Scandalous Bride. Diana Hamilton

      CHAPTER ONE

      ‘OLIVIA MONROE killed her first husband then jumped into bed with her boss, the richest married rat in town!’

      The male voice, thick with alcohol, penetrated the smoochy dance music and the nightclub chatter. Olivia stiffened in Nathan’s arms, flinching as she heard a woman shriek, ‘You can’t be serious, Hughie!’

      ‘Ask anyone—she’s been sleeping with my big brother for years and it’s not going to stop just because she’s got herself a solid gold meal-ticket for life, all legally tied up with wedding lines!’

      ‘The Olivia who married that scrummy, rich as a plum-cake Nathan Monroe? Their wedding made the front pages a couple of months ago—good grief! Does he know he’s been taken for a sucker?’ The woman was obviously loving every minute of it and Olivia felt sick, her feet rooting themselves to the minute dance-floor. The elegant, glittering surroundings suddenly felt tawdry.

      Had Nathan heard?

      Nathan had.

      His big, hard body went still. He took an incisive step back, his arms falling to his sides as his hands made dangerous fists. She looked up into his harsh and beautiful face and shuddered, her skin crawling with fire and then ice.

      Sometimes the inescapable intensity of what she felt for him frightened her. The inadmissible knowledge that she couldn’t live without him, the way her blood turned to a burning torrent when he walked into a room, the reckless way she’d given every last scrap of her future happiness into his keeping when, years ago, she’d solemnly and sensibly vowed she would never fall in love again.

      And now the anger frightened her. Savage, black anger blazing in those steel-grey eyes, pulling the tanned flesh tight against his strong and elegant bones.

      Instinctively, her eyes sifted through the swaying bodies, homing in on Hugh Caldwell. Running to fat, he looked older than his thirty-four years. For a split second her eyes clashed with his, dark brown and malicious, before he led his dance partner off the floor with a smirk on his dissolute face.

      Olivia held her breath, shocked by the vile gossip Hugh was spreading. The sound of the music had faded, the noise people made when they were enjoying themselves ebbing out of her consciousness, and all she could hear was the thunderous beat of her heart and Nathan’s ice-cold threat, ‘I’ll kill the son of a bitch!’

      ‘Don’t.’ Her hand on the black sleeve of his dinner jacket stayed him. He swung round to face her, his shoulders wide and hard, intimidating. She took a deep breath. One of them had to remain cool and collected. She felt anything but. However, she’d spent long, lonely years perfecting her act.

      ‘Make a scene and you’ll give credence to his foul lies,’ she advised quickly. ‘Think about it.’

      Of all the exclusive nightclubs in London why had Hugh Caldwell chosen this one? He’d been born with a chip on his shoulder and for the past thirty-four years it had been growing heavier by the day. She had always suspected he could be dangerous but hadn’t imagined he could stoop so low. The cold premonition of disaster feathered over her skin, making her shiver, but—

      ‘Ignore him, or sue. Or both,’ she said calmly, her mind frantically willing him to agree. He looked capable of tearing Hugh Caldwell limb from limb and taking savage pleasure from every moment.

      She hated violence in any form. For one terrible day, the last day of her first husband’s life, she had known what physical violence really was. She had known that it had fatally poisoned their already weakened relationship and had opened her eyes to the fact that violence of another form, emotional violence, had been eroding their marriage almost from day one. ‘Don’t put yourself down on his level.’

      That, mercifully, appeared to have the desired effect. She actually saw the battle to rein in his flaring anger. And saw him win. But then nothing ever defeated him, did it? She fought her own impulse to sag with relief, simply dipping her head coolly as he commanded, tight-lipped, ‘We’re leaving.’

      And she walked out at his side, five feet three inches of dignity, her glossy black hair whispering against the tanned skin of her back where the sweeping cut of the elegant white dress left it bare. Her amethyst eyes were staring straight ahead and her sultry mouth was caught tight against her teeth in case the tremor of her lips gave her away.

      But distressed tremors plagued her on the taxi ride back to the Chelsea mews cottage and she couldn’t relax enough to make them stop.

      ‘It’s cute,’ he’d said when he’d snapped the cottage up just days before their wedding. ‘A London base for a time. I haven’t had a permanent home in England for years. A cute and private place to make memories before we move on. Like it, sweetheart?’

      She’d loved it on sight. Loved the dolls’ house proportions, the cosy, secluded atmosphere, projecting that love into the wonderful memories they’d make together, not heeding the warnings about moving on, not even hearing them properly.

      But now he wasn’t saying a thing. The distance between them was far more than a few feet of upholstery. The tension between them was making the small space a void.

      He was a proud man with a streak of self-assurance a whole mile wide. A hard man. A brilliant wheeler-dealer, a key stock-market player, his mind had the cutting edge of a diamond.

      No one took him for a ride, called him a sucker. That