SOS: Convenient Husband Required / Winning a Groom in 10 Dates: SOS: Convenient Husband Required / Winning a Groom in 10 Dates
SOS: Convenient Husband Required
by
Liz Fielding
Winning a Groom in 10 Dates
by
Cara Colter
Whirlwind dates and shotgun weddings!
But what happens when convenient romance becomes real?
Find out in:
SOS: CONVENIENT HUSBAND REQUIRED
by Liz Fielding
WINNING A GROOM IN 10 DATES
by Cara Colter
Enjoy our new 2-in-1 editions of stories by your favourite authors—for double the romance!
SOS: Convenient Husband Required
by
Dear Reader
Welcome back to Maybridge, a town I created back in 1994. SOS: CONVENIENT HUSBAND REQUIRED is the sixth of my books to be set there (the full list is on my website), and if it existed it would undoubtedly be one of the most romantic places in Britain.
Along with the nearby city of Melchester, the villages of Little Hinton and Upper Haughton, I have created a world of my own from the places I grew up in. There’s the river, the regenerated industrial areas, and the vibrant arts and crafts centre in a huge old coaching inn, with delightful boutiques around the cobbled courtyard.
May Coleridge comes from an old Maybridge family—the ones who lived in ‘the big house’—but she fell in love with Adam Wavell, who comes from the other end of the social scale, when they were both in high school. Now the tables are turned. Adam is rich and powerful while May is about to lose everything. Adam can’t quite escape his past, his family, or the memory of May’s sweet kisses, no matter how hard he tries. Nor can he rid himself of the memory of his humiliation at the hand of May’s grandfather. Or her coldness in the years since then.
He’s sure that a temporary marriage of convenience will give him closure, but being close to May rekindles feelings he’d thought dead. Can a convenient marriage become something more?
Walk through the park with them and watch them fall in love all over again.
Warmest wishes
Liz
LIZ FIELDING was born with itchy feet. She made it to Zambia before her twenty-first birthday and, gathering her own special hero and a couple of children on the way, lived in Botswana, Kenya and Bahrain—with pauses for sightseeing pretty much everywhere in between. She finally came to a full stop in a tiny Welsh village cradled by misty hills, and these days mostly leaves her pen to do the travelling. When she’s not sorting out the lives and loves of her characters she potters in the garden, reads her favourite authors, and spends a lot of time wondering ‘What if…?’ For news of upcoming books—and to sign up for her occasional newsletter—visit Liz’s website at www.lizfielding.com
For my patient, long-suffering husband, who unfailingly keeps his sense of humour through all the crises, the rubbish meals when the deadline escapes me, and makes me believe on those horrible days when the confidence falters. He is my hero.
Chapter One
MAY COLERIDGE stared blankly at the man sitting behind the desk, trying to make sense of what he’d told her.
Her grandfather’s will had been simplicity itself. Apart from the bequests to local charities, everything had been left to his only living relative. Her.
Inheritance tax would mop up pretty much everything but the house itself. She’d always known that would happen, but Coleridge House was the only home she’d ever known and now, because of a clause in some centuries old will, she was about to lose that too.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said, finally admitting defeat. ‘Why didn’t you tell me all this when you read Grandpa’s will?’
‘As you’re no doubt aware,’ Freddie Jennings explained with maddening pomposity —as if she hadn’t known him since he’d been a kid with a runny nose at kindergarten—‘my great-uncle took care of your grandfather’s legal affairs until he retired. He drew up his last will after the death of your mother—’
‘That was nearly thirty years ago,’ she protested.
He shrugged. ‘Believe me, I’m as shocked as you are.’
‘I doubt that. Jennings have been the Coleridge family solicitor for generations,’ she said. ‘How could you not know about this?’
Freddie shifted uncomfortably in his chair. ‘Some of the Coleridge archives were damaged during the floods a few years ago. It was only when I applied for probate that this particular condition of inheritance surfaced.’
May felt as if she’d stepped into quicksand and the ground that she was standing on, everything that had been certain, was disintegrating beneath her feet. She had been so sure that this was a mistake, that Freddie has got his knickers in a twist over nothing, but it wasn’t nothing. It was everything.
Everything she’d known, everything she’d loved was being taken away from her…
‘The last time this clause would have been relevant was when your great-grandfather died in 1944,’ he continued, as if that mattered. ‘Your grandfather would have been told of the condition then.’
‘In 1944 my grandfather was a fourteen-year-old boy who’d just lost his father,’ she snapped, momentarily losing her composure at his attempt to justify their incompetence. ‘And, since he was married by the time he was twenty-three, it wouldn’t have been an issue.’ And by the time it had become one, the stroke that had incapacitated him had left huge holes in his memory and he hadn’t been able to warn her. She swallowed as an aching lump formed in her throat, but she refused to let the tears fall. To weep. ‘People got married so much younger back then,’ she added.
‘Back then, there wasn’t any alternative.’
‘No…’
Her mother had been a beneficiary of the feminist movement, one of that newly liberated generation of women who’d abandoned the shackles of a patriarchal society and chosen her own path. Motherhood without the bother of a man under her feet was the way she’d put it in one of the many articles she’d written on the subject.
As for her, well, she’d had other priorities.
‘You have to admit that it’s outrageous, Freddie. Surely I can challenge it?’
‘I’d have to take Counsel’s opinion and even if you went to court there is a problem.’
‘I think we are both agreed that I have a problem.’
He waited, but she shook her head. Snapping at Freddie wasn’t going to help. ‘Tell me.’
‘There can be no doubt that this restriction on inheritance would have been explained to your grandfather on each of the occasions when he rewrote his will. After his marriage, the birth of your mother, the death of your grandmother. He could have taken steps then to have this restriction removed. He chose to let it stand.’
‘Why? Why would he do that?’
Freddie shrugged. ‘Maybe because it was part of family