One Bridegroom Required!

‘Hello, Luke!’

There was another brief pause as he savoured a heady feeling of power. ‘You haven’t heard of me?’

‘You’re absolutely right. I haven’t.’

‘Well, I’m your new landlord.’

Holly was too busy blinking up at him to respond at first. Up this close he was even more divine. He had the kind of mouth that even the most hardened man-hater would have described as irresistible. She was just wondering what it would be like to be kissed by a mouth like that when his words seeped unwillingly into her consciousness.

‘But you can’t be my landlord!’ she protested. Landlords were pallid and wore pinstriped suits, not faded jeans and a golden tan which she suspected might be all over.

He slanted a look at her from between sultry azure eyes. ‘Oh? Says who?’

‘Says me! You’re not the person I signed the lease with!’

‘And who did you sign the lease with?’

‘I had to meet a man in Winchester—’

‘Called?’

‘Doug Something-or-Other...’ Holly frowned as she recalled the smoothie who had tried plying her with gin and tonics in the middle of the day and sat leering at her thighs. His oily attitude had had a lot to do with the speed with which she had signed the lease. ‘I know! Doug Reasdale, that was it.’

‘Doug’s the letting agent,’ he informed her. ‘He acted for my uncle.’

‘Well, he certainly didn’t mention that there was an absentee and highly hostile landlord!’ snapped Holly.

‘No longer absentee,’ he amended thoughtfully. ‘And Doug neglected to mention to me that he’d just rented out one of my properties to someone who doesn’t even look old enough to vote!’

‘I’m twenty-six, actually,’ she corrected him tightly. She was getting fed up with people thinking she was just a kid. Maybe it was time she started wearing a little make-up, maybe even cut her hair...

‘Twenty-six, huh?’ He looked at the wild tangle of her curls and her wide-spaced green eyes. Bare lips that excited...invited... Right at that moment she looked like jail bait. ‘Well, maybe you should try acting it,’ he suggested softly.

Holly smirked. ‘Really? That’s neat, coming from you! You mean I should follow your shining example of adult behaviour and start throwing my weight around? I thought that dictatorships had gone out of fashion until I met you!’

‘But clearly a very ineffective dictatorship in this case,’ he observed, trying very hard not to laugh, ‘since I asked you to move your car, but it still seems to be taking up half the road!’

‘You didn’t ask me anything!’ she fumed. ‘You issued the kind of order that I haven’t heard since I was at school!’

‘Then you were obviously a very disobedient schoolgirl,’ he murmured, before realising that the conversation was in danger of sliding helplessly into sexual innuendo and that he was in very great danger of responding to it.

Holly had never met a man she found as physically attractive as the one standing in front of her, and maybe his allure was responsible for what she did next. She tried to tell herself that it was purely an instinctive reaction to that suggestive velvet whisper, but, whatever the reason, she found herself slanting her eyes at him like a courtesan. ‘Why?’ she murmured provocatively, and put her hands on her hips. ‘Have you got a thing about schoolgirls?’

Luke froze. When she leaned back like that it was easy to see that she wasn’t wearing a bra, that her lush breasts were free and unfettered. He saw the way her lips were parted into a smile and he knew for certain that, if he tried to kiss her right then, she would melt into his arms in the way that so many women had done before. But no more. His mouth hardened.

‘I’ll tell you what I have a “thing” about,’ he said carefully. ‘And that’s people who take on more than they’re obviously capable of—’

‘Meaning me?’

‘Meaning you,’ he agreed evenly, as he fought to keep his feelings under control. ‘You clearly can’t tell your left from your right, judging by your parking—so heaven only knows how you intend to run a thriving business! Or maybe that’s why you enjoy flirting with me so outrageously. Maybe you suspect that you’re destined to fail? Perhaps you like to have a little something to fall back on, huh? So that if your business goes bust, then the landlord might be lenient with you.’

Holly stared at him, first in horror, then in disbelief. Then with an irresistible desire to giggle. ‘My God, you’re actually being serious, aren’t you? Are you really from planet Earth, or have aliens just dropped you here? Or do you honestly think that I’d leap into bed with you if I didn’t have enough money to pay the rent?’

Luke knew that he had two choices. If he allowed her to think that he had actually meant that outrageous suggestion, then she would seriously underestimate his critical judgement—and Luke didn’t like being underestimated by anyone. If she underestimated him then she wouldn’t respect him either, and for some reason the thought of that disturbed him. Then he thought of Caroline, and swallowed. Maybe, under the circumstances, that would be the best of the two options.

Alternatively, if he laughed it off—then some of this rapidly building tension might dissolve...

He relaxed and let his blue eyes crinkle at the corners. It was a calculated move because he knew only too well the effect that particular look had. It worked on everyone—men, women, children, animals. It was a charm he had in abundance, but he had never used it quite as deliberately as he did right now. ‘Don’t be absurd,’ he denied softly. ‘It was just a joke.’

‘Pretty poor taste joke, commented Holly, but it was impossible not to thaw when confronted by that melting blue gaze.

‘Listen, why don’t I help you unload your roof-rack so that you can move your car more easily?’ He smiled at her properly then, and Holly honestly couldn’t think of a single objection.

CHAPTER TWO

‘UNLESS,’ Luke queried, blue eyes narrowing, ‘you have someone else to help you?’

Holly shook her head. ‘Nope. Just me. All on my own.’

