A Wedding Worth Waiting For

“I can’t—not until I’m married!” Letter to Reader Title Page CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT Copyright

“I can’t—not until I’m married!”

Total and utter silence met her remark—and Karrie wanted to die.

“Not until you’re married,” Farne stated, not so much as a question, but more as though he was letting that message sink in.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized again, feeling dreadful. “it’s important to me.”

“Important?” He seemed to be having trouble taking it in. Then he cleared his throat. “Er—how important?” he asked slowly.

“Essential. I...” Her voice tailed off—and silence followed.

Astonishingly—and very nearly causing her to go into heart failure—she distinctly heard him state quietly, “In that case, Karrie, we’d better get married.”

True love is worth waiting for...

Dear Reader,

Welcome to our brand-new miniseries WHITE WEDDINGS. Everyone loves a wedding, with all the excitement of the big day: bedecked bridesmaids, festive flowers, a little champagne and all the emotions of the happy couple exchanging vows....

Some of your favorite Harlequin Romance^® authors will be bringing you all this and more in a special selection of stories. You’ll meet blushing brides and gorgeous grooms, all with one thing in common: for better or worse, they are determined the bride should wear white on her wedding day...which means keeping passions in check!

Happy Reading!

The Editors

A Wedding Worth Waiting For
Jessica Steele

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

THAT Tuesday started just like any other. Karrie was showered dressed and ready for work. She had debated whether or not to tie her blonde, gold-streaked shoulder-length hair back in some kind of knot, but had decided against it, and had brushed it into its normal straight, but just curving under at the ends style. Just because Darren Jackson had yesterday warmly remarked ‘I’d love to walk barefoot through your delicately pale, ripening corn-coloured tresses’ there was no need to get paranoid.

‘Poetical—but I’m still not going out with you’ she’d replied with a laugh. Darren, who worked in the same office, had been trying to date her ever since she’d started work at Irving and Small three weeks ago.

Karrie checked her appearance in her full-length bedroom mirror and felt she looked neat and ready for work in her smart burnt orange two-piece. She cast a glance at her—what were they?—‘delicately pale ripening corn-coloured tresses’, and, with a hint of a smile on her sweetly curving mouth at Darren’s over the top description, she left her room and went downstairs.

Any hint of a smile, however, abruptly departed as she entered the breakfast room. The chill in the air was almost tangible—her parents weren’t speaking. To each other, that was. What else was new? Karrie had grown up in a household where warring glances and icy silences alternating with storming rows were the norm.

‘Good morning!’ she offered generally, brightly, striving hard not to take sides.

Bernard Dalton, her father, ignored her—he still hadn’t forgiven her for leaving his firm and for daring to go and take a job elsewhere. Her mother did not reply to her greeting, but straight away launched into a bitter tirade. ‘Your father was kind enough to telephone me at seven o’clock last night to say he was too busy to make the theatre, as promised!’

‘Oh, dear,’ Karrie murmured sympathetically. ‘Er—perhaps you’ll be able to go—um—another time.’

‘The play finishes this week. Though I suppose I should be grateful that he rang me personally. The last time he got Yvonne to ring.’

Yvonne Redding was Bernard Dalton’s hard-worked secretary. ‘Um...’ Karrie was still striving for something diplomatic with which to reply when her father, with never a moment to spare, finished his breakfast and, without a word, went from the room. Karrie had spotted his briefcase in the hall. It would take him but an instant to collect it on his way out.

‘Furniture. Just part of the furniture, that’s all we are,’ her mother complained in the silence that followed the reverberating sound of the front door being slammed shut after him.

‘Er—Jan was looking well.’ Karrie sought to change the subject. Her cousin Jan was newly out of the hospital after an operation to remove her appendix, and, because Jan’s flat was in an opposite direction from her own home, Karrie had driven straight from work last night to see her. Hence, she had not been around when her father had phoned. She and Jan were the best of friends, and it had been going on for ten when Karrie had eventually returned home. She had thought her parents were at the theatre, but her workaholic father had not been in from work yet and her mother—clearly not at her happiest—had gone to bed early.

Mrs Dalton it seemed, was too embittered that morning by this latest lack of consideration on the part of her husband to be very much interested in her niece’s progress. And Karrie eventually left her home to go to her office reflecting that never, ever was she going to marry a man of the workaholic variety.

