Jill Mansell Boxed Set

by Jill Mansell

  ‘Thanks.’ Annabel plonked herself joyfully on the end of the bed, almost squashing the elaborate makeup kit her sister had just unpacked. ‘Oops, clumsy me! Jeannie’s doing my hair first, then my nails, then my face… just as well, the way my hands are shaking!’

  ‘I’ll see you later,’ Daisy told them as she moved to the door. ‘Have fun.’

  ***

  It wasn’t as if Tara was desperate to impress Dominic. Then again, it was only natural to aim to be looking your best when you bumped into an old boyfriend you haven’t seen for years. No one in their right mind wanted their ex to scuttle off breathing a sigh of relief and thinking phew, a narrow escape there.

  Tara shuddered at the prospect. Hopefully, Dominic wouldn’t think that. Today she had applied her makeup with a lot more care and attention to detail than usual. Her hair, by sheer chance, was looking great. And just for that smidgen of added confidence, she was wearing her pushy-uppy, ultra-padded peacock-blue bra.

  It was a shame, of course, about the outfit, but these things couldn’t be helped, and at least it was plain navy. Tara knew that as far as chambermaids’ uniforms went, she could have done a lot worse.

  Oh God, that was the other bit she wasn’t looking forward to. When she had known Dominic, she’d been an aspiring actress. An aspiring actress with dreams and, um, aspirations. Was he going to laugh his head off when he discovered what she was doing for a living now? Worse still, would he sneer?

  Tara, on her knees in Room 4, scrubbing energetically at what looked like a squelched-in bit of chewing gum on the carpet, briefly entertained the idea of pretending to Dominic that she was here undercover, secretly researching the job of a chambermaid for some high-budget drama series commissioned by ITV. That sounded a bit more impressive.

  Oh, stop it, thought Tara with a burst of impatience, what am I doing? I’m a chambermaid and that’s nothing to be ashamed of. We can’t all be Kate Winslet. This is Dominic’s wedding day, for crying out loud. He isn’t going to care what I do for a living and I don’t give two hoots what he thinks of me anyway.

  Tara heard the waiters downstairs shouting instructions to each other across the dining room as they organized the tables according to the seating plan. Checking her watch, she saw that it was one thirty. Dominic would be here soon. And Annabel, his prospective bride, had already spent three hours primping and preparing herself for the ceremony.

  Glad that nobody was around to read her mind, Tara leaned back on her heels and recalled how she had once spent hours lovingly practicing her signature, should she end up marrying Dominic. Tara Cross-Calvert had sounded so much more actressy and upmarket than plain old bog standard Tara Donovan. To be honest, she’d probably been more taken with the surname than she had been with Dominic himself.

  And now, in less than three hours, somebody else would be able to call herself Mrs Cross-Calvert and write her glamorous new signature with a flourish.

  It occurred to Tara that, with her luck, she’d more than likely end up marrying someone with a surname like Grimshaw or Winkle or Puke.

  The sound of a car on the graveled drive outside had an electrifying effect, but it was only one of the other guests, an American currently in possession of the loudest wife known to man. A wife, Tara belatedly recalled, who had asked her to replace the firm pillows in their room with soft ones. If she didn’t want her eardrums shattered, she’d better deal with that now.

  Ho hum. Who said chambermaiding wasn’t a glamorous life?

  Chapter 5

  ‘Oof,’ gasped Tara, turning a corner and colliding head on with a figure coming in the opposite direction. Happily, thanks to the fact that her arms had been full of squashy goose down pillows, it was a painless—even bouncy—collision. ‘I’m really sorry, are you OK?’

  Bending down to retrieve the scattered pillows and simultaneously getting her first proper look at her bump-ee, she caught her breath. Because, there was no getting away from it, he was truly, madly, and deeply gorgeous. Dark, glossy hair, even darker eyes with a glint of laughter in them, and the kind of unseasonal tan that had left his mouth a shade paler than his skin. When he smiled, his teeth were as white as his polo shirt. He had a lean, hard, broad-shouldered body to die for. He was also familiar, although Tara couldn’t immediately place him. He certainly wasn’t one of the hotel guests.

  ‘I’ll live.’ Grinning down at her as she clumsily gathered up the pillows, he added, ‘I like your bra.’

