Page 1 of A Baby to Make Her His Bride

CHAPTER ONE

VIENNAWAVERLYPARKEDoutside the house she owned but had never seen.

Her brother, Hunter, had bought it a month ago, in the most bizarre way.

“Can I use your numbered shell to buy a house without telling you why?” he had asked. “It’s nothing criminal, I swear.”

“I didn’t think it would be, but I thought you were dissolving those.” They each had a shell company that Hunter had set up to protect their assets while they’d been in litigation with their stepmother.

“I will, but this came up,” he had said.

“What did?” Vienna liked to think she and her brother were close, but it was more accurate to say they were close—adjacent. Kitty-corner. They always had the other’s back, but they also kept things from each other, usually in an effort to protect. She loved Hunter to bits and would do anything for him, but this had been a very odd favor.

“It’s fifty years old,” he had continued in his brisk, close-the-deal manner. “Off-grid, upgraded with solar and water filtration. Great location. The current owners run it as a vacation rental, so it’s furnished and in good repair. I’ll take it offline, though. There won’t be any maintenance or management to worry about. I’ll cover all the fees and taxes and explain why I want it in a few months. Then you can do whatever you want with it. Until then, you can’t mention this to anyone, not even Neal.”

She had barely been talking to her soon-to-be ex-husband, so that had been an easy promise to make.

“Does Amelia know about it?”

“I’ll tell her.” Hunter had left a distinct pause. “When the time is right.”

He had only been married five or six weeks at that point, to a woman who had kept secrets of her own—including the fact that she’d had Hunter’s baby. There’d been a massive scandal over the revelation, including his last-minute cancellation of his wedding to one of Vienna’s best friends.

Since then, Hunter and Amelia had seemed to be falling for each other. If he was hiding something this big from his new bride, however, that was a huge red flag.

“I need your answer now, Vi,” he’d prodded.

“That’s really all you’re going to tell me?”

“Yes.”

Since there were also things she wasn’t ready to tell him, she had felt obliged to trust him even though he was leaving her in the dark. “All right. Yes. Go ahead.”

“Thank you.” He’d sounded relieved. “I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t important.”

“I know.”

She would not have leaned on Hunter’s executive assistant to get here without any trace appearing in her own accounts if it hadn’t been important, either. She would eventually reimburse all the expenses for her two chartered flights, her company credit card and her temporary phone on the Wave-Com account, but dropping off-grid was exactly what she needed right now.

When she had landed in Nanaimo, on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island, a company-leased SUV had awaited her with a full tank of gas and all the groceries she would need. She hadn’t told Hunter’s PA where she was going, but had asked him to forward her new number to Hunter so he would have it when he needed it.

When the proverbial poop hit the propeller, was what she had meant.

That would happen shortly after Neal was served his divorce papers. Vienna’s PR team was cued up with instructions to go on the offensive at that point, with statements that the divorce was a fait accompli.

Never in her life had she been such a sneaky, cutthroat person, but her requests for a quiet, uncontested divorce had been met with faux hurt, promises they could continue trying for a baby, and subtle threats about going to the press with a tell-all about the Waverlys.

That had been last year, when Hunter had been steeped in that ugly court case with Irina, their stepmother. Vienna hadn’t wanted to add to his stress with her own drama, so she had simply asked Neal for space. She began spending all her time at their apartment in Toronto while he remained in Calgary, where he was Wave-Com’s VP of Sales. She had quietly changed her driver’s license, redirected her mail and opened a separate bank account. As long as she maintained the illusion that they were happily married, making herself available for Neal’s work engagements and inviting him to a handful of her family appearances, Neal hadn’t cared.

Shetoldpeople they were separated, though. Not a lot of people, but solid character witnesses for when the time came.

Nevertheless, she knew Neal would play the victim and say this had come out of the blue. He would claim he wanted to reconcile. There was too much money at stake for him to go quietly. Too much cachet in being Hunter Waverly’s brother-in-law.

This story would be yet another gold mine for the clickbait sites, but scandal was unavoidable. That was what Vienna had come to accept. The best she could do was exactly what she’d done. She had waited until Hunter had left with Amelia on a belated honeymoon so the blast radius wouldn’t scorch them too badly.

Now she was taking cover herself to ride out the fallout. The address on the conveyancing documents had brought her to Tofino, one of the soggiest places in Canada, located where the western edge of the country dropped into the brine of the Pacific Ocean.

Neal didn’t know this house existed. Only her lawyer knew where she had gone.

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