The Moretti Marriage

  “What are you really doing here, Nico?”

  “Your mother invited me to attend your wedding.”

  “I don’t believe you!” Chloe said. “Why would she do such a thing?”

  “Because ours was the most civilized divorce in the world, so where is the harm in wishing you and this new man well and showing him he has nothing to fear from me?” Nico replied.

  “He already knows that.”

  “Then my being here won’t disturb him, will it?”

  “Not a bit!”

  “And what about you, Chloe? Will knowing I’m close by make you less sure of yourself and the plans you’ve made?”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “Then there’s no problem.”

  “You are not coming to my wedding, and that’s final! I’ll see you in hell first!”

  “Darling,” he said lazily, “I’ve already spent enough time there.”

  Legally wed,

  But he’s never said

  “I love you.”

  They’re

  The series where marriages are made in haste…and love comes later….

  Look out for more WEDLOCKED! wedding stories available only from Harlequin Presents®

  Blackmailed into Marriage

  by Lucy Monroe

  #2484

  Catherine Spencer

  THE MORETTI MARRIAGE

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Friday, August 21

  SUNLIGHT bounced off the swimming pool and patterned the bedroom ceiling with shifting reflections of the water. Another brilliant day in an endless summer that had left the grass scorched yellow except here, in her mother’s garden, where in-ground sprinklers worked under cover of night to preserve the velvet-smooth emerald lawns.

  It was after nine o’clock, a good two hours later than she usually awoke. But that tended to happen when a person had tossed restlessly throughout most of the night, unable to sleep. Now, lying flat on her back, with only a sheet to cover her, Chloe Matheson mentally reviewed the day ahead. The morning spent at the office, taking care of business, and a quick visit with Baron. Lunch with Monica, her best friend and matron of honor, followed by final dress fittings for both of them. One last meeting with the caterer, and a late afternoon consultation with her hair stylist. Then, as a grand finale, the cocktail party here at the house, to meet the groom’s parents, newly arrived from Ottawa.

  How had it happened that the small, intimate ceremony she and Baron had envisaged had turned into the social event of the season? How had a select guest list of twenty blossomed into something closer to a hundred and twenty?

  They should have eloped, except that was something only the very young and impetuous did. She and Baron were too sensible, too mature, to act like Romeo and Juliet….

  No! A door in her mind clanged firmly shut. Not like Romeo and Juliet. Chloe wanted no part of anything to do with them.

  On the terrace below, her mother, Jacqueline, and grandmother, Charlotte, were taking breakfast. The low buzz of their conversation and the faint chink of china drifted through the open window, mingled with the aroma of coffee. Although she couldn’t discern their actual words, Chloe knew they’d be discussing the wedding. It was all anyone talked about these days.

  “You’re making too much fuss about this,” she’d objected, when the event had started to gather the speed of a runaway train. “It’s not as if it’s a first marriage for either Baron or me.”

  “If you care enough for one another to want to make it legal, then it’s worth getting excited about,” her mother had overruled. “And no daughter of mine is going to settle for some tacky little hole-and-corner wedding when I can afford to give her the best.”

  It hadn’t seemed worth fighting about, back in April when Baron had proposed. Now though, Chloe wished she’d stood firm. But with the invitations sent out six weeks ago, all spare bedrooms in the house prepared for out-of-town guests, and every room at the nearby Trillium Inn reserved for the overflow, it was too late to apply the brakes.

  Tucking a pillow behind her head, she glanced down at the silhouette of her body under the sheet. Her hip bones projected like clothespins anchored to her body by the concave dip of her abdomen. Her breasts lay so flat, they were barely discernible.

  “Poached egg boobs are what we’ve got—the legacy of having nursed our babies,” Monica had laughed, the day they’d gone shopping for wedding outfits. Then, realizing she’d stepped on tender ground, she’d sobered and said, “Sorry, Chloe, I forgot. I didn’t mean to be insensitive.”

  Chloe, though, never forgot, and turning now to look at the silver-framed photograph on the nightstand, she met the solemn, dark-eyed gaze of her son, captured forever on film at two months. “Hey, angel,” she whispered, her throat thick and aching.

  Downstairs, the phone rang. With a tremendous effort, Chloe pulled herself back from the abyss of grief and regret forever waiting to swallow her up. Kissing her fingertip, she pressed it to her son’s tiny mouth, curved in the beginnings of a gummy smile, then flung aside the sheet and headed for the shower.

  Neither Jacqueline nor Charlotte heard her step out to the terrace, some twenty minutes later. They were too busy with their heads together, cooking up something so furtive that when Chloe said, calmly enough, “Good morning!” they sprang apart as if they’d been caught shoplifting.

  “Darling!” her mother exclaimed, almost knocking over her coffee cup. “You’re up! How…lovely!”

  “I don’t know what’s so lovely about it, Mother,” she replied, observing both women mistrustfully. “It’s something we all do, every morning.”

  “But you look so rested,” her grandmother chirped, which was an outright lie because Chloe knew very well that no amount of concealer had been able to disguise the smudged shadows under her eyes.

