a claim like this.
With shocked disgust, Holly recognised the knife twist in her guts as jealousy. She suddenly had a nauseating vision of herself in a dire frilly pink bridesmaid dress stumbling up the aisle behind the glowing vision of her sister. He might be an ex-fantasy figure, but she’d have to be a saint to be actually happy for her sister under these circumstances, and unhappily she was no saint.
‘You’re not making any sense.’ Except with the bit about Rowena being the only woman he’d marry—he was being very clear there.
Had he asked, and been turned down? she wondered, her imagination now working in top gear. Rowena had some very inflexible ideas about a career and marriage and she often said that a girl couldn’t have both if she wanted to succeed in either.
‘You’re just not listening. It’s quite simple. I wanted Rowena to pretend to be my fiancée for tonight.’ He carelessly flicked an invisible speck off his immaculate dark trousers.
‘Pretend?’ The man made it sound a completely normal suggestion. ‘Why…?’ She cleared her throat and continued before he could tell her it was none of her business. ‘Do you drop in many mornings and make requests like that?’
The blue eyes lifted once more to her face. ‘You did say…morning?’
‘So…?’ With a bolshy little glare, she got to her feet. The dignified action was spoilt somewhat by the fact she tripped over the overlong leg of her pyjama trousers. She half-expected to see him smirking when she shot him a dark warning glance, but he wasn’t.
It occurred to Niall for the first time that the pyjamas that totally swamped her diminutive figure belonged, in fact, to a man. Somewhat bizarrely, the idea that she might have been sharing the bed in the adjoining room with a man shocked him.
He supposed he still had her fitted into the niche in his brain marked Rowena’s baby sister, a funny intense little thing with braces. He checked…No, they were gone. There were other changes too, notably the clear creamy complexion. Niall suddenly felt depressingly past his prime.
‘It’s not morning.’
Disbelief showed in her heart-shaped face, closely followed by panic. He was in no position to judge; he’d had some pretty wild nights in his time, too.
‘What day is this?’ she asked after a small frozen pause.
Niall blinked. His hadn’t been that wild! ‘It’s Wednesday evening.’ He watched her sink weakly back down into the chair she’d just vacated.
‘Are you serious?’ she asked hoarsely.
‘What day did you think it was?’
‘I thought it was Tuesday morning.’
‘It must have been some party.’
Even though a stunned Holly was still coming to terms with the fact she’d slept around the clock, and then some, she couldn’t miss that definite austere note of disapproval in his deep voice.
‘You sound like my mother.’ It wasn’t parties that her mother disapproved of, it was the hours that her younger daughter—as a newly qualified junior doctor—was expected to work. The farewell party after a straight sixty hours on call in the busy casualty department had probably not been a good idea. She had meant it as a joke when she’d laughingly said she was going to spend her fort-night’s holiday sleeping!
‘I hope you’ll respect Rowena’s property while you’re staying here.’ Niall suddenly had alarming visions of this girl and her equally wild friends trashing the place. ‘Rowena does know you’re staying here?’
Holly thought a little guiltily of the smashed pig. If only, she thought wistfully, he’d sounded this stuffy when I was sixteen, I’d never have lost a single night’s sleep. Mind you, there was a certain novelty value to being regarded as a dangerous person.
‘My secret’s out: I’m a squatter!’ She gave him a scathing look that would have shrivelled lesser mortals where they stood, or in this case sat. ‘I need a drink. Don’t worry, I mean coffee,’ she added acidly.
‘Feeling hung over?’
‘No!’ Holly glanced angrily over her shoulder.
She continued to futilely open cupboard doors in her search of a jar of coffee, aware that he followed her as if he was well used to treating the place like home. His next words confirmed his familiarity with his surroundings.
‘The coffee’s in here,’ he informed her, reaching into an eye-level cupboard—well, eye level for him, anyway; she’d have needed a step ladder. ‘Rowena always drinks the instant stuff.’
Holly, who had trouble finding time to eat, let alone brew proper coffee, snatched the jar from his unresisting hand. ‘I haven’t found my way around the kitchen yet. I’ve not actually been in that much.’
That he could believe. He watched as she filled a glass with water.
‘Alcohol sends your electrolytes up the chute. That’s why you’re so thirsty.’ Now I’ve started sounding like my father! Hell! What is it about this girl that brings out the stern parent in me? He hadn’t forgotten the last time he’d had to step in to save her from her own stupidity—nor what he had got for his troubles!
‘I don’t need a lecture on physiology,’ she told him drily. Even if she hadn’t read her books like the good student she had been, she’d had a wealth of practical evidence to back up the theory since she’d been working in Casualty. The gentle tap that had given her the black eye hadn’t been the first time a drunk had got physical with her! This one had taken exception to her efforts to suture up his head wound.
‘I take it black.’ Holly regarded him blankly. ‘Coffee: I take my coffee black, no sugar.’
‘You’re a very pushy person,’ she told him, spooning granules into a second mug. If anyone had told me twenty-four—no, make that forty-eight hours ago, she corrected, that I’d be making coffee for Niall Wesley…! ‘Why do you need a fiancée?’ she asked, her curiosity greater at that moment than the growing desire to visit the bathroom. ‘Just for the night.’
‘Tonight I’m going to dinner with a woman who wants to marry me.’
Holly bit her quivering lower lip. His doom-laden announcement made her want to laugh out loud. She felt a spurt of unholy glee to see the roles of predator and victim apparently so neatly reversed.
‘And you wanted to use Rowena as a shield.’ She could instantly see where he was going; her sister was so drop-dead gorgeous that most women would be suitably intimidated. Hadn’t she spent her entire adolescence being intimidated by her elder sister’s perfection? ‘How do you know she—this woman—wants to marry you?’ This could be the arrogant assumption of a man who knew himself to be irresistible to the opposite sex.
‘She told me.’
Holly’s eyebrows shot up. The amorous female was not an advocate of the subtle approach, then. ‘She might have been joking.’
Niall gave a dry laugh. ‘Believe me, she wasn’t,’ he told her heavily.
‘How can you be so…?’
‘It’s Tara.’
Holly dropped the milk carton and it spattered all over Rowena’s stainless steel splashback. ‘Not the same Tara…?’ she asked hoarsely.
Niall had taken over the task of making the coffee as Holly seemed to have lost interest. ‘The same one I married and divorced. The mother of my child…Yes, that’s the one.’
‘Gosh!’
‘A more socially acceptable way of phrasing that instantly springs to my mind, but definitely…Gosh.’
‘I thought she was living with that actor in—’
‘Was is the right word.