His Convenient Royal Bride

by Cara Colter

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  Carrying Her Millionaire’s Baby

  by Sophie Pembroke

  CHAPTER ONE

  ZOEY HEPBURN SHOVED the hotel window a little further open, hoisted her bare foot up onto the sill and cursed as her hem got caught on the latch—again. She was beginning to regret the strapless hot pink dress she’d chosen for her rehearsal dinner. However pretty the lacy skirt was, it was not getaway-friendly.

  Of course, when she bought it, she hadn’t been planning on escaping through a back window the night before her wedding. But then, she never did.

  ‘People are looking for you, you know.’ The calm, almost lazy voice behind her made Zoey jump just enough to whack her head on the window frame. Ow. ‘Also, you made me promise I wouldn’t let you do this again this time.’

  ‘Again feels a little harsh. I’ve never actually climbed out of a window before.’ Maybe her shoulders would fit through the small gap better if she twisted them more to the left.

  Zoey tried it. They wouldn’t.

  Ash sighed. His usual, What did I do in a past life to get lumbered with you as my friend? sigh. Zoey was alarmingly familiar with it.

  ‘They want to do the speeches,’ he said. As if the idea of hearing David’s father waffle on about how important his family was—to him and to the world at large—might tempt her back into the hotel restaurant. Everyone in there knew what trouble his company was in anyway, whatever tall tales he told about famous people he’d met once and who would never remember his name.

  David didn’t do that, she reminded herself. David was reasonably modest. Well, compared to his father anyway, which wasn’t a very high bar, she had to admit.

  Still, it meant she probably couldn’t use ‘pompous name-dropper’ as a reason for not marrying him.

  ‘Since when did speeches become a must for rehearsal dinners, anyway?’ she asked, eyeing the window again. ‘Can’t they save them for tomorrow? You know, the actual wedding.’

  ‘Seems to me they’re being sensible getting them in early,’ Ash said, and she just knew he was raising an eyebrow at her, the way he always used to when she and Grace came home from the pub tipsy and tried to deny that last bottle of wine they’d shared. ‘Tomorrow is not looking like a sure thing right now.’

  Outside, a warm breeze fluttered past like butterfly wings. She was in paradise—a luxurious island in the middle of the Indian ocean, a boutique hotel filled with her and David’s friends and family, private villas on stilts stretching out into the azure sea from a wooden boardwalk for all her guests.

  It was just unfortunate that, from the minute she’d arrived three days ago for the last-minute wedding preparations, she’d felt as if she’d been trapped in purgatory.

  But she wasn’t going to escape hell through this window—even if she had followed any of those ‘Lose Ten Pounds for your Wedding Day’ diets her mother had kept leaving strategically around the house. Which she hadn’t.

  Resigned, Zoey pulled her head back through the open window, turned to face her best friend’s husband and sat down on the windowsill. ‘I can’t go back in there, Ash.’

  Ash took a seat on the table she’d climbed up on to reach the window. ‘Because rehearsal dinners are a terrible tradition that should be banned, or because you don’t want to marry David tomorrow?’

  ‘Both,’ Zoey replied promptly. ‘And I should know. I’ve had three rehearsal dinners, including this one.’

  ‘And not a wedding between them,’ Ash said mournfully. ‘Not to mention the two other broken engagements.’

  Zoey winced. ‘Three, actually. One of them was before Grace and I met you.’

  ‘The musician, right?’ Ash tilted his head to the side as he looked at her. ‘Grace told me about him. I think calling that one off was legit.’

  ‘As opposed to the others?’ She gave him a sideways look. ‘Do you honestly think I should have married Harry, or Julian, or Fred?’

  ‘I suppose not.’ Leaning back, Ash rested his elbows on the table and looked up at her. His bright blue eyes were too knowing, and Zoey had to work to resist the urge to brush his sooty hair away from them. He really was absurdly good-looking. The thought registered, as it always did—an acknowledgement of a fact, like saying the ocean was blue.

  She’d never let herself dwell on it beyond that. That way lay madness and misery.

  ‘It’s just a shame you never figured out that they weren’t the right guy for you until the morning of the wedding,’ Ash went on, and she focused on his words rather than his looks again. ‘As much as I love a last-minute runaway bride drama, I think some other people might be thinking it’s gone a little far now.’

  He could have a point, Zoey allowed. In fact, she had a nagging suspicion that David might have had an ulterior motive for insisting the wedding took place on an island in the middle of nowhere.

  She frowned. Ash would know. ‘When David spoke to you about booking the wedding, did he say why he wanted to have it here?’ She hadn’t wanted to ask before. But if not now, when?

