Welcome to Mills & Boon. Jennifer Rae

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       CHAPTER ONE

      FLYNN STARED AT HER, a hint of panic in his usually calm and collected brown eyes. Helena gazed back, hoping she looked slightly less like a small wild animal caught in the open by a predator than he did.

      She had to admit, though, that was unlikely. This was very new territory for both of them.

      ‘While I know that what we just did was very noble and right and championed the cause of true love and so on...what on earth do we do now?’ Flynn asked.

      Helena’s mind whirred with the possibilities, just as it had been doing since the moment her sister ran out of the door, leaving her holding both the pearl-encrusted ivory wedding dress and the proverbial baby. They didn’t have much in the way of options, and one choice kept rising to the top of the very short list.

      ‘Help me out of this dress.’ She placed Thea’s wedding dress carefully on a padded armchair, then twisted to try and reach the zip at the back of her own flamingo-pink bridesmaid’s dress. Not a chance. No one had arms that bent like that.

      She looked up at Flynn. He was still staring at her.

      Men. Hopeless in a crisis.

      Although, actually, before today she’d have wagered that Flynn would be pretty good in an emergency. By all accounts, he’d handled the discovery that his fiancée had slept with his brother less than twenty-four hours before their wedding with remarkable aplomb. He’d managed the news that he was about to inherit sole responsibility for a multinational media conglomerate without breaking a sweat. He’d even let the aforementioned fiancée, Helena’s sister, run out and elope with her true love moments before the wedding without looking particularly perturbed.

      But apparently Helena in her underwear was pushing him too far.

      With a sigh, she turned to present him with her back and the offending zip. ‘Just undo me, yeah?’

      Flynn hesitated a moment before she felt his warm fingertips against her back. ‘Why am I doing this?’

      ‘Because I need to get changed. Into that.’ She pointed at the wedding dress and felt Flynn’s hands still at her back.

      ‘No. No, you don’t. We’ll just go down to the church and...’

      She spun round to face him. ‘And what? Tell every business associate you have plus a nice collection of reporters—not to mention both sets of parents—that the wedding of the year is off?’ Helena shook her head. That option was very firmly a last resort. Never mind the tabloid fallout, or the impact on company shares—her father would have a heart attack.

      ‘Surely that has to be better than us getting...’ He waved a hand between them and she rolled her eyes.

      ‘Married, Flynn. Go on, you can say it. It’s not actually a dirty word. You were all set to do it with my sister, and I suspect you weren’t any more in love with her than she was with you. As evidenced by the fact you just told her to elope with Zeke.’

      ‘That was different,’ Flynn argued. ‘Thea and I had a plan. There was...paperwork.’

      The man was completely business bound. Grabbing the file the wedding planner had put together for Thea, Helena pulled out a spare invitation, grabbed the pen from its loop and scratched out her sister’s name to replace it with her own. Then, as an afterthought, she scribbled a few lines on the back on it. ‘Paperwork,’ she said, handing it to Flynn. ‘Happy now?’

      ‘“I, Helena Morrison, promise to marry Flynn Ashton purely to avoid the hideous fallout of my sister’s elopement,”’ Flynn read. ‘Helena, this is—’

      ‘Keep going.’ Helena reached behind her to try and work the zip down the last few inches, finally succeeding in wriggling the strapless dress past СКАЧАТЬ