Lord Sebastian Griffiths would do anything for his beloved dying mother. But he didn’t see this one coming: to see him married before she died.
Sebastian, a 38-year-old confirmed bachelor, liked things done his way and his way only. Sebastian considered a wife to be an embarrassing, time- consuming, meddling and unnecessary addition to his life.
After consulting with Dennis Burrows, a solicitor and good friend from university, he forms a plan to buy a temporary wife who could be paid off.
Isabel couldn’t believe her own father would sell her into marriage. After spending nine years in debtors’ prison looking after him, Isabel had become a strong, independent woman. It was that or fall apart and die from hunger.
But Isabel wasn’t ready for Sebastian. He was an attractive, arrogant, dangerous pig, yet she’d gone ahead with the marriage, for the love of her father, and the chance to get him out of the hellhole they had been living in for the last nine years.
Sebastian is caught unawares by the passion he experiences with Isabel. After his mother dies and he leaves Isabel for the second time, he realises he’s truly fallen in love with his own wife. Miserable and drowning his sorrows he is rescued by Burrows, who knows his friend has to pull himself together for the sake of his unborn child, whose existence Sebastian has yet to discover.
Will Sebastian be able to find the courage to go back to Isabel and win her heart, or will she turn him out like the rat he’s been?
Sold into Marriage
by
Maxi Shelton
Chapter 1
Lord Sebastian Griffiths was pacing around the office of his solicitor, Dennis Burrows. Burrows was the only person Sebastian could turn to at a time like this. Burrows and Sebastian had been good friends since their days at university together
The problem was that Sebastian’s mother was fatally ill and had announced that her dying wish was to see her only son—not to mention only living heir—married before she died.
Normally Sebastian wouldn’t stop at anything to provide or do whatever his beloved mother asked. But this was the one thing Sebastian hadn’t seen coming. He had no objections to marriage itself, but it just wasn’t something he had ever desired for himself. In fact, it was the last thing Sebastian wanted.
He was happy with the life he had: he possessed more money than he could ever spend and did whatever and went wherever he pleased. The idea of answering to someone—and more importantly, a woman who whined and nagged—well, it simply sent him into a cold sweat.
Burrows had been so-called happily married for the last nine years but had gone grey over those years and become rounder around the middle and basically tired looking. Many men his age were. Sebastian was thirty-eight years old, with not a single grey hair in sight, and still in the same shape he’d been in as a youth. More importantly, he was free and answered to no one. There was no wife to embarrass him at social events, no little woman putting demands on his time.
What in God’s name was his mother thinking? Get married?
“Don’t you have a thing to drink in this office?” snapped Sebastian.
“No, and you know that. Now sit down; you’re making me dizzy.”
Sebastian reluctantly sat in one of the leather chairs in front of Burrows’s desk. The office was a relatively large room, decorated in a dark, imposing green colour, with heavy, bulky furniture. The office was stuffed with shelves and cabinets. The solicitor’s desk was always piled high with numerous papers and files.
