style="font-size:15px;"> ‘You’re a very pushy person,’ she told him, spooning granules into a second mug. If anyone had told me twenty-four—no, make that forty-eight hours ago, she corrected, that I’d be making coffee for Niall Wesley…! ‘Why do you need a fiancée?’ she asked, her curiosity greater at that moment than the growing desire to visit the bathroom. ‘Just for the night.’
‘Tonight I’m going to dinner with a woman who wants to marry me.’
Holly bit her quivering lower lip. His doom-laden announcement made her want to laugh out loud. She felt a spurt of unholy glee to see the roles of predator and victim apparently so neatly reversed.
‘And you wanted to use Rowena as a shield.’ She could instantly see where he was going; her sister was so drop-dead gorgeous that most women would be suitably intimidated. Hadn’t she spent her entire adolescence being intimidated by her elder sister’s perfection? ‘How do you know she—this woman—wants to marry you?’ This could be the arrogant assumption of a man who knew himself to be irresistible to the opposite sex.
‘She told me.’
Holly’s eyebrows shot up. The amorous female was not an advocate of the subtle approach, then. ‘She might have been joking.’
Niall gave a dry laugh. ‘Believe me, she wasn’t,’ he told her heavily.
‘How can you be so…?’
‘It’s Tara.’
Holly dropped the milk carton and it spattered all over Rowena’s stainless steel splashback. ‘Not the same Tara…?’ she asked hoarsely.
Niall had taken over the task of making the coffee as Holly seemed to have lost interest. ‘The same one I married and divorced. The mother of my child…Yes, that’s the one.’
‘Gosh!’
‘A more socially acceptable way of phrasing that instantly springs to my mind, but definitely…Gosh.’
‘I thought she was living with that actor in—’
‘Was is the right word. Now she’s living wherever I happen to be,’ he announced, in the voice of a man whose patience was wearing thin. ‘I was in Paris, Tara appears; ditto in Los Angeles…’
‘I’m sure she travels a great deal. Models do.’
‘A book festival in Munich…?’
‘Perhaps not,’ Holly conceded.
‘There’s no perhaps about it.’
‘Wasn’t she the one who did the leaving?’
He nodded, noticing she’d seemed to relish reminding him of this fact. ‘She’s dripping remorse now. She wants to make it all up to me.’
He didn’t sound exactly overjoyed at the prospect, but Holly wondered if this wasn’t a matter of him protesting just a bit too much. She’d have thought the idea of Tara Steel, supermodel—she of the endless legs and gravity-defying ample bosom—making amends would have sent most males delirious with delight.
‘Why don’t you just tell her you don’t want to marry her…again?’ It seemed to her that he was creating problems where there weren’t any. Or perhaps this was all part of a token resistance.
‘I’ve tried, but she doesn’t believe me, and I don’t want to hurt her,’ he announced astonishingly. ‘The press gave the poor angel such a bad time when we split up, and when I got custody of Thomas they got really vicious.’ There was no mistaking the warmth towards his ex-wife in his voice. ‘Sugar?’ he enquired, spoon in hand.
Poor angel! Holly gaped at him incredulously. The way the tabloids had told it—and, yes, she had read every single word—his model wife had dumped him when he’d quit the glamorous Formula One circuit and left him literally holding the baby! Did this mean he was still in love with her…?
Heavens, she thought, aggravated by her fascination with the state of his emotions, what’s wrong with me? Two minutes ago, I had him in love with Rowena. Anyone would think I gave a damn.
He looked genuinely distracted as he absently stirred his coffee. For once, he seemed to have forsaken his habitual urbane poise. ‘Tara is a woman on a mission,’ he told her in a tone of deep foreboding. ‘She wants to rescue me from a lonely, aimless existence.’
‘Do you have a lonely, aimless existence?’ she asked unsympathetically. If he did, he only had himself to blame.
‘Being single equates with lonely and aimless in Tara’s eyes.’
‘My heart bleeds.’ She stopped short of smirking outright—but only just. She widened her eyes innocently when he shot a savage glare in her direction.
‘I enjoy my single state.’
‘Yes, I think I read something about that the other week in the newspaper my fish and chips were wrapped up in.’ He’d been enjoying his single state in the back of a limousine with a young actress barely wearing a stunning outfit.
Annoyance flickered in his eyes as he bent his dark head in acknowledgement of her sly words. ‘The awards ceremony debacle,’ he said grimly. ‘If I weren’t a gentleman, I’d say the same thing to you that I did to that photographer. For your information, that stunt was a put-up job.’ He ground his teeth as the little witch actually giggled.
‘Of course it was,’ she soothed. ‘Couldn’t you have asked—what was her name?—to help you out?’ Holly bit her trembling lower lip. ‘She looked to be a very obliging sort of girl,’ she choked.
‘No, I couldn’t!’ he bellowed. ‘I never intended to actually produce a woman. I thought Tara would accept it when I told her I’d fallen in love.’ He looked deeply frustrated by her lack of co-operation.
‘You mean she doesn’t take what you say at face value? How strange,’ Holly puzzled.
‘It just so happens I don’t lie to Tara.’
Holly lifted her brows expressively.
‘Normally,’ he ground out, with an expression which suggested that throttling his interrogator would offer him the greatest satisfaction. ‘I don’t lie, but this is for her own good.’
‘Not to mention yours.’
‘I said I’d produce this woman thinking Rowena would step into the breach. That was before she vanished off the face of the earth. Now…Now I’ve got about—’ he looked down at his watch ‘—about thirty minutes to find a stand-in lover.’
‘I’d have thought there would have been a whole flock of lovelies gagging to help you out.’
He raised guileless blue eyes to her face and mournfully nodded his agreement. ‘The problem is,’ he confided in a slow languid drawl that, had she known it, was pitched deliberately to aggravate her, ‘they wouldn’t all be as happy as Rowena to hand back the ring in the morning. I could well be jumping from the frying-pan into the fire.’
‘God, it must be