  Tara blushed furiously. She couldn’t help it. Glancing down, she discovered that the top button of her navy smock had popped undone, leaving the v-shaped neckline gaping dramatically. From his elevated position this stunning dark-eyed man could probably see not only her bra but all the way down to her navel.

  Hastily sucking in her stomach just in case, Tara fumbled with the button and refastened it. But as well as blushing, she was aware of biting her lip in an effort not to smirk because, to be honest, it wasn’t every day you had your bra admired by someone quite so pulse-racingly gorgeous.

  And it had been nice of him to say he liked it. Tara was both flattered and pleased, seeing as the thing had cost her thirty-eight pounds fifty. Such a beautiful bra deserved to be appreciated.

  ‘Come on, up you get.’ Holding out a hand, he hauled her efficiently to her feet. ‘No injuries that might need looking at?’

  Tara felt her skin begin to prickle with pleasurable delight.

  ‘I’m fine.’ Grinning broadly now, she thought how brilliant it would be if he were a guest who had just booked into the hotel for a month. ‘But you’ve got… excuse me…’

  ‘What?’ His eyebrows rocketed in mock alarm as Tara reached out towards the front of his jeans.

  ‘Sorry. There you go.’ Having retrieved the small curly feather, Tara waved it at him. ‘It was on your trousers. Must have escaped from one of the pillows.’

  Lucky feather!

  ‘Phew. For a second there I wondered what you were about to do.’ He smiled as he said it, revealing wicked dimples. Behind her, Tara was vaguely aware of a door opening and clicking shut. Realizing that another guest had just emerged from the Gents and would be needing to squeeze past them in the narrow corridor, she automatically clutched the pillows to her chest and moved to one side.

  The next moment a stunned male voice gasped, ‘I don’t believe it. Tara?’

  She turned and there he was. Dominic, looking exactly as she remembered. Except maybe more poleaxed.

  ‘Hello, Dominic. Getting married at last, I hear. Congratulations.’ She’d been practicing these lines for days, needless to say, but the great thing about being an actress was you could rehearse endlessly and still make it come out sounding spontaneous and completely natural. Even failed actresses could manage that.

  Pleased with herself, Tara flashed Dominic a breezy smile. Then, because it seemed rude not to, she planted a brief kiss on his cheek.

  ‘Hang on. I don’t understand.’ Dominic was shaking his head, still in shock. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Determined not to be ashamed, Tara raised her chin and said, ‘Working. I’m a chambermaid now.’ She nearly managed to pull it off, to make it sound as though it couldn’t matter less that she was no longer in the business, but the faint wobble in her voice let her down. Oh yes, this is me, these days I earn my living picking other people’s chewing gum out of carpets.

  Dominic was incredulous. ‘What happened to the… other stuff?’

  ‘The acting, you mean?’ Praying her voice wouldn’t betray her a second time, Tara shrugged nonchalantly. ‘I gave it up. Too competitive. Well, maybe I just wasn’t good enough. Anyway, it was time to get out of London. Aunt Maggie invited me to stay down here with her—she’s got a gorgeous little cottage in the village—and I’ve been here ever since. Not what you’d call a glitzy career, but we have a laugh.’ As she rattled on, Tara turned to include the Feather
man in the conversation in case he might be feeling left out, but he was no longer there. Silently, he had slipped away.

  Oh well, never mind, she was bound to bump into him again before long.

  And in the meantime…

  ‘I just don’t believe this. I just do not believe this is happening.’ Dominic slowly shook his head.

  I say, steady on.

  ‘I know, it’s been awhile, hasn’t it?’ Tara hadn’t expected him to react quite so dramatically. He was staring at her as if she’d suddenly turned into Madonna or someone. The color had drained from his face. As he reached for her hand she realized that he was trembling.

  ‘God, Tara, this isn’t fair. I’m supposed to be getting married in two hours’ time.’

  ‘What?’ Tara laughed at his slip of the tongue. ‘You’re not supposed to be getting married, you twit! You are getting married.’

  Dominic’s tone grew urgent. ‘I’m sorry but you don’t know what this means to me. You have no idea.’ He lowered his voice still further as another guest passed them in the corridor. ‘Tara, we have to talk.’