  They were doing their very best to appear guileless, but something about their expressions—“smug” was the word that sprang to Chloe’s mind—made a mockery of their pathetic attempts to behave as if this were just another morning in the long week leading up to the wedding.

  “All right,” she said, plunking herself down at the breakfast table. “Out with it. What’s going on?”

  They exchanged a shifty glance, then hurriedly broke eye contact. “Well,” her mother practically twittered, “you have a dress fitting this afternoon, a meeting with the caterer—”

  “I’m perfectly well aware of what’s on my calendar,” Chloe informed her testily. “It’s your agenda that worries me.”

  Her grandmother bathed her in a sunny smile. “Have you forgotten? We’re entertaining Baron’s parents tonight, and we want everything to be quite…perfect.” She spooned fresh blueberries into a small crystal bowl and passed it to Chloe. “After all, you never get a second chance to make a good first impression.”

  “Exactly.” Her mother poured her a cup of coffee. “Don’t look so suspicious, darling. What do you think is going on?”

  “That you’re both stonewalling me.” Ignoring the blueberries, Chloe added a little cream to her coffee and stirred. “Who was that on the phone earlier?”

  “Nobody,” Jacqueline said, just a fraction of a second before Charlotte chipped in with, “The florist.”

  Chloe eyed them severely. “Would you like me to leave you alone for a few minutes, so that the pair of you can get your stories straigh
t?”

  “Oh, stop being such a lawyer!” her mother said, in that pooh-pooh voice Chloe well knew was designed to throw her off track. “We haven’t committed any crimes that we’re aware of. Eat your blueberries. I read somewhere that they’re very good for you.”

  But her grandmother’s next remark left Chloe feeling too sick to the stomach for her to eat so much as a mouthful. “Just remember, precious, that things don’t always turn out the way you expect them to. Life sometimes throws you a curve.”

  “You think I don’t know that, Gran?” she said quietly. “You think I didn’t learn that lesson in the most cruel way possible?”

  “Of course you did, my sweetheart, and it’s not my intention to open up old wounds. All I’m trying to say is that, no matter what might come about, your happiness, your…choices…are the most important things in the world to us. We only ever want the very best for you.”

  Choices? That was an odd word, surely, especially at a time like this? “Then you must be thrilled that I chose Baron, because he’s the best thing that’s happened to me in a very long time.”

  “If you say so, Chloe.”

  “I do, Gran. So why, I wonder, don’t you believe me?”

  “Perhaps,” her mother cut in, “because you don’t seem able to whip up any great enthusiasm for this wedding. To put it bluntly, Chloe, no one would believe you’re the bride, the way you’re distancing yourself from it all. Why, when you married Nico—!”

  “I was twenty-two, and foolishly idealistic.”

  “You were so eager to become Signora Nico Moretti that you practically galloped down the aisle to meet him at the altar.” Jacqueline closed her eyes and let out a sentimental sigh. “I remember your veil flying out behind you like a parachute, and the crinoline on your dress swinging like a pendulum. Your joy was so infectious, everyone in the church was smiling by the time you reached his side. They all commented on how radiant you were.”

  “Nerves will do that to a person.”

  “You were deeply in love—and so was Nico.”

  “Not quite deeply enough, as it turned out. Our marriage didn’t last.”

  “It could have,” Charlotte said. “It should have.”

  Annoyed, Chloe pushed aside the blueberries. “Is there a reason you’re both raking up the past like this? Is it, by chance, your way of telling me you think I’m making a mistake in marrying Baron?”

  “Do you think you are?” Jacqueline asked.

  “No!” she said, a shade too emphatically. “And if you two do, you’ve left it a bit late in the day to mention it.” Beset by her own niggling uncertainty, she glared at the women she loved most in the world. “You’re the ones, after all, who insisted on turning a small, quiet wedding into a three-ring circus!”

  Jacqueline’s face almost crumpled, but at the last minute she regained control of herself. “Because we wanted to show you how much we love you, Chloe. We want so badly for you to move forward with your life and find real happiness again.”

  “I know,” Chloe murmured, ashamed. It wasn’t their fault she couldn’t let go of the past.

  “We hoped marrying Baron would be the key, but you seem so…indifferent, somehow—as if marrying him is just another case to deal with. You weren’t even going to buy a proper wedding dress until we bullied you into it. As for the gifts people are sending, why, you haven’t bothered to open half of them!”

  “Because I’m preoccupied with my workload at the moment,” she hedged. “Taking all next week off is bad enough, but tack on the month we’ll be in the Bahamas after that, and it’s asking a lot to expect others in the firm to cover both for me and Baron. As for buying a wedding dress, well, it seemed a bit over the top for the second time around, especially given the closet full of clothes I already own.”

  “Even a quiet second wedding deserves some fanfare,” her grandmother observed. “It is a special day, after all.”

  “You’re right, of course.” Tired of the subject, she directed her next question at Jacqueline. “How many people are we expecting tonight, Mother?”

