Bad Brides Read Free

and magazines. Or that, even if they did, one of them would conceivably want to marry him. He was the
envy of the entire county. Brianna Jade looked like the model for Botticelli’s
Birth of Venus
, she was the sweetest-natured girl Edmund had ever met, and she was bringing him a dowry
that would literally transform Stanclere.
    And what did he have to give her in return? A title, a big delapidated house and – he looked at himself again in the mirror as he straightened his tie – an average-looking man who
just happened to be an Earl.
    He really was the luckiest chap in the world.

Chapter Two
    As Edmund St Aubrey contemplated his good luck, Brianna Jade Maloney sat quietly in the corner of one of the tatty chintz sofas in the morning room of Stanclere Hall, waiting
for its owner to come with his sure light tread down the creaky central oak staircase and stride across the tatty old carpets in the Great Hall. Tamra, Brianna Jade’s mom, said that as soon
as Edmund and her daughter were officially engaged, there would be major,
major
renovations on the Hall, and you’d better believe all the ancient rugs would be the first thing to go,
before the moths in them got to her Italian cashmere.
    Brianna Jade’s hands were folded in her lap, her expression perfectly composed as she pictured Edmund appearing in the doorway of the morning room, smiling at her with his polite,
English-gentleman smile, about to say –
    But Brianna Jade made herself stop right there, before she actually heard the words in her head. She wanted them to be lovely and new when Edmund said them to her, to have her own reaction be
completely spontaneous. This was a luxury she had barely ever enjoyed in her adult life to date: from the age of fifteen, she had competed in one pageant after another for four straight years, and
pageant competitors were programmed like computers. Even though those days were behind her, had ended when Tamra married vast amounts of money in the shape of Ken Maloney, the Fracking King of
America, Brianna Jade had still needed to learn how to behave in her new life, to follow another set of rules. She was very much looking forward to a marriage in which her own vast dowry would
allow her, hopefully, just to be herself.
    It’s the start of a new life now,
she thought with great relief.
I’m settling down.
Finally, she knew where she belonged: in this lovely house in the country with
farmland all around it. She had always wanted to live on a farm. And England was so pretty and green, so much prettier than Illinois. Brianna Jade loved it here.
    She had totally earned this. All those years of walking onto pageant stages, smiling till her mouth cramped and saying what the judges wanted to hear without any idea of what she actually
thought about the questions they were asking. And then, after her mother had married Ken, catapulting them into the lap of luxury, they both swiftly realized that they had to learn how to talk
right and know how to act classy enough for Florida high society, which had turned out to be just as exhausting.
    Being the Countess of Respers, by contrast, seemed like it would be a walk in the park. The London upper crust had been hugely welcoming to the Fracking Queen and Princess: no one in Britain
cared about what kind of an American accent you had. US class distinctions were meaningless over here.
    Brianna Jade might not have been the brightest bulb in the chandelier intellectually, but she was richly gifted with common sense. She was perfectly aware that almost everyone in London society
had been so very friendly because she and her mother Tamra had swept in on a glittering tide of money, as if their dollars had been golden coins that her mother scattered from her carriage, like
she pictured people doing in the olden days. Of course, some of the younger women hadn’t been
quite
so nice to her, but that was only to be expected. Brianna Jade knew all about
mean-girls’ cliques and how they