Bad Brides by Rebecca Chance

not looking back.
She’d worked her ass off, schemed with everything she had to give her daughter a big break that would take BJ into a better life; what she hadn’t expected was that the break would
happen to her, passing through Jacksonville, Florida, pumping gas into her beat-up old Hyundai, which was pretty much held together with duct tape at that point. Ken Maloney, pulling into the gas
station in his shiny silver Lexus convertible, had looked over, seen the way Tamra handled that nozzle and fallen in lust on the spot. And after three consecutive nights spent wining, dining but
most certainly not bedding Tamra, he had fallen in love as well.
    ‘I fell for your pretty face, honey, but I stayed for what was behind it,’ he’d always said to her fondly. Tamra wasn’t educated, but she had a brain like a steel trap,
and Ken took great pleasure in teaching his new bride all about the intricacies of the fracking industry. Tamra had been thirty-five then, Ken seventy-four; she had been honest with him, had told
him that she wasn’t in love with him when he proposed, and Ken had responded that if she’d pretended she was he would have taken back the offer. And of course she was grateful to Ken,
not just for his kindness to her but to Brianna Jade, who had been nineteen when Tamra and Ken married.
    Ken had saved them just as Tamra was really starting to panic about her and BJ’s future, but he’d always maintained he’d got the best end of the bargain. Tamra had kept him
laughing from morning till night, and proved such a natural in the fracking business that he’d brought her in as an equal partner, tearing up the prenup on their second anniversary. By their
fifth, he’d dropped dead of a major heart attack, but he’d always said he wanted to go with a smile on his face and Tamra on top of him –
and bless him, that’s exactly
what happened,
his widow thought fondly.
His doctor warned him about how much Viagra he was taking, and Ken just said, ‘Hey, Dr Katz, you’ve seen my wife in her bikini at the
country club, right?’ and Dr Katz sighed and refilled the prescription.
    Tamra had been taken aback at how much she missed Ken. She had come to feel huge affection for her husband, who had adored her and given her so much, and she found herself unwilling to stay in
the home that they had shared and in which they had found a surprising amount of marital happiness. So she had decided on a fresh start, even though the highest ranks of West Palm Beach society
would still be open to her and BJ as long as Tamra upped her donations to the fundraising charities and benefits: Ken Maloney’s widow might not be liked by the women who ran that world, but
her money most certainly was.
    Still, Tamra didn’t want to mope around a marble palace in Florida with memories of Ken everywhere she turned and nowhere further to rise in their social circles. She had much bigger
ambitions. Why stay in the States to be patronized by would-be ladies when she could go to the UK and meet the real ones? On that TV series
Downton Abbey
, the whole set-up was based on the
American heiress who’d gone to Britain and married an Earl who needed the money to fix up his stately home. Well, Tamra was willing to bet there were plenty of titled guys in the UK whose
houses could do with a big cash infusion.
    Besides, she could run the fracking business from the London office perfectly well. Their company had fracked wells successfully in the Ukraine and Poland, which were waiting to be fully
exploited; plus there was the European Union to be lobbied with assurances that fracking could be done responsibly and without the horror stories of polluted drinking water and natural gas
explosions which were rife in the US. The more Tamra considered it, the more she realized that being based in Europe would be a business as well as a personal advantage.
    But Tamra needed to see her daughter settled well. Brianna Jade wasn’t going to follow