chocolates.
‘You’re wonderful. And I got what you asked for.’ Allie produced three roses.
‘Fantastic. I’m going to play.’ Amber carefully painted the petals with egg-white, dipped them in icing sugar and set them to dry while Gina and Allie were in charge of the salads. She cooked the meringue and prepared as much of the filling as she could. ‘I need to assemble this at the very last minute, or it’ll be soggy and disgusting,’ she said, ‘so I’ll do it when people have nearly finished eating, OK?’
‘More than OK,’ Allie said, giving her a hug. ‘I don’t know why Celebrity Life keeps making you out to be an airhead. They really have no idea about who you really are.’
Amber knew exactly why they did it. She’d turned down a date with one of the journos and, even though she thought she’d been tactful in her refusal, he’d really taken a huff. As a result, the magazine’s favourite sport seemed to be Amber-baiting. She tried her best to ignore the snide headlines—When will Bambi be a Wynne-r in love?—but it was starting to rankle. After that last nasty feature, she’d had to stop herself going to the office and punching him on the nose. Ignoring him was the best policy. She’d just have to grit her teeth; someone else would do something indiscreet, soon enough, to take the spotlight off her.
‘Who cares about Celebrity Life?’ she said lightly, and picked up a platter of bread to take out to the terrace.
Xav was already cooking things on the grill, and Guy was pouring wine for all the wedding guests who were staying overnight at the château.
He handed her a glass in silence.
Time to fix things, she thought. She was definitely in the wrong about the rose, and it wouldn’t be fair for Allie and Xav to have needless tension at their wedding. ‘Guy, may I have a word, please?’ she asked.
He looked wary. ‘Why?’
‘I owe you an apology,’ she said, ‘for picking your flowers without asking. Especially as I didn’t have the manners to introduce myself when we met. I know your name and that you’re Xav’s brother. I’m Amber Wynne. Nice to meet you.’ She held out her hand to shake his.
For a moment, she thought he was going to refuse, but then he took her hand and shook it. The second his skin touched hers, desire jolted through her, shocking her with its intensity; judging by the surprise in his eyes, quickly masked, it was the same for him.
Interesting.
Except, she reminded herself, she was off men. Her love life was a disaster area, and she’d promised herself a break for the next six months.
‘I owe you an apology, too, Amber,’ he said, surprising her. ‘You’re a guest and I shouldn’t have snapped at you. My only excuse is that you caught me at a bad time.’
‘And your roses are important to you. I thought you were maybe the gardener,’ Amber said, ‘but I take it that you grow them for your perfume?’
Guy looked slightly taken aback, clearly realising that she’d talked to Allie about him. ‘Well, yes.’
‘May I?’ She gestured to the chair next to him. At his brief nod, she sat down. ‘You have a beautiful garden,’ she said, ‘and a beautiful home.’ And she really hoped he hadn’t overheard her telling Sheryl that it needed a bit of work. ‘Thank you so much for letting me stay here.’
He shrugged. ‘You’re a wedding guest—any friend of my sister-in-law-to-be is a friend of my family.’
Guy had been prepared to dislike Amber, because she reminded him so much of Véra, but there was an easy warmth about her; to his surprise, he found himself relaxing and chatting to her. And when she encouraged him to talk more about his roses, for one crazy moment he thought he could smell them. On her skin.
No. Of course not. The virus he’d caught three months ago had put paid to that. But, all the same, she intrigued him.
And attracted him. An attraction he wouldn’t let himself act on—not while his life was in chaos and all his energy seemed to be used up in fighting the fear that the career he loved was over. Besides, she was only here for the wedding. It wasn’t as if their paths were likely to cross again in the near future. There was no point in starting something he had no intention of continuing.
When Allie and Gina started to clear away, Amber stood up and started helping—something else Guy hadn’t expected. Véra would have considered herself a guest and therefore someone to be waited on, not someone to help with the waiting.
As if she read the expression on his face, she said, ‘I’m in charge of pudding. Back in a minute.’ She smiled, and was gone.
And what a pudding. She came back holding a platter containing two soft meringue roulades, filled with what looked like some kind of cream-and-fruit mixture; the top was decorated with candied rose-petals and a drizzle of passion-fruit seeds, and she’d found some indoor sparklers somewhere and stuck those in, too, so her pudding could make a real entrance.
‘So that’s why Allie wanted three more roses,’ he said when she brought him a slice neatly plated.
She looked awkward. ‘Sorry, but they were so perfect for this—cream in the centre shading out to deep pink at the edges.’
‘And candying them must’ve taken you a while.’
‘It’s the little details that make the difference,’ she said simply.
‘And you pay attention to them.’ Again, he hadn’t expected that. He’d pigeonholed her as a careless, thoughtless diva. How had she managed to wrong foot him so completely? He gestured to the pudding to cover his awkwardness. ‘This looks good. Are you a chef?’
She shook her head. ‘I like messing about in the kitchen. But being a chef would mean working crazy hours. Not my thing.’
‘So what is your thing?’ he asked, suddenly curious.
‘I organise parties.’
He blinked. ‘You organise parties?’
‘It’s how I met Allie. She came to one of my parties, a couple of years back, and we hit it off. We’ve become friends.’
‘You’re a party girl.’ So he’d been right, at heart. She was a media darling—just like his ex-wife.
‘Uh-huh.’ She sighed. ‘But don’t believe everything you see in the press about me.’
‘You’re in the press a lot?’ Although her face seemed familiar, he couldn’t quite place her. He skimmed the business news, most of the time online because it was quicker; he certainly didn’t read the gossip and celeb pages in the newspapers, and the only time he saw one of the celeb magazines was if the cuttings agency sent it over because it contained a piece about GL Parfums. One of the things that drove his business partner, Phillipe, crazy was Guy’s insistence on low-key product launches—but Guy had already been burned by the media. Badly. And he wasn’t giving them a chance to dig around in his life again.
‘She’s the darling of the celeb mags, our Bambi,’ Gina said, coming over and draping her arms round Amber’s neck.
‘Bambi?’ The question was out before he could stop it.
‘Because of those big brown eyes and the legs up to her armpits. If she wasn’t so nice,’ Gina said cheerfully, ‘we’d all hate her for looking this good. Everyone else has to work at it. Not her. She could be wearing a sack after having no sleep for a week, and she’d still manage to look glamorous and start setting a trend! Life just isn’t fair.’
Amber laughed. ‘Thank you for the compliment, Gina, but you have to credit my mother for giving me her genes. And if you’d let me get you out of your “I’m an artist so I must wear black” uniform and put you in some colour to show off that porcelain skin, beautiful auburn hair and those gorgeous eyes, there’d be a queue of men from here to Paris.’