Stranded with the Secret Billionaire

by Marion Lennox

  So his big black horse was calmly grazing behind the makeshift altar and Matt was standing waiting. He smiled and the world stood still.

  He looked stunning. ‘I’m damned if I’ll wear a dinner suit if I’m riding a horse,’ he’d told Penny and she’d agreed—the Matt she loved wasn’t a dinner suit kind of person. But he’d compromised.

  He was wearing the breeches of a true horseman, buff, moulded to his legs. He wore glossy riding boots reaching to his knees, a deep black dressage jacket and a cravat, white silk, intricate, splendid. He’d do a Regency hero proud.

  He’d do anyone proud, she thought mistily. He looked spectacular. Drop dead gorgeous. Toe-curlingly handsome.

  Her Matt.

  Music swelled in the background. She’d thought they’d have recorded music but, amazingly, Matt seemed to have organized a grand piano. How the...? But now wasn’t the time to ask. The pianist and a cellist were playing A Thousand Years, a song to take her breath away. To make all eyes well.

  But she was no longer hearing the music.

  Matt was smiling and smiling. Their guests were on their feet, smiling almost as much as Matt.

  ‘Are you ready, my love?’ Louise asked, groping for her lace handkerchief and then giving up and sniffing.

  ‘Of course I’m ready,’ Penny told her. ‘How could I not be? This is my Matt. This is the rest of my life.’

  * * *

  He thought of the first time he’d seen her—little, blonde, hot and cross. Bare toes covered with sand.

  He’d thought she was beautiful then. How much more so now?

  The dress she’d chosen—ignoring her mother’s questionable advice—was perfect for her. It was mermaid style, white silk, the bodice perfectly cupping her breasts. Tiny slivers of shoulder straps made it safe for the ride. It was figure-hugging to her hips, then flared out to her feet in a gorgeous rustle of silk and taffeta.

  Shoulder straps or not, how had she ridden in that?

  How could he ask? There was nothing this woman couldn’t do.

  Her hair was caught up loosely, curls cascading from a fragile spray of jasmine and tiny white rosebuds.

  How could he look at her hair?

  All he saw was her smile. And her eyes. She was smiling and smiling—just for him.

  And, at that moment, something in him settled. Something strong and sure.

  They hadn’t hurried this wedding because it hadn’t seemed important but now, here, suddenly it was.

  Will you take this woman...

  The words had been spoken thousands, millions of times, but they’d never been spoken as they would be today.

  And now she was beside him. Lily was taking her bouquet and stepping back, and Penny was smiling up at him.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ she whispered and it was all he could do to make his voice work.

  ‘What kept you?’

  ‘Ron found a lamb,’ she told him. ‘It got through the fence down the back paddock and spent the night separated from its mum. You know we had a frost? Ron brought it in just before we left, so Noreen and I had to take the meringues out of the oven and replace them with lamb. But no drama. We have mum waiting impatiently in the home paddock, baby warming up nicely and the meringues doing their final dry in the sun on the veranda.’

  And she took his breath away all over again.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ he said faintly. ‘You coped with a lamb in that dress.’

  ‘I only got it a little bit smudgy,’ she told him, lifting an arm so he could see a tiny smudge of mud on her waist. ‘And somehow I already had a little smear of lemon icing on the hip. But it’s okay. It’s pretty perfect.’

  And he couldn’t help himself. He chuckled and then thought: To heck with convention. He gathered her to him and hugged her and swept her round and round until she squealed.

  And then he set her on her feet again and they both stopped laughing.

  Pretty perfect? She was absolutely perfect.

  Life was perfect.

  They turned together, hand in hand, to be made man and wife.

  * * * * *

  Keep reading for an excerpt from

  REUNITED BY A BABY BOMBSHELL

  by Barbara Hannay

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  Reunited by a Baby Bombshell

  by Barbara Hannay

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHEN THE INVITATION arrived Eva Hennessey was away in Prague, dancing the role of Odette in Swan Lake. On her return to Paris a week later, she found her mailbox crammed, mostly with an assortment of bills and dance magazines. She was riding the rickety old lift to her apartment on the fifth floor when the bright sunny Australian stamp caught her eye. Then she read the postmark. Emerald Bay.

  The sharp pang in her chest made her gasp. It wasn’t homesickness. Eva’s feelings about the beach town where she’d grown up were far more complicated. These days, she rarely allowed herself to unpack the mixed bag of emotions that accompanied memories from her youth.

  She always ended up thinking about Griffin Fletcher...and the other harrowing memory that would never leave her.

  She’d worked hard to put that life behind her. She’d had to. Long ago.

  Today, as the hum of Parisian traffic reached Eva from the street below, she let herself into the apartment that had been her home for the past ten years. Nanette, the concierge, had already turned on the heating and the apartment was welcoming and warm. Eva had loved this place from the day she’d first found it.

