A Match Made in Scandal

Melody Thomas
ISBN: 0060742313

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An obsession that blooms into scandal...

Since childhood, Ryan Donally adored Rachel Bailey, though the
brilliant, beautiful lass saw him as just another rowdy boy. The
years pulled them apart, carrying Rachel to a place of responsibility and respect few women of her time enjoyed...while Ryan ascended to undreamed-of heights of wealth and success, and bound himself to another.

Now Fate has brought them together again--and Rachel sees not the boy she once spurned, but a breathtaking man she desires. Yet Ryan has moved on and is unwilling to forgive, and Rachel hides a secret shame that could destroy everything she has worked for. Then in one moment of unrestrained passion, the walls between them tumble, and the price they must pay is a marriage neither can afford. But will a sensuous fire-too long resisted bring tragedy ... or will it forge a glorious and undying love.
 

REVIEWS

EXCERPT

“Are you sure Mr. Donally knows I spent the night?” Rachel asked as Boswell set a coffee tray on the table the next morning when she arrived downstairs for breakfast.

“Yes, mum. He was informed when he returned home.”

“He is here?”

“He returned just before dawn, mum.” There was a cheerfulness in his voice that disconcerted her. “He was quite put off by it all, mum.”

She was sure that her overnight presence in this household violated every tenet of moral etiquette, but it wasn’t as if she and Ryan were lovers, though she had seen him naked once a long time ago. And he’d seen her in a worse state of dishabille than the heavy robe she’d worn in his room last night. She’d never been an outwardly prissy type anyway. She’d rarely worn a real dress until she was well into her middle teen years.

“He doesn’t like me very much, Boswell.”

“Quite the opposite, Miss Bailey,” he reassured her. “I’ve never seen him so angry.”

Rachel flushed and said, “And this is a positive sign?”

“Mr. Donally doesn’t get angry, mum.”

Rachel laughed. Of course, he got angry. He’d always been hot-tempered around her. Shrugging aside Boswell’s logic, Rachel stirred cream in her coffee and brought the cup to her lips. Mary Elizabeth was on her morning constitutional with Miss Peabody. They would be back in an hour. Rachel had watched her briefly from her window that morning.

Taking a deep breath, she inhaled more than coffee aroma and looked at the fresh spray of flowers adorning each end of the polished table and three console tables between the glass doors that looked outside. A massive breakfront sat against the wall. “Why doesn’t Mr. Donally just stay at his house in London?” Rachel asked.

“He usually does when he remains in the city for more than a few nights, mum. But for now he has more privacy here for himself and his daughter.”

Rachel idly flipped through the newspaper that Boswell had brought her. A courier had delivered it from the train station earlier. Beyond the window, the early morning sky was a crisp, bright blue. At home, she was always up before dawn, and had already been awake for three hours.

Last week, she had kissed Memaw goodbye and made her way to London on the Holyhead ferry. She had not stepped foot in England in four years. This morning, Boswell had found her a pair of boy’s trousers, shirt and boots to replace the gown she’d destroyed last night in the pond. She saddled one of Ryan’s fancy thoroughbreds and rode to the chapel where Kathleen was buried.

Now, she was eating in Ryan’s fine dining room on beautiful china; yet, the glittering morning held nothing that spoke of home or familiar things. She could not sit here forever thinking useless thoughts, staring at the sky beyond the windows and wonder where Ryan had gone last night. Her clothes had taken too long to dry. The last train to London had departed the station at seven, so she’d been left with no choice but to spend the night. She wasn’t a complete stranger there. She had visited Kathleen three times after she’d been married, and Ryan had been away. Boswell put her into the blue room where she’d stayed before.

“The newspapers aren’t always kind toward Mr. Donally,” Rachel said, folding the broadsheet and shoving it away.

“No, mum.”

Not that he deserved kindness, she thought, having read the financials on a daily basis for years. Ryan raided companies for profit. He would take them over, break them up and sell off their weaker assets. His contacts extended across the Atlantic as well as the Continent. The London Times had once accused D&B’s charismatic chairman of taking his corporate genius and pillaging the less fortunate for profit. The British Globe called him a vulture. Vanity Fair labeled him one of the most eligible men in Great Britain.

But to her he was still just an arrogant Irish nincompoop.

Finally, she finished breakfast. Ryan was still asleep. Annoyed that he could sleep so late when her entire future remained uncertain, she paced in her room before again leaving the chambers. She explored the house, opening doors and looking inside the rooms. At the end of the corridor, she found a glass studio. Three pairs of French doors opened from the studio to the terrace. A summer breeze filled the room. Fencing gear lined the wall in braces and brackets. She stepped into the room. David had taught her to fence years ago, and she practiced regularly. But nothing she had in her possession compared to the splendors she found in this room.

Rachel lifted a shiny foil from its brace on the wall. Felt the steel in her hand and tested its weight. She stood in momentary riposte, foil extended. She feinted and lunged at imaginary targets, slashing the air with each step backward and froward. Sunlight glinted off the thin edge of steel, and she flicked at the protective nob at the end. There were other ways to slay the dragon that was Ryan Donally, she decided as an idea popped into her head.

Smiling to herself, Rachel grabbed a second foil, walked out of the room, down the long corridor, and stopped in front of Ryan’s door. Holding her ear to the solid wood, she listened for noise. He didn’t sound awake. No one was moving inside.

