Tillie could feel her blush shoot to the roots of her hair. She almost expected it to be singed right off her scalp. She could barely speak for the anger vibrating through her body.
Or maybe it wasn’t anger...
Maybe it was a far more primitive emotion rushing through her in blazing, electrifying streaks. Desire. A pulse-throbbing sexual energy that left no part of her untouched. It was as if her blood were injected with its bubbling hot urgency. She shot him a glare as deadly as one of her metal cake skewers. ‘Get out of my shop.’
Blake tapped his index finger on the stack of bills on her desk. ‘It won’t be your shop for much longer if these aren’t seen to soon. Give me a call when you’ve changed your mind.’
Tillie lifted one of her brows as if she were channelling a heroine in a period drama. ‘When? Don’t you mean if?’
His eyes held hers in an iron will against iron will tug of war, making her heart skip a beat. Two beats. Possibly three. If she’d been on a cardiac ward they would have called a Code Blue.
‘You know you want to.’
Tillie wasn’t sure they were still talking about the money. There was a dangerous undercurrent rippling in the air. Air she couldn’t quite get into her lungs. But then he picked up his business card, which she’d placed on her desk earlier, and, reaching across the small space the desk offered, slid it into the right breast pocket of her shirt. At no point did he touch her, but it felt as if he had stroked her breast with one of those long, clever fingers. Her breast fizzed as if a firework were trapped inside the cup of her bra.
‘Call me,’ he said.
‘You’ll be waiting a long time.’
His smile was confident. Brazenly confident. I’ve-got-this-in-the-bag confident. ‘You think?’
That was the whole darn trouble. Tillie couldn’t think. Not while he was standing there dangling temptation in front of her. She’d always prided herself on her resolve, but right now it felt as if her resolve had rolled over and was playing dead.
She owed a lot of money. More money than she earned in a year. Way more. She had to pay her father and stepmother back the small loan they’d given her because as missionaries living abroad they were living on gifts and tithes as it was. Mr Pendleton had offered to help her but it didn’t sit well with her to take money off him when he had already been incredibly generous by allowing her to stay at McClelland Park rent-free and to use his kitchen for baking when she ran out of time at the shop. Besides, he would need all his money and more if he didn’t sell McClelland Park, because an old Georgian property that size needed constant and frighteningly expensive maintenance.
But to take money off Blake McClelland in exchange for a month pretending to be his fiancée was a step into territory so dangerous she would need to be immediately measured for a straitjacket. Even if he didn’t expect her to sleep with him she would have to act as if she were. She would have to touch him, hold hands or have him—gulp—kiss her for the sake of appearances.
‘Good day, McClelland,’ Tillie said, as sternly as if she were dismissing an impertinent boy from the staffroom.
Blake was almost out of her office when he turned around at the door to look back at her. ‘Oh, one other thing.’ He fished in his trouser pocket and took out a velvet ring box and tossed it to her desk to land on top of her stack of bills with unnerving accuracy. ‘You’ll be needing this.’
And without stopping to see her open the box, he turned and left.
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