Malone's Vow

by Sandra Marton

  “No,” Liam agreed, “it isn’t.”

  “Anyway, I’m not blameless. Part of this mess is my fault, too.”

  “That’s not true,” Carrie said, with indignation. “You didn’t do anything!”

  “But I did.” Bill took Carrie’s hand and held it tightly. “I didn’t give Jessica any options. One night she agreed to have dinner with me and the next thing she knew, I was making her part of my life. Isn’t that right, Jessica?”

  “If you mean that you were wonderful…” Jessie smiled shakily. “You sent me flowers every day. You phoned all the time.”

  “Sure. I figured if you were right for me, all I had to do was convince you that I was right for you. I guess I thought, well, if we were a great team in the office, we’d be terrific as husband and wife.” He cleared his throat. “Obviously, I was wrong.”

  “Bill.” Liam cleared his throat, too. “I don’t expect you to forgive us—”

  “Good.” Bill stood straight and tall, and looked directly into Liam’s eyes. “Because I haven’t. You want the truth, Malone? I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive you. Accepting what’s happened is one thing. Forgiving it is another.”

  Liam nodded. “I understand. Let’s—let’s give it some time, okay?”

  “Yeah,” Bill said, “let’s do that.”

  He stepped back, still clasping Carrie’s hand, and the door swung shut. Liam stood motionless for a long moment. Then he swallowed hard, turned to Jessie and took her in his arms. She was weeping, and he drew her close and kissed away her tears.

  “Don’t cry,” he said softly. “It’s going to be okay.”

  “Poor William. He’s so hurt.” She sniffled, and Liam dug out his handkerchief and handed it to her. “He was right, you know.” She smiled through her tears. “We were a great team in the office. We should have left it at that.”

  Liam smiled, too, as he took her in his arms again. “You liked being assistant to the CEO, huh?”

  “Yes.” Despite her tears, she tilted her chin in defiance. “Don’t tell me you’re one of those male chauvinists, Malone, who doesn’t like the idea of his woman having a job.”

  “To begin with,” Liam said gently, “you’re not going to be my woman, you’re going to be my wife.”

  Jessie sighed. “I like the sound of that.”

  “And you’re right, I don’t like the idea of you working for some guy.”

  “Now, wait a minute, Liam—”

  Liam kissed her. “Working with some guy,” he said, smiling into her eyes, “an equal partnership kind of thing, well, that’s different.”

  “What are you talking about? Do you mean you’re thinking of starting some sort of business?” She snuggled against him. “Oh, that would be lovely. But you don’t have to do it for me. I know you like to bounce from place to place, and if that’s what you want, it’s what we’ll do.”

  Liam wrapped his hand around the back of her neck and tilted her face to his. “I have a lot to tell you, sweetheart. About me, about my life…” He could feel his heart lift. “Let’s just say I’ve got some irons in the fire that can use your skills and, no, we’re not going to bounce from place to place, unless that’s what you really want.”

  “I just want you,” Jessie whispered. “Only you, my love.”

  “Always,” Liam said softly. “For all the rest of our lives.”

  EPILOGUE

  THEY WERE MARRIED less than a month later, in the solarium of the handsome house they’d bought on one of the beautiful San Juan Islands in Puget Sound.

  Jessie had wanted to be wed in the garden, because a garden was where they’d met, but Liam convinced her to take pity on their guests and have the ceremony inside the solarium. The northwest was still in the grip of a chilly spring, but that day the sun shone. The first of the spring crocuses had pushed their heads through the snow and Jessie had decorated both the house and the solarium in the same soft lilac color.

  She wore white silk; Liam wore a black tux. A guitarist played softly in the background. There was champagne and caviar, oysters and Dungeness crab, and on top of the five-tiered wedding cake, in place of the figures of a bride and groom, there stood a small globe that Liam had given Jessie at breakfast.

