His for Revenge

And he didn’t know what he meant to do with this woman—he didn’t know how to make her his revenge when he couldn’t seem to make her do anything—but he couldn’t takethisany longer. He couldn’t stand it.

“I’m not empty inside,” Chase blurted out, gravel and steel in his voice, and she jerked in her seat as if he’d smacked her. He hated himself as if he really had.

“What?”

But he was already crossing the room. He was already right there, looming above her, so obviously brutal and dangerous, and yet she still gazed up at him in a kind of wonder. Like she saw all the things in him he’d stopped wishing were there a long, long time ago.

Like she was as much a fool as he was.

“It’s much worse than empty in here,” he gritted out. “It’s murderous dark, vicious and wrong, and there’s no changing it. You should have run away from me when I gave you the chance, Zara. You should have understood that it was a gift, and I don’t know that I’ll hand you another one.”

VOWS OF CONVENIENCEBound by duty!

The Whitaker name was once synonymous with power, wealth and control. But with the family business facing certain ruin, and its reputation turning into dust, the Whitaker siblings need to make the ultimate sacrifice to safeguard their futures …

HIS FOR A PRICE

Following the death of Mattie Whitaker’s father, a merger with Greek tycoon Nicodemus Stathis’s company will go a long way towards fixing her problem—but Nicodemus’s help comes at a price …

October 2014

HIS FOR REVENGE

Chase Whitaker is playing his own dark game of revenge against Zara Elliot’s father, the chairman of his board. He plans to replace him—but he has no defences against Zara’s unstudied charm and natural beauty …

December 2014

His for Revenge

Caitlin Crews

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CAITLIN CREWS discovered her first romance novel at the age of twelve. It involved swashbuckling pirates, grand adventures, a heroine with rustling skirts and a mind of her own, and a seriously mouth-watering and masterful hero. The book (the title of which remains lost in the mists of time) made a serious impression. Caitlin was immediately smitten with romances and romance heroes, to the detriment of her middle school social life. And so began her life-long love affair with romance novels, many of which she insists on keeping near her at all times.

Caitlin has made her home in places as far-flung as York, England, and Atlanta, Georgia. She was raised near New York City, and fell in love with London on her first visit when she was a teenager. She has backpacked in Zimbabwe, been on safari in Botswana, and visited tiny villages in Namibia. She has, while visiting the place in question, declared her intention to live in Prague, Dublin, Paris, Athens, Nice, the Greek Islands, Rome, Venice, and/or any of the Hawaiian islands. Writing about exotic places seems like the next best thing to moving there.

She currently lives in California, with her animator/comic book artist husband and their menagerie of ridiculous animals.

Welcome to the world, Baby Haslam!

Contents

Cover

Introduction

Vows of Convenience

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

Extract

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

ZARA ELLIOTT WAS halfway down the aisle of the white-steepled First Congregational Church she’d always thought was a touch too smug for its own good—taking up a whole block on the town green in the center of the sweetly manicured, white clapboard village that her family had lived in since the days of the first Connecticut Colony way back in the 1630s—before the sheer insanity of what she was doing really hit her.

She felt her knees wobble alarmingly beneath her, somewhere underneath all that billowing white fabric that was draped around her and made her look like a lumbering wedding cake, and she almost stopped right there. In front of the hundreds of witnesses her father had decided it was necessary to invite to this circus show.

“Don’t you dare stop now,” her father hissed at her, the genial smile he used in public never dimming in the slightest as his wiry body tensed beside her. “I’ll drag you up this aisle if I have to, Zara, but I won’t be pleased.”

This constituted about as much paternal love and support as she could expect from Amos Elliott, who collected money and power the way other fathers collected stamps, and Zara had never been any good at standing up to him anyway.

That had always been her sister Ariella’s department.

Which was how this was happening in the first place, Zara reminded herself as she dutifully kept moving. Then she had to order herself not to think about her older sister, because the dress might be a preposterous monstrosity of filmy white material, but it was also much—much—too tight. Ariella was at least three inches taller than Zara and had the breasts of a preteen boy, all the better to swan about in bikinis and gravity-defying garments as she pleased. And if Zara let herself get furious, as she would if she thought about any of this too hard, she would pop right out of this secondhand dress that didn’t fit her at all, right here in the middle of the church her ancestors had helped build centuries ago.