Substitute Bride (Beaufort Brides Book 2) Read online

  Substitute Bride

  Beaufort Brides, Book 2

  Noelle Adams

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Noelle Adams. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means.

  Proofreading: Vanessa Bridges, PREMA Romance

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from Hired Bride

  About Noelle Adams

  One

  Rose Beaufort tried to smother a yawn as she poured out crispy rice cereal into two bright pink bowls.

  She hadn’t gotten very much sleep last night because six-year-old Jill had woken up twice with nightmares, and Rose had been awakened by her cries and had gone into her room to comfort the girl. But she’d been the Harwood girls’ nanny for more than two years now, and she could go through the breakfast routine without conscious thought. She topped the cereal off with milk, scattered sliced strawberries on top, and then brought the bowls over to the girls, who were both sitting at the countertop bar on the large kitchen island.

  “My strawberries aren’t good,” five-year-old Julie said, frowning down at her cereal.

  Rose quickly checked the fruit in question. “Sure they are. They’re just darker red than some of the others we’ve gotten. They haven’t gone bad yet.”

  “I don’t like mushy strawberries.” Julie was a particularly verbal child, especially for her age, but she was also a perfectionist, and was always very unhappy when things in her life weren’t just so.

  Rose knew how to deal with the girl by now. She used to take Julie’s complaints seriously, which only nurtured them into real temper-fits. Now, she knew better, and she always just shrugged them off. She reached over and popped one of the strawberries from the bowl into her mouth. “Mm,” she murmured, shaking her head. “Not mushy at all. I’ll eat them, if you don’t want them.”

  Julie frowned down again at her bowl and then soberly scooped out a bite, one small strawberry slice perched atop the cereal. She put the spoonful in her mouth and chewed for several seconds. Then she gave a little nod. “It’s okay.”

  Rose hid a chuckle by turning around to face the single-serve coffee pot, where her coffee cup had been sitting forgotten for a couple of minutes. She gave it a dash of cream and took a sip, closing her eyes for a minute and trying to wake up. She had a long day today, since the girls had dance practice after school and then a birthday party at a skating rink this evening.

  When she turned back around, she saw that Jill had only stirred her cereal in her bowl. Jill was a year and a half older than her sister and had the same long, red-brown hair and hazel eyes. But Jill was much more quiet and introspective than Julie, and Rose sometimes worried that she brooded too much. “Are your strawberries not good, Jill?” Rose asked casually.

  “They’re okay.” Jill stared down at her bowl as she finally took a bite.

  “Are you tired this morning?” Rose reached over to tilt up the girl’s chin so she could see her. It was a fair, pretty face with a small nose and a sprinkling of freckles. There were slight shadows under her eyes, but her lips weren’t pale and she didn’t look sick.

  “No. Just thinking.”

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Nothing.”

  Julie looked over at her sister as she chewed, a trickle of milk streaming down her chin. “Are you thinking about Mya’s party tonight?”

  Jill shook her head.

  “Are you thinking about your dreams last night?” Rose asked, suspecting this was the case. For the last few weeks, the girl had woken up periodically with nightmares, which was a little worrying.

  Jill shrugged and looked down, proving that Rose’s suspicions were right.

  “What did you dream?” Julie asked, her eyes wide and round.

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, you dreamed about something,” Rose murmured, wiping down the stray rice crisps from the counter. “You don’t have to tell us what it was, if you don’t want, but it’s not nice to lie to us and say it was nothing.”

  “Oh.” This seemed to hit home with Jill. Her little forehead wrinkled.

  Julie put down her spoon and leaned her head on her sister’s shoulder. “You can tell me and Rosie.”

  It was a very sweet gesture, and it touched Rose’s heart. It also appeared to have an impact on Jill. She gave a big sigh and stared down at her cereal bowl unblinkingly. “It was no big deal. It wasn’t scary.”

  “Then there’s no reason not to tell us,” Rose said, leaning on the counter so she was closer to the little girl. “Sometimes dreams are hard to talk about if they’re scary, but it usually makes you feel better if you do.”

  “It wasn’t scary,” Jill repeated. “It was about a evil stepmother—like from the movie. She was mean to us.”

  Rose’s breath hitched in her throat at the implications. “What did she do?”

  “She yelled at us and made us work all the time and she threw Topsy out on the street.”

  Topsy was the girls’ little white Cockapoo, much beloved and long-suffering as she was constantly dressed up in outfits for pictures and playing house.

  “That was mean,” Julie said with a gasp, fisting her hand around her spoon again and continuing to eat. “Poor Topsy.”

  “Was the stepmother the one from the movie?” Rose asked lightly, carefully watching Jill’s face.

  Jill’s eyes shot up quickly and then back down. “Ye—yeah.”

  Rose knew that wasn’t true. The girl just didn’t want to say who the evil stepmother in her dream had been—which meant it was almost certainly Genevieve Brown.

