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Dear Lord, he must have gone and fallen in love! And that was why no other woman had ever given him such intense pleasure to look at, such a charged adrenalin rush, such an aching need—
His hormones really started playing up, mushing up his brain, and he took a long gulp of scalding coffee to quiet them down. All last week she hadn’t wanted to know him, had frozen him out with frigid politeness. Now she wanted marriage—and was wiling to pay for it!
He looked into her troubled blue eyes, his own skimming down to note the way she was chewing on a corner of her mouth as she waited for him to respond, and said, ‘Why? Are you pregnant?’
It was the first explanation that came into his head. Why else would a beautiful woman want a husband, any husband, unless she’d been made pregnant, wanted a father for the coming child because its natural one had run away?
A rosy blush spread from her primly buttoned neckline to the roots of her hair as she repudiated quickly, ‘No, of course not!’
Which brought him right back to where he’d started from. Of course not, he thought, deploring his own stupidity. She could hardly get impregnated if her partner wasn’t of the opposite gender.
To give himself time to get his head straight he angled away from the table and hooked one arm over the back of the chair, offering her a suave exterior that was completely at odds with the turmoil going on inside him, and prodding, ‘Then why don’t you tell me why you want to marry? And why pick me?’
Allie was fighting to stay cool, to squash the impulse to get up and run. The laid-back character who had hung around most evenings last week was nothing like the man who was facing her across the table now. This man looked tough, as if he could command huge international armies with the lift of one straight black brow. All sharp edges, and then some.
So how could she tell him that she believed he’d do anything for a hand-out?
Only once this morning had he seemed like the man she had come to know—unwillingly, she reminded herself—and that had been when she’d said she wanted him to marry her. He’d worn the same expression as he had when she’d first thanked him for helping her mother. Shellshocked.
He was waiting, and of course he had a right to hear the reasons for her proposal. To him it must have sounded like the ravings of a lunatic!
His golden eyes were alert, despite his relaxed position. And the way he’d hooked an arm over the back of the chair somehow forced her eyes to where the soft fabric of his T-shirt outlined his overpowering masculinity, those strong wide shoulders, the broad chest that tapered down to a flat, narrow waist.
She bit down on her lip and lowered her eyes. So he was sexy. So what? He was still the same person, struggling to earn a living. So get on with it, woman, spit it out, she exhorted herself, then took a deep breath, laid the palms of her hands flat on the table and told herself she had nothing to lose.
‘My uncle, Fabian Brannan, left me a property in Shropshire on condition that I was married at the time of his death or within one month after it. I don’t want it, and I certainly don’t want to be married.’ She raised her eyes to hold his, and there was no disputing the sincerity of that final statement. ‘But my mother wants Studley Manor. She spent the happiest years of her life there and she would give anything to be able to go back.’
Her tiny sigh was soft, barely ruffling her breath, but he heard it and, cursing the way she could so easily rouse his protective instincts, intrigue him, he found himself asking softly, ‘So why did she leave it?’
‘Fabian wanted it back,’ she told him, and if she sounded bitter she couldn’t help it. ‘My grandfather had two sons: Fabian, and Mark, my father. Dad was the youngest by several years, and apparently considered to be a no-account weakling, a hopeless dreamer. When Grandfather died the family home, Studley Manor, went to Fabian. He had no use for the place, no desire to live in the sticks, and was busy making his fortune in London
and living the life of a rake, by all accounts. But he grudgingly agreed to let my parents use it when they knew I was on the way. A five-year lease and a modest rent.
‘Dad wrote fiction. Not very successfully, but he earned enough to scrape by. The lack of money didn’t matter to them; they were happy—two dreamy romantics living in cloud-cuckoo-land. Crunch time came when I was fifteen. Fabian wanted us out and refused to renew the third lease. Against all our expectations he’d decided to marry, and his future wife had a yen to play Lady of the Manor.’
Her mouth had tightened, he noted. There was a white line around her unpainted lips. ‘So you and your parents were out?’
She nodded, picked up the spoon from her saucer and began turning it round and round. Then she dropped it and folded her hands together quickly, as if the nervous gesture had betrayed her. When she spoke again her voice was cool and controlled, and he wondered if she always bottled up her emotions, and what would happen if they were released.
‘We left Studley and came to live with my mother’s sister. Fran. Her husband had recently walked out on her. We were to stay until Dad could find us a place to rent. I can remember Mother trying to be brave, saying it didn’t matter if the place he found was falling down, so long as it was back in the country and had a garden. They were like two bewildered children. Then…’ Her voice shook, but she controlled it. ‘The publishers Dad had been with for years sold out to one of the big international outfits. They refused to renew his contract. They considered his work to be dated, said it didn’t fit the market. Two blows in quick succession. He’d lost our home and he’d lost his only source of income. He wasn’t strong enough to take it. He took his own life instead.’
Instinctively Jethro reached over and covered her hands with his own. ‘That was tough, Allie.’ She made no attempt to draw her hands away and he was glad of that, because all he wanted to give her at this moment was the comfort of caring human contact.
Her fingers unfurled slowly and curled around his, as if she were grateful for the warmth and strength of him. He eased his breath out gently and said, ‘Have you considered that although your mother wants to go back, or thinks she does, she might find the memories too painful to bear if it actually happened?’
‘Oh, no.’ She seemed quite adamant about that; there was even a ghost of a smile playing at the corners of her mouth. ‘Two years after Dad died we heard that Studley was empty again. Fabian’s wife was suing for divorce, was living in France, and he’d moved back to London. When my mother heard that, it was as if she’d come to life again. She travelled up to see him—she had such plans. I’d left school, and was wondering how to make money fast and legally, and she wanted to go back—believed she and I could start a small nursery in the walled garden, make a go of it. And sure, Fabian told her, we could move back to Studley, do as we pleased with it—provided he got regular “visiting rights”. He’d always fancied her, thought her too good for his useless wimp of a brother.’ Allie shrugged fatalistically. ‘So that was that. No dice.’
She looked him full in the face, her deep blue eyes glittering. ‘Fulfilling the conditions of his will now would serve two objectives. Giving Laura back her lost happiness, the joy of being where she wants to be, doing what she wants to do. And getting the better of Fabian for once. That,’ she told him firmly, ‘is why I have to go back to the solicitor within the next three weeks with a husband on my arm.’
‘Why me?’
She looked at him blankly, then slowly withdrew her hands from his, as if only now becoming aware of how tightly she’d been holding on to him. ‘Because I don’t know of any other man who’d consent to the sort of marriage I have in mind,’ she told him honestly. His compassion had eased something between them, allowing her to slough off the earlier tension, open up. ‘And I figured you might find the money handy.’ Dimples appeared at the corners of her mouth. ‘You could even buy yourself new transport. Heaven knows, you need it.’
‘And what sort of marriage do you have in mind?’ He thought he knew, and she confirmed it.
‘Nominal. You pick up the money and we put on a united front in public until Studley’s legally mine. But behind closed doors it’s separate rooms, separate lives. Then, after a decent interval—twelve months, say—you leave me, or I leave you. Irreconcilable differences.’
Twelve months of being bought and paid for, living with her and yet not living with her, knowing there was no way he could make her change her mind about the separate rooms angle because she liked her bread buttered on the other side. It would drive him crazy.