  Tara, her heart starting to thump, clutched the pillows tighter to her chest.

  ‘Dom, I can’t. I’m busy. And you have to get yourself ready for the wedding.’

  ‘Come to my room.’ He pulled a key from his jeans pocket. Tara stared at it in disbelief. ‘Are you mad? Of course I’m not coming to your room! What would it look like if anyone saw us?’

  ‘Tara, this is important. If you won’t talk to me, I’ll cancel the wedding. And then it’ll be all your fault.’ He was smiling his familiar lopsided smile as he said it. Tara’s heart went twaannggg as she remembered how he had always been able to make her laugh.

  ‘Just five minutes,’ Dominic persisted, his straight fair hair flopping into his eyes.

  ‘I’ve got to take these to Room Six.’ Helplessly, she indicated the pillows.

  ‘Great idea. We’ll talk in there.’

  ‘We will not!’ Thinking fast, instinctively aware that any bedroom anywhere was a bad idea, Tara said, ‘Let me just take these up. I’ll be back in two minutes.’

  ‘I’ve waited this long.’ Dominic gave her another one of those heart-melting smiles. ‘I don’t suppose another couple of minutes will hurt.’

  Upstairs, Tara shook the pillows into fresh pillowcases and tried to figure out why Dominic had reacted the way he had. What was the big deal? Crikey, it wasn’t as if she’d ended their relationship and Dominic had spent the last two years pining like a dog. He was the one who had finished with her.

  Downstairs, she found him waiting in exactly the same place in the corridor, pretending to admire a painting on the wall. Ahead of them, the reception area was buzzing with preparations for the wedding, the finishing touches were being put to the flower arrangements.

  The clatter of cutlery being laid out drifted through from the dining room. Reversing back down the corridor and taking a couple of left turns with Dominic in tow, Tara opened one of the side doors leading outside and murmured, ‘There’s a summerhouse next to the pool. We won’t be disturbed there.’

  ‘We certainly won’t.’ Dominic peered up at the leaden sky. ‘Nobody else in their right mind would be mad enough to go out in this.’

  It was raining harder than ever. Really hammering down now.

  ‘You’re going to get wet,’ Tara warned.

  ‘You don’t say.’ His bright eyes narrowed with amusement. ‘Never mind, you’re worth it.’

  But why? Tara wanted to yell. Why, why, why am I suddenly worth it?

  Oh well, only one way to find out.

  ‘OK.’ Closing the door behind them, she gasped as the first icy blast of rain hurled itself at her like gravel. ‘See the roof of the summerhouse over there? One, two, three… go.’

  ‘Th-this is the w-w-worst idea I ever h-had,’ Tara stammered through frantically chattering teeth, forty seconds later. The summerhouse might be a discreet place to talk but it was also concrete-floored and colder than being trapped in a deep-freeze.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll warm you up.’ Dominic’s arms were round her before she had a chance to protest, and Tara was unable to summon the willpower to move away. The heat of his body was gorgeous, better than any electric blanket. And he was rubbing her arms and back in a brisk, circulation-boosting kind of way.

  ‘Right,’ said Tara, when she was able to speak again without risking biting through her tongue. ‘So are you going to tell me what this is all about?’ Glancing at her watch she added, ‘Bearing in mind that your future wife is probably, at this very moment, climbing into her wedding dress.’

  ‘Look at you.’ Ignoring the question, Dominic slowly trailed a finger down one side of her face. ‘You haven’t changed a bit. Not on the outside, at least.’

  ‘I haven’t changed on the inside,’ Tara protested. ‘I’m exactly the same.’

  ‘Wrong. You only think that. But you have changed,’ he told her. ‘More than you know.’

  A wooden bench ran along the back wall of the summerhouse. As they sat down together, Tara shivered and warned, ‘Say it quickly then, whatever it is. Five minutes and I’m going back inside.’ Despite pretending to be stern, she was bursting with curiosity. It was such a thrill, discovering that you’d had more of an effect on someone than you’d ever imagined.

  ‘I loved you,’ Dominic said simply. ‘You were my dream girl. You were funny and beautiful and the best fun in the world.’