  Genevieve was their father’s fiancée and one of the snottiest women Rose had ever met.

  She knew the girls didn’t like their future stepmother. They tried to do as their father told them and get to know her, but the woman made very few efforts, as far as Rose could tell. She acted overly sweet whenever James was present, but Rose wasn’t deceived. She didn’t seem to care for the girls at all.

  Rose hadn’t realized Jill was so worried about it, though.

  This dream—as childish as it was—was troubling.

  “Well,” Rose said, pitching her tone to be encouraging, “the important thing to remember is that dreams aren’t real. We would never let anything happen to Topsy, would we?”

  “No!” Julie exclaimed.

  “No,” Jill agreed, less enthusiastically.

  “And your daddy wouldn’t let anyone be mean to you,” Rose continued with a smile. “So you know what we do with bad dreams?”

  “We file them away in the back of the drawer and tell them to stay there!” Julie was grinning now, making the motions of putting a paper in a file and then sticking it into a file cabinet.

  James, the girls’ father, worked from home a lot, so they were very familiar with office supplies.

  Jill’s expression was clearing, so Rose caught her eye and gave her a significant look. “What do we do?”

  With a long exhale, Jill gave a little smile. “We file it away in the back of the drawer.”

  “And tell it to stay there!” Julie added.

  “Did someone have a bad dream to file away?”
The male voice came from the side entrance of the kitchen, surprising Rose so much she gave a little jerk.

  She turned to see James Harwood, her employer of two years, walking into the kitchen in a dark gray suit and blue tie. He wasn’t a traditionally handsome man—with a too high forehead and a too square jaw—but Rose thought he was attractive anyway. He had brown hair and broad shoulders and hazel eyes like the girls’. He was in his mid-thirties and already a rising executive in an international corporation.

  His wife had died two and a half years ago quite suddenly from a random brain aneurysm. Rose had started working for him as the nanny of his girls a few months later.

  She instinctively glanced down at herself to make sure she was presentable. She wore a baggy T-shirt and a pair of yoga pants, and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail—none of which was very flattering.

  It didn’t matter, of course.

  The first year she’d worked for the Harwoods, she’d gotten up an hour early every day so she could be showered and fully dressed before breakfast, but she’d given up on that eventually as she started to feel more a part of the family. No one cared what she looked like at breakfast, and it seemed better use of her time to shower and dress after she’d taken the girls to school.

  It wasn’t like she was any sort of a beauty-queen, even when she was dressed up. She had long brown hair and normal brown eyes, and she was just a little too curvy, always needing to lose about ten pounds. She was here to take care of the girls—not wow anyone with her appearance.

  “Jill had a bad dream,” Julie informed her father, as he made a bee-line for the coffee pot. “But she already filed it away.”

  James turned his gaze on his oldest daughter as coffee streamed into his mug. “Is that right, Jill?”

  “Yes. It’s all over now.”

  “Good.” He stepped over and brushed the girl’s hair back from her face so he could better see her expression. “Did it wake you up last night?”

  “Yes, but Rosie came in and took care of me.”

  James glanced over at Rose, a question in his eyes.

  She gave him a little smile. “She was brave and went right back to sleep.”

  Jill seemed pleased with this praise and squirmed on her stool.

  James turned back to her. “You know you can wake me up any time you want to, if you get scared at night.”

  “I know,” Jill said soberly. “But Rosie took care of me.”

  Rose couldn’t read James’s expression as his eyes moved a few times between her and his daughter, but whatever mental conclusions he had drawn seemed to satisfy him. He turned back to grab his coffee and took a long sip. “So what’s happening today?” he asked.

  He tended to be rather absent-minded, and he could never keep a schedule in his mind. His assistant kept him on track at work, and Rose kept him on track at home.

  “The girls have dance practice this afternoon. Then they have a birthday party at a roller-skating rink this evening. You said you had a work dinner tonight, so you probably won’t see them until bedtime.”

  “Oh. Right.” He’d obviously forgotten about his work dinner tonight. “Whose birthday is it?”

  “Mya’s!” Julie informed him, grinning brightly. “She’s going to have pink strawberry cupcakes!”

  “Sounds good. I wouldn’t mind having one of those.”

  “They’re not for you!”

  Rose picked up Julie’s empty cereal bowl and then glanced at Jill’s. “Take three more bites, Jill, and then you need to run and brush your teeth so I’ll have time to do your hair before school.”

  Jill obediently took three more quick bites before she dropped her spoon and slid off the stool. The girls disappeared from the kitchen in a flurry of red-brown hair and whispers.

  “I should be back by eight this evening, so I’ll be here for bedtime,” James told her as he took another long sip of coffee.

  “Okay.”

  Because she was watching, she could see him wince slightly as he swallowed. When he lowered the mug, he absently rubbed the side of his face.

  “Does your jaw hurt?” she asked.

  He dropped his hand quickly. “It’s okay.”

