Bad Brides by Rebecca Chance Page A

her mom into the fracking business; she didn’t have the drive or the ambition to run a company,
and Tamra was no believer in nepotism. With her sweet nature and domestic tendencies, all Brianna Jade wanted – really, pretty much all she had ever wanted – was to marry a nice guy and
start having a home and kids. Fine, but why shouldn’t Tamra get the best husband possible for her daughter? Not just nice, but titled too? Prince Hugo was married, and Prince Toby, his
cousin, was famously too wild a playboy to make a good husband, but if she couldn’t get a prince for her Fracking Princess, a Duke or an Earl would do nicely . . .
    Tamra’s glass was empty. She refilled it from the bottle resting inside the built-in veneered wine cooler, an addition she had insisted Bentley custom-make, and for which they’d
billed her a fortune.
    Well, I did it. I snagged my baby an Earl, just like on
Downton Abbey
, and a lovely one too. He’ll make her a great husband – Lord knows, I know men, and I picked a good
one out for Brianna Jade. And all those bitches who ruled West Palm Beach and looked down on me and my daughter for coming from hog country are gonna feel like their stomachs are burning up with
acid for the rest of their lives every time they read about the Countess of Respers in the society magazines.
    It was the icing on the cake. Tamra would never have insisted Brianna Jade marry an aristocrat simply to spite the West Palm Beach Competitive Starvation League, but hey, if their suffering
added whipped cream and cherries to the top of the sundae, Tamra would relish that too. And she sure as hell did. It was time to celebrate.
    Let’s go shopping
, she thought with an even more cat-got-the-cream smile.
Mommy needs some me time.
    She set down her glass, used the remote control to bring up the internet on the screen in front of her – the Flying Spur had a built-in Wi-Fi hub – and navigated swiftly to one of
her favourite sites, inputting her search criteria and scrolling through the results with considerable interest. After much consideration, she picked two options, placed her order, specified the
delivery time and logged off in the happy certainty of a job very well done. She emailed some instructions to her live-in housekeeper, slid out the wireless headphones from their discreet slot, put
them on, clicked again with the remote and loaded the audiobook of what most people would consider a bizarrely unlikely suggestion for a Fracking Queen to listen to: Edith Wharton’s
The
Buccaneers
.
    But, having caught the bug from
Downton Abbey
, Tamra had become obsessed with biographies of American heiresses who had come to Britain in the nineteenth century to find titled
husbands. Consuelo Vanderbilt, with a vast dowry garnered from her father’s US railways, had married the Duke of Marlborough, while his brother, Lord Randolph Churchill, had snapped up Jennie
Jerome. May Goelet, the richest American girl of all, had been sponsored into society by the Prince of Wales himself, and had her choice of European royalty and half a dozen British peers before
finally settling on the Duke of Roxburghe. Then there was Winnaretta Singer, of the sewing-machine fortune, who went to France and snagged the Prince de Polignac. It turned out it was way easier to
find princes on the Continent, but Tamra was very grateful they hadn’t had to cross the Channel to find BJ a nice aristo husband – it was foreign enough for her in Britain
sometimes.
    And as well as the biographies, there were not only the novels, but the films and TV series adapted from them. The American heroines in fiction all snagged their peers by being bright, sparky,
charming and spirited, like Isabel Boncassen in Anthony Trollope’s
The Duke’s Children
, who married a Marquis who would be Duke one day. Bettina Vanderpoel in
The
Shuttle
fell for an Earl, Lord Mount Dunstan – unlike her poor sister, who only managed a baronet, and a nasty one into the