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For those with a little more time, here's the blurb -
What do you when, three weeks from your wedding, a
blackmailing aunt leaves you holding the baby?
Faith Bridges should be wedding dress shopping with her
bridesmaids, finalising the menu for the reception, house hunting. Instead
she's up close and personal with Harry March - the last man on earth she’d
trust with her heart - a fractious baby and a four year old diva.
She and Julian may not have had the most conventional of courtships but he’s wise, responsible and utterly dependable. The exact opposite of Harry, who thinks that all he has to do to get her to stay and take care of his sister's children is to tease her, charm her and, when that doesn’t work, make love to her.
It won't work; Faith knows that love is like meringue — all sugar and air, and about as
substantial. And she has made a promise that she isn’t about to break. So why
does she find it so hard to walk away?
And here's an excerpt
And here's an excerpt
‘BLACKMAIL,’ Faith muttered for perhaps the tenth time that day. Her aunt was an expert in the technique. One of these days she’d call her bluff — except of course that she wasn’t bluffing. She never bluffed. But whatever crisis had befallen Harry March, Faith vowed that it wouldn’t occupy one minute more than twenty-four hours of her precious time. ‘Not one second longer,’ she informed the signpost she had slowed to consult — Wickham Ash being too small to appear on her road map. A timely reminder not to weaken.
Despite the urgency of the call for help, there was no enthusiastic rush to greet her when she drew up in front of Wickham Hall. A small stone manor house it seemed to almost hang from its wooded hillside perch above the river, dominating the well-kept estate that stretched for acres in all directions. It was timeless, peaceful and quite beautiful but Faith, long past the age when she could be impressed by this evidence of wealth, or the man who possessed it, tugged at an old-fashioned wrought-iron bell pull.
For a moment nothing happened then she heard a faint far off jangle in some distant servants’ hall. All impressively picturesque and charming no doubt, like the house, like the stunning bird’s-eye view over the woods to the river glinting silver in the evening light below her. Not terribly efficient, but pretty much what she would have expected from a man whose response to an emergency was to send for his old nanny.
The door was eventually opened by a middle aged man of military bearing. ‘Yes, miss?’ The accent was unexpectedly Scottish, the tone dour, the expression lugubrious rather than a grateful welcome for someone who had dropped everything to ride to the rescue, no matter how unwillingly.
‘Mac? Is it her? Don’t keep her waiting on the doorstep, man, bring her in.’ The irritable tones of a disembodied voice raised impatiently above the more insistent cry of a baby, that grew louder as it came nearer, cut off her attempt to introduce herself. A baby?
The man who had opened the door regarded her doubtfully for a moment before turning away. ‘It’s not Miss Bridges, sir, it’s a young female.’ Young was clearly not a recommendation.
‘I’m Faith—’ she began, but as Harry March appeared in the open doorway of a room leading from the hall, the comfortable shabbiness of which could only have been accumulated through generations of hard use, Faith’s attempt to explain her presence died on her lips.
The man whose summons she had raced to answer was, according to her aunt, irresistible but Faith had never doubted her ability to resist the smooth, boyish good looks and too-
obvious charm that oozed from the photograph in the silver frame that had pride of place on her aunt’s sofa table.
Foolishly, she had expected him to look just the same as a ten-year-old photograph. Ten years was not long and men, after all, changed less than women in the decade between their early twenties and thirties but time, it seemed, had dealt harshly with Harry March.
He still made a singularly striking figure; he was tall — far taller than she had imagined from his picture, probably because he was so beautifully proportioned, with the broad shoulders of an athlete and a strongly muscled neck to support the kind of head that more usually adorned the warrior statues of ancient Greece.
Pain, though, had chiselled away the boyish good looks, forging the smoothly handsome features into something harder, stronger, revealing a strength of character she would never have imagined from the softer features in that smiling portrait taken in his youth.
The confident curve of his smile had hardened to a straight line, the slight droop of his lower lip retaining only a suspicion of the reckless sensuality that dared girls to resist his charm. His nose, long and once arrow-straight now showed battle fatigue and his chin, deeply cleft, boasted such stubbornness that she almost flinched. But dominating the whole was a scar, livid against the tanned outdoor complexion, a scar that scythed from the centre of his forehead to his temple. It was no longer a pretty face, she thought, remembering her own instinctive recoil from such blatant and careless charm, but one that had been lived in and lived in hard. And the effect on Faith was far more devastating than the unmarked beauty that it had replaced.
Despite the urgency of the call for help, there was no enthusiastic rush to greet her when she drew up in front of Wickham Hall. A small stone manor house it seemed to almost hang from its wooded hillside perch above the river, dominating the well-kept estate that stretched for acres in all directions. It was timeless, peaceful and quite beautiful but Faith, long past the age when she could be impressed by this evidence of wealth, or the man who possessed it, tugged at an old-fashioned wrought-iron bell pull.
For a moment nothing happened then she heard a faint far off jangle in some distant servants’ hall. All impressively picturesque and charming no doubt, like the house, like the stunning bird’s-eye view over the woods to the river glinting silver in the evening light below her. Not terribly efficient, but pretty much what she would have expected from a man whose response to an emergency was to send for his old nanny.
The door was eventually opened by a middle aged man of military bearing. ‘Yes, miss?’ The accent was unexpectedly Scottish, the tone dour, the expression lugubrious rather than a grateful welcome for someone who had dropped everything to ride to the rescue, no matter how unwillingly.
‘Mac? Is it her? Don’t keep her waiting on the doorstep, man, bring her in.’ The irritable tones of a disembodied voice raised impatiently above the more insistent cry of a baby, that grew louder as it came nearer, cut off her attempt to introduce herself. A baby?
The man who had opened the door regarded her doubtfully for a moment before turning away. ‘It’s not Miss Bridges, sir, it’s a young female.’ Young was clearly not a recommendation.
‘I’m Faith—’ she began, but as Harry March appeared in the open doorway of a room leading from the hall, the comfortable shabbiness of which could only have been accumulated through generations of hard use, Faith’s attempt to explain her presence died on her lips.
The man whose summons she had raced to answer was, according to her aunt, irresistible but Faith had never doubted her ability to resist the smooth, boyish good looks and too-
obvious charm that oozed from the photograph in the silver frame that had pride of place on her aunt’s sofa table.
Foolishly, she had expected him to look just the same as a ten-year-old photograph. Ten years was not long and men, after all, changed less than women in the decade between their early twenties and thirties but time, it seemed, had dealt harshly with Harry March.
He still made a singularly striking figure; he was tall — far taller than she had imagined from his picture, probably because he was so beautifully proportioned, with the broad shoulders of an athlete and a strongly muscled neck to support the kind of head that more usually adorned the warrior statues of ancient Greece.
Pain, though, had chiselled away the boyish good looks, forging the smoothly handsome features into something harder, stronger, revealing a strength of character she would never have imagined from the softer features in that smiling portrait taken in his youth.
The confident curve of his smile had hardened to a straight line, the slight droop of his lower lip retaining only a suspicion of the reckless sensuality that dared girls to resist his charm. His nose, long and once arrow-straight now showed battle fatigue and his chin, deeply cleft, boasted such stubbornness that she almost flinched. But dominating the whole was a scar, livid against the tanned outdoor complexion, a scar that scythed from the centre of his forehead to his temple. It was no longer a pretty face, she thought, remembering her own instinctive recoil from such blatant and careless charm, but one that had been lived in and lived in hard. And the effect on Faith was far more devastating than the unmarked beauty that it had replaced.
