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Bride On Loan
Leigh Michaels
Caleb Tanner is a playboy millionaire with an aversion to weddings–only, he's surrounded by women scheming to get him to the altar! Caleb needs a decoy: a bride on loan…Sabrina Saunders isn't thrilled about moving in with Caleb. He's far too attractive for his own good! He's also her agency's biggest client so she's forced to play the part of Caleb's bride-to-be. It's only for a couple of weeks–or so they both think!
“Do you anticipate actually announcing an engagement?”
“I don’t think we need to go that far,” Caleb replied.
“So we’re supposed to be living together with no intention of making it legal,” Sabrina mused. “It’s going to be bad enough having everyone think I’ve lost my mind enough to live with you. Having to explain that I was such a fool, I believed a diamond ring on my finger would tie you down…” Sabrina shuddered delicately.
Caleb grinned. “You’re a woman in a thousand, Sabrina.”
“And you,” she said under her breath, “are certainly the man who’s got enough experience to know.”
Three single women, one home-help agency—and
three professional bachelors in search of…a wife?
*Are you a busy executive with a demanding career?
*Do you need help with those time-consuming everyday errands?
*Ever wished you could hire a house-sitter, caterer…or even a glamorous partner for that special social occasion?
Meet Cassie, Sabrina and Paige—three independent women who’ve formed a business taking care of those troublesome domestic crises.
And meet the three gorgeous bachelors who are simply looking for a little help…and instead discover they’ve hired Ms. Right!
Enjoy bestselling author Leigh Michaels’s new trilogy:
HUSBAND ON DEMAND #3600
BRIDE ON LOAN #3604
WIFE ON APPROVAL #3608
Bride on Loan
Leigh Michaels
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE (#u17da0900-9c10-5f51-a669-aea14cfc6d44)
CHAPTER TWO (#ua108c75e-ab89-5c88-b533-772f120e35ff)
CHAPTER THREE (#uc8261e2b-3708-565e-abb6-20b82b387093)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ONE
THE calendar said it was Halloween, but Sabrina Saunders thought it felt more like the middle of March. The gray sky, pale daylight, low roiling clouds and howling wind made her think of the Arctic Circle in winter, not Denver on an October afternoon.
As she started to get out of her car, a gust caught at the convertible’s door and slammed it against her shin. Sabrina winced in pain and paused to examine the leg of her silk trousers. Seeing that the edge of the door had hit hard enough to leave a streak of street dirt on the emerald-green fabric, she decided she didn’t want to look at the damage underneath. There wasn’t much she could do about it just now anyway.
She knelt on the driver’s seat, propping the door open with one foot, as she dragged a couple of long, lightweight garment bags from the tiny back seat. The breeze whipped the flimsy plastic, and she tugged it away from her face as she hurried up the ramp at the front of the little bungalow to ring the bell. “Come on, Paige,” she muttered as she waited, wishing she hadn’t left her scarf and gloves in the car.
The door swung open, and Sabrina looked down at a white-haired woman sitting in a wheelchair. “Hi, Eileen,” she said. “I brought Paige her Halloween costume for the party tonight. Is she here?”
Eileen McDermott didn’t answer, just backed her chair out of the way, looked over her shoulder and called her daughter’s name. Then she fixed her chilly gaze on Sabrina and said, “I do hope you’re planning to close that door. I’ve already got a sore throat.”
Sabrina bit her tongue to keep from saying how much she was enjoying the frigid air and finished untangling the end of one of the garment bags from the latch so she could close the door. “I’m sorry to hear you’re feeling ill again, Eileen.”
“I suppose I’m as well as can be expected,” Eileen said with a long-suffering air.
Paige McDermott came around the corner from the kitchen, checkbook and pen in hand. “You’re running a bit late, aren’t you, Sabrina?”
“Just a smidge. Nothing I can’t make up. And it was worth it, Paige, because look what I found today.” Sabrina pulled up one of the plastic bags to show off the garment that hung underneath.
Eileen sounded as if she’d swallowed a lemon. “You can’t mean that you chose that for Paige to wear at a children’s party!”
Sabrina raised her eyebrows and looked thoughtfully from Eileen to the skimpy bit of midnight blue satin and lace she was holding at arm’s length. “As a matter of fact,” she said, “I think with her coloring she’d look lovely in it. If we team it up with some mesh stockings and very high heels, and maybe add a little ribbon tied around the neck—”
“Don’t forget a long flannel bathrobe to cover up the goose bumps,” Paige added.
“Made of a Scottish plaid, no doubt.” Sabrina sighed. “Paige, do you have no sense of adventure? No romance in your soul?”
“Not a speck,” Paige said firmly.
Sabrina ignored the interruption. “You’d look grand in a satin teddy, and if the right guy was around you wouldn’t have to worry about goose bumps, either.”