Rachel knocked. When she heard no response, she carefully opened the door. Sheer draperies billowed gently and Rachel could see the lake behind his house. Honeysuckle filtered through the other essence Rachel breathed, leaving no doubt the masculine inhabitant of these chambers. She moved farther into the room.

A kneeling bronze Venus sat on one of the console tables that flanked each side of the four-poster tester bed. Ryan lay on his stomach in bed, his head resting on one arm pillowed beneath his cheek. His back was bare to the waist where the sheet had twisted around his hips. His shoulders were wide. His muscles defined in corded delineations that crossed his upper arms and back, unmarked, save for the scar slashed across one defined biceps--a wound he’d received when he was younger in a fight against the local village thugs who made some comment about the Irish.

Even in sleep, Ryan’s body emanated strength, a contrast to his peaceful repose. His lashes looked like smudges against the flesh. His jaw and cheeks were dark with the beginning of a beard. The last time she had seen Ryan in any state of undress, he had been swimming with his brothers in the pond behind his house. He had been fifteen. Gazing at him now, she felt a rush of heat in her face. But she was in no mood to drink him into her senses or her memory when he was the complete cause of her misery.

“If you look any harder, Rache, I don’t think you’ll like what you find.” His eyes were open and he was looking at her from beneath the careless toss of his bangs. Not that she blamed him for his anger. She had no business in his private chambers.

He pushed himself up on one elbow, his dark hair disheveled and in his eyes. As if he noticed her attire for the first time, one brow shot up his forehead. His gaze dropped to her mouth. “Have you been drinking?” he demanded.

“Truly, Ryan.” With only one look into those coffee-colored eyes, he made her feel like a blushing virgin, a love-struck ninny, and lush all rolled into one. When she was neither a ninny or a virgin. “I’ve seen you undressed before.”

“That was a hell of a long time ago. And I was bloody swimming in ice water.”

“What difference does that make?”

His amused gaze slid over her face and down her boy’s shirt. “If I told you, you would only slap me.”

“Then tell me, won’t you?”

He flopped on his back and scraped a palm over his jaw. He was laughing, she realized, gaping at him. He opened one eye as if it hurt to look at her. She’d shocked him. She’d never shocked him before, and she watched him, the two fencing foils in her hand lowered to her side. The sheet barely covered his lap, drawing her eyes downward to his hard belly. He was so beautiful, unquestionably male--more potently sexual than she was used to dealing with in those men who surrounded her in her day to day life. More than she remembered in him. The smattering of hair on his chest tapered to a dark line down his abdomen to disappear beneath the covers that covered the lean span of his hips. No part of him was lacking.

He was looking at her hard when she finally raised her gaze. Narrowing his eyes, he seemed to penetrate the very fabric of her soul to scorch her heart, the sensation stunning her because it was not something she could control, and it heightened the sense of danger he aroused in her, reminding her of her own survival.

They had no future, not in the sense she’d thought she’d wanted when she arrived in London. Ryan didn’t love her. She suspected he could be every bit as ruthless with her when it came to his personal and professional life as gossip implied.

Yet, strangely Rachel understood Ryan’s drive to marry above his station, had always understood him since they’d been children. The Irish were not welcome into a society that held to such staunch elitist segregation of cultures and faith. Ryan had battled the establishment his entire life.

In return for Ryan’s wealth, Lady Gwyneth would give his daughter something that he, with all of his riches, could not, she thought with the crystal-clear knowledge that she could never offer Ryan what he so single-mindedly sought.

A true place in Society.

No one would ever shun Mary Elizabeth or scorn her because she was the wrong religion or a descendant of Celtic primitives. She would be welcomed to society and someone’s home, never suffering the perfidy society inflicts on those who live beyond the confines set by the elite. Everything that Ryan worked for in his life was within his grasp.

Indeed, she and Ryan had both set about conquering the world to the exclusion of all else. Today’s fight only lent more importance to her own quest, especially now. For when she left London this time, D&B would be all that she had left.

“Have you invaded my chambers to end your misery, Rache? Or mine?” he finally asked, a warning surely aimed at the look he’d glimpsed in her eyes. “I should warn you the blade is blunted.”

She waggled the end of one foil in front of his nose. It was an effort not to smack him. “If I win, you send my report through the committee for funding, and my name goes on it as chief engineer.”

“Is that right?”

“Are you afraid you might lose?”

“Hardly,” he scoffed, awake and fully aware of her presence. He raised his brows. “Can’t this wait?”

“This is important to me, Ryan.”

“Sleep is important to me.”

“It’s already well into the day. The sun has been up for over three hours.”

“Jaysus.” He flung off the sheets.

Rachel retreated an alarmed step, expecting him to appear naked beneath. He wasn’t. Not completely. He wore loose-fitting silken pajamas that clung to his hips. Padding past her across the chamber, he walked into the dressing room. “When this is over, promise me you’ll leave London and go back to Ireland, Rachel.”

“When I win you’ll accept me as an equal in this company.”

She could hear the splash of water, drawers opening and slamming shut. She set her hand on the back of a high-back chair where his shirt lay discarded from last night. The masculine trace of his familiar cologne tugged at her senses--as well as something subtly more invasive. Expensive French perfume.

“I can’t wait for this.” Ryan returned to the doorway wearing black pants tucked into tall boots and finishing the last of the button on his shirt. “You must have faith in your instructor.”

“I have all the faith on my side. He’s a priest, Ryan,” she said, tossing him a foil, which he snatched easily out of the air. She would personally skewer him. “Bare feet and in the grass. First strike wins.”

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