The Engagement Deal Read online

  ‘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 throttl
ing 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.

  Standing behind the door, she opened it a crack and flung out the dress. ‘Be a lamb and iron it for me, if you don’t want to be late!’ she instructed loudly.

  She closed the door with a firm click before he had an opportunity to reply. Well, I bet that’ll be a first. Niall Wesley, former pin-up of the racing circuit, present boss of the family publishing empire and future titled lord of Monksleigh and several thousand acres…ironing…? The man had spent his life surrounded by flunkies—it was likely he hadn’t learnt to tie his own shoelaces yet! She gave a small chuckle as she sat down to explore the Aladdin’s cave of cosmetics on her sister’s dressing table.

  Her hair was still damp when, with a clever twist of her wrist, she secured the heavy copper swathe in a loose knot at the nape of her neck before pulling loose a few long soft curling tendrils to frame her face. She screwed up her nose in approval at the overall effect. Fortunately, the black eye had proved simple to disguise.

  She sniffed at the neck of an interestingly shaped perfume spray before dousing her body in a generous mist of scent. All I need now, she thought, slipping on some underwear and then a pair of high-heeled mules, is the dress.

  There was only pause enough between the light tap on the door and it swinging open for her to clamp her hands over her bare breasts and fix an indignant expression on her face.

  Although she would have happily crawled out of her skin, pride made Holly stand immobile while his startling cerulean eyes travelled over her skimpily clad body from head to toe, pausing noticeably longer over some areas than others.

  ‘You were right.’

  One nicely shaped brow rose in haughty enquiry as she tried to maintain the illusion that she felt perfectly at ease with this nerve-shredding situation. Actually, until that moment she’d have claimed she was quite relaxed about her own body, only suddenly…She shivered, even though her skin felt hot. She felt conscious of every centimetre.

  Calm down, Holly, she told herself. Niall Wesley has seen more beautiful women naked than you’ve had hot dinners, and you’re only passable. Being passable didn’t stop a violent surge of feeling rushing through her, a feeling that was purely sexual.

  ‘You do scrub up well.’ His sardonic mask left his words open to any interpretation she wished to place upon them—no, better by far not to think too much, if at all, about what he might mean! ‘Here.’ He held out the dress—which was draped across one arm—towards her.

  ‘Thanks.’ Automatically, she began to stretch out one hand towards him before realising how exposed, quite literally, this gesture left her. She gave a dismayed gasp and retracted her hand, but not before the erect coral tip of her exposed breast had peeked out. ‘You’d better leave it on the bed,’ Her voice cracked as she made a desperate attempt to regain her composure. ‘Hurry up, will you?’ she snapped as he strolled slowly towards the bed…Had he slept in it with Rowena? ‘We don’t want to keep your wife waiting.’

  He laid the soft garment on the bed and smoothed it with the flat of his hand. The gesture brought a searing image to her head of the same hand stroking bare flesh.

  He straightened up. ‘Ex-wife,’ he reminded her softly. ‘And Tara’s never been on time for anything in her life—even her own wedding, as I recall…So don’t break your neck. There’s no big rush.’

  ‘Now he tells me.’ She had managed to slide on a robe of Rowena’s over her minuscule pants and hold-ups and she was able to sound more like herself.

  That sensation had just been because she felt vulnerable—him being fully dressed and her being almost naked, she told herself comfortingly. Yes, that had a nice comfortingly logical sound to it, she decided, tying the sash of the pale green robe around her waist. If he’d been naked too he wouldn’t have had the upper hand at all; they’d hav
e been on more of an equal footing.

  As images of Niall Wesley’s well-built naked body flashed through her mind, her lovely little theory crumbled. Oh, God, she thought, as he turned to flash her the sort of smile that made her worry he had read her mind. I’ll be glad when this night is over!

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘THERE’S no time to think up a cover story so when we get there leave me to do most of the talking.’ Businesslike, Niall cast her an arrogantly stern look.

  ‘Laryngitis?’ Holly queried meekly. ‘Or am I meant to be struck dumb by my good fortune in landing you?’

  He took her hand and, before she could protest, had slid a large flashy-looking sapphire ring on one finger. ‘It’s smart remarks like that I’m talking about,’ he said, observing the effect of the large sparkling gem on her small slim finger with a critical frown.

  ‘I can’t wear this thing!’ she gasped in tones of revulsion.

  ‘Sorry if it’s not to your taste, but it’s only for one night.’

  Not to my taste? Actually, it was beautiful and probably scarily expensive. ‘It’s too big, I might lose it,’ she babbled, feeling her chest tighten as pure panic gripped her. It would probably have fitted Rowena like a glove—perhaps it had been made for her? This possibility made it even more imperative to rip it off her own finger.

  ‘The setting’s quite old-fashioned; Tara never wanted it. It was my grandmother’s,’ Niall announced casually.

  Under the circumstances, it was perverse to feel as if she was wearing another woman’s cast-offs. It was even more perverse to mind—but she did.

  ‘I don’t think your Tara is going to swallow this, Niall,’ Holly remarked, staring at the heavy ring as if it were going to jump up and bite her.

  ‘So long as you can withstand the odd cryptic dig, she’ll believe it. Tara doesn’t have a suspicious bone in her body. I’ve never lied to her before, so she has no reason to believe I’ve begun now.’