  It was made of crystal and, inside it, a tiny porcelain bride who looked suspiciously like her, and a porcelain groom who more than resembled Liam, embraced before a bright green palm tree standing on white sand, set against a tropical cardboard sea.

  Jessie had wept with happiness.

  “Turn it over,” Liam had said gently. She did, and as the sand turned the placid scene into a hurricane, she saw the inscription engraved on the bottom of the globe.

  Let The World Tilt, it said.

  Now, the ceremony that would join them forever was moments away. Their future stretched ahead, brightly shining. There had been some difficult moments as Jessie’s friends made peace with the fact that she’d fallen in love with another man on what was to have been her wedding day, but she and Liam were so much in love that no one could fault her, or him, for following the dictates of their hearts. And they were filled with plans, plans that Liam had already put into motion. He was CEO of Flamingo Resorts; she was Chief Financial Officer. They worked together, played together, loved together.

  Their lives had taken the shape fate had meant them to take all along.

  And it would all be perfect, Jessie thought, as she stood in the encircling curve of her husband’s arm—they’d both agreed that they didn’t want to be separated, not even for the hours prior to their wedding. It would be perfect, but for one thing.

  “You’re thinking about Bill,” she said softly.

  Liam nodded. It was the first time she’d referred to William by his nickname. Liam knew that, in some subtle way, it marked a passage in their lives.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I am. I didn’t really expect him to come.” He ran an index finger under his collar. “I just thought—”

  “Liam?”

  “I thought, well, maybe he’d realize that our friendship—”

  “Liam.” Jessie looked up at Liam and smiled. “He’s here, darling.”

  Liam stiffened, then looked across the room. Bill and Carrie were coming toward them. A huge smile broke over his face.

  “Bill.” He stepped forward. “Man, I’m so happy you—”

  “Me, too.”

  The men stared at each other. Then Liam held out his hand and Bill clasped it.

  “Good to see you,” Bill said.

  “Yeah.” Liam grinned. “Same here.”

  Bill let go of Liam’s hand and drew a smiling Carrie forward. “We’re engaged, Carrie and I.” He looped his arm around her shoulders. “Crazy, isn’t it? That so much good came out of this whole thing?”

  “I think it’s wonderful.” Jessie touched her cheek to Carrie’s. Then she took Liam’s arm and smiled at the others. “Just wonderful.”

  “So,” Bill said briskly, after a moment had gone by, “what’s the deal here, huh? Did you manage to bribe some poor slob into standing up for you?”

  Liam laughed, though Jessie noticed his green eyes were suspiciously bright.

  “Actually, I figured, why go to all that trouble when the best man of my choice was going to show up any minute?”

  Bill grinned. “You really sure you want to do this, Malone? Sign your freedom away to one woman?”

  “Absolutely.” Liam turned to Jessie and took her in his arms. “For all of my life.”

  Jessie smiled. “Forever,” she said, and kissed the only man she had ever, would ever, love.

  * * * * *

  Now, read on for a tantalizing excerpt of Caitlin Crews’s new release,

  A BABY TO BIND HIS BRIDE

  The next part of the One Night With Consequences miniseries!

  Leonidas Betancur, presumed dead after an accident, cannot recall the wedding vows he made to Susannah. Her finding him awakens his memories and his desire for a wedding night! When their pas
sion has consequences, Susannah realises she’s bound to her husband forever…

  Keep reading to get a glimpse of

  A BABY TO BIND HIS BRIDE

  CHAPTER ONE

  “THEY CALL HIM the Count,” the gruff man told her as he led her deeper and deeper into the wild, wearing more flannel and plaid than Susannah Betancur had ever seen on a single person. “Never a name, always the Count. But they treat him like a god.”

  “An actual god or a pretend god?” Susannah asked, as if that would make any difference. If the Count was the man she sought, it certainly wouldn’t.

  Her guide shot her a look. “Not sure it really matters this far up the side of a hill, ma’am.”

