Never Fall for your Fiancée, page 1
Copyright © 2021 Susan Merritt
Cover design by Olga Grlic. Cover illustration by Vikki Chu.
Author photograph © Nicholls Photography
The right of Virginia Heath to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published by arrangement with St Martin’s Griffin,
An Imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group
First published in this eBook edition in 2021
by HEADLINE ETERNAL
An imprint of HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
eISBN 978 1 4722 8873 8
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
About the Author
Praise for Virginia Heath
Also by Virginia Heath
About the Book
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Acknowledgments
Keep an eye out for the next Merriwell Sisters novel!
Find out more about Headline Eternal
About the Author
When Virginia Heath was a little girl it took her ages to fall asleep, so she made up stories in her head to help pass the time while she was staring at the ceiling. As she got older, the stories became more complicated, sometimes taking weeks to get to the happy ending. Then one day, she decided to embrace the insomnia and start writing them down. Twenty-one books and two Romantic Novel of the Year Award nominations later, and it still takes her forever to fall asleep.
To discover more, find her online on Facebook /VirginiaHeathAuthor,
on Twitter @VirginiaHeath_, and on Instagram @virginiaheathwrites.
Praise for Never Fall For Your Fiancée!
‘Virginia Heath’s fun characters and situations will have you laughing out loud! Don’t miss this wonderful read!’ Sabrina Jeffries
‘Filled with fabulously British banter, wit, and heart, this delightful book is one of my must-read rom coms of the year’ Evie Dunmore
By Virginia Heath
The Merriwell Sisters
Never Fall For Your Fiancée
The Wild Warriners Series
A Warriner to Protect Her
A Warriner to Rescue Her
A Warriner to Tempt Her
A Warriner to Seduce Her
The King’s Elite Series
The Mysterious Lord Millcroft
The Uncompromising Lord Flint
The Disgraceful Lord Gray
The Determined Lord Hadleigh
The Discerning Gentleman’s Guide
Redeeming the Reclusive Earl
Miss Bradshaw’s Bought Betrothal
The Scoundrel’s Bartered Bride
Her Enemy at the Altar
His Mistletoe Wager
That Despicable Rogue
About the Book
The trouble with lies is they have a tendency to catch a man out.
The last thing Hugh Standish, Earl of Fareham, wants is a wife. But since the only way to keep his mother’s matchmaking ways at bay is the promise of impending nuptials, Hugh takes the most logical action: he invents a fake fiancée.
It’s the perfect plan - until Hugh learns that his mother is on a ship bound for England to meet his ‘beloved’. He needs a solution fast, and when he collides with a mysterious beauty, he might just have found the answer to his prayers.
Minerva Merriwell is desperate for money to support her sisters, and although she knows that posing as the Earl’s fiancée might seem nonsensical, it’s just too good an offer to refuse.
As the Merriwells descend upon Hugh’s estate, the household is thrown into turmoil as everyone tries to keep their tangled stories straight. And with Hugh and Minerva’s romantic ruse turning into the real thing, is true love just one complication too many?
For Greg, the long-suffering Mr. H
Who is always there to lend me his shoulders to stand on every
time he pushes me to reach for the stars
Chapter One
LATE NOVEMBER 1825 . . .
The trouble with lies is they have a tendency, if not well managed, to catch a man out. Hugh’s out-of-control, grossly overembellished falsehood was like a snarling, rabid dog about to sink its foaming teeth into his behind, and there was not a damn thing he could do about it.
He stared at the letter again, pathetically hoping he had mis-read his mother’s flamboyant, sloping handwriting—but alas, he was doomed. She had booked passage from Boston to leave on the first and, if the tide and the current and the trade winds complied, intended to be in Hampshire for Christmas. Which meant he had received her blasted letter far too late to put a stop to it, no doubt on purpose, as his mother, stepfather, and a whole heap of trouble were currently bobbing somewhere ever closer on the Atlantic Ocean. Worse— if indeed things could get worse— there was only one purpose to their spontaneous and wholly unwelcome trip.
They were desperate to meet and become better acquainted with his fiancée now that she was finally out of mourning.
The fiancée who didn’t exist.
“Let’s face it, you’re done for.” His best friend, Giles, the unenthusiastic heir to a dukedom, was an eternal pessimist. He popped his eighth biscuit into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully as he stared at his ceiling. “Perhaps now is a good time to run away? Take an extended tour of the Continent and only return once they have sailed back. Your stepfather is a businessman, is he not? In my experience, all businessmen are so dreadfully dull they cannot bear to leave their business alone for prolonged periods of time.”