‘Well, then. Show me what needs doing.’

She looked into his eyes, confused by this sudden softening of his attitude towards her. One minute he was Mr Mean, the next he was laying on the charm with a trowel, and—surprise, surprise—he was very good at that! ‘What’s the catch?’

‘No catch.’

‘Well, that’s very sweet of you—’ she began, but he shook his head firmly.

‘No, not sweet,’ he corrected. ‘I am never sweet, Holly.’

‘What, then?’ She wrinkled her nose at him. ‘Let’s go on what we know about you already. Kind? Polite? Gentlemanly?’

He laughed, and even that felt like a brief betrayal, until he told himself that he was being stupid. Men could be friends with women, couldn’t they? Or, if not actually friends, then friendly. Just because you had a laugh and a joke with a woman, it didn’t mean that the two of you automatically wanted to start tearing each other’s clothes off.

‘Let’s just say that it wouldn’t rest very easily on my conscience if I walked away knowing that I had left you to deal with that outrageous amount of luggage. I’m kind of old-fashioned like that.’

Holly regarded him steadily, but her heart was beating fast. She wasn’t used to men coming out with ruggedly masculine statements like that last one. ‘You mean that I’m too much of a delicate female to be able to manoeuvre a couple of suitcases off the roof-rack?’

‘Delicate?’ Luke looked her over very thoroughly, telling himself that she had asked the question, and therefore he needed to give it careful consideration.

She was getting on for six feet—tall for a woman—with correspondingly long limbs. She had legs like a thoroughbred, he thought, then wished he hadn‘t—long and supple legs that seemed to go all the way up to her armpits. She was slim and narrow-hipped, but not skinny in the way that tall women very often could be. And her breasts were almost shocking in their fullness—they looked curiously and beautifully at odds with her boyish figure. ‘No,’ he growled. ‘I wouldn’t call you delicate.’

She wondered if he had noticed that she was blushing. Maybe not. He hadn’t exactly been concentrating on her face, now, had he? There had been something almost anatomical in the way he had looked at her. If any other man had stared at her body quite so blatantly, she suspected that she would have asked them to leave. But she didn’t feel a bit like asking Luke to leave. With Luke she just wanted him to carry on looking at her like that all day long.

‘So do you want my help, or not?’

Holly swallowed, wishing that everything he said didn’t sound like a loaded and very sexy question. And the decision was really very simple—if she wanted to be totally independent and self-sufficient then she should decline his offer and do it all herself.

But a sensible person wouldn’t do that, would they? After all, she knew no one here, not a soul. Was she, the great risk-taker, really tying herself up in knots over a simple offer of assistance just because it happened to come from a man she found overwhelmingly attractive? Wasn’t that a form of sexism in itself?

‘Thanks very much! You can start bringing the stuff in from the car, if you like,’ she told him, trying to sound brisk and workmanlike, ‘while I go and see how habitable it is upstairs. I just hope it’s more promising than down here.’ But her voice didn’t hold out much hope. ‘Unless you happen to have been up there lately?’

He shook his head. ‘I’ve never set foot inside the place before.’

Holly frowned. ‘But I thought you said you were the landlord?’

‘I did. And I am—but an extremely new landlord. It’s a long story.’ He shrugged, in answer to the questioning look in her eyes. In the dim winter light shining through the shop window he became acutely conscious of how pale her skin looked, how bright her green eyes. With the deep copper ringlets tumbling unfettered around her shoulders, she could have stepped straight out of a pre-Raphaelite painting, jeans or no jeans, and he suddenly felt icy with a foreboding of unknown source.

‘And you didn’t ask to see any credentials,’ he accused suddenly. ‘Basic rule of safety, number one.’ His eyes glittered. ‘And you broke it.’

‘Do you have any on you?’

‘Well, no,’ he admitted reluctantly. ‘But the lesson is surely that I could be absolutely anyone—’

‘The impostor landlord?’ She hammed it up. ‘About to hurl me to the floor and have your wicked way with me?’

The air crackled with tension. ‘That isn’t funny,’ he said heavily.

‘No,’ she agreed, and her throat seemed to constrict as their gazes clashed. ‘It isn’t.’

‘In fact, it’s a pretty dumb thing to do—to put yourself in such a vulnerable situation,’ he growled.

Independent and self-sufficient—huh! She had fallen headlong at the first hurdle. ‘Okay. Okay. Lesson received and understood.’

He was still frowning. ‘You’d better give me the keys,’ he instructed tersely. ‘And I’ll move your car when I’ve unloaded all the stuff.’

Holly hesitated. ‘Er—you might find she’s a little temperamental in cold weather—like all cars of that age.’

‘I should have guessed!’ His voice was tinged with both irritation and concern—though he didn’t stop to ask himself why. How was she hoping to get a business up and running if she was this disorganised? ‘Why the hell don’t you buy yourself a decent car?’ he drawled. ‘Didn’t it occur to you that you might need something more reliable?’

His sentiments were no different from her own, but it was one thing deciding that she needed a newer car for herself—quite another for a complete stranger to bossily interrogate her on why she hadn’t bought one!

‘Of course it occurred to me,’ she agreed. ‘But reliable usually means boring. And expensive. To get an interesting car that you can count on costs a lot more money than I’m prepared or able to spend at the moment.’ She gave him a reassuring smile. ‘But don’t worry if she won’t start first time. A little coaxing usually works wonders.’

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 strutted 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?