by Ally Blake
Novak watched on from the sidelines, though after seeing Cormac she ambled up the stairs and leant against his leg.
Cormac made a kiss-kiss noise. Marnie’s ears pricked before she came bolting up to him, dropped the shoe and jumped around on her back feet.
Cormac lifted her up, gave her a kiss, then plopped her back inside the house, shutting the door behind her.
Harper blew a stream of air from the side of her mouth then pulled herself to her feet. Or, more precisely, her foot. “Of course, the dog has a crush on you too.”
Cormac grinned and held up a shoe with a heel that could take out a vampire. “Looking for this?”
Harper limped up the stairs, fixing her suit as she went. And, hell, if he didn’t want to drag her inside and unfix it. But he knew she wouldn’t want to miss visiting the restaurant on the way to the airport, so he leaned down to help her on with her shoe, before sliding a hand up her leg, up her hip, around her back and pulling her in for a kiss.
A car horn beeped as a black cab pulled up just beyond their gate.
Harper’s gaze was gorgeously fuzzy as she pulled away slowly from his kiss. “Two more days in New York to get this contract to bed. Then I’ll be home tomorrow night. I have nothing lined up after this so I’m all yours for as long as you want me.”
“I’ll be waiting with bated breath till you come home.”
“Right here?” she asked, her hand going to his towel and giving it a quick tug.
“I won’t move an inch.”
She pressed up against him a little more, and he moved more than an inch.
Knowing she was close to fulfilling the contracts she’d had in place after Lola and Gray’s wedding, he’d cleared his schedule as well. “Since we have a rare break in the calendar, how about we go home.”
She blinked. “Home-home?”
They hadn’t been back to Blue Moon Bay in six months, and he knew she was itching to see Lola even more than he was ready to see his friends and family.
Cormac nodded. “Winter will have hit Blue Moon Bay by now. The fires will be lit. We can rug up against the brisk wind coming in off the bay.”
Harper breathed out hard. “Yes, please. But what about—?”
“Adele and Wilma will look after the dogs.” Adele had hooked up with one of Lola’s yoga-teacher friends at the wedding, an English girl, and had made the trek north not long after Harper and Cormac had done the same. “It’ll be a Hampstead holiday for them too.”
“Gotta love a man who thinks of everything.”
“Love you too.” And saying it to this woman never got old. “We’ll head off at the end of the week, giving you just enough time to pack.”
The cab driver beeped again. Harper turned and shot the driver a look. He lifted his hands in surrender, grabbed a magazine and hunkered down in his seat.
“Go,” Cormac said, reaching down to hand her her small suitcase from the landing.
She gave him a quick kiss. Then reached around his neck to give him a kiss hotter than any summer’s day he’d ever known.
While he fixed his towel, Harper jogged down the stairs in her killer heels, slid into the cab and was gone.
Cormac watched the car till it turned the corner. Breathed in a lungful of London air, before heading inside, Novak at his heels.
He didn’t tell her the flights had been booked weeks before.
Or that he’d tracked down the photo booth from Lola and Gray’s party, and paid an exorbitant amount of money to have it waiting for him in the Chadwicks’ pool house.
That it was plugged in, stocked with film, ready and waiting for Cormac to lead Harper inside.
For there was where he planned to offer her the diamond ring he’d had sitting in his sock drawer for months. Where he would ask her to be his wife.
Grinning from the inside out, Cormac hit the kitchen to grab an apple. And glanced at the strip of black and white photo-booth photos stuck to their fridge. Photos of Harper looking stressed, then frustrated, surprised, then melting into his kiss, while in every picture he looked like a man who was happy to wait for his girl to catch up.
He moved them over a little to make room for the new strip he’d bring back once their trip home was done. Pictures he had no doubt would show two people crazy in love.
It’s a big fridge, Cormac thought, and he couldn’t wait to fill it with photos of his family. And friends.
And Harper. His woman. His love. His everything.
Upstairs Cormac went; a man with a plan, a smile on his face, and a whistle as he walked.
* * *
If you enjoyed this story, check out these other great reads from Ally Blake!
Hired by the Mysterious Millionaire
Amber and the Rogue Prince
Rescuing the Royal Runaway Bride
Millionaire Dad’s SOS
All available now!
Keep reading for an excerpt from Pregnant on the Earl’s Doorstep by Sophie Pembroke.
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Pregnant on the Earl’s Doorstep
by Sophie Pembroke
CHAPTER ONE
LENGROTH CASTLE LOOKED bigger than it had on the website. More imposing.
