The Engagement Deal

Niall slid a large, flashy sapphire ring onto her finger.

“I can’t wear this thing!” Holly gasped.

“Sorry if it’s not to your taste, but it’s only for one night.”

Actually the ring was beautiful. Holly toyed with the sapphire.

“And the only reason you went along with this pretense,” Niall continued, “was because you wanted to prove to me that age had improved you beyond all recognition.”

Holly went scarlet. How could he know? This man got more detestable with each passing second. I must have been totally blind as well as besotted when I was a silly teenager, she concluded wrathfully….

KIM LAWRENCE lives on a farm in rural Wales. She runs two miles daily and finds this an excellent opportunity to unwind and seek inspiration for her writing! It also helps her keep up with her husband, two active sons and the various stray animals that have adopted them. Always a fanatical consumer of fiction, she is now equally enthusiastic about writing. She loves a happy ending!

The Engagement Deal

Kim Lawrence

MILLS & BOON

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ONE

HOLLY pulled the pillow over her head and tried to ignore the strident peal of her sister’s doorbell. After several minutes of teeth-clenching determination to remain asleep, she rolled over onto her back and stuffed her fingers in her ears.

Whoever it was wasn’t going away. With a defeated sigh, she threw the pillow over her head. As luck would have it, the feather-filled item managed to ricochet off the wall and knock a porcelain pig off her sister’s cluttered dressing table.

Holly looked at the broken pieces and decided optimistically that with a bit of superglue it would be as good as new—always supposing it wasn’t actually antique and valuable. You never knew with Rowena; her up-in-the-clouds flat was filled with an eclectic mish-mash of tacky but fashionable rubbish and staggeringly expensive items.

She looked around briefly for a robe. Although she’d moved in a week ago, she still hadn’t had the opportunity to unpack her clothes. On reflection, she concluded that her pyjamas covered everything—if not more—that modesty demanded, and the style was unlikely to drive anyone on the doorstep mad with lust.

‘Yes!’ she snarled, opening the door a crack on its security chain.

‘I need to speak to Rowena.’

You and about every other male under ninety in the city, if my sister’s answering machine was anything to go by, Holly thought sourly. This was the first one that had got past the building’s tight security, though, so she assumed that under normal circumstances he was a welcome visitor.

Holly brushed a heavy hank of dark copper-red hair from her eyes. ‘Well, she isn’t…’ she began impatiently, wrinkling up her eyes against the light in the brightly illuminated communal hallway. ‘Oh, it’s you!’ Disbelief rushed through every inch of her, from her untidy red head to her curling bare toes.

This wasn’t how her dream went at all! A flicker of annoyance crossed her face as she brushed aside the inane thought.

Without thinking, she clicked free the bolt. Niall Wesley wasn’t the sort of man you left standing on a doorstep; neither, she reflected, was he the sort of man usually to be found on her doorstep. Beautiful men—and this adjective was fully justified, in Niall’s case—wearing dinner jackets didn’t as a rule come calling on her at eight o’clock in the morning.

‘Do I know…?’ The beautiful, disturbingly electric-blue eyes swept briefly over her diminutive figure, before illumination dawned in those azure depths. ‘Oh…Polly, isn’t it…?’ Long-legged, and elegant down to his fingertips, he walked past her into the bright open-plan living area.

I always knew I made a deep impression on him! And it did a girl’s confidence no end of good to have her suspicions confirmed, she decided wryly. She looked with steadily growing resentment at the impressive rear view of his broad-shouldered, lean-hipped figure silhouetted against the full-height windows that ran the entire length of one wall.

‘Holly,’ she corrected him coolly.

His smile was perfunctory and distinctly impatient as he glanced around the room. ‘Have you had an accident or something?’

She’d completely forgotten about that! Holly’s hand went automatically to her right eye. She winced and rushed over to a mirror; there were quite a few to choose from in the flat her sister called home.

She gulped. ‘Or something,’ she confirmed drily, surveying the damage. It could, she concluded with stubborn optimism, be a lot worse. Nothing too dramatic; a bit of make-up should disguise the worse of the damage.

‘When will Rowena be back?’ He glanced at the metal-banded watch on his wrist.

Some people might have registered the expensive brand of this accessory automatically, but Holly was much more aware of the fine dark hairs on his forearm briefly revealed by the impatient gesture. Her stomach gave an uncomfortable lurch. For heaven’s sake, she thought in exasperation, anyone would think I’m still a silly infatuated teenager!

She suddenly remembered that intense adolescent vow she’d made the last time she’d seen him in the flesh—far too much flesh, as it happened, for her fragile peace of mind at the time!

The next time she saw Niall Wesley, she’d vowed, she’d have no trace of teenage acne, no braces and her hair would no longer be a violent show-stopping shade of red. The first two criteria had been filled, and she’d made the surprising discovery since those far-off days that some people—of the male variety—actually liked red hair!

She seemed to have some hazy recall that he’d be struck dumb by her stunning beauty and witty eloquence. A black eye and pyjamas that didn’t even register on the seduction scale—and which, into the bargain, made her look like an undersized gnome—had not figured anywhere at all! This was what came of accepting hand-me-downs from a frugal parent who was too polite to tell his elderly aunt that his waistline had enlarged a little since he was sixteen!

