One Bridegroom Required!

by Sharon Kendrick

  That smile was so cute. He threw her a lazy look in response. ‘And I’m a dab hand at coaxing the temperamental.’

  ‘Just cars?’ she quizzed, before she could stop herself. ‘Or women?’

  He held her gaze in mocking query. ‘Do you always make assumptions about people?’

  ‘Everyone does. You did about me. And was my assumption so wrong?’

  ‘In this case, it was. I was talking about coaxing horses, actually—not the opposite sex.’

  He had hooked his fingers into the loops of his jeans as he spoke, and he suddenly looked all man—all cowboy. Holly nodded and bit back a smile. It all made sense now. He had looked completely wrong strolling down a sleepy English village street, with his jeans and battered sheepskin and tough good looks. But she could picture him on horseback—legs astride, the muscle and the strength of the man and the animal combining in perfect harmony. It was a powerful and earthy image and she found that persistent fingers of awareness were prickling down her back. ‘Really?’ She swallowed. ‘Round here?’

  ‘No. Not round here. I’ve only just got back from Africa.’ He read the question in her eyes. ‘It’s a long story.’

  That might explain the tan. ‘Another one? So when did you get back?’

  He glanced down at the watch on his wrist—a tough-looking timepiece which suited him well. ‘About twelve hours ago.’

  ‘Then you must be jet-lagged?’

  ‘Yeah, maybe I am.’ Could he blame this troublesome tension on jet-lag, he wondered, or would that be fooling himself? He took the keys from her unprotesting fingers. ‘You go on up and I’ll start moving the stuff.’

  Masterful, thought Holly wistfully, then immediately felt guilty as she found the staircase at the back of the shop, which led directly to the flat upstairs. Masterful men were very passé these days, surely?

  The stair carpet was worn, and upstairs the accommodation was basic—in a much worse state than the shop below. Holly sniffed. It had the sour, dark tang of a place unlived in.

  She glanced around, trying to remember what had caught her enthusiasm in the first place There was an okay-sized sitting room, whose window overlooked the street, a small bedroom containing a narrow and unwelcoming-looking bed, a bathroom with the obligatory dripping tap, and a kitchen which would have looked better in a museum. So far, so bad.

  But it was the main bedroom which had first attracted her, and Holly sighed now with contentment as she looked at it again. Dusty as the rest of the apartment, it nonetheless was square and spacious, with a correspondingly high ceiling, and would be absolutely perfect as a workroom.

  She heard footsteps on the stairs and went out to the landing to see Luke, with a good deal of her belongings firmly clamped to his broad shoulders.

  She rescued a tin-opener which was about to fall out of an overfull cardboard box. ‘You shouldn’t carry all that!’ she remonstrated. ‘You’ll do yourself damage.’

  He barely looked up as he put down two big suitcases and brushed away a lock of the dark, gold-tipped hair which had fallen onto his forehead. ‘Nice of you to be so concerned,’ he said wryly. ‘But I’m not stupid. And I’m used to carrying heavy weights around the place.’

  She watched unobserved while he took the stairs back down, three at a time. Yes, he was. A man didn’t get muscles like that from sitting behind a desk Holly had grown up in the city, and city men were what she knew best. And they tended to have the too-perfect symmetry gained from carefully programmed sessions in the gym. Whereas those muscles looked natural. She swallowed. Completely natural.

  It wasn’t until he had done the fourth and final load, and dumped her few mismatched saucepans in the kitchen, that Luke stood back, took a good look around him and scowled.

  ‘The place is absolutely disgusting! It’s filthy! I wouldn’t put a dog in here! Didn’t you demand that it be cleaned up before you took possession?’

  ‘Obviously not!’ she snapped back.

  ‘Why not?’

  Because she had been blinded by the sun and by ambition? Mellowed by the gin and tonic which Doug Reasdale had given her, and an urgent need to get on with her life? ‘I was just pleased to get a shop of this size for the money,’ she said defensively.

  His voice was uncompromising. ‘It’s a dump!’

  ‘And I assumed that’s why it was so cheap—I understood that you took a property on as seen, and this was how I saw it.’