  She was neither surprised nor deceived by his attempt to cover. After working for him for so long, she knew him really well. “Do you think you’ve been clenching your teeth at night?” she asked. “That would make your jaw sore.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, frowning at her. “Not that I’m aware of. I said it was fine.”

  She watched as he took another sip of coffee and saw the slight wince, even though he was clearly trying to hide it. His teeth must be sensitive. That, in addition to the sore jaw, almost certainly meant he was clenching his teeth at night.

  He had a lot of stress at work, and she suspected there was a lot of stress involved in being engaged to Genevieve Brown.

  She had no idea why he was going to marry the woman. Of course, she was gorgeous, but James had always been a smart man. Surely he could see beyond her looks.

  Rose had never known his first wife, but from everything she’d heard, the woman had been both sweet and pretty. How hard would it be for James to find a woman like her to marry now?

  Genevieve wasn’t good for him. Rose tried to be supportive, but she couldn’t help but hope something would come between them before the wedding, which was fortunately still eight months away.

  James could do a lot better than Genevieve. It wasn’t Rose’s place to say anything, but she’d spent a lot of time thinking about it in the last couple of months.

  James deserved a lot better, and his little girls did too.

  ***

  James Harwood always went to his home office to work for an hour in the mornings, before he headed into the office. Normal office hours in the company were eight-thirty to five. If he went in at seven-thirty, then his assistant would feel like she needed to arrive that early too, so he always waited to go in.

  He found he usually got a lot done in that morning hour, with no one to call or stop by, the way they always did when he was at work.

  This morning, however, his jaw was killing him, and he was having trouble focusing on the emails he was trying to sort through in his in-box.

  His jaw had been hurting on and off for the last month or so, but it had gotten a lot worse this week. It hurt when he chewed and when he smiled and when he wasn’t moving at all. And anything hot or cold would send a shooting pain through his teeth.

  He was sure Rose had been right when she’d suggested he was clenching his teeth. He wasn’t conscious of doing so, but he’d been feeling unusually stressed when he went to bed, and he would wake up sometimes with his jaw muscles exhausted.

  It was just an annoyance and a distraction—one of those trivial things that tended to get in the way of what was most important—so he tried to push the pain from his mind.

  Jill was having bad dreams. He needed to ask her about the dreams tonight before bed. He didn’t like how quiet she sometimes was—as if she kept her fears and concerns to herself.

  He was trying to read through an email that had come through last night when his phone beeped with a text. When he pulled up the message, he was greeted to a photo of Genevieve.

  She’d taken a selfie at some trendy breakfast bistro, if the background was any evidence. She’d evidently ordered a fancy fruit and yogurt parfait in a tall crystal glass.

  She looked beautiful and polished, as she always did with her glossy blond hair and stylish clothes. But James rolled his eyes as he glanced at the photo.

  She’d taken to sending him selfies several times a day, and each time she was at some other expensive establishment—restaurant, boutique, health club, bar. He had no idea why she thought he would want to get a picture of her everywhere she went, but it was sometimes annoying to see her out having fun and spending money when he was busy at work or at home trying to take care of his family.

  He sent an immediate reply, though, since she would s
ulk if he ignored her.

  Looks good.

  Her reply came quickly. It is.

  He rubbed his sore jaw and told himself it was ridiculous to expect her to be anything other than what she was. She was a fun-loving, social, and charming woman—just as his wife had been.

  He’d spent the last year dating various woman, after coming to the conclusion that his having another wife would be good for the girls. They needed a female influence, and he was starting to dread their teenage years, when he was sure he’d be absolutely clueless to help them.

  Jill and Julie’s grandparents—the parents of Melissa, his wife who had died—had introduced him to Genevieve about six months ago. She was in their same social circle, and she and Melissa had evidently been friends in school.

  James had thought she was fun and gorgeous, and she reminded him strongly of his wife. His mother and father-in-law also approved of her, which was a huge plus, since they had a tendency to nag.

  The relationship seemed to make sense. He was tired of living alone, and the burden of raising two daughters on his own was sometimes so heavy he could barely breathe. He had an empty slot in his life that was labeled “Wife,” and Genevieve could fill it.

  Things would be easier when that was taken care of.

  He had turned back to his computer screen, still rubbing his jaw, when he was surprised by a tap on the door.

  “Yeah,” he muttered.

  Rose came in carrying a small blue object.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “A hot pad,” she explained. “For your jaw.”

  He rolled his eyes, preferring for her not to know how much his jaw was hurting. He didn’t like to be babied, and Rose was so composed and competent all the time that he didn’t like her to think he needed taking care of. “I said I was fine.”

  “Don’t be grumpy,” she said with a smile. She held the hot pad against his jaw. “This will help. The muscles get tight when you clench your teeth at night, and the heat will help relax them. You hold this against your jaw, or I’ll stand here and hold it for you.”

  He grumbled under his breath, although he actually appreciated the fact that she’d thought about him. It would be nice if sometimes his own fiancée would have done the same.