Eileen snorted. “That’s the kind of remark I’d expect from Cassie, not you. Now that she’s gone all starry-eyed about that…that—”
“I believe the word you’re looking for may be man,” Sabrina said innocently. “As a matter of fact, this bit of finery isn’t for Paige. I bought it for Cassie. Saturday’s her bridal shower, and I thought she’d rather have something like this than another casserole dish or set of tea towels.”
“And since you just happened to see it on the clearance rack as you were walking through Milady Lingerie…” Paige murmured.
“Well, not exactly. At least, it wasn’t on sale. But wait till you see what I did find on the clearance—” Sabrina stopped. “Hey, if you’re implying I was goofing off, Paige, I wasn’t. But Milady’s right across the mall from the costume place, and I had to wait while they adjusted the tail on my cat suit.”
Paige laughed. “And given a choice between killing time looking at lingerie or trying on clown noses—”
“I’ll take lace and satin any day,” Sabrina agreed.
Paige gave a tug to the other garment bag and glanced without apparent interest at the contents. “At least it isn’t lace and satin,” she said. “But I still don’t see why we have to dress up for this. It’s not like we’re part of the party, we’re just running the thing.”
“Because we won’t look so out of place if we’re in costume. And it’ll be more fun for the kids that way. They love it when adults make fools of themselves.”
“No doubt,” Paige muttered darkly. “Personally, I wouldn’t mind dressing as the party organizer. Jeans, sweatshirt, running shoes and clipboard are my idea of a great costume.”
Sabrina grinned. “Hey, be grateful I didn’t call you All Hallows’ Eve and deck you out in fig leaves and apples.”
“I’ll remember that,” Paige said. “Mother, are you absolutely certain you don’t want to go to the party at the senior center tonight instead of staying here alone? I can drop you off, and they’ll make sure you have transportation home even if I’m late. It would be much more fun—”
“If you’re worried about my safety, Paige, I certainly have no intention of opening the door to the sort of little hoodlums who are likely to come trick-or-treating. I’ll just sit here with the lamps turned off, with my book and a flashlight, and they’ll never know I’m home at all.”
Sabrina wanted to roll her eyes. Sitting alone in the dark seemed to her to be one of Eileen’s favorite pastimes—especially if there was a chance of making Paige feel guilty about it.
“Now if you wouldn’t mind finding my cough drops, Paige,” Eileen said.
“Is your throat worse, Mother?”
“I don’t think so.” Eileen’s tone, in contrast to her words, was full of doubt. “Though if you could see your way clear not to go out tonight…Cassie will be there to help with the party, won’t she?”
Sabrina nodded. “But it’ll take all three of us just to oversee the people I’ve hired.”
“I thought this was going to be a small party,” Eileen said. “Just a little entertainment for the staff’s children, to keep them off the streets on Halloween night.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Sabrina agreed. “But then it grew into a celebration for everybody at Tanner Electronics.”
“That’s because Caleb Tanner’s bimbo of the week got hold of the idea,” Paige explained.
“At least she’s not expecting us to arrange all the entertainment for the adults.” Sabrina wrinkled her nose at the memory. “But since it looks as if her festivity’s going to last all night, I decided it might be prudent to hire a couple of baby-sitters for each age group, to take the kids off and entertain them while their parents party.”
“It breaks my heart, Paige,” Eileen said mournfully, “the sort of people you’re being exposed to.”
She sounded, Sabrina thought, as if she believed her daughter was still an impressionable preteen. “And there’s an amazing age range on these kids,” she went on, “so the number of sitters required—”
“Besides, there’s not only a range, there’s a lot of kids,” Paige said. “For what was represented to us as a bunch of nerds with nothing on their minds but work, the crew at Tanner Electronics have an awful lot of offspring.”
“Which is why it’ll take all hands to manage the party, Eileen. And right now,” Sabrina added, “though she means well and she tries hard, the fact is that Cassie doesn’t have eyes for anything but Jake, so she’s going to be of minimal—”
“That’ll wear off soon enough.” Eileen’s tone was chilly. “The tunnel vision, I mean. And obscene bits of underwear won’t delay the process by much, either.”
Obscene? The teddy was certainly suggestive, Sabrina thought. It was even a trifle naughty—that was the whole point of honeymoon lingerie, after all. But it was hardly obscene.
Sabrina couldn’t stop herself. She draped the teddy across the arm of Eileen’s wheelchair so the woman couldn’t avoid an up-close view while she painstakingly retied a blue satin ribbon, located at the bikini line, which had come undone. “I don’t suppose you’d like to tell us exactly how you know all that,” she said innocently as she held up the teddy once more.
Paige intervened hastily. “If you’re going to get everything done in time, Sabrina, hadn’t you better be going? I’ll be along just as soon as I can.”