  “About a dozen, only—just family, those in the wedding party, and a few friends. We didn’t want to swamp the Prescotts with too many new faces all at once. What time are they flying in from down east?”

  “Eleven-twenty, I believe. Baron’s going to pick them up and take them to lunch, then leave them to settle in at their hotel and catch an afternoon nap before the party.” She pushed back her chair. “Which reminds me, I’d better get going. I promised him we’d sneak away for coffee before he heads out to the airport. We’ve both been so busy this last few days, we’ve only seen one another in passing, and it doesn’t look as if the coming week’s going to be much better.”

  “You’ll have the rest of your lives together after next Saturday,” Jacqueline pointed out. “In the meantime, with all the social engagements we’ve got planned, you’ll be seeing each other pretty much every day, even though you won’t be going in to the office.”

  This was true, but the fact was, Chloe needed some private time with her fiancé, away from all the pre-wedding hoopla. She needed his steadying influence to soothe her frazzled nerves; his calm, quiet voice to drown out the diabolical whispers of doubt which persisted in creeping up on her. She needed to feel his arms around her, to bask in the warmth of his slow, sweet smile.

  That’s all it would take for her doubts to evaporate, and bring home the realization of how lucky she was to have found him. How could it be otherwise when he was everything a woman could want in a husband—patient, kind and loyal? And so in tune with her own wishes that it was little short of miraculous.

  “Before you give me your answer,” he’d cautioned, the night he’d proposed, “I have to reiterate what I’ve mentioned before. I really do not want children, or a house in the suburbs, with a big garden and neighbors who like to get together around the barbecue every Friday evening. I’ll be forty in November, and I don’t see myself spending weekends mowing lawns or coaching soccer for small boys. You and I are dedicated professionals, Chloe, with both of us putting in long hours Monday through Friday. When we’re not working, I want us to be free to concentrate on each other, to be able to lock the front door and take off, without the attendant stress of babies who’ll eventually grow up to be…” He’d shuddered. “…teenagers. Am I asking for too much?”

  “Absolutely not!” she’d told him, closing the door on memories of how it had been the last time a man had proposed to her. “We’re exactly in tune on the kind of life we want. So yes, I’ll marry you, and be proud to call myself Mrs. Baron Prescott—socially, at least.”

  “Of course.” He’d stroked the hair back from her face and regarded her fondly. “I’d never ask you to give up everything you’ve worked so hard to achieve. It goes without saying that, professionally, you’ll always be Ms. Chloe Matheson, attorney-at-law.”

  And that, she’d thought at the time, was more than enough to make her happy. Because Baron was right. The steady stream of desperate women coming to her for help in escaping an unbearable marriage, haunted her. As for the innocent children caught up in such messes, they broke her heart. And Baron, dealing mostly with wills and estates, witnessed sufficient family in-fighting to persuade him that nothing brought out the ugliness in siblings more than the division of a parent’s worldly goods. Cocooning their lives around just the two of them made perfect sense.

  Only now, with her second wedding day just little more than a week away, did it occur to her that accepting his terms so readily might have had a lot less to do with love than it had with safety—from hurt, disillusionment, loneliness…and always, always, from grief.

  She might have wished for a more scaled-down wedding, but Chloe had to admit that, if a grander affair was in the scheme of things, no one could beat her mother at doing it in style. As a prelude of even greater things to come, the cocktail party was a triumph of understated elegance.

  Of course, it didn’t hurt any that the balm
y evening meant the French doors could stand open, allowing guests to drift from the drawing room to the patio, to admire the sunset gilding the Strait and etching the distant islands in flaming gold. Add an endless supply of the very finest caviar, accompanied by enough excellent champagne to float a battleship, and by the time daylight dwindled to dusk, it was small wonder most people had loosened up a little.

  But despite the surface conviviality, Chloe found the party a strain. Baron’s parents moved in an elite social circle. His late grandfather had been a member of parliament, his father was a renowned archaeologist, and his mother the retired headmistress of a prestigious private school for girls. Although pleasant enough, there was no hiding the fact that Mrs. Prescott was sizing up not just Chloe, but Jacqueline and Charlotte, as well as the house, to determine if the bride’s upbringing had equipped her sufficiently well that she’d fit in as a Prescott wife and daughter-in-law.

  “So how did you find the Prescotts?” Jacqueline inquired, closing the front door as the last car drove away.

  “Not all warm and fuzzy, if that’s what you’re asking,” Chloe said bluntly. “Frankly, I’m glad they live at the other end of the country. From the way Baron’s mother quizzed me about the fact that I’d been married before, I got the impression she considered me soiled goods.”

  “I noticed that, too,” her grandmother remarked. “She was really rather snooty at first, although she did warm up to us a little, toward the end.”

  “It was the Waterford chandelier that did it.” Jacqueline choked back a laugh. “Myrna Prescott almost swallowed her teeth when she saw it. I think both she and her husband went away quite favorably impressed with our standard of living.”