Free The Marriage Merger by Sandy Curtis Page B

bed and Jenna took off her sneakers.
For a minute they both stood gazing down at the sleeping child and
Jenna had a wonderful sense of family intimacy. In one short week
she had come to love this small child. She murmured dreamily.
“She’s so like you, Braden. Don’t you wish that one day you’ll fall
in love and get married and have children of your own?”
    Jenna’s jaw dropped at the anger that
suffused his face. He whirled and strode out of the room.
     
     
     

CHAPTER SIX
     
     
    Jenna gathered her wits and walked after him.
What had caused that reaction? It was meant as a rhetorical
question. She had never suspected that he might not want to have
children, but surely someone who loved Caitlin the way he did would
want children of his own?
    He was standing in the courtyard, gazing out
towards the opposite bank of the river, his long legs apart, his
stance rigid. As she walked up to him she could see a muscle
twitching in the tight line of his jaw. Something in what she had
said had obviously touched a raw nerve. Hot-tempered though she
was, Jenna would never knowingly cause pain to anyone. She placed a
tentative hand on his arm.
    “Braden?”
    He didn’t move or acknowledge her presence.
His eyebrows were drawn together as though he was searching for
something in the far off distance. The tendons under her hand were
hard as steel and she realised his hands were clenched into
fists.
    She repeated his name.
    Suddenly he turned and glared at her.
    “When I marry, it won’t be for a reason as
ridiculous as love. There will be no illusions to be shattered. The
woman I marry will know exactly what she’s getting and I intend to
make sure I know exactly what I’m getting. I have no intention of
making the same mistake my father did.”
    For a brief flickering moment, pain flared
across his face. Who had hurt him so badly Jenna wondered. She
could feel the raw emotion emanating from him.
    “And what mistake was that?” she asked
softly.
    His lips thinned into a grim line.
    “He married my mother for love. Unfortunately
it wasn’t reciprocated. My father was quite well off when they were
married but she wanted more. She finally got it by running off with
another man - one with four times the money my father had. The fact
that she had abandoned her two children didn’t seem to bother her.
Then she had the gall to screw my father for all she could get when
she divorced him.”
    Jenna wondered about Braden’s father. It
wouldn’t have been easy for a man to have been left with two young
children.
    “How did your father cope?”
    Disgust vied with derision across grim lips
and glacial eyes. “He coped by turning Alicia over to the latest
housekeeper and sending me to boarding school. His love for our
mother didn’t include his children.”
    Jenna shuddered. “How old were you?”
    “Twelve.” He spat out the word.
    Twelve. A very impressionable age in a young
boy’s life. And judging by the pain and anger Braden obviously
found so difficult to control it had left a deep scar on his
psyche. Compassion stronger than she’d ever felt flooded Jenna’s
being.
    “So the woman I ask to be my wife will have
to be financially independent before we marry.” Braden’s voice was
cold. “At least that way I know her attraction to me is not based
on avarice. She will be a woman who can cope with the fact that I
won’t be available when business matters keep me away from home for
days and weeks at a time; she will be a suitable hostess for the
dinner parties I have to give; and she will agree to have my
children.”
    Jenna realised all but the last criteria
applied to Veronica. Was Braden saying he had picked Veronica for
his wife? If he thought Veronica would have his children Jenna was
sure he was mistaken. She had seen Veronica’s loathing for Caitlin
but realised how quickly she disguised this around Braden.
    “You make it sound like a merger,” she
whispered.
    “A merger.” He ran the word around on