  ‘And who told you that? Doug?’

  ‘That’s right. But I checked it out afterwards, and he was absolutely right.’

  He laughed, but there was a steely glint in his eyes. ‘Lazy bastard! I’ll speak to him.’

  ‘You don’t have to do that,’ she told him, with a shake of her head. ‘Like I said—I didn’t exactly insist.’

  ‘He took advantage of you,’ he argued.

  No, but he’d have liked to have done, thought Holly, with a shudder.

  ‘Sounds like you need a little brushing up on your negotiation techniques.’ He frowned as he looked around, his mouth flattening with irritation. ‘This place is uninhabitable!’

  As if on cue, a rattle of wind chattered against the window-pane and raindrops spattered on the ledge. Luke threw another disparaging glance around the room. On closer inspection, there was a small puddle on the sill where the rain obviously leaked through on a regular basis.

  ‘If I’d been around there is no way I would have let you move into a place when it was in this kind of state.’

  ‘Well, there’s no point saying that now because you weren’t around,’ she pointed out. ‘Were you?’

  ‘No.’ God, no. But now he was.

  Their eyes met again, and Luke tried to subdue the magnetic pull of sexual desire. It had happened before—this random and demanding longing—but never with quite this intensity. It was sex, pure and simple. And it meant nothing, not long term—he knew that. Its potency and its allure would be reduced by exposure and it was completely unconnected with the real business of living, and relationships.

  He should get out of here. Now. Away from those witchy green eyes and those soft lips which looked as if they could bring untold pleasure to a man’s body.

  Yet some dumb protective instinct reared its interfering head, and when he spoke he sounded like a man who’d already made his mind up. ‘You can’t stay here when it’s like this.’

  ‘I don’t have a choice,’ said Holly quietly.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Oh, yes, you do,’ came his soft contradiction.

  Holly stared at him in confusion, convinced by the dark look on his face that he was going to tell her to go back where she came from—back where she belonged. But this wasn’t the Wild West, and she was a perfectly legitimately paid-up leaseholder of this flat! She gave a little smile. ‘Really? And what’s that?’

  Luke wondered if he had just taken leave of his senses. ‘Well, you could always come up to the house and stay with me,’ he offered.

  She searched his face. ‘You’re kidding!’

  ‘Why should I be? I feel responsible—’

  ‘Why should you feel responsible?’

  ‘Because it’s bleak and cold in here, and because the property is mine and I have enough bedrooms to cope with an unexpected guest.’

  ‘But I don’t even know you!’

  He laughed. ‘There’s no need to make me sound like Bluebeard! And what’s that got to do with anything? You must have shared flats with men when you were a student, didn’t you?’

  ‘Doesn’t everyone?’

  ‘So how well did you know them?

  ‘That’s different.’

  ‘How is it different?’

  The difference was that none of her fellow design students—for all their velvet clothes and pretty-boy faces and extravagant gestures and prodigious talent—had appealed to Holly in any way that could be thought of as sexual. She had shared flats with men of whom she could honestly say it wouldn’t have bothered her if they had st
rutted around the place stark naked. Whereas Luke Goodwin...

  She thought of soft beds and central heating, and couldn’t deny that she was tempted, but Holly shook her head. ‘No, honestly, it’s very kind of you to offer, but I’ll manage.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I’m resourceful.’

  ‘You’ll need to be,’ he gritted, his eyes going to the grey circle of damp on the ceiling. ‘I’ll have someone fix that tomorrow.’

  He started to move slowly towards the door, and Holly realised that she was as reluctant for him to leave as he appeared to be. ‘Would you like some tea? As a kind of thank-you for helping me bring my stuff up?’ she added quickly. ‘And you’re the one with the milk!’

  ‘And the biscuits!’ He found himself almost purring in the green dazzle of her eyes. ‘That would be good.’ He nodded, ignoring the logic which told him that he would be far wiser to get out now, while the going was good. ‘I left them downstairs. I’ll go and fetch them.’

  The room seemed empty once he had gone, and Holly filled the kettle and cleared a space in the sitting room, dusting off the small coffee-table and then throwing open the window to try and clear the air.

