Mistress Of The Groom by Susan Napier

Author:Susan Napier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2011-06-06T16:00:00+00:00

Jane stood on the porch of her dilapidated little beach house and watched the wind-tossed seagulls ride the swirling air currents in the sky above Lion Rock. If she hadn’t been so greedy for the poisonous fruit of knowledge maybe she would still be in Auckland, living in the hope that Ryan’s caring would one day become much more than casual...

But that was purely wishful thinking. The twenty-year-old scar that she had ripped open when she had sabotaged Ryan’s wedding could never be fully healed. To Ryan, she would always be the daughter of the man who had murdered his father.

Oh, Mark Sherwood hadn’t wielded a knife or a gun, but the impact of his actions on his victim had been ultimately just as fatal as a killing blow.

True to her word, Jane hadn’t been shocked by the tale of a crooked home-building deal which Mark Sherwood had set up two decades before; she knew all too well that her father had had little respect for the law where it interfered with his own interests and protected ‘fools and losers’.

By his definition Charles Blair would have been a loser, even though as a carpenter and builder he had built up a respectable business, because Ryan’s father had been too honest to take his profits and run when the deal had inevitably collapsed. Instead he had tried to honour the promises he had made. As a result he had been bankrupted, and his reputation and means of livelihood destroyed when rumours that he had been using substandard building materials began to circulate. In desperation he had naïvely confronted Mark Sherwood, pleading for help, and Jane’s father had laughed in his face, threatening to produce documentary evidence that it was Charles’s embezzling that had caused the scheme to fail.

Charles Blair had died not long afterwards, electrocuted in his home workshop, and rumours of suicide had thrown further shadows over his blackened reputation. His pregnant wife and thirteen-year-old son had been left homeless and destitute after the debts that he had assumed responsibility for had been paid.

While Mark Sherwood had gone on to build a financial empire on his ill-gotten gains, Charles’s widow had been trapped in a cycle of poverty, supporting her son and new baby daughter in a hand-to-mouth existence, taking menial positions because of her lack of qualifications and often working two jobs to make ends meet. She was now remarried, but for fourteen years she had struggled alone, haunted by her husband’s undeserved legacy of shame, watching her son grow from a secure little boy into an angry young man who had sworn that one day he would be rich and powerful enough to destroy the company that had been built on the ruins of his father’s honour.

But by the time Ryan had amassed a sufficient fortune and manoeuvred himself into a position to put his vengeful plan into action Mark Sherwood had been a dying man, no longer at the helm of Sherwood Properties. Unwilling to cause the

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