‘Actually, I was just off to pick up the tree. Anyone like to come?’ she enquired. She was predictably underwhelmed by the response. ‘Right, I’ll be off, then.’
‘If you don’t mind, I wouldn’t mind coming along for the ride.’
Darcy spun around, horror etched on her pale features. ‘You!’
‘I’m getting a bit stir-crazy, unable to drive,’ Reece explained glibly to the room in general.
‘You’d be bored,’ she said several shades too emphatically.
‘I think it’s an excellent idea,’ Jack responded firmly, reproach in his eyes.
Nick spoke for the first time. ‘I’m sure Darcy will enjoy having company.’
Darcy shot her treacherous narrow-minded brother a seething look from under the sweep of her lashes. ‘There will be lashings of mud.’ Nobody paid her any heed.
‘Borrow some Wellingtons—the twins look about the same size as you.’
With a sigh Darcy subsided into a resentful silence whilst her eager family—with the notable exception of Nick—equipped their neighbour.
‘You look awfully pale, Darcy.’
Thanks, bro, she thought as Nick’s contribution to the conversation brought her a lot of highly undesirable attention.
‘Yes, she does, doesn’t she?’ her stepfather agreed. ‘Are you feeling all right?’
‘Absolutely fine.’
‘It’s probably sleep deprivation,’ Nick continued smoothly. ‘She’s not been sleeping too well.’ He wasn’t looking at his sister as he spoke but at the tall figure who stood beside her. The two men exchanged a long look.
‘Is that right? You didn’t say so, Darcy.’
‘Lot on my mind, Dad…’ she muttered. ‘Holidays are always the same—it takes me the first week to wind down.’
‘Darcy is a computer analyst,’ her proud stepfather explained to Reece. ‘She has a very responsible job.’
Darcy cringed. ‘Give the man a break, Dad,’ she laughed uncomfortably. ‘I’m sure Mr Erskine doesn’t want to know about my work.’
Nick, of course, couldn’t resist stirring the pot. ‘You mean, he doesn’t already?’
‘If you’ve got nothing better to do, Nick, you could take a look at the Christmas lights for me.’ She felt a surge of satisfaction as her brother looked suitably horrified at the prospect. ‘They don’t seem to be working.’
‘I think,’ Nick announced hopefully, ‘that it’s time we bought some new ones.’
‘You can’t do that, Nick!’ Charlie protested. ‘We’ve had them for ever…’
‘My point exactly,’ Nick muttered. ‘It’s the same every year—they never work.’
‘I remember the time the cat—that one that had no tail—’ Harry began.
‘Oscar,’ his twin supplied.
Nick decided to inject a little reality into this trip down memory lane. ‘I remember the time they fused the electrics while Mum was cooking Christmas dinner…’
There was a collective subdued gasp of dismay and all eyes turned to Jack.
‘Far be it from me to break with tradition,’ Nick put in quickly. ‘I’ll fix the damned things.’
‘You all seem pretty protective of your father,’ Reece observed as he trailed Darcy outside.
‘Stepfather, actually, but yes, I suppose we are.’
‘Stepfather; that makes the twins your…?’
Darcy gave a resigned sigh. ‘Jack adopted Nick and me when he married Mum—I was five. Not that it’s any of your business.’ She stood beside the Land Rover, jingling the keys. ‘You can’t want to come…’ Please…please, let him say he doesn’t. She always had been a hopeless optimist!
‘DID you have to bring this thing?’ Reece scowled as the big dog, his paws planted on the back of the passenger seat, licked his face ecstatically.
‘I wanted him to come,’ Darcy, tight-lipped, pointedly replied. ‘Sit down, Wally!’ Reluctantly the big animal curled up on the back seat of her stepfather’s Land Rover, his eyes reproachful.
Reece wiped the excess canine saliva off his neck with a pained grimace. ‘A man could get to feel unwanted.’
‘Not by Wally.’ The dog’s ears pricked up at the sound of his name. ‘Or my family,’ she reflected with a frustrated little snort. ‘You’ve certainly weaseled your way into their affections,’ she hissed nastily. ‘It was a master stroke to appeal to the twins’ stomachs.’
Reece, who wasn’t really interested in the direct route to the twins’ hearts, responded with a slightly distracted smile.
‘I take it the way to your elder brother’s heart is not through his stomach…’
‘You noticed that, did you?’ Darcy had not yet forgiven Nick. How dared he lecture her on morality, she fumed—the man who had had, much to his parents’ dismay and her awe, an affair with a thirty-year-old divorcee when he was just seventeen?
‘Let’s just say I didn’t feel warm and welcome when he looked at me,’ Reece responded drily. His eyes narrowed. ‘Is he giving you a hard time?’ he wondered suspiciously.
‘I don’t give a damn what Nick thinks!’
‘Yeah, I heard that bit.’
A deep tide of colour washed over her fair skin as she worked out what he must have heard. ‘Don’t go reading anything into that. I was establishing a principle. Sex isn’t a high priority for me.’
Darcy knew she was wasting her breath; the man obviously had her down as some sort of sex junkie—I could always refer him to Michael, she thought. He would set the record straight. Not that Michael had ever come right out and complained about her sex drive, or lack of it, but that was probably because the man had still had a wife at home to keep happy. From his point of view, the fact she hadn’t made excessive demands had probably been a godsend!
‘You got many other prospects lined up?’
‘Has anyone ever told you you’ve got a very crude mouth, and a one-track mind?’ He wasn’t the only one, she thought, struggling hard to banish the image of his big, sexy body shifting beneath her…his skin glistening…the ripple of muscle… The heat travelled like a flash-flood up her neck and bathed her face. The empty feeling in the pit of her belly got emptier and achier.
Despite her determination to think of anything else but the man beside her, Darcy couldn’t have stopped her eyes from furtively fluttering to the mouth she’d criticised if her life had depended on it. Perfection didn’t seem too extravagant an adjective for that wide, mobile curve which intriguingly managed to combine both sensuality and control.
‘Actually,’ she mused, her voice husky, ‘the new vicar did ask me to the Christmas dance.’ She’d almost forgotten this unexpected event, which had occurred only this morning, but then she had other things on her mind. How her little sister would laugh if she ever discovered what a man-magnet the sister she despaired of had become.
‘New vicar…’ Reece didn’t look as though he was taking the opposition seriously. ‘I’m seeing tweed jackets, maybe a goatee—looks aren’t everything, of course…’
‘Actually, Adam played rugby for Oxford,’ she was pleased