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‘You haven’t told her, have you, darling?’
‘Told me what?’ Claire demanded.
At the same time Heather said, gaping, ‘Told her what?’
‘About us…’ Theo felt a powerful kick of sweet satisfaction as he strolled towards Heather. Claire looked as though she had been whacked on the head by a sledgehammer. Her mouth had formed a perfect circle of pure astonishment.
He slung his arm around Heather’s shoulder and pulled her against him, expecting some resistance but encountering none. He didn’t know why, but his heart was soaring. He could feel her tremble slightly, and he wanted to tip her face up to his and kiss her.
‘About you?’ Claire looked between them in bewilderment. ‘What about you?’
‘That we’re engaged…’
Heather was appalled by the lie, but just for a few precious moments she savoured the unique sight of her sister looking utterly flabbergasted. The colour had left her face and her attempts to speak emerged as strangled gasps.
Through the fog of her muddled thoughts she was aware of Theo talking, expressing surprise that the little confidence hadn’t been shared between sisters—but then they weren’t exactly close, were they?
In the middle of his coolly confident revelation Claire leapt to her feet and shot off to the bathroom with a handful of clothes, to re-emerge seconds later, upon which she slammed out of the flat without so much as a goodbye.
Heather felt inclined to say a big thank you to Theo for providing that moment of uncharitable satisfaction—which was wrong, she knew, but she was only human after all, and it would do Claire no harm at all to discover that her sister wasn’t the complete nitwit she seemed to think she was.
Instead, she wriggled away from Theo and turned to face him, chin up, arms folded.
‘What possessed you to say that?’
‘Are you going to tell me that you didn’t get a kick when you saw her face?’ In truth, Theo didn’t know what had possessed him. Why had he said that? And why did he feel disinclined to unsay it?
‘That’s beside the point,’ Heather stormed. ‘What gives you the right to come here on a rescue mission? No, don’t interrupt!’ She flung herself onto the sofa and hugged one of the cushions to her. Tears squeezed themselves out of the corners of her eyes. ‘You felt sorry for me. Am I right? Poor Heather can’t look after herself when it comes to the big, wide world. And she can’t look after herself when it comes to tackling her sister.’
Theo walked towards her and sat at one end of the sofa, keeping his distance with difficulty.
When there was no reply to her self-pitying outburst she finally looked at him, and looked away just as quickly. Something in his eyes seemed to suck the breath out of her body.
Heather no longer trusted her responses to this man. She reminded herself that in his presence she was continually walking on quicksand. She had given herself wholly to him, and in her naïveté had been pushed away. She wasn’t going to repeat the same mistake twice. Although his expression was tearing down her defences and making her want to rush into his arms.
‘I can’t believe you would enter into this stupid charade all over again,’ she said in an unsteady voice.
‘That would be crazy,’ Theo agreed in a low voice.
‘Claire isn’t going to just disappear conveniently, like your mother did, leaving you the chance to fabricate some story about us drifting apart. She’s going to be around, and she’s going to be asking loads of questions that I won’t be able to answer.’
‘I expect she will be.’
Heather looked at him in angry frustration. It was okay for him to sit there, staring at her and agreeing with everything she said, but he wasn’t going to have to pick up the pieces. Claire might have been stunned by his revelation, but admitting the truth to her would be equally dramatic. Heather shuddered when she thought about it.
‘You have no right to barge into my life and turn it upside down,’ she muttered, with heartfelt honesty, and Theo gave her the strangest of looks.
‘I might say the same thing about you,’ he murmured, flushing darkly.
‘I made your life easier.’ Heather glared at him over the cushion. ‘I was always there, making sure your fridge was stocked and your apartment was clean, buying things for people you didn’t have time to buy for, and never complaining when you pointed me in the direction of your computer at ridiculous hours of the night because you had some e-mail or other that just couldn’t wait.’ She could hear the wobble in her voice as she lashed out at him, but she couldn’t seem to help herself any more. Life, recently, had been careering off its tracks, and the arrival of her sister had catapulted it straight off the road.