  Ash, as heir to the Carmichael Luxury Travel business, had organised the use of the island hotel as his wedding present to them. She was pretty sure his company actually owned the island, as well as the hotel, when it came down to it. Zoey wondered if she’d have to pay him back for that if the wedding didn’t go ahead. She hoped not. Her job as an art gallery assistant in London was her dream, but the benefits weren’t all entirely financial.

  ‘He might have mentioned the advantages of having control over which boats and sea planes arrived at—and more pertinently left—the island,’ Ash said diplomatically.

  ‘You mean he was trying to make sure I couldn’t run away.’ Zoey frowned. Was He manipulated my wedding venue choice a good enough excuse not to marry him? And why did she need an excuse at all beyond I don’t want to?

  Because your mother is going to pitch a fit. Not to mention all the other people you’re letting down.

  Not Ash, though. Even if he had gone along with David’s possibly nefarious scheme.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me that sooner?’ she asked, trying to feel outraged and failing. ‘I mean, you’d let me marry a man who didn’t give me an out on my wedding day? What kind of a friend are you?’

  Ash rolled his eyes. ‘Yes, obviously this is my fault. Zoey, you know that if you told me you wanted out then I would get you out—planes, boats and automobiles be damned. But, if you recall, you also told me—quite definitely—when we had dinner last month that David was absolutely the one, and that I wasn’t to let you get cold feet this time, because you’d
regret it for the rest of your life.’

  Had she really said that? It was hard to imagine somehow, here and now. Impossible to summon up that certainty again—and not because of the island, or his father’s pompous speeches. But because now it came down to it she simply could not picture spending the rest of her life with David.

  But she had been able to once. She must have done, to say yes to his proposal. She’d loved him—or believed she did—and had been planning their life together right up until the moment they had arrived in paradise to get married.

  People might laugh at her history of running out on weddings—and, yes, there had been a few family members who’d refused to even come to this one, just in case—but when she said yes to a guy on one knee with a sparkly ring, she always, always meant it.

  It was just getting from ‘yes’ to ‘I do’ that seemed to cause her problems.

  Her whole life with just one person—that was a big ask. And Zoey had seen first-hand what a disaster it could be if she picked the wrong one. Her own parents were a shining example of how not to do marriage.

  And then there was Ash.

  Ash, her only friend, who had been her best friend’s husband. Ash, who’d had the perfect marriage—until it had been ripped away from him and had left him broken.

  Zoey bit her lip, contemplating the question she wanted to ask but didn’t know if she dared.

  ‘What?’ Ash sat up straighter, watching her. ‘Whatever it is, just ask, Zoey. You know I’ll help if I can.’

  He always had. Ash was one of only two people she’d known beyond doubt that she’d always be able to rely on, ever since she and Grace had met him in the student union over a decade earlier. But she didn’t want to hurt him by bringing up painful memories.

  On the other hand, she needed to know the answer, if she were to make a real decision about what to do next—not just bash her way through a window and hope for the best.

  ‘When you and Grace...on your wedding day. Weren’t you nervous?’

  Unbidden, memories of that perfect English summer day came back to her. Grace, her best friend since junior school, ethereally beautiful in her delicate lace dress. Zoey’s rose-pink bridesmaid’s dress, a perfect match for the tea roses in Grace’s bouquet. The tiny stone chapel in their home village. The afternoon tea reception on the village green, with mismatched china and bunting strung all around.

  And, through it all, Ash and Grace smiling at each other as if their hearts were on show. So in love, so certain that the future would be perfect, as long as they were together.

  It hurt now to think of how happy they’d all been, never imagining that it could all be torn away from them in a heartbeat.

  ‘Nervous?’ Ash shook his head. ‘I was terrified.’

  He hadn’t looked it. He’d seemed like a man whose every dream had come true.

  If Ash had been nervous, maybe it was okay that she was too?

  Or maybe it depended on why. Because Ash had gone through with it. He’d said ‘I do’ and promised his whole life to another person.

  And six diamond rings later, that was something Zoey still hadn’t managed.

  * * *

  Ash took in the look of confusion on Zoey’s face and wondered how he could make her understand, when the depth and strength of his love for Grace had always been something he’d just had to take on faith, rather than pick apart and puzzle out.

  He was telling the truth when he said he’d been nervous, but perhaps not in the way Zoey meant the question. It hadn’t been the wedding—all those people there looking at him—that had worried him, or the fear of anything going wrong. And it definitely hadn’t been the concept of marriage itself; the idea of spending the rest of his life with Grace had only ever made him smile.

  No, he’d never been scared of committing to Grace. But he’d been petrified of not being good enough to deserve her. Even now she was gone, the idea of not living up to the man she’d believed he could be kept him awake some nights.

  Sometimes, he wondered if it was only Grace’s belief in him, in what he could become, that kept him going after her death. That, and Zoey’s blind determination to drag him out of the pit he’d buried himself in the moment the doctor had told him the news.

