I’m not your mistress. You may think I’m bought and paid for. But I’m not.’
She babbled to a stop. He was looking at her as if she’d taken leave of her senses. ‘You don’t own me,’ she soldiered on regardless. ‘And I won’t be treated as if you do.’
He shrugged. ‘Right enough,’ he said, then pulled down his zipper. The crackle of the metal teeth unlocking drew her gaze down. ‘Move over. I’ve a mind to join you in the tub.’
‘I most certainly will—’ But her indignant reply backed up in her throat as his trousers and boxers dropped to the floor and her eyes fixed on his groin. Unfortunately that hadn’t got any less beautiful, any less magnificent, than the last time she’d seen it. Her whole body began to shake.
She gulped, her mouth bone-dry, and forced her eyes back to his face as he stepped into the tub. The sensual smile made it obvious he was very well aware of the effect his nakedness had on her.
He settled beside her, his big body making the water and her temperature rise. ‘Now, where were we?’ he said.
She lay transfixed by her raging hormones as he reached behind him for the soap.
Heidi Rice was born and bred and still lives in London, England. She has two boys who love to bicker, a wonderful husband who, luckily for everyone, has loads of patience, and a supportive and ever-growing British/ French/Irish/American family. As much as Heidi adores ‘the Big Smoke’, she also loves America, and every two years or so she and her best friend leave hubby and kids behind and Thelma and Louise it across the States for a couple of weeks (although they always leave out the driving off a cliff bit). She’s been a film buff since her early teens, and a romance junkie for almost as long. She indulged her first love by being a film reviewer for ten years. Then two years ago she decided to spice up her life by writing romance. Discovering the fantastic sisterhood of romance writers (both published and unpublished) in Britain and America made it a wild and wonderful journey to her first Mills & Boon® novel, and she’s looking forward to many more to come.
Recent books by the same author:
PLEASURE, PREGNANCY AND A PROPOSITION
THE TYCOON’S VERY PERSONAL ASSISTANT
HOT-SHOT
TYCOON,
INDECENT
PROPOSAL
BY
HEIDI RICE
To Bryony, for knowing when the Elvis impersonator
needs to be kicked out of the manuscript.
With special thanks to Eilis, who made sure Connor
didn’t sound like an extra from The Quiet Man.
CHAPTER ONE
‘YOU can’t do this. What if you get caught? He could have you arrested.’
Daisy Dean paused in the process of scoping out her neighbour’s ludicrously high garden wall and slanted her best friend, Juno, a long-suffering look.
‘He won’t catch me,’ Daisy replied in the same hushed tones. ‘I’m practically invisible with all this gear on.’
She looked down at the clothes she’d borrowed from her fellow tenants at the Bedsit Co-op next door. Goodness, she looked like Tinkerbell the Terminator decked out in fourteen-year-old Cal’s sagging black Levi’s, his tiny mother Jacie’s navy blue polo neck and Juno’s two-sizes-too-small bovver boots.
She’d never been this invisible in her entire life. The one thing Daisy had inherited from her reckless and irresponsible mother was Lily Dean’s in-your-face dress sense. Daisy didn’t do monotones—and she didn’t believe in hiding her light under a bushel.
She frowned. Except when she was on a mission to find her landlady’s missing cat.
‘Stop worrying, Juno, and give me the beanie.’ She held out her hand and stared back up at the wall, which seemed to have grown several feet since she’d last looked at it. ‘You’ll have to give me a boost.’
Juno groaned, slapping the black woollen cap into Daisy’s outstretched palm. ‘This better not make me an accessory after the fact or something.’ She bent over and looped her fingers together in a sling.
‘Don’t be silly.’ Daisy shoved her curls under the cap and tugged it over her ears. ‘It’s not a crime. Not really.’
‘Of course it’s a crime.’ Juno straightened from her crouch, her round, pretty face looking like the good fairy in a strop. ‘It’s called trespassing.’
‘These are extenuating circumstances,’ Daisy whispered as a picture of their landlady Mrs Valdermeyer’s distraught face popped into her mind. ‘Mr Pootles has been missing for well over a fortnight. And our antisocial new neighbour’s the only one within a mile radius who hasn’t had the decency to search his back garden.’ She propped her hands on her hips. ‘Mr Pootles could be starving to death and it’s up to us to rescue him.’
‘Maybe he looked and didn’t find anything?’ Juno said, her voice rising in desperation.
‘I doubt that. Believe me, he’s not the type to lose sleep over a missing cat.’
‘How do you know? You’ve never even met the guy,’ Juno murmured, wedging the tiniest slither of doubt into Daisy’s crusading zeal.
‘That’s only because he’s been avoiding us,’ Daisy pointed out, the slither dissolving.
Their mysterious new neighbour had bought the double-fronted Georgian wreck three months ago, and had managed to gut it and rehab it in record time. But despite all Daisy’s overtures since he’d moved in two weeks ago—the note she’d posted through his door and the message she’d relayed to his cleaning lady—he’d made no attempt to greet his neighbours at Mrs Valdermeyer’s Bedsit Co-operative. Or join the search for the missing Mr Pootles.
In fact he’d been downright rude. When she’d dropped off a plate of her special home-made brownies the day before in a last ditch attempt to get his attention, he hadn’t even returned the plate, let alone thanked her for them. Clearly the man was too rich and self-centred to have any time for the likes of them—or their problems.
And then there were his dark, striking good looks to be considered. ‘All you have to do is look at him,’ Daisy continued, ‘to see he’s a you-know-what-hole with a capital A.’
Okay, so she’d only caught glimpses of the guy as he was striding down his front steps towards the snazzy maroon gas-guzzler he kept parked out front. At least six feet two, leanly muscled and what she guessed most people would term ruggedly handsome, the guy was what she termed full of himself. Even from a distance he radiated enough testosterone to make a woman’s ovaries stand up and take notice— and she was sure he knew it.
Not that Daisy’s ovaries had taken any notice, of course. Well, not much anyway.
Luckily for Daisy, she was now completely immune to men like her new neighbour. Arrogant, self-absorbed charmers who thought of women as playthings. Men like Gary, who’d sidled into her life a year ago with his come-hither smile, his designer suits and his clever hands and sidled right back out again three months later taking a good portion of her pride and a tiny chunk of her heart with him.
Daisy had made a pact with herself then and there—that she’d never fall prey to some good-looking playboy again. What she needed was a nice regular guy. A man of substance and integrity, who would come to love her and respect her, who wanted the same things out of life she wanted and preferably didn’t know the difference between a designer label and a supermarket