The further she drove away from her home, however, the more her more natural sunny humour began to reassert itself. Chance would be a fine thing! Well, there was Travis Watson, of course—he was always asking her to marry him. But he knew that marry him she never would. It was true that she hadn’t reached twenty-two without a few possible candidates moving into her orbit—but she had always moved out of theirs. It was a fact too, though, that since she intended to be two hundred per cent sure—and with her parents’ example before her, why wouldn’t she?—that the man she said yes to was going to have to be extremely special in more ways than one.

She drew up in the car park that belonged to the giant firm of Irving and Small with a hint of a smile back on her lips, glad to be part of the purchase and supply team. With new contracts being secured all the time, it meant her section was often at full stretch, but she enjoyed working there far more than she had ever enjoyed working for her father.

She had previously worked for her father at Dalton Manufacturing for a pittance. And, though money had never been a problem, she had started to resent that he expected her to put in similar hours to himself, something that had caused a great deal of friction at home—her mother loudly complaining that she was losing her daughter to the firm too. Which had led Karrie to suggest to her father that she wouldn’t mind leaving work at six most evenings, only to be told by him to go and find another job elsewhere if she didn’t like it.

So she had, and some stubbornness she hadn’t known she possessed had refused to make her budge and retract her resignation when her father had exploded in fury at her nerve.

‘You’d give up your chance to ultimately have a seat on the board!’ he’d ranted.

Ultimately! She wasn’t falling for that carrot being dangled in front of her. He’d promised her her own department in two years if she joined him from college and learned the business. She’d been there four years and it hadn’t happened yet.

Leaving her car, she headed for Irving and Small’s main building. ‘Karrie!’ She turned—where had Darren Jackson sprung from?

‘Morning, Darren,’ she smiled; she didn’t want to go out with him, but she liked him.

‘I still can’t believe your flaxen hair is natural!’

Flaxen! Yesterday, according to him, it had been ‘delicately pale ripening corn’. Her hair colour was natural, and had never seen a chemical dye, but she had no intention of discussing that with him.

‘Looks like being a nice day,’ she commented pleasantly as they entered the building.

‘Every day since you joined the firm has been nice,’ he replied.

She still wasn’t going out with him. ‘Concentrate on your computer,’ she tossed at him, and as they entered the open-plan office they shared with a dozen or so others she parted from him and went to her own desk.

The work was interesting but not so complicated that it did not leave space for private thought, and in one such moment Karrie fell to thinking of her father, who loved his work more than his home. Countless were the meals that were cooked for him and which, because he didn’t come home, were thrown away. And, thinking back to last night, countless were the times he and her mother had arranged to go out somewhere, only for his secretary to ring and say he would be delayed. Countless were the times Karrie had seen the excited light go from her mother’s eyes.

Kate knew that her mother had at one time adored her father. She probably still did—or he wouldn’t have the power to hurt her. But, while it upset Karrie when she thought of her mother’s hurt and unhappiness, she knew better now than to try to interfere. She had once tried to talk to her father about his neglect of her mother, and, aside from earning his deep displeasure, had done her mother no favours either when her husband had treated her even more badly than before, the end result being that her mother had become ever more bitter.

‘Have you got...?’ Celia, a colleague from across the aisle, interrupted Karrie just as she was mentally writing in indelible ink that, if she knew nothing else, there was no way she was going to have the kind of marriage her parents endured.

Breaking away from what she was doing, she felt no end of pleasure that, having worked in purchase and supply for so short a time, she was immediately able to answer Celia’s in-depth query.

It was around mid-morning, when Karrie had just decided to visit the coffee machine—that Tuesday having been marked down as the same as any other, with nothing in any way noteworthy to change it—when something quite out of the ordinary did happen. She stood up, stepped into the aisle—and bumped into a tall, good-looking man who was making his way to a far end door that led to where the higher executives worked.

Something in the region of her heart actually lurched. She opened her mouth to apologise, but whether or not she did, she couldn’t remember, because as her soft and wide brown eyes met the piercing blue ones of the man in his mid-thirties, so her voice seemed to die on her!

He nodded Had she spoken? Or was that his way of acknowledging her presence? Feeling suddenly the desperate need to get herself together, as he took a side step Karrie turned and went smartly out from her office.

Lucy, a girl who sat immediately behind her, was already at the coffee machine. Which was perhaps just as well, because Karrie had forgotten completely to take any coins from her purse to feed the machine.

‘I’ve enough change!’ Lucy offered, to save her going back. And just then Heather, the young woman who worked behind Celia, came to join them.