  But the chill air which blasted onto her face didn’t take the oddly insistent heat away from her cheeks. She found herself wondering what subtle combination of events and chemistry had combined to make her feel so attracted to a man she had known less than an hour.

  But by the time Luke returned with the milk and biscuits she had composed herself so that her face carried no trace of her fantasies, and her hand was as steady as a rock as she poured out two mugs of tea and handed him one.

  ‘Thanks.’ He looked around him critically. ‘It’s cold in here, too.’

  ‘The window’s open,’ she said awkwardly.

  ‘Yeah, I’d noticed.’

  ‘I’ll shut it.’ The room now seemed so cramped, and he seemed so big in it. Like a full-sized man in a doll’s house—and surely it wasn’t just the long legs and the broad shoulders. Some people had an indefinable quality—some kind of magnetism which drew you to them whether you wanted it or not, and Luke Goodwin certainly had it in spades.

  She perched on the edge of one of the overstuffed armchairs. ‘So what were you doing in Africa?’

  He cupped the steaming mug between strong, brown hands and stared into it. ‘I managed a game reserve.’

  Holly tried hard not to look too impressed. ‘You make it sound like you were running a kindergarten!’

  ‘Do I?’ he mocked, his blue eyes glinting.

  ‘A bit.’ She crossed her legs. ‘Big change of scenery. Do you like it?’

  ‘Give me time,’ he remonstrated softly, thinking that, when he looked at those sinfully long legs, he felt more alive than he had any right to feel. And the scenery looked very good from where he was sitting. ‘Like I said—I just got in late last night.’

  Holly found that breath suddenly seemed in very short supply. ‘And are you here for...good?’

  ‘That depends on how well I settle here.’ He shrugged, and he screwed his eyes up, as if he were looking into the sun. ‘It’s been a long time since I’ve lived in England.’

  She thought that he didn’t sound as though he was exactly bursting over with enthusiasm about it. ‘So why the upheaval? The big change from savannah to rural England?’

  He hesitated as he wondered how much to tell her. His inheritance had been unexpected, and he had sensed that for some men in his situation it could become a burden. He was Luke—just that—always had been. But people tended to judge you by what you owned, not by what you were; he’d met too many women who had dollar signs where their eyes should be.

  Yet it wasn’t as though he feared being desired for money alone. He had had members of the opposite sex eating out of his hand since he was eighteen years old. With nothing but a pair of old jeans, a tee shirt and a backpack to his name, he had always had any woman he’d ever wanted. And a few he hadn’t, to boot. Even so, it was important to him that he had known Caroline before he had inherited his uncle’s estate. And what difference would it make if Holly Lovelace knew about his life and his finances? He wasn’t planning to make her part of it, was he?

  ‘Because my uncle died suddenly, and I am his sole heir.’ He watched her very carefully for a reaction.

  Holly’s eyes widened. ‘That sounds awfully grand.’

  ‘I guess it is.’ He sipped his tea. ‘It was certainly unexpected. One morning I woke up to discover that I was no longer just the manager of one of the most beautiful game reserves in Kenya, but the owner of an amazing Georgian house, land and property dotted around the place, including this shop.’

  ‘From ranch hand to lord of all he surveys?’

  ‘Well, not quite.’

  ‘But a big inheritance?’

  ‘Sizeable.’

  ‘And you’re a wealthy man now?’

  ‘I guess I am.’

  So he had it all, Holly realised, simultaneously accepting that he was way out of her league—as if she hadn’t already known that. There certainly weren’t many men like Luke Goodwin around. He had good looks, physical strength and that intangible quality of stillness and contemplation which you often found in people who had worked the land. And now money, too. He would be quite a catch.

  She let her eyes flicker quickly to his left hand and then away again before he could see. He wore no ring, and no ring had been removed as far as she could tell, for there wasn’t a white mark against the tan of his finger.

  ‘You aren’t married?’ she asked.

  Straight for the jugular, he thought. Luke was aware of disappointment washing in a cold stream over his skin. He shook his tawny head. ‘No, I’m not married.’ But still he didn’t mention Caroline. He could barely think straight in the green spotlight of her eyes. ‘And now it’s your turn.’