On the slick, professional website of the Earl of Lengroth the castle had been bathed in sunlight, with impossibly blue skies shining behind its corner towers, the stone walls almost white in the sunshine. In reality, even on a dry July day in Scotland, the skies were more white with cloud than blue, and the stone was a heavy, dark and imposing grey. The seventeen stone steps up to the dark wooden front door seemed designed to put visitors off altogether—they were narrow, steep, and they looked slippery with moss encouraged by the moat they rose across.
In fact, the whole scene was enough to make Heather Reid want to jump on the first train back to Hertfordshire and never return.
Except she couldn’t. Not until she’d done what she’d come to do. After that...? Well, what happened next was anybody’s guess. By then the ball would be firmly in the court of Ross Bryce, Earl of Lengroth.
Steeling herself, Heather crossed the gravelled courtyard from the open front gate and carefully made her way up those seventeen slippery steps. Halfway up, she risked a glance down at the moat. The water was black and bottomless. Much like her fear.
Heather swallowed and took another step.
A splash beside her made her jump and almost lose her footing. Grappling for purchase on one of the higher steps, Heather darted her gaze around, looking for the cause of the sound. A fish? Duck? Crocodile? She wouldn’t put it past the Earls of Lengroth to have installed the Loch Ness Monster in their moat.
T
hen she spotted the rubber duck, bobbing happily on the dark water.
‘Not a monster,’ she whispered to herself. ‘That’s a start.’
But that duck definitely hadn’t been there when she’d started climbing the steps. Risking letting go of her step, Heather looked up at the windows overhead, trying to see who might have thrown the rubber duck.
Nothing.
Ross Bryce had kids, she remembered uncomfortably. Two of them, perfectly turned out in a party dress and a sailor suit respectively, featured on the home page of the website, standing and smiling sweetly next to their handsome father, the Earl, and their beautiful mother, Lady Jane Bryce, Countess of Lengroth.
She’d been physically sick when she’d seen that photo and realised how monumentally she’d screwed up. Of course, she’d been throwing up a lot lately anyway. But seeing that photo had marked the moment she’d realised just how much trouble she was in, and the magnitude of the consequences she had to face.
There was still no sign of the duck’s owner, but Heather had been a teacher long enough to know that when a child threw a duck at you it meant you weren’t wanted. In fact, she was pretty sure she’d have been able to figure that much out even without her teaching qualification.
Carefully, she reached down to the water and retrieved the duck as it bobbed past, tucking it under her arm.
‘I don’t want to be here, either, kid, believe me,’ she muttered.
And then she took the next step anyway—because what choice did she have?
She’d made a mistake and now she needed to own up to it, deal with it and face it head-on. She knew only too well what happened when people ducked their own guilt and tried to cover up their actions with lies.
The big brass knocker on the castle door echoed around the courtyard as she lifted it and let it fall against the wood. At least she’d survived the steps and the duck missile. As long as the door didn’t open outwards and send her flying into the moat she was almost there.
And then would come the really hard part.
She’d practised what she would say to Ross—it was hard to think of him as the Earl of Lengroth at this point—all the way up on the train. She’d thought of different ways to break the news, but it all came down to the one basic fact.
I’m pregnant. With your child.
She really hoped his wife wasn’t in the room when she saw him again.
Not that he’d mentioned his wife, of course, when they’d met that night in London. Or his kids. He’d told her about the castle, and about lonely dark Scottish nights—even in early June, apparently. He’d talked about the countryside and his responsibilities and the parties he went to.
But he’d failed to mention his family. And he hadn’t been wearing the wedding ring she’d seen on his finger later, in the most prominent website photo of them all—a large family portrait.
‘You must have all the aristocratic ladies after you,’ she’d joked, when he’d told her where he lived and shown her a snapshot on his phone. ‘How do you know they’re interested in you and not your castle?’
‘Trust me,’ he’d replied with a wicked grin. ‘My castle is the least impressive thing about me.’
Heather groaned, just remembering the line. How had she fallen for that? She blamed the cocktails her friend Lacey had insisted on them drinking.
Was anybody ever going to open this door? She really wasn’t enjoying reliving the worst mistake of her life in her head while she waited. She’d done enough of that over the last month as it was.
Now she was there, at Castle Lengroth, she just wanted to get this over with. She wanted to see Ross Bryce and tell him everything. She wanted this to be someone else’s problem, too, even if just for a few minutes before he inevitably threw her out.
Heather didn’t have high hopes for this meeting. But she knew it was something she had to do. Ross deserved to know about the baby—even if he didn’t want anything to do with it, or her, after this. At least she’d have done the right thing.
Because, apart from one stupid night in London almost two months ago, Heather Reid always did the right thing. Her mother had taught her that much—if only by being a stunning example of what happened when a person didn’t.
Finally the door creaked open to reveal an elegant, polished older lady in a navy skirt suit and a cream blouse, with a string of pearls around her neck and sensible navy shoes on her feet.