‘I’m not stopping!’ she announced to the pair. ‘Farne Maitland’s just arrived to see Mr Lane, I don’t want to miss seeing him when he comes out if this is only a flying visit.’

‘Farne Maitland’s here?’ Lucy asked in hushed tones.

Heather nodded, hurriedly putting coins into the refreshment machine. ‘And Karrie very nearly knocked him over!’

‘You didn’t!’ Lucy exclaimed.

‘Who is he?’ Karrie asked, realising that Heather must have witnessed her bumping into him.

‘You don’t know?’ Lucy cried. But it was Heather who answered her question.

‘He’s on the board of the Adams Corporation, our parent company. He likes to keep his finger on every pulse. Though...’

‘Though he doesn’t visit Irving and Small anywhere near often enough,’ Lucy put in.

‘You’re obviously smitten,’ Karrie teased.

‘So are half the women who work here,’ Lucy agreed. ‘Such a waste—all that male, and no wife to go home to!’

‘You’re going to have to lower your sights, duckie,’ Heather laughed. ‘You know he’s never likely to look at any of us.’

‘A girl can dream!’ Lucy retorted, but didn’t have time to just then. ‘I’d better get back. Jenny isn’t in today.’

‘Somebody’s always away—no wonder we always seem to be short-handed. Thank heaven you’ve joined us, Karrie.’

Karrie smiled. It was nice to be wanted as part of the team. Though because they were busy that day she didn’t linger over her coffee break.

But back at her desk she found she couldn’t help wondering if the man with the piercing blue eyes, Farne Maitland, was still in with Mr Lane, or had he left the building? He was, indisputably, extremely good-looking, and had a certain kind of air about him. He was a bachelor, apparently, and half the women at Irving and Small were smitten with him. But seemingly he didn’t go in for dating any of them. He should be so lucky...

Karrie stopped her thoughts right there. Good heavens, what on earth was she thinking? Abruptly she channelled her thoughts away from the man and concentrated on the work in hand. But the present task she was engaged on was not that taxing to her brain, and she glanced up when a door up ahead opened. Two men came out, as if Mr Lane intended to escort his visitor through the banks of computers and out to his car.

But then Farne put a stop to that by extending his hand to Gordon Lane and making his adieus from there. Karrie, aware that the man from the Adams Corporation would walk by her desk at any moment, suddenly found her computer screen of the most compelling interest.

Indeed she was glued to it, staring at the screen as if rapt as she waited for Farne Maitland to go by. Her desk was about halfway down the long room—she’d be glad when he passed; what on earth was the matter with her?

He was close; she knew he was close. She lost track of what she was supposed to be doing, but tried to make out she was absorbed anyway. From the corner of her eye she saw the grey of his expensive, exquisitely tailored suit. Just concentrate, or pretend to for a few more seconds, then he’d be gone. But he drew level with her desk—and—halted.

Her insides turned to jelly. She stopped what she was doing—it was nonsense anyway—and looked up. Oh, my word, did he have it all! She stared into piercing blue eyes that seemed to be making a thorough scrutiny of her face. Vaguely it occurred to her that he had recognised that she was new, and that perhaps he had paused in passing to make her welcome.

He was still standing there at any rate when, his survey of her over, he looked into her velvety brown eyes. His voice, when she heard it, was the sort that could quite easily liquefy her bones—if she’d let it.

But he was amusing too, and she realised she was feeling at her most light-hearted when he asked solemnly, ‘And whose little girl are you?’

Solemnly she eyed him back. ‘Mr and Mrs Dalton’s,’ she replied prettily, wanting to laugh but managing to hold it in.

She saw his glance go from her merry eyes and down to the ringless fingers of her left hand. Then his eyes were steady on hers again, as, unhesitatingly, he enquired, ‘So tell me, Miss Dalton, are you having dinner with me tonight?’

Karrie had all but forgotten her surroundings, forgotten that she was in a large office with a dozen or more other people. But as Farne waited for her answer, a hush seemed to descend over the office—and she could only be astonished at his supreme confidence that in front of everyone he was asking her out!

She supposed few had turned him down, so she smiled as she replied, ‘Can’t I’m washing my hair!’

She could tell nothing from his expression as to how he had taken her refusal. Then she saw his glance go to her squeaky clean, washed-only-that-morning, shoulder-length gold-streaked luxuriant blonde hair, and suddenly he was laughing. She watched him, fascinated, and then the laugh that had started to bubble away inside her a few seconds earlier would no longer be suppressed. All at once her laughter mingled with his.

