A Very Special Proposal. Josie Metcalfe

watch reminded him that it was time to get ready for the hospital fundraiser he’d been conned into attending.

      He swung his feet to the ground and levered himself upright with a groan. ‘So, just you remember that you learned your lesson the first time around,’ he reminded himself sternly. ‘Princesses and paupers don’t mix.’

      Except the reminder didn’t stop his pulse rate rocketing into the stratosphere when he saw Amy enter the room an hour later, her honey hair freshly coiled in some elegant arrangement high on her head and her slender body draped in a fluid column of something dark blue shot with shimmering strands of silver that instantly made him think of stars in a midnight sky.

      ‘Fanciful nonsense,’ he muttered under his breath as he turned his back on her and accepted a glass from the brimming tray offered by a smiling waiter. But, even though he set off to circulate in the opposite direction, somehow he always seemed to know exactly where she was, the pale gold of her hair attracting his gaze like a candle flame across a dim room.

      Finally, with an audible groan that startled the heavily bejewelled matron beside him, he gave in to the inevitable.

      ‘Dr Willmott, I presume?’ he said when he joined her at one side of the crowd. ‘You look a little different.’

      ‘Zach!’ The pleasure in her eyes when she caught sight of him gave his spirits a nitroglycerine lift, as did the subtle widening of her pupils when her eyes travelled over his evening suit. ‘You scrub up well, too. I’ve never met a man yet who didn’t look good in a DJ—a bit like James Bond, all suave and sophisticated.’

      ‘Suave and sophisticated?’ he repeated with a blink, never having thought of himself that way. ‘I think I like that.’

      ‘Not that I didn’t like your old leather jacket and your snazzy motorbike leathers this morning,’ she teased.

      ‘Zo, tell me,’ Zach said in a heavily faked Germanic accent. ‘How long have you had zis leather fetish?’

      Amy chuckled aloud, the serene grey of her eyes gleaming with her appreciation of his nonsense, and his spirits lifted still further.

      ‘If I’d known you were coming to this thing, too, perhaps we could have come together,’ he suggested, deliberately stifling the logical voice in the back of his head that was telling him to walk away now, while he still could. ‘That way I wouldn’t have had to dread standing around all by myself in a room full of strangers.’

      ‘You needed someone to hold your hand?’ she teased, and for just a moment he was tempted to do just that. He’d done nothing more than accidentally brush against her when they’d been tending a patient today, and the contact had felt electric. Had it been some sort of fluke reaction, or merely static electricity? Or had the awareness that had caused his teenaged self to spend endless hours fantasising survived fifteen years intact?

      ‘Amy, dear,’ said a cultured voice behind them. ‘Do introduce us to your friend.’

      The hairs went up on the back of his neck. It had been fifteen years since he’d last heard that voice but he’d never forgotten it…probably never would.

      ‘Father,’ Amy said with a smile as they turned to face the older couple standing behind them, but he took petty delight in the fact that it was a far less carefree one than those she’d bestowed on him. ‘Hello, Mother. I’ve always loved that colour on you.’

      ‘Amy.’ The well-preserved woman returned her daughter’s hug with such a restrained gentility that it seemed to Zach as though she was more worried about their greeting creasing the burgundy fabric of her dress than embracing her only child. ‘Darling, why aren’t you wearing the dress I sent over for you?’

      ‘I’m sorry, Mother, but I didn’t see it until I was almost ready to leave the house. If I’d stopped to change at that point, it would have made me late,’ Amy said with every appearance of regret, but somehow Zach knew it was faked. There was a definite subtext to this conversation that was probably far more interesting than what was actually being said. He would have to get Amy to explain it later.