‘I’m here to see the Earl of Lengroth,’ Heather said as confidently as she could, as if it were the sort of thing she said every day.
‘You’re late,’ the woman told Heather sternly. ‘Come on. He’s waiting.’
Heather blinked twice, then followed. She got the feeling that this woman wasn’t used to being disobeyed.
‘Um...how am I late, exactly?’
Well, she was late—six weeks late at this point—but she was pretty sure the woman wasn’t talking about Heather’s period.
‘I didn’t have an appointment...’ Maybe she should have made one. Except she couldn’t imagine that Ross was going to be happy to see her again.
The woman didn’t answer—in fact, Heather wasn’t even sure if she heard her over the sound of her own heavy footsteps on the polished stone floors of the hallway. On either side the walls were painted dark shades of green, in between bare stone columns, and every now and again they’d pass a chair with tartan cushions, as if there to give people a chance to recover from the unrelenting hard darkness of the place.
Finally, after several more hallways, eight chairs and two staircases, the woman stopped in front of another heavy wooden door and rapped her knuckles sharply against it.
‘Come in,’ a male voice called, and as the woman opened the door Heather thought she heard him mutter, ‘Finally...’ under his breath.
Heather stepped inside just as the woman said, ‘The new nanny is here, sir.’
Nanny? Okay, someone had got something seriously confused here.
But as Heather stared at the darkly handsome man behind the mahogany desk she realised that a case of mistaken identity was the least of her problems. Because the man sitting at the desk belonging to the Earl of Lengroth wasn’t the man she’d slept with in London almost two months earlier.
* * *
Cal Bryce had never harboured any ambitions to be the Earl of Lengroth. He didn’t want the title, the castle, the requirement to provide an heir, the responsibility, or to have to uphold the reputation expected of a sterling member of the aristocracy.
And in fairness, he still didn’t have most of those things. He wasn’t the Earl—he remained the Hon Calvin Bryce, as he’d always been as the Earl’s younger brother. The castle wasn’t his—it belonged to his nephew Ryan, the eight-year-old newly minted Earl. He didn’t have to provide an heir—and he didn’t think anyone was expecting Ryan to do so for quite some years yet.
Since his brother Ross’s death, however, the responsibility was all his—at least until Ryan turned eighteen. And the reputation... Well, it seemed that was Cal’s to fix, too.
What on earth made you take that corner so fast, brother? Cal thought, not for the first time since he’d got that middle-of-the-night call and heard Mrs Peterson, the castle housekeeper, shrieking incomprehensibly down the phone at him from thousands of miles away in Scotland.
‘They’re dead! They’re both dead, Cal!’ she’d finally managed to say.
And the bottom had fallen out of Cal’s world.
His whole life Ross had been a constant. And he’d needed that so badly—especially when they were growing up. While the world around them might have believed that the Bryce family were a perfect example of modern aristocracy done right, Ross and Cal had known the truth.
The family weren’t above scandal and outrageous behaviour—they’d just grown very, very good at covering it up.
As a child, all Cal had known
was that he had to get out of the way when his father started shouting, and that if he was drinking it was better not to be in the castle at all. Ross, three years older, had taught him all the best hiding places—and the signs to look out for telling him that it was time to run. And when Cal got it wrong Ross had stood between him and the Earl to give his little brother a head start.
Cal had idolised Ross. Until six weeks ago.
Even as he’d grown up into a teen, and then a young man, it had taken Cal some time to realise the true nature of his genetic inheritance. The Bryces hid their scandals well—even from their own flesh and blood. But once he’d seen his first evidence—walking in on his father in bed with the barmaid from the village pub was a scene sadly seared into his memory—he’d started to notice it everywhere. Especially as his parents had become less careful of their words around him.
There was the affair his mother had been having with the family lawyer for most of Cal’s life. The endless parade of barmaids and local girls he’d seen letting themselves out of the castle kitchens in the mornings. The bruises on Ross’s face and arms after a shouting match with their big bear of a father—red-faced and fuming so much of the time.
Hell, there was even the legend of the Lengroth ghost, which was currently causing him issues in ways the woman couldn’t possibly have imagined a hundred years ago when she’d died. The story went that a century earlier one of the local village girls had got pregnant and claimed the father was the Earl. Shunned by the local village people, and with her reputation ruined, she’d come to the castle to ask for his help. The Earl had denied her and sent her away, and she’d fallen down the castle steps and died—although some still whispered to this day that she’d been pushed.
Cal wished he didn’t know the truth about that one, if he was honest. His ancestors were enough of a disappointment to him already.
But not Ross. Ross had married the beautiful and lovely Janey and had two beautiful and lovely children. Ross had bucked the family trend.