Her tears had haunted him, plaguing him with guilt, but now he understand that her tears had not been for what he’d done to her, but because she’d just risked everything she had in a momentary rush of lust. No wonder she couldn’t wait to get away…
Sylvie smiled encouragingly at the youthful journalist, the advance guard from
Full of enthusiasm, the girl immediately set about hunting down anything she could find in the chosen colour scheme.
Sylvie, not in the least bit enthusiastic, dropped the face-aching smile that seemed to have been fixed ever since she’d arrived at Longbourne Court and looked around at the chaos in what had once been her mother’s drawing room.
The furniture had been moved out, stored somewhere to leave room for the exhibitors. But it wasn’t the emptiness that tore at her. It was the unexpected discovery that, despite the passing of ten years, so little had changed. It was not the difference but the familiarity that caught at the back of her throat. Tugged at her heart.
The pictures that had once been part of her life were still hanging where they had always been. Velvet curtains, still blue in the deep folds but ever since she could remember faded to a silvery-grey where the light touched them, framed an unchanged view.
There was even a basket of logs in the hearth that might have been there on the day the creditors had seized the house and its contents nearly ten years ago, taking everything to cover the mess that her grandfather, in his attempt to recoup the family fortunes, had made of things.
But driving in the back way through the woods at the crack of dawn, walking in through the kitchen and seeing Mrs Kennedy standing at the sink, her little cry of surprised pleasure, the hug she’d given her while they’d both shed a tear, had been like stepping back in time.
She could almost imagine that her mother had just gone out for an hour or two, would at any moment walk through the door, dogs at her heels…
She swallowed, blinked, reminded herself what was at stake. Forced herself to focus on the job in hand.
She’d already decided that the only way to handle this was to treat herself as if she were one of her own clients. Just one more busy career woman without the time to research the endless details that would make her wedding an event to remember for the rest of her life.
Distancing herself from any emotional involvement.
It was, after all, her job. Something she did every day. Nothing to get excited about. Except, of course, that was just what it should be. Something to be over-the-moon excited about rather than just a going-through-the- motions chore.
She shook her head. The quicker she got on with it, the quicker it would be over. She had the colour scheme, which was a start.
‘I’ll be in the morning room,’ she called out to Lucy, already busily talking to exhibitors, searching out anything useful. It was time she was at work too, hunting down a theme to hang the whole thing on, something original that she hadn’t used before.
And the even bigger problem of the dress.
She turned to find her way blocked by six and half feet of broad-shouldered male and experienced a bewildering sense of
A feeling that this had happened before.
And then she looked up and realised that it was not an illusion. This
She cared now because it wasn’t just ‘some’ billionaire who’d bought her family home and was planning to turn it into a conference centre.
It was Tom McFarlane, the man with whom, just for a few moments, she’d totally lost it. Whose baby she was carrying. Who’d grabbed her offer to forget it had ever happened. She’d expected at least an acknowledgement…
‘Tell me, Miss Smith,’ he said while she was still struggling to get her mouth around a simple, Good morning, using exactly the same sardonic tone with which he’d queried every item on her invoice all those months ago. The same look with which he’d reduced her to a stuttering jangle of unrestrained hormones.
Despite everything, she hadn’t been able to get that voice, the heat of those eyes, his touch, the weight, heat of his body, out of her head for weeks afterwards.
Make that months.
Maybe not at all…
The man she most wanted to see in the entire world. The man she most dreaded seeing because she’d made a promise and she would have to keep it.
‘What?’ she demanded, since they were clearly bypassing the civilities, but then there had never been anything civil between them. Only something raw, almost primitive. ‘What do you want?’
He didn’t want anything from her.
‘To know what you’re doing here.’ Then, presumably just to ram the point home, because he must surely know that it had once been her home, ‘In my house.’
‘It’s yours?’ she said, managing to feign surprise. ‘I was told some billionaire had bought it but no one thought to mention your name. But then I didn’t ask.’ And because she had nothing to apologise for-she’d not only been invited here, but was taking part in this nonsense at great personal inconvenience and no little expense-she said, ‘If you’ll excuse me, Mr McFarlane?’
She’d been so right to keep it businesslike.
He didn’t move, but continued to regard her with those relentlessly fierce eyes that were apparently hell-bent on scrambling her brains.
The man she’d dreaded seeing. The man she’d longed more than anything to see, talk to. If he would just give her a chance, let her show him a scan of the baby they’d made. His daughter. But maybe he understood the risk, the danger of being sucked into a relationship he’d never asked for, never wanted.
She’d given him that get-out-of-jail-free card and could not take it back. And, since he was studiously avoiding the subject, clearly he had no intention of voluntarily surrendering it.
‘I have a lot to get through today,’ she said, unable to bear it another moment and indicating that she wanted to pass. She’d meant to sound brisk and decisive but the effect was undermined by a slight wobble on the ‘h-h- have’.
She might have a lot to get through but the dress would have to wait until she’d had enough camomile tea to drown the squadron of butterflies that were practising formation flying just below her midriff.
Except that it wasn’t butterflies but her baby girl practising dance steps.
His baby girl…
‘I don’t think so,’ he responded, not moving.
Well, no. She hadn’t for a moment imagined it would be that easy. Trapped in the doorway, she had no choice but to wait.
‘What are you doing here?’ he repeated.
A man came through the front door carrying a pile of chairs and Tom McFarlane moved to let him pass, taking a step closer so that she was near enough for the warmth of his body to reach out and touch her.
The warmth had taken her by surprise the first time; she would have sworn that he was stone-cold right through until he’d put his hands around her waist, slid his palms against the bare skin of her back and his mouth had come down on hers, heating her to the bone.
Not cold. Anything but cold. More like a volcano-the kind with tiny wisps of smoke escaping through fumaroles, warning that the smallest disturbance could bring it to turbulent, boiling life.
