Cinderella’s Wedding Wish

were spattered with mud and his beautifully shined shoes were unrecognisable.

Miranda’s court shoes were faring even worse. ‘Oh, dear, I suppose we’re not very suitably dressed,’ she said, looking down at her prim office suit and then at Rafe, who pretended to look stern.

‘It had better be worth it!’ he said, but she could see the telltale tug at the corner of his mouth, and she smiled back, suddenly sure.

‘It will be,’ she promised.

CHAPTER FIVE

ACROSS a stream on a rickety bridge, up a path through some trees and finally they were there. Whitestones was a long, low, sturdy cottage with a glassed-in verandah overlooking the sea, and a cluster of outbuildings at the back. It had a wonderful situation, nestled into a slight hollow for shelter, but opening out to the glittering expanse of the English Channel.

Oh, yes, the setting was spectacular, but Rafe was aghast when Miranda showed him round the house. She had retrieved a key from its hiding place and opened the door with apparent pride. Inside, it was damp and dingy and dusty and dilapidated. Its paint was peeling, its plaster cracked. There was no phone, no heating, no water and no mains electricity.

‘Dulcie, my godmother, managed with a generator, and used to pump water by hand,’ Miranda explained.

‘I hope you’re not planning to do the same?’

‘I will until I can afford to do something about it. Dulcie lived here on her own until she was sixty. If she could do it, I can.’

‘But, Miranda…’ Rafe began to protest, until he remembered that it wasn’t any of his business.

‘It needs some work, I know.’ Miranda opened the verandah door so they could sit on the steps leading down to the garden. She could see that Rafe was appalled, and tried to look at the cottage through his eyes. It wasn’t in a good state. A house needed to be lived in and cared for, but what could she do?

‘I wish you could have seen it when Dulcie was here,’ she told him. ‘I suppose it was always a bit shabby, but it was warm and clean and it always seemed to be full of sunshine.’

Her expression softened with memory as she rested her elbows on her knees and propped her chin on her curled fists. ‘I used to love coming to stay with her. I’m always surprised my parents chose her as my godmother. She wasn’t anything like them. She was at school with my mother, I think, but they couldn’t have been more different. I don’t think my mother ever came here, in fact, but if she did she would have hated it.

‘Belinda and Octavia did. They thought it was boring, and that Dulcie was eccentric, so I used to come on my own, and that was fine by me. I never felt as if I fitted in with my own family,’ Miranda went on, ‘but I felt right at home here with Dulcie. She never cared what I looked like. She never criticised me because I wasn’t dressed properly or hadn’t spent hours fiddling with my hair. She never expected me to pick up after her or make sure she got somewhere on time. She just expected me to be myself.’

Her voice cracked, just a little, and when Rafe glanced at her he saw that her lips were pressed together in a tight line.

‘She sounds like a nice godmother to have.’

‘She was wonderful. I always had interesting conversations with Dulcie,’ Miranda remembered. ‘She never talked down to me. Even when I was a very little girl I can remember her treating me as if I were an adult.

‘Generally, though, Dulcie preferred animals to humans,’ she went on. ‘She was always rescuing them and nursing them back to health. I remember the cottage being full of cats and rabbits and chickens and hedgehogs and baby birds…and of course all sorts of dogs. Rafferty was my favourite.’

She smiled reminiscently. ‘He was an Irish Setter cross who’d been abandoned on the road. I loved that dog,’ said Miranda. ‘I walked him for hours.’

Rafe studied her dreamy profile. She had told him more about herself than perhaps she realised. Growing up as an ugly duckling in a family of self-absorbed beauties-including her father, by the sound of it-it was hardly surprising that she had retreated behind that prickly, prim, practical facade.

It was odd now to remember how colourless she had seemed when he first met her. Rafe watched her now, sitting on the steps in her neat grey skirt and that good girl white blouse and her muddy shoes. She was different here. He had been able to tell as soon as she got out of the car. Even sitting there he could see that those taut muscles had relaxed. It was as if the sea and the air and this dilapidated old house had lit something inside her.

She was almost shining with it, he thought. Miranda would never be pretty, but she reminded him of a bright- eyed bird with deceptively dowdy plumage, the subtle beauty of whose patterned feathers you only saw when you looked closely.

No, not a beauty, and yet…Rafe remembered how light and slender she had been in his arms as he danced her around the dusty ballroom. The clean, fresh fragrance of her still lingered in his memory, like the gurgle of laughter and the smile that had lit up her face, and, more disturbingly, that peculiar sense of rightness he had felt when he held her.

Rafe shook the thought aside. Really, he was getting fanciful.

‘Are you really going to live here?’ he asked her dubiously.

‘It’s mine. Dulcie left it to me when she died three years ago.’

‘A pity she didn’t leave you any money to make it habitable.’

Miranda turned her head at that. ‘I hadn’t told her about the problems we were having at Fairchild’s,’ she said with a clear look. ‘I’m sure she assumed that I would have plenty of money of my own. She left a fortune to the animal rescue centre, but she knew how much I loved it here, and I’ll always be grateful to her for making Whitestones mine.’

She looked back at the sea. ‘Everything started to go horribly wrong not long after she died. For a long time it was all I could do to keep things together at Fairchild’s. My father was in a terrible state, and Belinda and Octavia simply didn’t understand what was going on and why they couldn’t keep their allowances. I had to sell everything that meant so much to them-the houses, the horses, the paintings, the cars…’ Miranda sighed. ‘It was a horrible time, and all through it the thought of Whitestones was all I had to hang onto. I can’t explain what it meant to me.’

There was a faint crease between Rafe’s brows. It sounded as if Miranda had had to deal with everything by herself. Why had her family let her take on that burden alone? She hadn’t had an easy time of it, then or now.

‘Did you never consider selling? At least then you wouldn’t be spending your evenings as a waitress.’

She shrugged. ‘I’m not sure it’s worth that much. You’ve seen the condition it’s in, and not many people would want to walk over the field to get to the house.’

‘You could put in a track.’

‘Maybe, but you would have to negotiate with the farmer. It would take ages and cost a lot of money. How many prospective purchasers could be bothered? And why should I sell it?’ Her chin had a stubborn tilt that was already becoming familiar to Rafe. ‘It was nothing to do with Fairchild’s. It’s the only thing that’s ever been mine, and I’m not going to let it go.’

‘So you’re going to leave London to live all alone in a decrepit cottage miles from anywhere, without the most basic of conveniences, and run a business you haven’t been able to think of yet?’

The chin went up a notch. ‘I won’t be all alone. I’m going to have a dog.’

‘Miranda Fairchild, I can’t believe you would even think of doing anything so reckless and impractical,’ said Rafe, but his voice was warm with an unmistakable undercurrent of laughter.

‘I know.’

She did know. Miranda turned her head back to look at Rafe and was gripped by a feeling of unreality. He really was impossibly handsome. He had no business looking that good.

It was hard to imagine anyone who belonged less at Whitestones than Rafe did right then, but Miranda was suddenly, desperately aware of him again. It was as if every cell in her body were tingling with the knowledge that he was there, sitting only inches away, close enough to touch.

In spite of looking so utterly out of place, he was relaxed, long legs drawn up on the steps, broad wrists