And that was all there was to it. A moment or two of shared laughter, then Farne Maitland was extending his right hand. She offered her right. They shook hands, and he went on his way—and she did not forget him.

Apart from anything else, how would she get the chance? No sooner had the double doors at the end of their office closed after him than three chairs wheeled over at speed to her desk.

‘He asked you out!’ Heather exclaimed.

‘And you turned him down!’ Lucy squealed—as if she just could not believe it.

‘We hadn’t been properly introduced,’ Karrie laughed.

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ Celia wanted to know.

‘He—er—was only being pleasant because I’m new here.’ Karrie thought she’d better down play it a little.

‘He’s never asked any of us out!’ Lucy stated.

Darren Jackson walked up to the group. ‘None of you has hair the colour of cream and golden honey!’ he explained.

‘Shut up, Darren!’ Karrie’s three colleagues told him in unison.

The fact that she had turned down a date with Farne Maitland was still being talked about the next day, and Karrie did not like to confess that, in a way, she was sorry that she had said no. According to office gossip, his visits were few and far between. So Lord knew when she might see him again.

Not that he would ask her out a second time. Not after having been turned down in front of an office full of people. Not that her refusal had bothered him. He had laughed. She had liked his laugh. She had joined in.

Would she refuse a second time? She didn’t know. Though since in all probability he had only asked her out on impulse, she felt sure the thought that he might not ask her out a second time was something she should put entirely from her mind.

She wished she could so easily forget him. Thoughts of him, pictures of him—tall, darkish-haired, sophisticated—seemed to spring into her head at the oddest of times. Darren again asked her for a date on Thursday—and she thought of Farne Maitland. He had laughed when she turned him down; Darren didn’t.

She went to visit her cousin again that night. ‘Anything new happening in your life?’ Jan asked. Karrie thought of Farne Maitland—but couldn’t tell her.

‘I’m enjoying my job,’ she smiled.

‘You should have left Uncle Bernard’s firm years ago!’ Jan stated categorically. ‘In fact, you should never have started there—you know that old saying, a cobbler’s children are always the worst shod!’

From that Karrie gathered that her cousin must be meaning something along the lines that the boss’s children always had the worst deal—and were always the worst paid and treated.

‘It wasn’t so bad,’ she commented lightly, but saw that Jan didn’t look anywhere near convinced.

‘Now that you’ve made the break with Dalton Manufacturing, have you thought any more about leaving home?’ Jan asked.

Because her cousin was family, and had first-hand experience from childhood overnight stays of the strife that went on in the Dalton household, Karrie had been able to confide at one particularly bad time that she wouldn’t mind leaving home.

‘I can’t,’ she answered simply, forbearing to mention that her parents still weren’t speaking. ‘It seems—sort of disloyal to my mother, somehow.’

‘Aunt Margery’s too sensitive. You’d have thought she’d have toughened up by now,’ Jan mused, but kindly offered, ‘You know you’re always welcome to come and stay with me if things get too unbearable.’

Karrie thanked her, and later went home. But on Friday she felt sorely inclined to take her cousin up on her offer. The cold war was over. Her parents were speaking again. That was to say they were yelling at each other, rowing. Karrie did not stay downstairs to find out what the problem was this time—experience had shown hostilities could erupt over the merest trifle. She went upstairs to her room and stayed there.

Oh, how she wished it could be different—her parents could still be at it—neither of them prepared to yield an inch—a week from now. Where had it all gone wrong? Well, she knew the answer to that one: at the very beginning.

After one gigantic explosion, when her father had slammed out of the house, her mother, near to hysteria, had instructed a sixteen-year-old Karrie to ‘Never give yourself to any man until you’ve got that wedding ring on your finger!’ Her mother had then calmed down a little to go on and tearfully confide how all her rosy dreams had turned to ashes. She and Bernard Dalton had married after a very brief courtship, when Margery Dickson, as she was then, had discovered she was pregnant. They had been taking precautions, apparently, but she had conceived just the same.

A week after their wedding, however, she had suffered a miscarriage. Bernard Dalton had accused his wife of tricking him into marrying her, and the marriage that had never had time to get on any steady footing had gone steadily downhill from then on.

But Margery Dalton had adored her husband, and had hoped that, when she again found herself pregnant, matters between them would improve. But things had gone from bad to worse when, instead of presenting him with the son he had taken for granted he was entitled to, she had given birth to a daughter. She’d had an extremely difficult time having Karrie—and was unable to have another child.