  The hill they were trudging up was more properly a mountain, to Susannah’s way of thinking, but then, everything in the American Rockies appeared to be built on a grand scale. Her impression of the Wild, Wild West was that it was an endless sprawl of jaw-dropping mountains bedecked with evergreens and quaint place names, as if the towering splendor in every direction could be contained by calling the highest peak around something like Little Summit.

  “How droll,” Susannah muttered beneath her breath as she dug in and tried her best not to topple down the way she’d come. Or give in to what she thought was the high elevation, making her feel a little bit light-headed.

  That she was also breathless went without saying.

  Her friend in flannel had driven as far as he could on what passed for a road out in the remote Idaho wilderness. It was more properly a rutted, muddy dirt track that had wound deeper and deeper into the thick woods even as the sharp incline clearly indicated that they were going higher and higher at the same time. Then he’d stopped, long after Susannah had resigned herself to that lurching and bouncing lasting forever, or at least until it jostled her into a thousand tiny little jet-lagged pieces. Her driver had then indicated they needed to walk the rest of the way to what he called the compound, and little as Susannah had wanted to do anything of the kind after flying all the way here from the far more settled and civilized hills of her home on the other side of the world in Rome, she’d followed along.

  Because Susannah might not be a particularly avid hiker. But she was the Widow Betancur, whether she liked it or not. She had no choice but to see this through.

  She concentrated on putting one booted foot in front of the other now, well aware that her clothes were not exactly suited to an adventure in the great outdoors. It hadn’t occurred to her that she’d actually be in the wilderness instead of merely adjacent to it. Unlike every person she’d seen since the Betancur private jet had landed on an airfield in the middle of nowhere, Susannah wore head-to-toe black to announce her state of permanent mourning at a glance. It was her custom. Today it was a sleek cashmere coat over a winter dress in merino wool and deceptively sturdy knee-high boots, because she’d expected the cold, just not the forced march to go along with it.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to change?” her guide had asked her. They’d stared each other down in his ramshackle little cabin standing at lopsided attention in an overgrown field strewn with various auto parts. It had made her security detail twitchy. It had been his office, presumably. “Something less…?”

  “Less?” Susannah had echoed as if she failed to catch his meaning, lifting a brow in an approximation of the ruthless husband she’d lost.

  “There’s no real road in,” her guide had replied, eyeing her as if he expected her to wilt before him at that news. As if a mountain man or even the Rocky Mountains themselves, however challenging, could compare to the intrigues of her own complicated life and the multinational Betancur Corporation that had been in her control, at least nominally, these last few years, because she’d refused to let the rest of them win—her family and her late husband’s family and the entire board that had been so sure they could steamroll right over her. “It’s off the grid in the sense it’s, you know. Rough. You might want to dress for the elements.”

  Susannah had politely demurred. She wore only black in public and had done so ever since the funeral, because she held the dubious distinction of being the very young widow of one of the richest men in the world. She found that relentless black broadcast the right message about her intention to remain in mourning indefinitely, no matter what designs her conspiring parents and in-laws, or anyone else, had on her at any given time.

  She intended to remain the Widow Betancur for a very long while. No new husbands to take the reins and take control, no matter how hard she was pushed from all sides to remarry.

  If it was up to her she’d wear black forever, because her widowhood kept her free.

  Unless, that was, Leonidas Cristiano Betancur hadn’t actually died four years ago in that plane crash, which was exactly what Susannah had hauled herself across the planet to find out.

  Leonidas had been headed out to a remote ranch in this same wilderness for a meeting with some potential investors into one of his pet projects when his small plane had gone down in these acres and acres of near-impenetrable national forest. No bodies had ever been found, but the authorities had been convinced that the explosion had burned so hot that all evidence had been incinerated.

  Susannah was less convinced. Or maybe it was more accurate to say that she’d been increasingly more convinced over time that what had happened to her husband—on their wedding night, no less—had not been any accident.