  Not to mention fab in bed, thought Tara, don’t forget that bit.

  Aloud she said, with just a hint of sarcasm, ‘If I was that much fun, seems a bit strange that you decided to chuck me.’

  ‘Can’t you guess why I did that? Can you really not work it out?’ Dominic shook his head sadly. ‘You were perfect in almost every way. But the one thing I couldn’t cope with was the one thing you cared about more than anything else in the world.’

  Tara boggled. Good grief, was he seriously saying he couldn’t cope with her addiction to toffee pecan ice cream?

  ‘Your so-called career,’ Dominic went on. ‘You were obsessed with it. Nothing else mattered. Your whole life revolved around this crazy dream that you were going to make it big one day and you just couldn’t see what it was doing to you. Every Thursday you’d buy The Stage and read it from cover to cover. Then there were the endless auditions that never came to anything. So you started doing the tacky stuff, convinced that it didn’t matter, it was better than nothing and you might still get your big break. You actually managed to convince yourself that some hotshot producer might spot a topless photo of you and decide that you were the girl he needed to star in his next Hollywood blockbuster.’

  Tara, her skin prickling with embarrassment, said indignantly, ‘But everyone has to go through that! The whole thing about acting is you do have to struggle before you get noticed. Madonna went through it. And Geri Halliwell. God, even Joanna Lumley did it.’ She knew he’d always had a soft spot for Joanna Lumley.

  ‘Maybe they did. But I couldn’t handle seeing you do that to yourself. It made me feel… well, a bit sick, to be honest. And then I heard through a friend of a friend that you’d gone along to audition for a job in a lap-dancing club and I knew I couldn’t handle it anymore. I loved you, but I didn’t want a girlfriend who was a lap-dancer. And when I asked you about the work, you told me it was waitressing. That was the last straw. I had to end our relationship.’

  Tara was astounded. OK, she’d lied to him and been caught out, but she hadn’t realized he’d felt this strongly about her whole career.

  ‘But you never even gave me a clue! If you hated me doing it so much, why didn’t you tell me? For crying out loud, Dominic, I didn’t have any idea!’

  He shrugged. ‘I know you didn’t. That’s because you were obsessed. Acting was more important to you than anything or anyone else. It w
as the love of your life. There was no point asking you to give it up because, well, you just wouldn’t have done it. You were like an alcoholic refusing to believe you had a problem. I just decided to get out while I still could. It hurt like hell, but I realized I didn’t have any choice. It was a no-win situation. I couldn’t stop you doing what you wanted to do.’

  Tara shivered, her sodden uniform cold and clammy against her skin. No doubt Dominic had envisaged her ending up as some bloated, silicone-pumped old hag starring in soft porn movies. The really shaming thing was, it could so nearly have happened. She’d been there, teetering right at the top of that scary slippery slope. All it would have taken was one tiny push.

  She had, thank God, come to her senses in the nick of time. Realizing what she was on the verge of doing, she’d stepped back.

  ‘That’s all in the past now,’ Tara said slowly. ‘I faced up to the fact that I’d been kidding myself. I was never going to make it as an actress. So I gave it all up and moved down here. Does that make you feel better?’ she added with a wry smile. ‘Knowing you were right all along?’

  Dominic roughly raked back his hair, his expression strained. ‘Tara, listen to me. Don’t you understand, don’t you see what this means? You were perfect in every other way. The only thing that came between us was your acting. And now you aren’t doing it anymore. Which makes you…’

  ‘Perfect?’ quipped Tara.

  But Dominic wasn’t laughing. There was anguish in his eyes as he uttered, ‘God, yes, yes,’ and made his lunge.

  Caught off guard by the unexpectedness of the onslaught, Tara toppled backwards along the wooden bench. Dominic’s arms were all over her like tentacles, his body pressing against hers as he groaned and kissed her passionately on the mouth. To stop herself falling off the bench, Tara was forced to hang on to him. She let out a muffled wmpphh of surprise and grabbed his shoulders, dimly aware that one of her knees was trapped between his legs. Dominic’s warm tongue had snaked its way into her mouth and he was kissing her so hard she could barely breathe. His wet hair was flopping into her eyes, she could feel his heart thump-thumping against her chest and the smell of his aftershave was—