Bridegrooms Required: One Bridegroom Required / One Wedding Required / One Husband Required
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.’