Improperly Wed (Aristocratic Grooms 3)

When the deal went through, Belinda would have no choice but to engage him—face matters without running or dodging.

Two

She’d made all the right moves in life…until a night in Las Vegas with Colin Granville.

Belinda tossed a sweater into the suitcase on her bed with more force than necessary.

She’d read history of art at Oxford and then worked at a series of auction houses before landing her current gig as a specialist in impressionist and modern art for posh auction house Lansing’s.

She was usually punctual, quietly ambitious and tastefully dressed. She considered herself to be responsible and levelheaded.

In the process, she’d made her family happy. She’d been the dutiful child—if not always doing what they dictated, then at least not rebelling.

She was never the subject of gossip…until this past weekend. One glaring misstep was now the subject of breathless coverage in Mrs. Hollings’ Pink Pages column in The New York Intelligencer:

It was to be the society wedding of the year.

Except—oh, my!

In case word hasn’t reached your tender ears yet, dear reader, this town is abuzz with the news that the Wentworth-Dillingham wedding was crashed by none other than the Marquess of Easterbridge, who proceeded to make the astonishing claim that his short-lived marriage to the lovely Ms. Wentworth two years ago in Las Vegas—of all places!—had never been legally annulled.

Belinda winced as the words from Mrs. Hollings’ column reverberated through her mind.

Mrs. Hollings had simply fired the first salvo. Damn the social-networking sites. The fiasco at St. Bart’s Church had gone viral in the past three days.

She didn’t even want to think about her family’s continued reaction. She’d avoided calls from her mother and Uncle Hugh in the past few days. She knew she’d have to deal with them eventually, but she wasn’t prepared to yet.

Instead, yesterday she’d commiserated over the phone with her closest girlfriends, Tamara and Pia. They’d both been full of sympathy for Belinda’s situation, and they’d admitted that the would-be wedding had brought them troubles of their own. Tamara had confessed that she avoided one of the groomsmen at the wedding, Sawyer Langsford, Earl of Melton, because their families had long cherished the idea that the two would wed. Meanwhile, Pia had admitted that she’d discovered one of the wedding guests was her former lover, James “Hawk” Carsdale, Duke of Hawkshire, who had left her without so much as a goodbye after one night three years ago, when he’d presented himself as merely Mr. James Fielding.

In short, the aborted wedding had been a disastrous day for her and her two girlfriends.

Fortunately, Belinda thought, she had a ticket out of town. Tomorrow morning, she would be leaving her tidy little Upper West Side one bedroom for a business trip to England. Even before the wedding that wasn’t, she and Tod had decided to postpone a honeymoon for a later date—one that was more convenient for their mutual work schedules. And now she was glad she already had a business trip planned. She couldn’t outrun her problems, but some space and distance from the scene of the crime—namely, New York—would help clear her mind so she could come up with a plan.

Ironically, while her wedding date to Tod was supposed to seal her image as the perfect and dutiful society bride, it had done the exact opposite, thanks to Colin’s appearance. Her wedding was to have been her apogee, but instead it had been her downfall.

Still, an annulment or divorce should be easy enough to obtain. People got them every day, didn’t they? She herself had thought she’d received one.

She paused in the process of packing, sweater in hand, and gazed sightlessly at the clutter on top of her dresser.

She recalled how she’d stared at the annulment papers when they’d arrived for her signature and then pushed aside the quick stab of pain that they had engendered. They were simply a reminder of the blemish on the resume of her life, she’d told herself. But no one needed to know about her appalling mistake.

Belinda dropped the sweater into her suitcase and swallowed against the sudden panicky feeling in the pit of her stomach. She cupped her forehead, as if she could will h

er proverbial headache away.

But she knew there was no hope of making a six-foot-plus wealthy marquess disappear from her life with a poof!

Even before that fateful night in Vegas, she’d run into Colin at social functions occasionally over the years and had found him, well, compelling. But she was too aware of the history between their two families to ever talk directly to him. On top of it all, he was too masculine, too sternly good-looking, too everything. She, who prided herself on her propriety and self-control, couldn’t risk spending time with someone who made her feel so…unsettled.

But then she’d been sent on assignment to Las Vegas to appraise the private art collection of a multimillionaire real-estate developer. When she’d run into Colin at the developer’s cocktail party, she’d felt compelled for business’ sake to socialize with him. She hadn’t planned on discovering, much to her chagrin, how charming he was and how much she was attracted to him.

He was like a breath of home in a new place—pleasantly familiar—and yet he stirred a response in her like no one ever had. In the process of idle cocktail party chitchat and banter, she discovered they’d both been standout swimmers in school, they were both partial to operatic performances at New York’s Lincoln Center and London’s Royal Opera House and they were both active in the same charities to help the unemployed—though Colin sat on the board, while she was more of a foot soldier volunteering her time.

Belinda had thought their similarities were almost disconcerting.

Toward the end of her stay in Vegas, she’d run into Colin again in the lobby of the Bellagio. She’d been momentarily uncertain what to do, but he’d made the decision for her. The ice had already been broken at the recent cocktail party, and what’s more, it turned out they were both staying at the Bellagio.

Frankly, she’d been in a partying mood—or at least one for a celebratory drink or two. She’d landed a deal with Colin’s real-estate developer friend for a big auction sale of artwork at Lansing’s. She knew she had Colin partially to thank. His smooth mediation of her conversations with the developer at the party had certainly been helpful.