoned so abruptly.
He hadn’t come here planning to attend any weddings—or stop one—but as he’d been about to enter a meeting room this morning, Yardley Smythe-Camden had approached him.
Luca knew Yardley from their time at Oxford.
The man was an entitled ass, but Yardley’s father owned the hotel where the meetings were taking place.
That’s how they’d run into each other three months ago.
That’s how Yardley had tricked Luca into attending his sister’s birthday party.
Yardley had claimed his father had wanted to meet him, then took Luca to the family home in Kent.
They’d arrived to a party in full swing.
“What happened between you and that ginger at Giselle’s party?” Yardley asked Luca this morning, as people filed past them.
“Nothing.” It was a lie, but Luca didn’t think of women as conquests the way Yardley did.
His shockingly passionate encounter with that redhead had stayed on his mind all this time, though.
He’d gone so far as to try to find Jade online, but she wasn’t attached to any of Giselle’s social pages.
Ultimately, he’d decided it was better not to pursue her.
His grandmother was after him to find a wife and, sexual compatibility aside, a party girl from Yardley’s circle was not a suitable candidate.
“You didn’t leave with her that night?” Yardley probed.
“I left when I got the call about my grandmother.” That was true.
Luca had offered to take Jade home, but while she’d gone in search of her handbag, he’d picked up the call about Nonna.
He’d left word with the valet and owed Jade an apology for disappearing so abruptly, but his grandmother meant everything to him.
Nonna was the reason he wasn’t selling drugs for a living, or lying dead in the streets from taking them.
“I didn’t think it was you, anyway,” Yardley grumbled. “I gave you a condom.”
“What are you talking about? Never mind. I don’t want to know.” It was puerile men like Yardley who gave the rest of his sex its terrible reputation.
But he had used the condom that Yardley had pressed on him when they’d been in the car. Yardley had tried to give him three. You don’t know what sort of party this is. You’ll want these.
Yardley had slipped a single packet into Luca’s shirt pocket and Luca had left it there to put an end to the nonsense. He had already been messaging his driver to come get him as they were entering the house.
If Yardley had taken the hint and dropped the subject this morning, Luca wouldn’t be crashing this wedding, but Yardley was one of those rich nobs who couldn’t resist passing along the downfall of one of their own.
“I saw you looking at her. You two disappeared at the same time. I wondered if you were the father,” Yardley said with a shrug.
“Of who?” Luca latched onto that remark the way a hawk spied a bunny from a kilometer in the air. Paternity was a hair trigger for him.