“If I run, I might as well tell my mother everything. Unsupervised, she will dig and dig until she has fully excavated the whole truth and then I shall never hear the end of it. Might I remind you, I only invented Minerva in the first place because she threatened to come home and help find me a bride. You have no idea how tenacious that woman can be. She has become quite obsessed with my happiness since she went and married for love.” Hugh screwed up his face with distaste. “She has it in her head I will never be truly happy unless I am shackled to the woman of my dreams. If that woman is not Minerva, then she’ll find me a replacement quicker than you can say ‘I do.’ ”
“Well, at least your lone surviving parent wishes for you to have a blissful union. My father is determined to foist a duty bride on me, and despite my repeated assertions to the contrary, presents me with a suitably uninspiring candidate at least once a week. I’ve developed an irrational fear of Hyde Park now, as he has sucked all the joy out of my riding there. And Rotten Row used to be such a fruitful place to meet like-minded ladies.”
By “like-minded,” Giles meant discreet, open to a dalliance, free and easy with their favors, and desirous of no permanent complications. One of the many reasons he and Hugh had always been such good friends was their similar taste in women and abhorrence of permanent attachments.
“You know I sympathize— but can we please focus on the most pressing problem in hand. My problem. What am I going to do?”
“Well, if you are not prepared to run, you are going to have to face the music, old boy. I hear confession is supposed to be good for the soul. Unless you can conjure up a fiancée in the next few weeks.”
Not at all helpful. “Because there must be at least a hundred proper young ladies in Mayfair who would be delighted to be my temporary betrothed and dragged across the country to spend Christmas in dreary Hampshire.”
“Why does she have to be proper?”
“Because Minerva is proper! That’s how I created her. My mother wouldn’t settle for anything less, and frankly, seeing as she is a figment of my imagination, crafted to serve a necessary evil, I purposely ma de her the sort of paragon which every mother would want for their son.”
“ ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave, / When first we practice to deceive!’ ”
Hugh glared at his friend. “Must you quote the theatre while I’m in the midst of a crisis?”
“I adore the theatre.”
“I came to you for help. Some guiding words of wisdom because you are supposed to be my best friend. So far, all you’ve done is eat an entire plate of biscuits and tell me I’m done for.”
“You are done for.” Giles waved a fresh shortbread at him. “I gave you my infinite words of wisdom when you started this mockery of a sham two years ago and you blithely ignored them all.”
Even more unhelpful. “You agreed Minerva was a stroke of genius at the time!”
“Indeed I did. Because it was a stroke of genius and it made me very jealous. If only my father lived across an ocean so I could invent a fiancée . . . And I must say, you have a flair for effusive prose, which I lack. Those poignant letters you wrote during her long battle with consumption, where you stalwartly sat at her bedside and read to her, silently praying for a cure while cursing the fickle finger of fate, brought a tear to my eye, I don’t mind telling you.” The remnants of biscuit number nine disappeared before his friend wagged a chastising finger. “But you must also recall I was all for her tragic death. By then she’d more than earned it, the poor thing. Consumption is such a romantically lingering disease and you could have played the heartbroken hero. That would have bought you a few more months at the very least. Yet you dragged it out interminably. Expressly against my good advice that all good things must come to an end.”
“I couldn’t kill her then! If I had, I’d have been right back where I started and vulnerable to my mother’s rampant matchmaking again. She was about to buy passage on a ship to help console me at the end!”
But Hugh knew he was right. Despite meticulously projecting a flippant and shallow exterior to the world, Giles was annoyingly right more often than he was wrong. Hugh huffed out a breath in surrender. He’d overdone it, and now his precarious house of cards was in danger of collapsing in a heap. “All right, the miraculous recovery might have been a bit far-fetched.”
“Not as far-fetched as her father’s untimely death in the Cairngorms last year! Didn’t I caution you against writing to your mother when drunk?”
“You did, and you were right, but Mama caught me unawares with her insistence on coming back to help plan the nuptials, and I panicked. I had the devil of a job convincing her of the truth of my lie.” More folly piled upon nonsense, and all so that he didn’t have to witness the inevitable disappointed look in his mother’s eyes. An irony that wasn’t lost on him now. “It quite spoiled my visit to the Americas last Christmas.” Perhaps conciliation would make Giles more sympathetic? “I should have listened to you. Are you happy now?”
“Isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing? Although clearly she wasn’t convinced, old boy, or she wouldn’t be coming now. With precious little warning, too. Anyone would think she’s come to trap you.” Giles grinned, obviously enjoying himself immensely.