  But that was him. It was all so different for Zoey. For her, it was the commitment she was terrified of. The idea of forever with one person.

  Not that she’d ever told him that. But Grace had tried to explain it to him once, back when they were blissfully happy in their extended honeymoon period, and Zoey had just run out on her latest fiancé.

  ‘It’s not that she doesn’t want to get married. She does, desperately, I think. It’s just that after so many years of watching her parents perform the perfect How Not to Be a Happy Couple show, she’s terrified of getting it wrong.’

  That had been three fiancés ago and now, sitting in a tiny storeroom of a luxury hotel, watching Zoey eye up the too-small window as a viable escape route again, Ash had to admit that his wife had been right. As usual.

  Hardly surprising, he supposed. Grace had known Zoey better than anyone in the world. Almost as well as she’d known him.

  And now he and Zoey were all that was left, trying to muddle through together. She’d literally picked him up off the floor after Grace was pronounced dead following a frantic ambulance ride from the scene of a multi-car pileup that stole three other lives. In return, he tried to be the best friend he could to Zoey, to make up for the much better one that she’d lost that day.

  Some days he was better at it than others. He hoped today was a good day. Zoey looked as if she needed it.

  And she was still waiting for him to explain his fears.

  ‘It never occurred to me not to marry Grace.’ Ash stretched out his legs along the table, turning so he could see Zoey as he talked. ‘From the first moment I met her, she was my future. She was all I could think about.’

  ‘I remember,’ Zoey said, her voice dry. ‘You had to be reminded that you’d actually met me that night too, when you both finally came up for air a week or so later.’

  Ash winced. His eighteen-year-old self might not have been entirely aware of other people’s feelings. But Zoey was smiling at the memory, so he figured he must have made up for it in the decade or so since then.

  ‘So, why were you scared?’ Zoey asked.

  ‘Because...everything was so perfect. Grace was so perfect. I was scared I’d screw it up. That I wouldn’t be enough.’

  ‘That I get.’ Zoey pulled her knees up against her chest, her bare toes with their sparkly aqua nails peeking out from under the hot pink dress. Ash spotted her high heels discarded by the door.

  She looked about twelve, sitting like that. Ash felt the familiar protective instinct rising up in him. Ever since Grace died, it had just been him and Zoey, looking out for each other. His parents, as much as they loved him, were generally more concerned with Ash’s ability to perform his role in the family business than the state of his psyche, and Zoey’s parents were worse than useless.

  Which meant it was up to him to fix the latest twist in Zoey’s romantic life.

  Starting with figuring out which side of that window she really wanted to be on.

  ‘Is that what this is about?’ He scooted closer to sit beside her. The warm breeze from the open window brushed against the back of his neck. ‘You’re scared that you can’t be what David needs?’

  If anything, Ash thought it was the other way around. Of all her fiancés, David was his...second least favourite. Not that he was keeping a list. Well, not a written one.

  But then, he and Grace had never thought anyone was good enough for their Zoey.

  Zoey pulled a face. ‘Not exactly. It’s more... I don’t think that our marriage will be what either of us are hoping for.’

  ‘But you didn’t feel that way when you said yes to his prop
osal. Or when you told me that David was different, and that you’d absolutely go through with it and I wasn’t to let you climb out of a window to escape getting married this time.’

  ‘Hey! I told you. I’ve never climbed out of a window before.’

  Ash raised an eyebrow to remind her that the window really wasn’t the point here.

  Because this was the part that Ash couldn’t understand. When they’d had dinner a couple of weeks ago, when he’d been home in London between business trips, Zoey had been so certain, so sure of her love for David and their future together, that he’d resigned himself to boring dinners and holidays with the man for the rest of his existence. Because he wasn’t losing Zoey in his life, whatever idiot she finally married.

  He’d really thought that this time she’d go through with it.

  But maybe that just meant he didn’t know Zoey as well as he’d thought he did.

  ‘Zoey. Tell me. What changed in the last two weeks?’ he asked.

  * * *

  What always changes? Every damn time.

  Zoey sighed as she tried to find the words. Find the reasons. How could she explain it to him when it didn’t even make sense to her? It wasn’t one thing that had changed. It was a hundred tiny things she’d finally noticed, all building on each other.

  ‘Nothing. And everything.’ She shook her head to try and clear the whirlwind of thoughts that seemed to have filled it since she arrived on the island. ‘I really thought I could go through with it this time, Ash. That I could make it work. But then we landed here a few days ago to get everything ready for the wedding...and everything started feeling wrong.’ Pit of her stomach wrong. Instincts telling her to run wrong.

  She’d always trusted her instincts. Even when they led her into another engagement, or away from another wedding. At the time, they always seemed right.

  ‘Everything?’

  No. That wasn’t fair to David. He was a good man. She loved him. Had loved him. One or the other.