  She stared at him uncomprehendingly. ‘My turn?’

  ‘Life story.’ He flipped open the packet of biscuits and offered her one.

  Holly gave a short laugh as she took one and bit into it. ‘You call that a life story? You filled in your life in about four sentences.’

  ‘I don’t need to know who your best friend was in fifth grade,’ he observed, only it occurred to him that ‘need’ was rather a strong word to have used, under the circumstances. ‘Just the bare bones. Like why a beautiful young woman should take on a shop like this, in the middle of nowhere? Why Woodhampton, and not Winchester? Or even London?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious? Because, unless you work for yourself, you have very little artistic control over your designs. If you work for someone else they always want to inject their vision, and their ideas. I’ve done it since I left art school and I’ve had enough.’

  ‘You’re very fortunate to be able to set up on your own so young,’ he observed. ‘Who’s your backer?’ Some oily sugar-Daddy, he’d bet. An ageing roué who would run his short, stubby fingers proprietorially over those streamlined curves of hers. Luke shuddered with distaste. But if that was the case—then where was he now?

  ‘I don’t have a backer,’ she told him. ‘I’m on my own.’

  He stared at her with interest as all sorts of unwanted ideas about how she had arranged her finances came creeping into his head. ‘And how have you managed that?’

  She heard the suspicion which coloured his words. ‘Because I won a competition in a magazine. I designed a wedding dress and I won a big cheque.’

  Luke nodded. So she had talent as well as beauty. ‘That was very clever of you. Weren’t you tempted just to blow it?’

  ‘Never. I didn’t want to fritter the money away. I wanted to chase my dream—and my dream was always to make wedding dresses.’

  ‘Funny kind of dream,’ he observed.

  ‘Not really—my mother did the same. Maybe it runs in families.’

  She remembered growing up—all the different homes she’d lived in and all the correspondingly different escorts of her mother’s. But her mothe
r had always sewn—and even when she’d no longer had to design dresses to earn money she had done it for pleasure, making exquisite miniatures for her daughter’s dolls. It had been one of Holly’s most enduring memories—her mother’s long, artistic fingers neatly flying over the pristine sheen of soft satin and Belgian lace. The rhythmic pulling of the needle and thread had been oddly soothing. Up and down, up and down.

  ‘And why here?’ He interrupted her reverie. ‘Why Woodhampton?’

  ‘Because I wanted an old-fashioned Georgian building which was affordable. Somewhere with high ceilings and beautiful dimensions—the kind of place that would complement the dresses I make. City rents are prohibitive, and a modern box of a place wouldn’t do any justice to my designs.’

  He looked around him with a frown. ‘So when are you planning to open?’

  ‘As soon as possible.’ There was a pause. ‘I can’t afford not to.’

  ‘How soon?’

  ‘As soon as I can get the place straight. Get some pre-Christmas publicity and be properly established by January—that’s when brides start looking for dresses in earnest.’ She looked around her, suddenly deflated as the enormity of what she had taken on hit her, trying and failing to imagine a girl standing on a box, with yards of pristine ivory tulle tumbling down to the floor around her while Holly tucked and pinned.

  ‘It’s going to take a lot of hard work,’ he observed, watching her frown, wondering if she had any real idea of how much she had taken on.

  Holly was only just beginning to realise how much. ‘I’m not afraid of hard work,’ she told him.

  Luke came to a sudden decision. He had not employed Doug Reasdale; his uncle had. But the man clearly needed teaching a few of the basic skills of management—not to mention a little compassion. ‘Neither am I. And I think I’d better help you to get everything fixed, don’t you? It’s going to take for ever if you do it on your own.’

  Holly’s heart thumped frantically beneath her breast. ‘And why would you do that?’

  ‘I should have thought that was fairly obvious. Because I have a moral obligation, as your landlord. The place should never have been rented out to you in this condition.’ And that much, at least, was true. He told himself that his offer had absolutely nothing to do with the way her eyes flashed like emeralds, her lips curved like rubies when she smiled that disbelieving and grateful smile at him. ‘So what do you say?’