“Again— hardly helpful.” Hugh stood, affronted. “If you can think of nothing better than criticism, then I shall leave and consult my sensible friends.”
“We don’t have any sensible friends.” And there Giles went again, being annoyingly right when it was unwelcome and infuriatingly unpalatable. “But if you’re off, can you ring the bell on your way out?” He lifted the empty plate from his stomach and held it aloft. “Somebody appears to have eaten all of the biscuits.”
Hugh took himself to White’s, which served to depress him further because it was devoid of his friends but filled with all the sad, old, crusty bachelors who had nothing better to do with their time than sit with each other in the comfortable wingbacks and grumble about the state of the world. So he left, only to wander aimlessly down a decidedly chilly Piccadilly rather than go home. He’d never been good at introspection because, despite the crushing guilt that always seemed to plague him, he was an optimist at heart. Introspection made him either maudlin or remorseful, two emotions that had plagued him ever since Payne, his trusty butler, had placed his mother’s blasted letter on the breakfast table this morning next to his two soft-boiled eggs— and Hugh realized he was about to break his mother’s heart.
Again.
Exactly like his father.
The missive— and the unavoidable comparison— had quite put him off food in general. In fact, he hadn’t eaten a thing all day. Was it any wonder his brain was struggling to find a solution? Momentous decisions and important plans probably shouldn’t be made on an empty stomach. He decided to visit the Lion and Lamb in Conduit Street, an inn where he was guaranteed a hearty meal while being blessedly spared the presence of anyone who was anyone in society, so he could consider his dilemma in private. He took the narrow backstreets for speed and pondered his problem.
What to do?
He wished he had killed off Minerva long ago exactly as Giles had said. His fake fiancée was only ever meant to be temporary— a way to stall his mother, avoid falling out with her and hurting her feelings yet again, and to give himself some time off. He hated arguments more than he hated introspection, and he hated disappointing people. And he particularly hated hurting people. Especially his mother.
Aside from her irritating habit of matchmaking, he adored the woman. She didn’t deserve any of this. All she had ever wanted was the best for Hugh, and she had sacrificed herself tirelessly for the sake of his happiness. He’d practically had to force her to marry the love of her life, because she was so dedicated to Hugh— something that doubtless drove her to push for him to do the same. She felt guilty for snatching some happiness of her own; ergo, to lessen her guilt, she needed to see him happy, too.
Which in her book meant marriage, although heaven only knew why. Despite the apparent success she had made of her second trip up the aisle, the legacy of her first still lingered in Hugh’s mind and always would. How could it not when he and his father were two peas in a pod?
Or almost two peas.
Dear Papa, like his father before him, had managed to sleep at night whilst Hugh knew he never would. To be the cause of all that hurt . . . Unconsciously, he shuddered and found himself shaking his head as he marched forward. Unlike his philandering father and grandfather, he had standards. A man should only enter into a marriage when he had every intention of honoring his vows. Such a noble undertaking obviously required two attributes that, thanks to his ancestors, Hugh was fairly certain he didn’t possess: eyes that didn’t wander and a heart selfless enough to be capable of great love.
He had loved a great many women in his thirty-two years on the earth, and not one of them had ever made either of those fickle organs work as a good husband’s should. Besides the Standish male’s penchant for deceit, that wayward, womanizing Standish blood ran through his veins and always would. No indeed, the path of matrimony wasn’t for him.
As much as he didn’t want to end up like one of those sad, old, crusty bachelors who only went to White’s because they had nobody to go home to, Hugh was resigned to his eventual fate. He would inevitably be in a wingback at White’s next to Giles, and the pair of them could moan about the state of the world together. Until one of them died . . .
And there he was, being all maudlin again, mapping out a sorry future for himself when he wasn’t anywhere near his dotage and was still a carefree young buck enjoying sowing his wild oats.
Or at least he had enjoyed it. The bloom had faded off the rose a little in the last year, and he often had to force himself to go out purely to keep up appearances amongst his friends who were still dedicated to the sport. That worried him. It signaled his dotage was doggedly shuffling ever closer despite his fear of those depressing wingbacks at White’s.
Hugh had promised himself he would make more effort to enjoy his bachelorhood fully; however, more often than not, he made excuses nowadays. He tended to avoid the hells he’d been so dedicated to when he had first invented Minerva and hadn’t made any effort to chase any game women either. He’d dallied— of course he had— but the awkward truth was his carefree bachelor lifestyle wasn’t quite as carefree as it used to be.
