The Engagement Deal (2 page)

‘You’re just not listening. It’s quite simple. I wanted Rowena to
pretend
to be my fiancée for tonight.’ He carelessly flicked an invisible speck off his immaculate dark trousers.

‘Pretend?’
The man made it sound a completely normal suggestion. ‘Why…?’ She cleared her throat and continued before he could tell her it was none of her business. ‘Do you drop in many mornings and make requests like that?’

The blue eyes lifted once more to her face. ‘You did say…morning?’

‘So…?’ With a bolshy little glare, she got to her feet. The dignified action was spoilt somewhat by the fact she tripped over the overlong leg of her pyjama trousers. She half-expected to see him smirking when she shot him a dark warning glance, but he wasn’t.

It occurred to Niall for the first time that the pyjamas that totally swamped her diminutive figure belonged, in fact, to a man. Somewhat bizarrely, the idea that she might have been sharing the bed in the adjoining room with a man shocked him.

He supposed he still had her fitted into the niche in his brain marked Rowena’s baby sister, a funny intense little thing with braces. He checked…No, they were gone. There were other changes too, notably the clear creamy complexion. Niall suddenly felt depressingly past his prime.

‘It’s not morning.’

Disbelief showed in her heart-shaped face, closely followed by panic. He was in no position to judge; he’d had some pretty wild nights in his time, too.

‘What day is this?’ she asked after a small frozen pause.

Niall blinked. His hadn’t been
that
wild! ‘It’s Wednesday evening.’ He watched her sink weakly back down into the chair she’d just vacated.

‘Are you serious?’ she asked hoarsely.

‘What day did you think it was?’

‘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.

‘No, I couldn’t!’ he bellowed. ‘I never intended to actually produce a woman. I thought Tara would accept it when I told her I’d fallen in love.’ He looked deeply frustrated by her lack of co-operation.

‘You mean she doesn’t take what you say at face value? How strange,’ Holly puzzled.

‘It just so happens I don’t lie to Tara.’

Holly lifted her brows expressively.

‘Normally,’ he ground out, with an expression which suggested that throttling his interrogator would offer him the greatest satisfaction. ‘I don’t lie, but this is for her own good.’

‘Not to mention yours.’

‘I said I’d produce this woman thinking Rowena would step into the breach. That was before she vanished off the face of the earth. Now…Now I’ve got about—’ he looked down at his watch ‘—about thirty minutes to find a stand-in lover.’

‘I’d have thought there would have been a whole flock of lovelies gagging to help you out.’

He raised guileless blue eyes to her face and mournfully nodded his agreement. ‘The problem is,’ he confided in a slow languid drawl that, had she known it, was pitched deliberately to aggravate her, ‘they wouldn’t all be as happy as Rowena to hand back the ring in the morning. I could well be jumping from the frying-pan into the fire.’

‘God, it must be tough being irresistible!’ Teeth clenched, she sighed sympathetically.

Niall gave her a long thoughtful look. ‘I’d ask you to step into the breach…’ He paused politely while she made a rude derogatory noise in her throat. ‘But I get the impression you don’t like me. Besides, you’re not exactly…’ With a pained expression he tactfully averted his eyes from her colourful striped pyjamas.

‘Not exactly what?’ she jumped in, bristling with suspicion. As if she needed to ask! He was implying, and not very subtly, that nobody would believe a man like him would want to marry a girl like her.

Holly’s firm chin went up to an aggressive angle. She might not be every man’s first choice, but to be deemed unworthy even to be the last choice of a
desperate
man…! Well, this wasn’t the same little girl who had been reduced to abject misery by a careless cruel comment, and Niall Wesley was about to find that out. She’d show him!

‘Not exactly dressed for the occasion.’

He was awfully glad he had dredged up a memory of Rowena saying that the best way to make her sister do anything was to tell her not to! ‘She’s so pig-headed it’s unbelievable!’ Rowena had informed him with affectionate irritation. She hadn’t mentioned the size sixteen chip on Holly’s size eight shoulder, though!

Holly wasn’t going to let him wriggle out of this that easily. If he thought she wasn’t good enough to be seen with him, he’d have to come out and say so!

‘I’ve got other clothes and some people,’ she taunted, ‘think I scrub up quite well.’

‘I’m sure they do,’ he soothed smoothly. The gleam in his eyes made Holly frown as she suddenly felt less certain of what she was doing. ‘Shouldn’t you hurry?’

‘Hurry?’

‘If we’re going to get to dinner on time.’

Holly’s mouth opened and she blinked. ‘Why would I want to help you? I didn’t say I’d—’

‘Well, if you don’t think you’re up to the task,’ he drawled understandingly.

By this point Holly was ninety-nine per cent certain that she’d been manipulated by an expert, but a combination of that one per cent uncertainty and a congenital stubborn inability to back down from a challenge made her respond immediately.

‘I draw the line at drooling over you.’

‘Don’t worry,’ he soothed, his dark head inclining graciously, ‘I can work around that.’

Stifling a grin, he watched her small stiff-backed figure retire to the bedroom, muttering ferociously under her breath.

Ten minutes later, as she emerged from a hot shower, Holly still wasn’t quite sure how she’d got herself into this mess. She was even less sure why she felt excited. Wearing nothing but a towel wrapped turban-like around her head, she stalked back into the bedroom with the unconsciously smooth, graceful stride of a cat. She then opened the two neatly packed suitcases which contained a large proportion of her worldly goods.

Lips pursed, she extracted a few items and her eyes travelled to the full-length view of herself in the cherub-decorated cheval mirror set just behind her. Not too bad, she conceded, staring critically at the firm gentle curves that were in pleasing proportion to her diminutive frame. Not great, but not bad, she decided, holding up a bias-cut dove-grey silk dress against her slightly damp body. The creases in the long flowing gown made her frown. A spark of mischief entered her dark eyes.