tea-party dress was pinching her under the armpits or squeezing her around the waist, and her sky-high heels definitely weren’t giving her hammertoes. Harriet looked as though she had just stepped off a photo shoot with her immaculate makeup and perfectly coiffed hair.
Juliet felt like a basset hound turning up at a pedigree poodle show.
‘You’re the last one to arrive.’ Harriet’s gaze swept over Juliet’s retro dress. ‘Wow, don’t you look nice?’
Juliet knew that was code for “You look like a fat sow,” but she smiled anyway and sucked her tummy in a little harder. ‘Sorry, am I late? I had to change trains because of a breakdown on the line.’
‘No, we don’t kick off high tea till half-three.’ Harriet glanced at her watch. ‘That gives you thirty-two minutes to freshen up and change.’ She gave a smile that wouldn’t look out of place on an orthodontist’s website home page. ‘If you’re lucky you might even get a glimpse of Lucca Chatsfield. He arrived a few minutes ago. I just got a tweet about it. He’s staying the weekend.’
‘Not for Kendra’s hen party, I take it?’
Harriet laughed. ‘No, but I wouldn’t say no to him doing a little striptease show for us, would you?’
Juliet hated that she blushed so readily. It made her appear as naive and gauche as she felt. Newsfeeds and social media buzzed constantly with Lucca Chatsfield’s latest shenanigans. Not that she moved in the circles he stirred. She didn’t have a circle...apart from one of loneliness. Her job as a library-based rare book expert was her dream career, but it made for a pretty quiet social life.
‘I’m sure he’s very attractive, but I prefer intelligence over looks,’ she said, immediately thinking of Ben’s best friend since childhood, Marcus Bainbridge. But then, she thought of him a lot. Too much. Way, way too much. It was a bit of an obsession she had developed since Christmas, when he had joined Ben and their mother in Bath instead of dividing his time between his bitterly divorced parents and their new partners and families.
Aloof and reserved, which most people mistook for arrogance, Marcus was a perfect counterpoint to Ben’s outgoing daredevil personality. He’d been like a second older brother to Juliet since she was ten, when he had fixed a puncture on her bike because Ben, at sixteen, had been too busy chatting up his latest conquest.
But last Christmas something had changed.
It had been the first time they’d been alone together since The Incident. Her eighteenth birthday party. Blush. Too much alcohol. Double blush. Cornering Marcus in the study. Cringe. Him politely but firmly rejecting her clumsy advances. Him sternly lecturing her on the dangers of excessive drinking. Cringe. Blush. Cringe.
He had avoided her ever since.
Until last Christmas...
Six months on and she remembered as if it were yesterday. They had been washing up after lunch while her mother made a phone call to an elderly relative and Ben talked to his agent in L.A. Marcus handed her a wineglass to dry and her fingers brushed against his as she took it from him. Their gazes collided. Meshed. Stilled. Heated.
A sensation like a fizzing electrical pulse travelled from his fingers to hers, raced all the way up her arm and then through her body to light a fire in her core. She saw the flare of his pupils, the way they made his eyes darken to a midnight blue. The way his fingers didn’t jerk away, but lingered. Burned against hers.
His gaze went to her mouth. Paused there. Her lips felt scorched from the heat of his gaze. She heard the scuff of his shoe on the tiled floor as he closed the half-step distance between their bodies....
But then Ben came bounding in to announce he had got the part for the rom-com. Champagne was opened. Toasts and celebrations were conducted. There were no more private moments. Marcus kept his distance. Business as usual.
‘So—’ Harriet smoothed an imaginary hair behind her ear. It was a ploy Juliet knew was so Harriet could showcase her glittering and ridiculously huge and brand new—as of last week—diamond engagement ring. ‘Are you seeing anyone?’
Juliet was going to say no. Of course she was. Why wouldn’t she say no? She hadn’t dated anyone since Simon Foster had made a fool out of her five years ago, stringing her along for months with weekend dates while he got it on in the city with a size-zero blonde the rest of the time. Of course she was going to say no. Her mouth even went as far to shape the word but instead she said, ‘N-yes.’
Harriet’s impeccably groomed eyebrows shot up beneath her perfectly trimmed and blow-dried fringe. ‘Who is it?’ But before Juliet could think of a name, Harriet had already come up with one. ‘It’s Marcus, isn’t it? That stuck-up naval architect friend of your brother’s?’
‘He’s not stuck up.’ Had she sounded too defensive?
‘Oh. My. God.’ Harriet’s china-blue eyes were as round as the satellite dishes on the International Space Station. ‘Get outta here. Are you serious? Marcus Bainbridge and you?’
Juliet’s back came up at Harriet’s incredulity. She knew she wasn’t beautiful—or at least not without soft lighting or a quick touch-up in Photoshop. She knew she didn’t have the best figure, and she hated her freckles because they made her look about eight years old. But was it that unbelievable that a man like Marcus would be interested in her? He had almost kissed her at Christmas. She hadn’t been imagining that. Had she?
She was tired of being the odd one out.
Tired of being almost twenty-nine years old and unattached. The only one of Kendra’s Clan who was still single. An object of pity. Like at school, where she had been the only girl in her class without a father. The bookish nerd who studied instead of dated. The lonely fringe-dweller who had a sudden rush of best friends around exam time when everyone wanted her to help them swot.
What would it hurt to pretend she belonged to someone? It was only for the weekend. She could head back to Bath on Monday morning and no one would be the wiser. It wasn’t as if Marcus would even hear about it; he was currently living in Dubai while he designed a luxury yacht for a sheikh.
‘Yes,’ she said, and took it one step further because she didn’t care for the way Harriet was still gaping at her. ‘It’s serious.’
‘How serious? Has he asked you to marry him?’ Harriet glanced at Juliet’s left hand, her eyes narrowing. ‘You’re not wearing an engagement ring.’
Juliet curled her fingers into a ball. There was a jeweller’s store half a block from the hotel. She had stopped to gaze dreamily at the rings in the window on her way past. ‘Erm, well, no, not yet. But I’m picking it up. Soon. This afternoon. Before tea.’ What are you doing? Are you crazy?
‘You’d better get a wriggle on,’ Harriet said. ‘I want everyone assembled for when Kendra makes her entrance. I want everything to be perfect for her.’
‘Don’t worry.’ Juliet pasted a smile on her face. ‘It will be.’
CHAPTER TWO
MARCUS WAS JETLAGGED and hungry and a tension headache was throbbing like a pneumatic drill behind his eyeballs as the cab pulled up outside the Chatsfield in London. He still had some work to do on his proposal for Gene Chatsfield’s luxury yacht before he presented it on Monday morning. He was one of three naval architects shortlisted to pitch for the multimillion-pound contract. It would be a career coup if he pulled it off, especially on the back of his success with the Dubai deal. He figured staying in-house might give him the edge on his competitors. It would demonstrate his commitment and dedication to the Chatsfield brand. He had heard the newly appointed CEO, Christos Giantrakos, was a stickler for that sort of thing.
Marcus paid the driver and turned to enter the hotel just as a small figure came bolting down the brass steps from the other direction. Her shiny brown-haired head was bent down as she glanced at her watch, a little pleat of a frown was pulling at her brow and her teeth were savaging