The Engagement Deal

‘I thought it was Tuesday morning.’

‘It must have been some party.’

Even though a stunned Holly was still coming to terms with the fact she’d slept around the clock, and then some, she couldn’t miss that definite austere note of disapproval in his deep voice.

‘You sound like my mother.’ It wasn’t parties that her mother disapproved of, it was the hours that her younger daughter—as a newly qualified junior doctor—was expected to work. The farewell party after a straight sixty hours on call in the busy casualty department had probably not been a good idea. She had meant it as a joke when she’d laughingly said she was going to spend her fort-night’s holiday sleeping!

‘I hope you’ll respect Rowena’s property while you’re staying here.’ Niall suddenly had alarming visions of this girl and her equally wild friends trashing the place. ‘Rowena does know you’re staying here?’

Holly thought a little guiltily of the smashed pig. If only, she thought wistfully, he’d sounded this stuffy when I was sixteen, I’d never have lost a single night’s sleep. Mind you, there was a certain novelty value to being regarded as a dangerous person.

‘My secret’s out: I’m a squatter!’ She gave him a scathing look that would have shrivelled lesser mortals where they stood, or in this case sat. ‘I need a drink. Don’t worry, I mean coffee,’ she added acidly.

‘Feeling hung over?’

‘No!’ Holly glanced angrily over her shoulder.

She continued to futilely open cupboard doors in her search of a jar of coffee, aware that he followed her as if he was well used to treating the place like home. His next words confirmed his familiarity with his surroundings.

‘The coffee’s in here,’ he informed her, reaching into an eye-level cupboard—well, eye level for him, anyway; she’d have needed a step ladder. ‘Rowena always drinks the instant stuff.’

Holly, who had trouble finding time to eat, let alone brew proper coffee, snatched the jar from his unresisting hand. ‘I haven’t found my way around the kitchen yet. I’ve not actually been in that much.’

That he could believe. He watched as she filled a glass with water.

‘Alcohol sends your electrolytes up the chute. That’s why you’re so thirsty.’ Now I’ve started sounding like my father! Hell! What is it about this girl that brings out the stern parent in me? He hadn’t forgotten the last time he’d had to step in to save her from her own stupidity—nor what he had got for his troubles!

‘I don’t need a lecture on physiology,’ she told him drily. Even if she hadn’t read her books like the good student she had been, she’d had a wealth of practical evidence to back up the theory since she’d been working in Casualty. The gentle tap that had given her the black eye hadn’t been the first time a drunk had got physical with her! This one had taken exception to her efforts to suture up his head wound.

‘I take it black.’ Holly regarded him blankly. ‘Coffee: I take my coffee black, no sugar.’

‘You’re a very pushy person,’ she told him, spooning granules into a second mug. If anyone had told me twenty-four—no, make that forty-eight hours ago, she corrected, that I’d be making coffee for Niall Wesley…! ‘Why do you need a fiancée?’ she asked, her curiosity greater at that moment than the growing desire to visit the bathroom. ‘Just for the night.’

‘Tonight I’m going to dinner with a woman who wants to marry me.’

Holly bit her quivering lower lip. His doom-laden announcement made her want to laugh out loud. She felt a spurt of unholy glee to see the roles of predator and victim apparently so neatly reversed.

‘And you wanted to use Rowena as a shield.’ She could instantly see where he was going; her sister was so drop-dead gorgeous that most women would be suitably intimidated. Hadn’t she spent her entire adolescence being intimidated by her elder sister’s perfection? ‘How do you know she—this woman—wants to marry you?’ This could be the arrogant assumption of a man who knew himself to be irresistible to the opposite sex.

‘She told me.’

Holly’s eyebrows shot up. The amorous female was not an advocate of the subtle approach, then. ‘She might have been joking.’

Niall gave a dry laugh. ‘Believe me, she wasn’t,’ he told her heavily.

‘How can you be so…?’

‘It’s Tara.’

Holly dropped the milk carton and it spattered all over Rowena’s stainless steel splashback. ‘Not the same Tara…?’ she asked hoarsely.

Niall had taken over the task of making the coffee as Holly seemed to have lost interest. ‘The same one I married and divorced. The mother of my child…Yes, that’s the one.’

‘Gosh!’

‘A more socially acceptable way of phrasing that instantly springs to my mind, but definitely…Gosh.’

‘I thought she was living with that actor in—’

‘Was is the right word. Now she’s living wherever I happen to be,’ he announced, in the voice of a man whose patience was wearing thin. ‘I was in Paris, Tara appears; ditto in Los Angeles…’

‘I’m sure she travels a great deal. Models do.’

‘A book festival in Munich…?’

‘Perhaps not,’ Holly conceded.

‘There’s no perhaps about it.’

‘Wasn’t she the one who did the leaving?’

He nodded, noticing she’d seemed to relish reminding him of this fact. ‘She’s dripping remorse now. She wants to make it all up to me.’

He didn’t sound exactly overjoyed at the prospect, but Holly wondered if this wasn’t a matter of him protesting just a bit too much. She’d have thought the idea of Tara Steel, supermodel—she of the endless legs and gravity-defying ample bosom—making amends would have sent most males delirious with delight.

‘Why don’t you just tell her you don’t want to marry her…again?’ It seemed to her that he was creating problems where there weren’t any. Or perhaps this was all part of a token resistance.

‘I’ve tried, but she doesn’t believe me, and I don’t want to hurt her,’ he announced astonishingly. ‘The press gave the poor angel such a bad time when we split up, and when I got custody of Thomas they got really vicious.’ There was no mistaking the warmth towards his ex-wife in his voice. ‘Sugar?’ he enquired, spoon in hand.

Poor angel! Holly gaped at him incredulously. The way the tabloids had told it—and, yes, she had read every single word—his model wife had dumped him when he’d quit the glamorous Formula One circuit and left him literally holding the baby! Did this mean he was still in love with her…?

Heavens, she thought, aggravated by her fascination with the state of his emotions, what’s wrong with me? Two minutes ago, I had him in love with Rowena. Anyone would think I gave a damn.

He looked genuinely distracted as he absently stirred his coffee. For once, he seemed to have forsaken his habitual urbane poise. ‘Tara is a woman on a mission,’ he told her in a tone of deep foreboding. ‘She wants to rescue me from a lonely, aimless existence.’

‘Do you have a lonely, aimless existence?’ she asked unsympathetically. If he did, he only had himself to blame.

‘Being single equates with lonely and aimless in Tara’s eyes.’

‘My heart bleeds.’ She stopped short of smirking outright—but only just. She widened her eyes innocently when he shot a savage glare in her direction.

‘I enjoy my single state.’

‘Yes, I think I read something about that the other week in the newspaper my fish and chips were wrapped up in.’ He’d been enjoying his single state in the back of a limousine with a young actress barely wearing a stunning outfit.

Annoyance flickered in his eyes as he bent his dark head in acknowledgement of her sly words. ‘The awards ceremony debacle,’ he said grimly. ‘If I weren’t a gentleman, I’d say the same thing to you that I did to that photographer. For your information, that stunt was a put-up job.’ He ground his teeth as the little witch actually giggled.

‘Of course it was,’ she soothed. ‘Couldn’t you have asked—what was her name?—to help you out?’ Holly bit her trembling lower lip. ‘She looked to be a very obliging sort of girl,’ she choked.