‘You did.’
‘And you can stop agreeing with me!’ she fumed. ‘If you think I’m going to tell you that it was okay for you to concoct a lie about us because Claire was being obnoxious, then you’re wrong! I don’t need you to save me!’
‘No, you don’t. But maybe I need you to save me.’
Heather looked at him in sudden confusion. Was this some ploy? Some other remark that she would stupidly proceed to misinterpret, only to repent her mistake afterwards? But his face, as he leaned towards her, was filling her head with a thousand forbidden thoughts and hopes, and her heart was fluttering wildly inside her.
‘Don’t,’ she said abruptly, slipping off the sofa and retreating to the window, where she stood and watched him guardedly from a safe distance.
‘Don’t what?’
‘Trick me with words.’
In mesmerised fascination she watched as he proceeded to follow her, until he was standing right in front of her, then he leant against the wall and stared down at her. ‘Tricking you is the one thing I never intended to do,’ he murmured roughly. ‘If you think that’s what I did, then I apologise.’
‘You apologise?’ She looked at him in confusion. ‘You never apologise, Theo.’
‘The fact is,’ he said heavily, ‘the only person I managed to trick was myself.’ He couldn’t help his hand reaching into her hair, smoothing it away from her face, or his thumb caressing her temple. ‘We shared the same space, and I kidded myself that the reason I started looking forward to returning to my apartment had nothing to do with the fact that I would find you there. Then we slept together, and I told myself that it was just sex, that there was nothing more involved. When you left I did my damnedest to accept the obvious truth, which was that that was the way it should be because my life had no room for anything more than passing relationships that wouldn’t interrupt the big picture. What I didn’t realise was that the big picture was all about you.’
‘What are you saying?’ Heather did her best to choke back the flood of hope. She closed her eyes briefly, wishing for this moment to never end.
‘You know what I’m saying. I came here to win you back. But I want more than that. I don’t just want you back in my apartment, or back in my bed on a temporary basis. I want you in my life for ever.’
‘For ever?’
‘Isn’t that what you want too?’ He smiled slowly at her, and Heather felt happiness swirl through her from the tips of her toes to the top of her head.
‘Yes, I love you. I’ve always known that.’
‘And I love you too. But, fool that I am, I’ve only just realised it.’
Heather’s eyes rounded.
‘I hadn’t planned on telling your sister that we were engaged, but the minute I said it, it was like wham! Everything slotted into place. And I knew that being engaged to you, being married to you, spending the rest of my life with you, was exactly what I wanted. And you love me.’ He murmured that with considerable masculine satisfaction. ‘So will you marry me…?’
Theo did not waste any time. Within four weeks—the most joyful four weeks Heather could ever have envisaged—arrangements were made and they were married in Greece, surrounded by family and friends and fussed over by his mother.
Claire was invited, and she attended. Reversing the power balance within their relationship was going to take time, but they were already on the way. Claire had poured her heart out to Heather, had admitted that America had been a big mistake and that she had become involved with a married man who had damaged her emotionally, leaving her badly equipped to discover a sister who was not only going somewhere with her career but in love with a man who adored her back.
Now she rented the flat that had been Heather’s, as Heather and Theo had moved to his country house—the perfect place, Theo said, grinning, in which to bring up the children they would have together.
In the silence of the bedroom, after a blissful marathon of lovemaking, Heather gazed adoringly at Theo as he slept, his ridiculously long lashes drooping against his cheekbones. His hand rested possessively across her and she sighed with pure pleasure, adjusting her body so that long brown fingers slipped across her breast and lay there. He opened his eyes and smiled at her.
‘You wanton woman,’ he murmured in a low, sexy voice. He marvelled at how, every time he looked at her, he felt his heart swell with pure adoration.
‘Well…’ she gazed at him with a smile ‘…we have to get a move on if we’re to fill some of these bedrooms with the pitter-patter of tiny feet…’
