Forsaking All Others

Forsaking All Others
SUSANNE MCCARTHY

In name only…"You're the woman who stood at the altar with my cousin not more than a few hours ago, vowing to forsake all others. You didn't manage to keep it up very long, did you?" Leo Ratcliffe had kissed his cousin's new bride and discovered that whatever reasons Maddy had for marrying, love didn't enter into it.Even on her wedding day she had wanted another man - Leo! But he hadn't given Maddy a chance to reveal the truth - that she was marrying his cousin only to forget Leo's own impending marriage… .Now Maddy was widowed and Leo was still single. But instead of the love affair she had dreamed about, all he was offering was a marriage of convenience: sexual satisfaction and heartbreak guaranteed! Another red-hot romance from this popular author!

Table of Contents

Cover Page (#ue22fee5f-a5fb-521f-af9c-3947a1c74bb8)

Excerpt (#uec0b435e-4108-560e-a0d1-5e76e131305b)

About the Author (#u607bedb2-619a-519a-a4d6-61df8a69e6ef)

Title Page (#uca9a60b9-b026-5405-80b6-c34017c7c2cd)

CHAPTER ONE (#ue47a3de6-767e-5459-80e2-021b6cd52411)

CHAPTER TWO (#u6c4ff12f-ec0b-57e2-b2f1-f1ea8eb59ab1)

CHAPTER THREE (#u5acd2318-e2f4-5481-8638-4813124cee8c)

CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

“Admit it. Admit you want me.”

She tipped back her head, desperate to deny his words.

“Admit it,” Leo grated. “You have from the very first time we met.”

“I’m…not going to marry you,” Maddy asserted raggedly. “I’m not going to be used just for your convenience.”

“You won’t have much choice…And, believe me, I shall expect to get my money’s worth,” he added, letting his gaze slide slowly down over her in an insolently detailed appraisal, lingering over every curve. “Every last penny’s worth.”

SUSANNE MCCARTHY grew up in south London, England, but she always wanted to live in the country, and shortly after her marriage she moved to Shropshire with her husband. They live in a house on a hill with lots of dogs and cats. She loves to travel—but she loves to come home. As well as her writing, she still enjoys her career as a teacher in adult education, though she works only part-time now.

Forsaking All Others

Susanne McCarthy

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_12987b52-8370-5400-96bd-ca2591ac80c6)

“THAT was Uncle Leo’s car!” Jamie glanced up from the hand-held computer game that was his latest obsession, his brown eyes alight with excitement as a sleek silver-grey Aston Martin appeared behind them on the quiet road that led from the suburbs of Stockport towards the contrasting wildness of the Peak District and overtook the elderly Escort Estate in one smooth manoeuvre. “Isn’t it super? It does almost two hundred miles an hour.”

“Does it really?” Maddy responded drily. “Pity the speed limit’s only seventy.”

“Oh, Uncle Leo never goes too fast,” her son confided. “Though he can when he’s in Germany—they don’t have a speed limit there, and I bet he really bombs along!”

“I expect he does,” Maddy conceded. “Remind me never to accept an invitation from him.”

Jamie returned her a scathing look. “You wouldn’t be scared would you?” he queried, with all the scorn of a bright eight-year-old for anything that could be thought remotely cissy.

“Yes, I would,” she confessed without hesitation. “I’ve too healthy a regard for my own skin to want to dash around at that sort of speed with only a tin box around me.”

Jamie chuckled with laughter, and turned his attention back to the challenge of the EcoWarrior, the tip of his tongue between his teeth as he zapped out the greenhouse gasses to repair the hole in the ozone layer. It had been a gift from his Uncle Leo, who owned the company that made it.

Well, at least forewarned was forearmed, Maddy reflected wryly. In fact, she ought to have guessed that he would be here—if she had allowed herself to think about him; but the habit of refusing to let herself think about him had become deeply ingrained over the years. She became aware that her hands were clenching the wheel a little too tightly, and made a conscious effort to relax them. She could cope with meeting Leo Ratcliffe again.

The telephone call from her sister-in-law had come in the small hours of the morning. She still wasn’t quite sure how she was supposed to feel. Jeremy, the husband she had walked out on nearly six years ago, was dead—killed in a skiing accident. Off-piste, of course, and in defiance of all the avalanche warnings; sensible caution had never been Jeremy’s strong point—he had always lived as if he believed himself to be indestructible.