  That had led to years of deploying private investigators and poring over grainy photographs of dark, grim men who were never Leonidas. Years of playing Penelope games with her conniving parents and her equally scheming in-laws like she was something straight out of The Odyssey, pretending to be so distraught by Leonidas’s death that she couldn’t possibly bear so much as a conversation about whom she might marry next.

  When the truth was she was not distraught. She’d hardly known the older son of old family friends whom her parents had groomed her to marry so young. She’d harbored girlish fantasies, as anyone would have at that age, but Leonidas had dashed all of those when he’d patted her on the head at their wedding like she was a puppy and had then disappeared in the middle of their reception because business called.

  “Don’t be so self-indulgent, Susannah,” her mother had said coldly that night while Susannah stood there, abandoned in her big white dress, trying not to cry. “Fantasies of fairy tales are for little girls. You are now the wife of the heir to the Betancur fortune. I suggest you take the opportunity to decide what kind of wife you will be. A pampered princess locked away on one of the Betancur estates or a force to be reckoned with?”

  Before morning, word had come that Leonidas was lost. And Susannah had chosen to be a force indeed these past four years, during which time she’d grown from a sheltered, naive nineteen-year-old into a woman who was many things, but was always—always—someone to be reckoned with. She’d decided she was more than just a trophy wife, and she’d proved it.

  And it had led here, to the side of a mountain in an American state Susannah had heard of only in the vaguest terms, trekking up to some “off the grid” compound where a man meeting Leonidas’s description was rumored to be heading up a local cult.

  “It’s not exactly a doomsday cult,” her investigator had told her in the grand penthouse in Rome, where Susannah lived because it was the closest of her husband’s properties to the Betancur Corporation’s European headquarters, where she liked to make her presence known. It kept things running more smoothly, she’d found.

  “Do such distinctions matter?” she’d asked, trying so hard to sound distant and unaffected with those photographs in her hands. Shots of a man in flowing white, hair longer than Leonidas had ever worn it, and still, that same ruthlessness in his dark gaze. That same lean, athletic frame, rangy and dangerous, with new scars that would make sense on someone who’d been in a plane crash.

  Leonidas Betancur in the flesh. She would have sworn on it.

  And her reaction to that swept over her from the inside
, one earthquake after another, while she tried to smile blandly at her investigator.

  “The distinction only matters in the sense that if you actually go there, signora, it is unlikely that you’ll be held or killed,” the man told her.

  “Something to look forward to, then,” Susannah had replied, with another cool smile as punctuation.

  While inside, everything had continued that low, shattering roll, because her husband was alive. Alive.

  She couldn’t help thinking that if Leonidas really had repaired to the wilderness and assembled a following, he’d been trained for the vagaries of cult leadership in the best possible classroom: the shark-infested waters of the Betancur Corporation, the sprawling family business that had made him and all his relatives so filthy rich they thought they could do things like bring down the planes of disobedient, uncontrollable heirs when it suited them.

  Susannah had learned a lot in her four years of treading that same water. Mainly, that when the assorted Betancurs wanted something—like, say, Leonidas out of the way of a deal that would make the company a lot of money but which Leonidas had thought was shady—they usually found a way to get it.

  Being the Widow Betancur kept her free from all that conniving. Above it. But there was one thing better than being Leonidas Betancur’s widow, Susannah had thought, and it was bringing him back from the dead.

  He could run his damned business himself. And Susannah could get back the life she hadn’t known she wanted when she was nineteen. She could be happily divorced, footloose and fancy free by her twenty-fourth birthday, free of all Betancurs and much better at standing up for herself against her own parents.

  Free, full stop.

  Flying across the planet and into the Idaho wilderness was a small price to pay for her own freedom.

  “What kind of leader is the Count?” Susannah asked crisply now, focusing on the rough terrain as she followed her surprisingly hardy guide. “Benevolent? Or something more dire?”

  “I can’t say as I know the difference,” her guide replied out of the side of his mouth. “One cult seems like another to me.”