The Pregnant Bride Read Free

woman with the guts to face her demons in the one place she’d expected to find true love is a real survivor. What say we head back to The Inn and I buy us both a drink to celebrate?”
    Well, why not? The only thing waiting for her in the suite was a bed big enough for two and no one to share it with. “All right,” she said. “Thank you. You’re very kind.”
    “Yeah,” he said, tucking her hand under his arm and towing her back the way they’d come. “But keep it under your hat, okay? I don’t want the word to get out.”
     
     
    His name was Edmund Delaney and she found herself enjoying his company more than she’d have thought possible an hour before. He was an entertaining host, articulate, amusing, and unquestionably the most attractive man in the room. She sat by the fire and sipped the cognac he ordered and, for a little while, she was able to push the fiasco of her wedding day to the back of her mind. Eventually, though, the evening came to an end.
    “I’ll walk you to your room,” he offered and because she dreaded being alone, she accepted.
    Taller than Mark, broader across the shoulders, and more powerfully built, he loped up the stairs with the graceful ease of an athlete at the peak of fitness. “Give me your key,” he said, when they arrived at her door, and as she handed it over, she noticed his hands were lean and tanned and capable, and just a little callused as if he worked with tools. Mark had a manicure every week and wouldn’t have known one end of a hammer from the other.
    “Here you are.” Edmund pushed open her door, dropped the keys into her palm and folded her fingers over them.
    If he’d said, “Sleep well,” she’d probably have managed to end the evening with a modicum of dignity, but his more sensitive “Try to get some sleep,” had the tears burning behind her eyes all over again.
    Mutely, she looked up at him.
    His fingers grazing her cheek were gentle. “I know,” he murmured. “It isn’t going to be easy.”
    He left her then and she knew a shocking urge to call him back and beg him not to make her face the night alone. It wasn’t that she wanted him to make love to her or anything like that; she just needed the warmth of human contact, the feeling that someone in the world cared—not that a two-thousand-dollar wedding dress had gone to waste, or that four hundred guests had been cheated of a seven-course dinner, but that she somehow survive the crushing blow to her self-esteem and live to face another day.
    Not until his footsteps had faded into silence did she venture into the room. A fire burned in the hearth and beyond the wide windows a half-moon floated over the ocean. The maid had turned down the bed on both sides and left foil-wrapped chocolates on each pillow. Hadn’t she noticed there was only one set of luggage, only one toothbrush in the bathroom?
    Unable to face the bed, Jenna sank down on the rug before the fire and because there was no longer any ignoring them, let the ghastly events of the day wash over her.
    It had begun well enough, with sunshine and clear skies. There’d been no hint of impending disaster as she’d ridden with her father to the church, no sense of something amiss as her bridesmaids fussed with her veil and whispered that the groom and his family had not yet arrived. Mark and his father were often late, held up by international phone calls and such. “That’s the price of doing business,” Mark had said, when she’d once had the temerity to complain. “Money before pleasure any day of the week.”
    Including their wedding day, it had seemed!
    “They’ve taken a wrong turn and got lost,” her father joked. “Or been stopped for speeding.”
    But as the minutes stretched and still no groom, the smiles had shrunk and the speculation had begun, rippling over the congregation like wind over a cornfield. Finally, “I have another wedding in half an hour,” the minister had said, coming out to where she waited in her