Yes, she was sad—sad for the thought of what might have been, if only the spoilt little boy she had married had ever been able to grow up. And sad for a man who at least had known how to enjoy life—albeit with such magnificent selfishness—who suddenly was not there any more. He hadn’t even reached his thirtieth birthday.

She glanced down at the child by her side, his soft brown head bent in deep concentration over his game. So far he seemed to have taken the news quite well. But at just eight years old he was just getting to the age when a father was important to him—and whatever else she might have accused Jeremy of, she couldn’t deny that he had tried to be a good one. Once a month, regular as clockwork, he had arrived to take his son down to Hadley Park for his weekend visit.

Hadley Park…Of course—the beautiful old house, barely beyond the suburbs of Manchester but seemingly a world away, would be Jamie’s now. A wry smile curved her delicate mouth at the thought Jeremy, whose family had owned it for generations, had always seen it as nothing but a millstone, while she had loved it. Unfortunately, after death duties had taken their toll, there wasn’t likely to be much money left to keep it up, she reflected pragmatically. But it would be a shame to have to sell it.

The quiet roads out of Manchester had once been so familiar to her, and now they brought the memories flooding back. She hadn’t been back to Hadley Park since the day she had walked away from the wreckage of her marriage.

It had been a tough decision at the time, to strike out on her own with a small child in tow—she’d had no family to back her, and no marketable skills that she’d known of to earn her living. But her marriage had been going wrong virtually from the beginning, and finding out that her husband was sleeping with her best friend had just been the last straw.

She had often wondered why he hadn’t married Saskia in the first place. He had known her long before he had met herself—in fact it had been Sass who introduced them. And if not then, why not later? He had known that she would have willingly given him a divorce if he had wanted one, without any fuss or scandal. But perhaps he had had enough sense to realise that any relationship needed one partner, at least, to have their feet somewhere near the ground—he and Sass were far too much alike, both wanting to flit through life without any cares or responsibilities.

Looking back now, she could only shake her head in sorry amazement that she had been such a fool as ever to believe that he was cut out for marriage. Her only excuse was that she had been young, and Jeremy had seemed able to offer her something from which she had felt excluded ever since her parents had died—a sense of family, of being part of a world of warmth and brightness and laughter, of belonging…

And it hadn’t all been a disaster, she mused reminiscently. There had been some happy times, especially at the beginning. And she had her son. A small smile curved her soft mouth. No, she couldn’t regret everything about her marriage.

A new set of traffic lights had been installed at the crossroads, and she drew the car to a halt, pulling on the handbrake and tucking her thick wheat-blonde hair back behind one ear in a characteristic gesture. She wore it now in a neat jaw-length bob; it had been one of the first things she had had done when she had decided to leave Jeremy—to have her hair cut. It had amused her since to learn that most women did exactly the same thing when they were asserting their independence for the first time.

And she was independent, she reflected with some pride. The modest little house in Whythenshaw that she had managed to buy last year might not be Hadley Park, but she owed not one penny to the Ratcliffes. It was quite a struggle to keep up with the hefty repayments on the mortgage, but she had known from the start that she wouldn’t be able to rely on any regular maintenance from Jeremy.

Besides, she preferred to manage alone, however difficult it was—Jeremy’s family had never made any secret of their belief that she had married him for his money, and it was good to be proving them wrong. And she had discovered shortly after leaving him that she did have a marketable talent after all—arranging children’s parties.

It had begun when she had put on a very small party for Jamie’s third birthday, to help him make new friends in the playgroup he had just joined. It had been such a success that one of the other mums, who worked full-time, had asked her to do her little girl’s birthday party as well. After that it had snowballed, and then she had been asked to do grown-up parties too—even weddings. She was kept very busy, but she loved every minute of it—who wouldn’t, being paid to help people enjoy themselves?

The traffic lights changed to green and she turned left, driving on carefully through the village. Little had changed here, at least, she mused—the post office had closed, its windows boarded up, and the old-fashioned grocery had adapted itself grudgingly to the supermarket era, but after the cosmopolitan bustle of Manchester it had the air of having been locked in a timewarp for the past three decades.