Tillie said, reaching for a set of tongs and a white paper bag.
‘Not today.’ His voice was so deep it was clear he hadn’t been at the back of the queue when the testosterone was handed out. Rich and dark, honey and gravel with a side order of smooth Devonshire cream. His eyes twinkled. ‘I’m abstaining from temptation just this once.’
Tillie’s cheeks were flaming hot enough to make toffee. ‘Can I tempt you with anything else?’
Bad choice of words.
His smile came up a little higher on one side. ‘I thought it was time I introduced myself. I’m Blake McClelland.’
The name rang a bell. Not a drawing-room bell. A Big Ben type of bell. Blake McClelland—international playboy, super-successful businessman and renowned financial whizz. McClelland Park was the name of the country estate Tillie was housesitting for the elderly owner, Mr Pendleton. The estate had been reluctantly sold by Andrew McClelland when his young wife Gwen tragically died, leaving behind a ten-year-old son. The son had certainly done a heck of a lot of growing up. He would be thirty-four now, exactly ten years older than her. ‘How can I...erm...help you, Mr McClelland?’
He held out his hand, and, after a brief hesitation, she slipped hers into its slightly calloused cage. The brush of warm male flesh closing around hers was as electrifying as a high-voltage current. The air suddenly became tighter, denser.
‘Is there somewhere private we can talk?’ he said.
Tillie was rapidly going beyond being able to think, much less talk. Even breathing was proving to be a challenge. Even though she pulled her hand out of his, the sensation of his touch was still travelling through her body like hot tentacles. One of them coiling deep and low in her belly. ‘I’m really busy right now so—’
‘I won’t take up too much of your time.’
She wanted to refuse but she was a businesswoman. Being polite to customers was important to her—even the most annoying ones. What if he wanted to order a speciality cake? Not that she made cakes that big-breasted bunny girls jumped out of, but still. Maybe he wanted her to cater for an event or something. It would be churlish to refuse to speak to him just because he made her feel a little...undone.
‘My office is through here,’ Tillie said and led the way back to the workroom, every cell of her flesh conscious of him only a few steps behind her.
Joanne looked up from the child’s birthday cake she was pretending to decorate with the handmade marzipan toys Tillie had worked on every night for the past week. ‘I’ll watch over the shop, will I?’ she said with a smile so bright it looked as if she were advertising toothpaste.
‘Thanks,’ Tillie said, opening the office door that led off the workroom. ‘We won’t be long.’
Well, she’d used to think of it as an office.
Now with Blake McClelland occupying a ridiculous amount of space inside it she rapidly downgraded it to the size of a cake box. A cupcake box.
Tillie waved her hand at the chair in front of her desk. ‘Would you like to sit down?’
So I don’t have to dislocate my neck to maintain eye contact?
‘Ladies first.’ Something about the sparkle in his eyes made her think of another context entirely.
She gritted her teeth behind her polite closed-lip smile, and instead of sitting on her own chair, held onto the back of it like a lion tamer about to take on a rogue lion. ‘What can I do for you, Mr McClelland?’
‘Actually, it’s more what I can do for you.’ There was an enigmatic quality to his voice and his expression that made the fine hairs on the back of her neck stand up and pirouette.
‘Meaning?’ Tillie injected enough cool hostility into her tone to have sent a pride of lions scampering for cover, chair or no chair.
Blake glanced at the stack of bills lying on her desk. Three of them were stained with a red stamp marking them as final notices. He would have to be colour blind not to have noticed.
‘Local gossip has it you’re undergoing a difficult financial period,’ he said.
Tillie kept her spine straighter than the ruler on her desk. ‘Pardon me if this sounds rude, but I fail to see how my current financial circumstances have anything to do with you.’
His eyes didn’t waver from hers. Not even to blink. He reminded her of a marksman who had taken aim, his finger poised on the trigger. ‘I noticed the wedding cake on my way in here.’
‘Hardly surprising since this is a cake shop,’ Tillie said, sounding as tart as the lemon meringue pies she’d made that morning. ‘Weddings, parties, anything—it’s what I do.’
‘I heard about your fiancé getting cold feet on the morning of the wedding,’ he said, still holding her gaze with that unnerving target-practice intensity.
‘Yes, well, it’s hard to keep something like that quiet in a village this size,’ she said. ‘But again—pardon me for being impolite—what exactly do you want to speak to me about? Because if it’s to talk about my ex and his tarty little girlfriend who is barely out of preschool, then you’d better leave right now.’
His smile tilted his mouth in a way that made the base of Tillie’s spine tingle and her hand want to rise up and slap him. She curled her fingers into her palms just in case. She was annoyed with herself for allowing him to see how humiliated she was by her ex’s choice of partner.
‘So here’s your chance to get even,’ Blake said. ‘Pretend to be my fiancée for the next month and I’ll take care of those debts for you.’
‘Pretend to be your...what?’
He picked up the sheaf of papers off her desk and proceeded to read out the amounts owing, whistling through his teeth when he got to the biggest one. He tapped the bills against his other hand and looked at her again with that startlingly direct grey-blue gaze. ‘I will pay off your debts and the only payment I want in return is for you to tell your old buddy Jim Pendleton we’re engaged.’
Tillie widened her eyes until she thought her eyeballs would pop right out of her head and bounce along the floor like ping-pong balls. ‘Are you out of your mind? Pretend to be engaged to you? I don’t even know you.’
He gave a mock bow. ‘Blake Richard Alexander McClelland at your service. Formerly of McClelland Park estate and now on a mission to buy back my ancestral home, which, up until twenty-four years ago, had been in the McClelland family since the mid-seventeen-hundreds.’
Tillie frowned. ‘But why don’t you make an offer to Mr Pendleton? He’s been talking about selling since he had a stroke two months ago.’
‘He won’t sell it to me.’
‘Why not?’
His eyes continued to hold hers but this time there was a devilish glint. ‘Apparently my reputation as a love-them-and-leave-them playboy has annoyed him.’
Tillie could well imagine Blake McClelland had done some serious damage to a few hearts in his time. Now she realised why he’d seemed familiar the first time he’d come into
