an ancient oak-board door and said, ‘Your room, Miss Kincaid. I do hope you’ll be comfortable,’ she grabbed her slipping courage by the edges, decided to be herself and not the threatening femme fatale that her boss thought his family would see her as, smiled warmly and insisted, ‘Call me Annie. It’s awkward, isn’t it, when strangers descend on you? I was brought up by an elderly aunt who had to have a week’s notice, preferably in writing, before anyone dropped by for afternoon tea! And by the way, many happy returns of the day.’
‘Oh—Mark must have told you!’ The blue eyes crinkled with pleasure and Annie nodded, her smile widening.
‘Of course he did. He wouldn’t have missed your birthday for the world. You know,’ she added confidingly, ‘although he likes to fly high and far, the homing instinct’s very strong. He’ll always come home to roost.
‘I was going to bring you flowers, but he said they’d have wilted long before we got here.’ She walked further into the room—pretty and airy, rosy sprigged wallpaper, its delicate pattern repeated on the curtains and bedspread. ‘I don’t know your tastes, but I remembered Mark once mentioning your weakness for Belgian chocolates.’ She bent and opened her weekend case, scrabbling around for the gift-wrapped box, uncomfortably aware of the brevity of her vividly coloured shorts.
But when she turned and extended the beribboned package there wasn’t a hint of disapproval on her companion’s comfy face.
‘How kind, Annie.’ She took the gift. Then, after a tiny pause, asked, ‘Have you been seeing my son for long?’
Annie wasn’t going to lie to this patently nice woman. ‘I work for him. We’re friends. Nothing more than that.’
If he could hear her, Mark would probably fire her on the spot—or reduce her salary by half. But Annie wasn’t into subterfuge and there wasn’t much she could do about it. Whether his mother believed her or not was another thing. But at least the older woman did seem more relaxed.
‘Come down as soon as you’ve freshened up. There’s a bathroom right opposite. We’ll all have drinks out in the garden—out of the front door, turn right and you’ll find us. Dan should be home any time now, and then we can have lunch.’
‘Dan’ would be big brother, Annie thought, the confidence engendered by being her natural self seeping out of her as soon as she found herself alone.
Meeting the lovelorn Enid would be the next hurdle. She’d rather not jump it, would rather skulk in her room.
She wondered whether to change and decided against it. Whatever she put on she’d still be noticeable. Unpacking took five minutes, washing and renewing her make-up—sunblock and her usual scarlet lipstick—took another five, while brushing the tangles out of her windblown mane took ten.
Irritated with the whole situation now, she dropped her brush down in the clutter she’d already created on the pretty Victorian dressing table and headed for the door. Only another forty-eight hours or so to get through, so she’d just have to grin and bear it—and remind herself to harden the mush that passed for her heart if her boss ever asked her to do him a favour again!
Halfway down the twisty stairs, feeling sick, still trying to remind herself of exactly why she had agreed to come here as Mark’s weekend guest, she felt very ill indeed when she recognised the austerely handsome face and power-packed frame of Daniel Faber as he suddenly rounded one of the quirky bends in the sixteenth-century staircase.
‘I’ve come to bring you down. Everyone thought you’d probably got lost. This house is something of a warren!’
But Annie had already subsided in a heap, sitting down on the nearest tread because her legs had given way, muscle and bone turning to water.
Perhaps he wouldn’t recognise her. It had been dark out on that terrace. They hadn’t been introduced at the party, either. And she and Rupert had left before he’d come back into the room. She’d made sure of that! And the embarrassing happening had been more than eight months ago...
‘Just what the hell are you doing here?’
Annie gave a faint groan. As soon as he’d had a proper look at her, he’d recognised her all right—and the quietly rasping tone told her he didn’t remember their brief encounter with any pleasure whatsoever!
But then, neither did she, she reminded herself bracingly, gingerly hauling herself back to her feet, hanging onto the banister. And even though it had been she who had hurled herself at him, he hadn’t passed up on the opportunity to kiss her back—he’d done more than that, too, she recalled, righteous anger momentarily quelling severely intense embarrassment.
‘I’m here as Mark’s guest, as I guess you must already know. Surely you were told who to fetch.’
Proud of her cool tone, she made the mistake of raking her eyes over him, slowly, from top to toe. And once she’d started the appraisal she couldn’t seem to stop.
How she could ever have mistaken him for Rupert, even in pitch-darkness, she would never know. Long legs encased in cool cotton chinos, topped by a body-hugging black T-shirt—his superb physique owed nothing whatsoever to expensive tailoring.
At six feet, Rupert was tall, but Daniel Faber could give him a good three inches. Plus, he was far wider in the chest and shoulder region and narrower in the hip. But she had known the difference hadn’t she? her ever-active conscience reminded her, bringing hot colour to her face.
As soon as his mouth had covered hers she’d known. And hadn’t been able to resist the startling effect of what the intimacy of his lips and hands had done to her.
His dark-browed frown made a deep cleft between the smoke grey eyes as he returned her minute scrutiny, as if mentally stripping away the silky shorts and top was something he had to do but didn’t want to.
‘I’ve only just arrived,’ he said through the slow build-up of sizzling tension. ‘Dad took me aside and told me Mark had brought a woman guest, that you’d been put in the rose room. He didn’t tell me who you were. I took it on myself to fetch you. I wanted to judge for myself how serious Mark might be about you. None of us are entirely happy about the situation. Now I know who you are, I’m furious.’
He looked it, too. Quietly and coldly furious. So he was the adoring Enid’s champion, too. Mark had implied as much. Yet her brow furrowed. ‘How can you be brothers?’
‘Half-brothers,’ he corrected impatiently. ‘My mother remarried after my father died, and a year later Mark arrived. At the time of the marriage I was eight years old. Old enough to know I wanted to keep my own father’s name.’
So he’d been a self-opinionated little boy, too. That figured. Her body was still tingling almost painfully where his eyes had wandered, and she’d had more than enough of this pointless and potentially embarrassing conversation.
She said, ‘Shall we join the others before they send the dogs to find us?’ and watched his wickedly sensual mouth curve cynically as the steely eyes stabbed her, reaching right into her soul and hurting it.
‘And we wouldn’t want anyone—Mark especially—to think we were doing anything we shouldn’t, would we?’
Flinching at the taunt, Annie willed her legs to stop shaking, held her golden head high and pushed past him. The weekend had barely begun and it had already turned into a nightmare. She had hoped she
