parental partnership than anything more personal. After all, he knew several couples who contrived to lead separate lives below the same roof while remaining safely married. They stayed together for the sake of their children or to protect their wealth from the damage of divorce, but nothing more emotional was involved.
In reality, Angel had never seen anything positive about the marital state. The official Valtinos outlook on marriage was that it was generally disastrous and extremely expensive. His own mother’s infidelity had ensured that his parents had parted by the time he was four years old. His grandparents had enjoyed an equally calamitous union while shunning divorce in favour of living in separate wings of the same house. Nor was Angel’s attitude softened by the number of cheating spouses he had met over the years. In his early twenties, Angel had automatically assumed that he would never marry.
But, self-evidently, Merry had a very different take on marriage and parenthood, a much more conventional take than a cynical and distrustful Valtinos. Here she was demanding fidelity upfront as though it was the very bedrock of stability. And maybe it was, Angel conceded dimly, reflecting on the constant turmoil caused by his mother’s rampant promiscuity. He thought equally hard about the little scene of apparent domestic contentment he had glimpsed at his cousin’s house, where a husband rushed into his home to greet a wife and children whom he obviously valued and missed. That glimpse had provided Angel with a disturbing vision of another world that had never been visible to him before, a much more personalised and intimate version of marriage.
And Merry, it seemed, had chosen to view his suggestion of marriage as being personal, very personal, rather than practical as he had envisioned. Beneath his brother’s exasperated gaze, Angel lounged back in his dining chair, his meal untouched, and for the first time in his life smiled with slashing brilliance at the prospect of acquiring a wife and a wedding ring...
‘YOU SHOULD’VE WARNED Angelina,’ Charles Russell censured his son while they waited at the church. ‘Your mother isn’t ready to be a grandmother.’
‘Tough,’ Angel dismissed with sardonic bite. ‘I’m thirty-three, not a teenager. It shouldn’t be that much of a surprise.’
Always more sympathetic to other people’s vulnerabilities, Charles sighed. ‘She can’t help being vain. She is what she is. By not telling her in advance, you’re risking her causing a scene.’
On her way to the church that same morning, Merry was lost in the weird daze that had engulfed her from the moment she had agreed by text to marry Angel. She was stunned by what she had done in the hold of more wine and jealousy than sense but, in the two weeks that had passed, any urge to renege on the deal Angel had named it had slowly faded away. She wasn’t willing to walk away from Angel Valtinos and face a court battle for custody of her daughter. She was also fully aware that he had blackmailed her into marriage and was quite unsurprised by his ruthlessness, having seen how he operated on the business front.
Angel would undoubtedly hurt her but when push came to shove she had decided that she would infinitely rather have him as a husband than not have him at all. He would be hers with a ring on his finger and she would have to settle for that level of commitment, was certainly not building any little fantasies in which Angel, the unfeeling, would start doing feelings. She was trying to be realistic, trying to be practical about their prospects and she would have been happier on her wedding day had she not somehow contrived to have a massively upsetting row with Sybil about her plans.
Quite how that dreadful schism had opened, Merry had no very clear idea. Her aunt had been understandably shocked and astonished when Merry had phoned her in Australia to announce that she was getting married. Sybil had urged her to wait until she got home and could discuss that major step with her. But Merry, fearful of losing her nerve to marry a man who did not love her, had refused to wait and Sybil had taken that refusal to wait for her counsel badly. The more Sybil had criticised Angel and his reputation as a womaniser, the stiffer and more stubborn Merry had become. She was very well acquainted with Angel’s flaws but had not enjoyed having them rammed down her throat in very blunt words by her protective aunt. It was all very well, she had realised, for her to criticise Angel, but inexplicably something else entirely for anyone else to do it.
And throughout the past tumultuous and busy two weeks, Angel had been terrific in trying to organise everything to ensure that Merry could cope with the gigantic life change he was inflicting on her. Unfortunately, it was also true that between their various commitments they had barely seen each other. Handing Tiger over to the new owner Sybil had approved had been upsetting because she had become very fond of the little dog and only hoped that his quirks would not irritate in his new home.
Angel had had so much business to take care of while Merry had been engaged in closing down her own business and packing. Even so, Angel had managed to meet with her twice in London to see Elyssa and in his unfamiliar restraint she had recognised the same desire not to rock the boat that beat like an unnerving storm warning through her every fibre. He had been very detached but playful and surprisingly hands-on with Elyssa. It was clear to her that Angel didn’t want to risk doing anything that could potentially disrupt their marital plans and deprive him of shared custody of their daughter.
Of course it would take time for Angel to adapt to the idea of marriage and a family of his own and Merry appreciated that reality. He wasn’t going to be perfect from the word go, but the imperfect that warned her that he was trying hard was enough to satisfy her...admittedly somewhat low...expectations. She couldn’t set the bar too high for him at the start, she told herself urgently. She had to compromise and concentrate on what was truly important.
And what could be more important than Elyssa and seizing the opportunity to provide her daughter with a father? Merry knew what it was like to live with a yawning space in her paternal background. She had never known her father and, unpleasant though it was to acknowledge, her father hadn’t cared enough to seek her out to get to know her. But Angel was making that effort, right down to having interviewed nannies with Merry to find the one he thought would be most suitable. Entirely raised by nannies before boarding school, Angel had contrived to ask questions that wouldn’t even have occurred to Merry and she had been impressed by his concern on their daughter’s behalf and his determination to choose the most caring candidate.
So what if his input on the actual wedding and their future relationship had been virtually non-existent? He had hired a wedding organiser to take care of the arrangements and hadn’t seemed to care in the slightest about the details that had unexpectedly consumed Merry. Was that just Angel being a man or a dangerous sign that he couldn’t care less about the woman he was about to marry? Merry stifled a shiver, rammed down the fear that had flared and contemplated her manicured fingernails with rampant nervous tension. She had made her choice and she had to live with it when the alternative was so much worse and so much emptier. Surely it was better to give marriage a chance?
It had been embarrassing to tell Fergus that she was marrying Angel but he had taken the news in good part, possibly having already worked out that she was still far from indifferent to her daughter’s father.
The first shock of Merry’s wedding day was the unexpected sight of Sybil waiting on the church steps, a tall, slender figure attired in a very elegant blue dress and brimmed hat. Eyes wide with astonishment, Merry emerged from the limousine that had ferried her to the church from the hotel where she had stayed the night before and exclaimed in shaken disbelief, ‘Sybil?’
‘Obviously I couldn’t miss your big day, darling. I got back in the early hours,’ Sybil breathed with a revealing shimmer in her eyes as she reached for Merry’s hand. ‘I’m so sorry about the things I said. I overstepped, interfered—’
‘No,
