Her Collateral Bride: A Lesbian Age Gap Romance

Chapter 1

Claire

“You’re a witch, Claire. A spiteful, vengeful, hag. I wish I

had never met you.”

Claire rolled her eyes in the face of the insults. It was hard

to believe that this defeated, angry man with the salt-and-

pepper hair and the purple smudges under his eyes, the

dishevelled clothes and the few days’ worth of patchy beard

growth had once been someone she held close to her heart in

few ways she ever let anyone in.

Robert Watt was a classic example of why it paid to never

let anyone get close.

Her righthand woman—Claire still privately found it

amusing to call Jenny that in her head—snarled from the

corner of Claire’s office. Half personal secretary, half

bodyguard, Jenny defined the phrase good things come in

small packages. Also, mean things. Highly trained in the arts

of defense and fighting, as well as brilliant, Jenny was one of

the very few people Claire did still believe in trusting. The

woman was probably ex-military, but if she was, she’d

managed to keep her past hidden like a blank slate, and after

seeing her capabilities at the job interview, Claire hadn’t dug

any further.

“You’re hardly in a spot to be hurling stones,” Claire shot

back. Her voice was perfectly neutral, and she let none of the

disgust she felt for Robert show. “And I’m sure that’s not true.

If you’d never met me, you wouldn’t be where you are now.

Or were. Because you were on top of the world, but now

you’re here. You just asked me to save you from the mess of

your own making. You’re here. Grovelling. And then you

insult me in the next breath?” She shook her head. “Manners,

Robert. Where are your manners?”

Robert threw a hand up to the back of his neck and

squeezed hard, like he could will himself back into control.

That was part of Robert’s problem. He had a terrible temper

and it showed itself, snapping and snarling like a two-headed

beast, so often that every single person in New York, Los

Angeles, Miami, London, Paris, and Milan knew about it. And