so. Without money her mother had been unable to escape her violent father.
Even now, with her mother blissfully married to another man, Lulu pushed her to keep her own bank account and manage her own money. Money gave you options. Lulu lifted her chin. Right now her own personal bank account gave her the ability to pay her way to Dunlosie Castle.
But when she emerged from the building it was into an overcast Edinburgh day. There was a light rain falling and Lulu stopped to retrieve her umbrella, opening it against the elements and peering about. She spotted the cab rank but there was a queue.
All right, sometimes those options a woman had weren’t optimal, but there was no help for it.
She pushed resolutely in that direction, aware that her pretty harlequin seamed stockings were receiving tiny splashes of dirty water with each step from the washback beneath the wheels of her trolley. The fact that she felt depleted from withstanding her own anxieties in the air for the last couple of hours wasn’t helping. Lulu wanted nothing more than to be warm and comfortable inside a car, with her shoes off, watching this bad weather through a windscreen.
Maybe she’d been a little hasty...
Which was when she saw the lovingly restored red vintage Jaguar.
The passenger side window came rolling down.
‘Get in,’ he instructed.
LULU KNEW SHE had a decision to make.
She lifted her umbrella to take another look at the queue. Then she looked at her ‘ride’.
Hot and sexy and far too full of himself—and he had looked at her as if she was a bug.
Her pride pushed to the fore. She was not climbing into a car with a man who didn’t even have the decency to open the door for her. And what about her luggage?
Lulu was tempted in that moment to phone her parents, who would be arriving at the castle tonight. But how would that look? And she couldn’t lean on Gigi this weekend of all weekends.
She gasped as another splash of muddy water, this time from passing pedestrians, hit her shoes and saw the mud now attached to her sadly limp blue ribbons. Her pride wavered.
Dieu, she knew she’d regret this.
She grabbed her trolley and pushed it towards the back end of the car.
It was really completely unfair, but frankly she’d be a fool if she passed this up.
She stood there. In the rain. Waiting.
He took his time.
Lulu narrowed her eyes on his languid stroll around to the boot, all shoulders and confident attitude, looking infinitely rugged and male and capable.
But she knew differently. Knew how a sturdy exterior could mask all kinds of weaknesses and flaws.
She’d bet this man had plenty. For one thing, he didn’t like women. The things he’d said to her on the plane... The way he’d curled his lip at her shoes... She’d seen the way he’d looked at them. He had no idea how secure these shoes made her feel. She stamped one of them, because he was making her wait deliberately.
‘Open the boot, would you?’
He looked her up and down. She wasn’t going to apologise for her rudeness. He needed to know she was onto him.
All the same, she took a shuffling step backwards.
She drew herself up, happily over six feet in her shoes, but still gallingly forced to tip up her chin to look him in the eye.
With a half-smile, as if he knew what she was doing, he unlocked the boot, and Lulu was mollified—and a little relieved—when without a word he began hauling her luggage inside.
He handled the matching powder-blue cases as if they weighed nothing. The problem was he was tossing them into the boot as if he was shifting hay bales.
Lulu made a sound of dismay, but from the look he gave her she was a little afraid he might haul her in there too if she said something.
It was only when he looked about to launch her carpet bag after the cases that she jumped and threw herself bodily in front of him to prevent certain shattering.
‘Doux Jésus, stop!’
He held off, but the look on his face told her he was unimpressed—which was pretty rich, given he was the one destroying her property!
‘It contains the crystal I’ve brought as a wedding gift. For Gigi—and Khaled,’ she added, grudgingly.
‘Crystal?’
‘Goblets...tableware. Crystal.’
He continued to stare at her, as if she’d announced she was giving them a horse and cart.
Lulu inhaled a breath. She held out her arms. ‘Give that to me.’
He complied, but she wasn’t expecting him to step right up to her. She was suddenly more aware of him than ever, and inhaled his aftershave—something woodsy that mingled with the scent of his own skin. It was attractively male in a way she wasn’t used to.
Confused and flustered, Lulu looked up.
She encountered his firm chin and the sensuous line of his mouth, which only made her feel more unsettled.
He had a faint frown on his face and she suspected she mirrored it.
She turned her back on him to lodge the bag carefully between two cases to prevent it being bounced around.
Rude, ignorant, appalling, macho jerk.
He waited until she’d stepped back to lower the boot. She waited patiently by the passenger door with her umbrella. But he abruptly headed for the driver’s side of the car.
‘The “macho jerk” wants you to get in the car,’ he said flatly as he yanked open his door.
Lulu realised two things in that moment. One, she’d spoken her thoughts aloud, and, two, he wasn’t going to open her door.
Given he had all her luggage now locked up inside his car, she didn’t have much choice, but she cursed herself for her weakness. She should have waited for a cab.
As if to remind her why she’d made her choice, the rain began to pelt harder.
Why is this happening to me?
She closed her umbrella and opened the door herself.
‘Try not to drip on the upholstery,’ he shot at her as she lodged her furled umbrella at her feet.
Distinctly queasy with the added tension, Lulu looked around in desperation. Where did he expect her to put it?
‘Here.’