  Decorated simply in quiet creamy tones with occasional touches of blue, the main living area was dominated by a far wall of windows that looked out over tiled rooftops, chimneys and church spires to the top of the Eiffel Tower. At night, on the hour, the Tower glittered with beautiful lights. It was a view Eva never tired of.

  Stopping for a moment, she smiled to herself as she looked about the space she’d carefully assembled over the years—the beautiful cushion covers she’d picked up on various tours, the collection of blue and white pottery from all over Europe, the wide-brimmed bowl full of shells and stones she’d collected from beaches in Greece and Italy, in Spain and the UK. So many happy memories to counteract the sad ones from her past.

  She set down her luggage and dumped the envelope from Australia on the coffee table along with the rest of her mail. Then she went thr
ough to the bathroom and had a long hot shower, massaging the nagging pain in her hip under the steady stream of water.

  She washed her hair, dried it roughly with a towel, letting the damp dark tresses hang loose past her shoulders as she changed into a comfy pair of stretch slacks and an oversized T-shirt.

  Soon she would make her supper. A simple herb omelette would suffice. But first a glass of wine, an indulgence she could allow herself now that the performance tour was behind her.

  Curled on the sofa, with the wine within reach and a cushion positioned to support her painful hip, Eva retrieved the envelope from Australia and slit it open. A card depicting an iconic Queensland beach fell out.

  Beneath the picture, a message—an invitation to a reunion of her classmates to celebrate twenty years since their last year of high school.

  Eva felt sick as she read the details.

  Where: Emerald Bay Golf Club

  When: Saturday October 20th

  The simple wording hit her like a punch to the chest. A thousand long-suppressed images crashed in. The beach in summer and the thrill of riding the rolling green surf. The smooth trunk of a palm tree at her back as she sat at the edge of the sand, eating salty fish and chips wrapped in paper. The smell of sunscreen and citronella.

  Her thoughts flashed to hot summer days in classrooms with windows opened wide to catch a sea breeze. And then, despite her best efforts to block them, there were memories of Griffin Fletcher.

  Griff, sitting at the desk just behind her in class, all shaggy-haired and wide-shouldered, catching her eye when she turned and sending her a cheeky grin.

  Griff on the football field. The flash of his solid thighs as he sped past to score a try.

  Griff holding her close in the dark. The surprising gentleness of his lips.

  And, flashing between those sweeter memories, the fear and the crushing weight of her terrible secret. The overwhelming heartbreak and pain.

  Enough.

  Stop it.

  Eva knew at once what her response would be. What it must be. Of course she couldn’t possibly go. With deep regret, she would be unable to accept the kind invitation. She was very grateful to be remembered by her old school friends, but her schedule was far too tight.

  It wasn’t untrue. She had a new set of rehearsals for The Nutcracker lined up and she couldn’t really afford the time away. And why would she want to go back to the Bay anyway? Her mother no longer lived there. It was many years now since her mum had married and settled in Cairns in the far north of the state. As for Eva’s classmates and the rest of her memories—of necessity, she’d very deliberately left all that behind.

  Instead, she’d worked as hard as possible for those twenty years, putting in endless, punishing hours to build the career of her dreams. These days, posters of Eva Hennessey, dancing as Giselle, as Cinderella or as Romeo’s Juliet, were on display in almost every theatre or train station in Europe.

  After long years of hard work, this was Eva’s reward. Rave reviews claimed her as ‘technically poised and polished and lyrically perfect’. Wherever she went, audiences cheered Bravo! and gave her standing ovations. Her dressing rooms were crammed with beautiful flowers.

  Eva’s world was now different in every way imaginable from the life she’d known in the sleepy seaside town of her youth. She might as well be living on a different planet. If she ever returned to Emerald Bay, she would not only awaken past hurts, she would feel like an alien.

  Just the same, she felt sick to the stomach as she tucked the card back into the envelope. She told herself she was simply overtired after the gruelling weeks on tour.

  In the morning she would post an ‘inability to accept’ and she would delete all thoughts of Emerald Bay.

  * * *

  Bees buzzed in the bottlebrush hedge. Small children laughed and squealed as they splashed at the shallow end of the elegant swimming pool, while their mothers watched, dangling their bare legs in the water as they sipped Pimm’s from long glasses. The smell of frying onions floated on the balmiest of breezes. It was a typical Sunday afternoon in suburban Brisbane.

  Griff Fletcher was the host on this particular Sunday and his guests were a couple of long-time mates and their families. Griff was repaying their hospitality while his girlfriend, Amanda, was away in Sydney on business. It made sense. Amanda hadn’t known these guys for decades as he had. They weren’t really part of her scene—she was so much younger than their wives—and she didn’t ‘do’ little kids.

  As Griff added steaks to the sizzling barbecue plate, the men helped themselves to fresh beers and kept him company.

