Eternal Vows. Rochelle Alers

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      Chapter 1

      Peyton Blackstone lay on her back, staring up at the gossamer fabric draping the four-poster bed. She’d turned off the air-conditioning the night before, leaving the windows open overnight to take advantage of the cooling temperatures.

      Pinpoints of light painted the dawning sky with streaks of pink and lavender and the woodpecker living in the tree outside her bedroom window had begun tapping his beak against the bark in a rhythmic cadence that set her teeth on edge. She didn’t need an alarm clock to wake her, not as long as she had her feathery neighbor.

      Peyton knew she had to get up and check on a mare recovering from a localized infection of the skin before driving over to a neighboring horse farm to pick up Celia Cole-Thomas. She and Celia had an eleven o’clock appointment at a Staunton salon for a beauty makeover. Later that afternoon Celia was scheduled to exchange vows with her fiancé. The ceremony would take place in the garden at Celia’s brother’s horse farm. The resident minister at Blackstone Farms would officiate, while Nicholas Cole-Thomas had invited everyone living on farms within a twenty-mile radius to attend the reception.

      Celia and her fiancé, Gavin Faulkner, had come to Virginia to marry and at the last possible moment decided to hold the ceremony at Cole-Thom Farms rather than at the local courthouse. Peyton, after embarrassingly revealing she liked Celia’s brother, had been recruited by Celia to stand in as her maid of honor, while Gavin had asked Nicholas to be his best man. However, she knew Celia’s attempt to play matchmaker was destined for failure. Whenever Nicholas visited Blackstone Farms to meet with his mentor, he would give her a barely perceptible nod, looking through her as if she didn’t exist.

      When she’d returned to Blackstone Farms after completing her studies for a degree in veterinary medicine, Peyton had asked her cousin about his protégé. Sheldon Blackstone was forthcoming when he told her about the swirling rumors weeks before Nicholas arrived to claim the prime land his agent had secured for him in an auction pitting him against the owner of Thornton Farms. Nicholas’s representative finally quoted a price that far exceeded what Jubal Thornton was prepared or able to meet, and over four hundred acres and a dilapidated mansion were deeded to the new owner who set up Cole-Thom Farms.

      Sheldon also revealed it’d taken Nicholas more than a year to restore the mansion to its original grandeur and another year to erect one- and two-bedroom prefab cottages, connecting dormitory-style buildings for resident employees, a dining hall and two state-of-the-art modern stables. Viewed as an outsider, Nicholas was touted as brash, vain, arrogant and an upstart after he’d purchased several Arabians for breeding purposes. There was even more chatter about him. No one had seen him with a woman and this simply added to the mystique of the tall, dark, handsome horse breeder.

      Sitting up, Peyton swept back a lightweight blanket, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. She combed her fingers through the hair falling over her forehead and around her face. Her feet touched the floor at the same time her cell phone vibrated on the bedside table. Reaching for the phone, she stared at it. An unfamiliar number was displayed on the screen. She punched in her pass code, deciding to answer the call.

      “Hello.”

      “Hey, baby. I knew you would be up. You always were an early riser.”

      The voice on the other end of the connection raised bumps on her exposed flesh. “Why the hell are you calling me?”

      “Is that any way to greet your husband?”

      She gritted her teeth. “Ex-husband, Reggie.” Peyton knew he hated when she called him Reggie.

      His deep laugh came through the earpiece. “I’ll always think of you as my wife, Peyton.”

      Her hand tightened around the phone. “I don’t want you to ever call me again.”

      “Don’t you want to hear what I have to say?”

      “No! You said and did enough when we were together.” Peyton pressed her thumb to the touch screen, ending the call.

      She didn’t want to believe he had the audacity to call her when she’d told him emphatically she never wanted to see or hear from him again. And Peyton didn’t want to believe that the man with whom she’d wanted to spend her life turned out to be a fraud. When she filed for divorce she didn’t know which of his names to use, so it’d become Reginald Matthews aka Ronald Mitchell, aka Richard Morris. The only consistent thing was his initials. СКАЧАТЬ