“Perhaps you’d better go right now, Paige,” Eileen said. Her voice was grim. “There’s no telling what Sabrina could accomplish if she’s left to herself—she could bring down the whole business that you’ve worked so hard to build.”
“It is true,” Paige said judiciously, “now that Rent-A-Wife has landed a client like Caleb Tanner, we’d be wise to avoid offending him. But I’m sure Sabrina already—”
Sabrina gave her a sunny smile. “Oh, well, if not offending Caleb Tanner is the goal,” she said gently, “then you really had better wear the teddy!”
The atrium lobby at Tanner Electronics was brightly lit and bustling; Sabrina noted that Cassie’s crew of volunteers had been busy, for most of the decorations they’d selected were already in place. Fake spiderwebs, bats hung on threads and a scarecrow-like witch in the corner all looked a bit obvious at the moment, but when night settled in and the lights were turned down, the effect would be appropriately spooky.
Not as good as a true haunted house, of course, Sabrina thought regretfully. But in the year since she and Paige and Cassie had combined forces to start Rent-A-Wife, they’d learned to work within all kinds of restrictions. And since this was the first good-size job they’d done for Tanner Electronics, it was more important, Paige had said, to pull off a simple, nice event that stayed well within the budget than it was to blow Caleb Tanner’s socks off with an expensive gala.
At the time, Sabrina had agreed, but after her first encounter with Caleb’s bimbo of the week, she’d had a change of heart. It was more likely, it seemed to her, that anything Rent-A-Wife came up with would look anemic to a man who was used to the celebrations thrown by a woman who obviously had no hesitation about spending his bank balance.
But Paige was right; there was quite a difference between the two situations. And it was too late for modifications now. They’d just have to impress Caleb the old-fashioned way.
Though it was an hour till the start of the party, Sabrina changed into her sleek black cat costume in the ladies’ lounge before she started to fill the dozens of black and orange helium balloons that would finish off the atrium’s decor. She knew from experience how easily time slipped by when she was busy and how hard it was to break away from a half-finished task, with party pressure already under way, to change clothes. This way, if the kids started arriving before she was finished, they’d think that helping blow up balloons was simply part of the planned entertainment.
Pumping helium into what seemed to be a million individual balloons was not Sabrina’s idea of high enjoyment. By the time the first hundred were filled, tied and bobbing from a hook on the side of the rocket-shaped helium tank, she was reminding herself that the occasional tedium of her job was more than offset by the daily advantages of flexibility, frequent change and lack of pressure.
By the time the second hundred were finished, she was regretting that she hadn’t kept her coat handy; the delivery company had left the helium tank right inside the main door, and every time an employee or visitor came in or out, Sabrina got a blast of chilly air. But since the tank was almost as tall as she was, at least twice as heavy and awkward to boot, she didn’t have the option of moving it.
“At this rate,” she mused, “even Eileen will have to concede me the title of sore-throat queen.”
She decided to take a break from filling and started to untangle the blown-up balloons from the hook on the side of the tank; she’d tie them into clusters so as soon as Paige showed up she could start placing them strategically around the atrium to complete the decorations.
And just where was Paige, anyway, she wondered. Kids in costumes were going to start drifting in at any minute.
Sabrina counted out fifteen balloons and began tugging them free from the anchoring hook on the side of the tank, intending to haul them out of the draft from the doorway so she could work more easily.
Her attention was focused on untangling the balloon strings, and when one unexpectedly gave way Sabrina took an unplanned step backward, directly into the doorway. Directly into a brick pillar—or at least that’s what it felt like to Sabrina. Only there weren’t any brick pillars in the atrium—and even if there had been, brick pillars didn’t swear.
The impact jolted her, and fifteen orange and black balloons soared free from her grip and bounded to the high ceiling. Short of driving a fire-department snorkel truck into the building, Sabrina bet they’d stay up there till they withered with age. “Now look what you’ve done,” she said, and turned to face the object she’d collided with.
He was a big man, lean but broad-shouldered and a couple of inches over six feet. His size seemed to be magnified by his attire—a close-fitting black-and-silver motorcycle suit, complete with a dark-visored helmet, which completely hid his face.
“Nice costume,” she said almost automatically. “But you’re a bit early. The kids’ party won’t actually start for half an hour or so, and the adult version won’t get rolling till—”
“I’m not here for the party.” His voice wasn’t much more than a growl. Or was she hearing the effect of the helmet?
“You mean you always go around looking like a cross between Don Quixote and a Hell’s Angel?”
“I mean I was merely walking in with an armload of mail when I got tackled by—of all things—an ill-mannered cat.”
“You’d better be referring to my outfit,” Sabrina said pleasantly. “Because if you’re accusing me personally of being an ill-mannered cat—”
“I’m not the one who called you Don Quixote.”