  ‘So what do you reckon about the school reunion?’ asked Tim, who, like Griff, had moved from Emerald Bay to live and work in Queensland’s capital city. ‘Are you planning to check it out, Griff?’

  Griff shrugged. He’d known that Tim and Barney were bound to talk about the reunion today, but he really wasn’t that interested. ‘I think I might give it a miss,’ he said.

  Tim pulled a face, clearly disappointed. ‘But surely you must be curious about your old mates? Wouldn’t you like to catch up with the gang?’

  The best Griff could manage was a crooked grin. ‘I see you two often enough.’

  Barney gave an awkward smile and Tim scowled and took a long drink of his beer. Griff scowled too, as he began to flip steaks. He knew it wouldn’t be long before one of the guys had another dig at him.

  Tim shook his head. ‘I know you’re a hotshot barrister, Griff, but I didn’t take you for a snob.’

  Griff gave another shrug as he turned the sausages for the children. ‘I just don’t see the point in revisiting the past. You know what these reunions are like. The only people who turn up are the ones who’ve been successful, or the ones who’ve bred a swag of offspring. Then they swan around feeling smug, gossiping about the ones who stayed away.’

  ‘That’s a bit harsh,’ Tim said stiffly.

  ‘I wasn’t talking about you of course, mate.’

  His mate wasn’t mollified. ‘Have you ever been to a school reunion?’

  ‘No, but it’s easy to—’

  ‘I have,’ cut in Barney. ‘My folks still live in the Bay, so I’m up there pretty regularly and I went to the ten-year reunion.’ He looked a tad defensive. ‘I enjoyed meeting up with everyone again, even after just ten years. There were some who’d really changed and others who looked exactly the same. Not that any of that mattered. We all had plenty of laughs and swapped war stories. It was interesting to hear what everyone’s doing.’

  ‘See!’ crowed Tim with a triumphant grin.

  Griff shrugged again and used the egg flip to shift the browned onions away from the heat. Then he turned to call to the women. ‘Steaks won’t be long.’

  ‘Right,’ Tim’s wife, Kylie, called back. ‘We’d better get these kids dry then.’

  Tim, meanwhile, moved closer to Griff. Out of the corner of his mouth, he said, ‘Eva Hennessey’s not likely to be there.’

  Griff stiffened, and was immediately annoyed that the mere mention of Eva could still raise a reaction. It really shouldn’t matter if he ran into a girl he’d known a million years ago.

  The reaction didn’t make sense. Sure, Eva had been his first girlfriend, but he’d eventually got over the shock of her leaving town so abruptly. It wasn’t as if he’d been planning to marry her straight out of high school and settle down in the Bay. He’d had big plans for his future.

  He’d carried on with his life, with university and his subsequent career. And in the past two decades he’d had more than his fair share of relationships with glamorous, beautiful, passionate women.

  He supposed it didn’t really make sense that he wanted to avoid Eva, but he’d moved on, so why ask for trouble?

  ‘Of course she won’t be there,’ he said, pl
eased that he managed to sound offhand. He added another nonchalant shrug for good measure, but he bit back the other comment that had sprung to mind—that Eva Hennessey was far too busy and world-famous to come back for such a piddling, unimportant event.

  ‘Well, Barney’s already put his name down, haven’t you, Barnes?’ Tim called to their mate, who was retrieving an inflatable ball that had bounced out of the pool.

  Barney sent them a thumbs up.

  ‘And I reckon it’d be a blast for the three of us to go back to the Bay,’ Tim persisted. ‘You know, just the Three Amigos, without the women and billy-lids. Like the good old days.’

  Griff was about to respond in the negative, but Tim stopped him with a raised hand.

  ‘Just think about it, Griff. We could stay at a pub on the beachfront, catch a few waves, even do a little snorkelling and diving on the reef.’

  Well, yeah.

  Griff couldn’t deny the great times he and these mates had enjoyed as teenagers, lapping up the free and easy outdoor lifestyle of a bayside country town.

  Griff’s family had moved back to the city as soon as he’d finished school, and he could barely remember the last time he’d donned goggles and flippers to dive into the secret underwater world of coral and fish.

  But there’d been a time when he’d lived and breathed diving...and surfing. Throughout his teenage years, he’d spent a part of every single day at the beach, in the sea. And every night, in bed, he’d listened to the sound of the surf pounding on the sand. The rhythm of the sea had been as familiar and essential to him as the beating of his heart.

  By contrast, these days, the only water he saw was when he was rowing on the Brisbane River, which was usually flat and brown and still.

  But the sea was different. And the Bay was special.

  More to the point, these two mates were important to Griff. Amanda wasn’t especially fond of them, but she did have a tendency to be slightly snooty. She preferred mixing with Griff’s barrister colleagues and their partners, whereas Griff knew that these guys kept him grounded. Tim worked in a bank and Barney was an electrician and, between them, they provided a good balance to the eminent judges and silks who filled Griff’s working life.