And Karrie had known from a very early age that she would rather not get married at all than have the kind of relationship her parents had. And from the age of sixteen, when her mother had taken her into her confidence about her father believing he’d been tricked into marriage, she had known that she was never going to give herself to any man before their wedding—regardless of what sort of contraception might be around. No man was going to have the chance of accusing her of trapping him into marriage.

Not that she found any problem with either of her deep-dyed decisions. For one thing, while she was not lacking for men who wanted to take her out, she had never met one she would dream of getting engaged to, much less marrying. And as for sharing her body with any of them—while it was true she had enjoyed skirting on the perimeters of the kissing pitch, she had not felt the least inclination to go to bed with any of them.

Karrie was brought rudely out of her thoughts by the sound of doors slamming downstairs. It sounded as though it was going to be one of those weekends. She wondered, not for the first time, why her parents didn’t just simply divorce and go their separate ways. But again came to the same conclusion she had come to before: the love they had once had for each other must still be a strand more strong than the hate that had grown up between them and weaved its way in between that love.

The phone rang—her parents, deep in battle, probably wouldn’t hear it. Karrie took the call on the phone in her room and discovered some relief from the prospect of a bleak weekend in her friend Travis. Travis was a couple of years older than her, uncomplicated and nice, and was ringing to see if she wanted to meet up.

‘I’m free tomorrow, actually,’ she told him, adding quickly, ‘Providing you aren’t thinking of proposing again.’

‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ he lied, and they both laughed, because they both knew that he was lying.

‘Quail and Pheasant?’ she suggested as a meeting place, knowing Travis seized up in fright in her father’s company. Her home was the smart, detached residence of a successful businessman—that it was more often than not an unhappy home was something Karrie could do little about.

‘I’ll call for you,’ Travis answered bravely, and seemed inclined to stay on the line chatting.

When later Karrie ended the call, however, and went and got ready for bed, it was not Travis Watson who was in her head, but the man she had bumped into last Tuesday, the man who had asked her out and, unoffended at her ‘hair-washing’ put-off, had laughed and shaken her by the hand.

Farne Maitland could afford to laugh, of course. No doubt he had women queuing up to go out with him. Without question, he already had his Saturday evening planned.

Somehow, that notion did not sit well with her. For goodness’ sake, she scoffed. As if she cared in the slightest that sophisticated Farne Maitland had a date tomorrow with some equally sophisticated female. Perish the thought!

It took her a long while to get off to sleep that night But when previously she had known full well that the strife between her parents was the reason for her wake-fulness—nightmares in childhood—she could not in all truthfulness say now that the hostility between her parents was the cause for her sleeplessness that night. Somehow, having conjured up a picture of Farne Maitland out wining and dining some ravishing sophisticate tomorrow, she did not seem able to budge the scene from her head!

Karrie was able to scorn such imaginings when she got up the next morning. Good gracious, as if she gave a button whom he dated that night. So why did she think of him so often? She pushed him out of her head, and continued to do so until just after ten that morning, when the phone rang. Expecting that the call might be for her father, who was out, as was her mother—though not together—she went to answer it—and got the shock of her life. The caller, staggeringly, was none other than the man who had occupied more than enough time in her head!

‘Hello?’ she said.

‘Farne Maitland,’ he announced himself, and, while her heart seemed to jerk straight out of her body, Karrie began to doubt her hearing—had he said ‘Farne Maitland’? How on earth had he got her number? He was going on, confident apparently, from that one word ‘hello’ that he was speaking to the right person, ‘I expect you’ve got a date tonight?’

Her mouth went dry. Was he asking her out? She swallowed. ‘Been stood up?’ she queried lightly.

She just knew he was smiling, fancied she could hear laughter in his voice, when he countered, ‘Would I make you second best, Karrie?’

So, as well as finding out her phone number, he—having supposed she would instantly know who he was—had bothered to find out her first name as well! There was laughter in her voice too—she just could not suppress it. ‘So you want me to break my date for tonight?’ she asked.

‘I’ll call for you at seven,’ he stated. And Karrie was left staring at the telephone in her hand

For ageless seconds she stood staring at the telephone. She couldn’t believe it! She had a date with Farne Maitland that night! Would you believe it? Would you believe not only did he know her first name and her telephone number, but, since he intended to call for her at seven, he had obviously found out where she lived too!

Suddenly a smile, a joyous smile, beamed across her face—hadn’t she feared he would never again ask her out?