At sixteen, Holly had nourished wild, foolish dreams, but she’d grown out of them; reality was far too challenging and exciting—not to mention exhausting! All the same, she knew that had she known she was going to see this man, she’d have made an effort to look at her best. Which means what? she pondered. A woman knew that even in the twenty-first century, she would ultimately be judged on her looks—was she vain? Either way, acknowledging that her adolescent desire to impress this man hadn’t entirely vanished made her frown with annoyance.

‘I said, when will Rowena be back?’

Holly closed her half-open mouth with a snap. None of the plagues she’d so viciously wished upon him had come to pass, either. He hadn’t grown short or fat and his head was still covered by a lustrous, nicely trimmed dark growth—the sort of hair a girl could really sink her fingers into! Her cheeks flamed hotly as she imagined herself in circumstances where sinking her fingers into his hair would be almost obligatory. Her imagination definitely needed a refresher course in obedience school!

‘In six months.’

‘What?’ he yelped, his dark brows forming a firm line of disapproval.

‘Don’t look at me like that.’ She sniffed. ‘It’s not my fault she didn’t tell you.’ She knew he had lovely manners; he was clever, witty, in a slightly cruel way. He walked into a room and people en masse fell under his spell. It only seems to be me, she thought, that can see past the high-voltage charisma and observe what a selfish, smug jerk he is. Although it seemed likely his ex-wife had caught on eventually, hence the ex!

‘God, just when I need her and she’s… Where is she?’

There he goes—me…me…me. The man’s so egotistical! She watched him slump down into one of the massive leather sofas with a small derisive smile. Her smile faded; she knew with gut certainty that he’d slumped there before! Was it the only thing he—they’d—done there? she found herself wondering.

‘New York.’ With a gulp, she drew a firm curtain over her lurid imaginings. What her sister got up to with this man—or any other—in the privacy of her own home was none of Holly’s business.

‘That’s it, then,’ he said with a grim finality. With one hand pulling at the tie around his neck, he sank his head into the deeply padded headrest and closed his eyes.

‘What’s it?’

His dark eyelashes lifted and from the expression in his eyes Holly had the distinct impression he’d forgotten that she was there. Either that or he was just hoping she’d gone away so he could indulge in a bout of self-pity.

‘I’m stitched up unless I can find a…’ He shot her a sudden hopeful glance; by the time his quick once-over had reached her toes, he was already shaking his head.

‘What are you doing here anyway, P…Holly?’ Why, he wondered, would a grown woman choose to wear those hideous stripy pyjamas?

‘The lease had run out on the flat I shared, and Rowena offered to let me hang my hat here until I get myself sorted.’ Her new contract was only for six months; afterwards, who knew where she’d be?

Niall could recall some mention of the sister being a student. In fact, Rowena had regaled a dinner party with quaint second-hand stories of student penury—he remembered thinking at the time that it probably wasn’t quite so amusing, up close—but all that had been a long time ago. There were lots of young people with good degrees who didn’t have a job. It sounded as if she was one of them.

He nodded without, she noticed indignantly, even pretending a scrap of interest in what she was doing in the present, future or for that matter what she had been doing since he’d last seen her almost ten years ago.

Ten years ago he’d been one of the select group of beautiful, brilliant people, including her sister, who had gravitated together at university. The charmed circle was how she’d always thought of them. Their glamorous lives had been equally charmed since they’d emerged to conquer the world, at least professionally—Niall wasn’t the only one of the charmed circle to be divorced, though his had been the most public and visible failure. Served him right for marrying his trophy girlfriend.

‘What’s Rowena doing in New York?’

‘The editor’s job here is hers when Annabel moves onwards and upwards in six months. They want Rowena to…’ Holly’s slim shoulders lifted. ‘I don’t know what they actually want her to do,’ she confessed. The inner workings of a glossy international fashion magazine were a closed book to her. ‘But they want her over there, and they didn’t hang around once they’d made up their mind.’ Which obviously accounted for Niall’s ignorance.

‘We probably passed each other mid-Atlantic,’ he mused. ‘Good for Rowena.’ Despite his words he still looked pretty gloomy about his friend’s—did ‘friend’ cover their relationship?—success. Obviously he was more concerned about how it would inconvenience him! Thank goodness I don’t have any friends like him, she decided with virtuous disapproval.

‘I’m sure she’d have refused if she’d known of your dire need.’

Her sweet voice was acid laced. Niall shot her a sharp look, and wasn’t fooled by the round-eyed innocence of the sarcastic little witch! Yes, there was something of the witchy woman about her, with those big dark eyes and that wild hair.

‘I’m very happy for Rowena. I know this is what she’s been working for.’ And scheming for, if he knew Rowena, he thought with affectionate admiration. She was a woman who knew exactly what she wanted from life and went for it. ‘I’m just more unhappy for myself.’

‘Yes, it must be so hard,’ Holly commiserated gently. His eyes swept over her face, half-query, half-irritation in their depths. ‘Being healthy…’ —and that was some understatement; the man simply oozed a restless vitality— ‘Rich, handsome…’ She didn’t even mention the stately pile and title that would be his when his father died.

Even though he was sitting down he managed to look down his nose at her, a distinctive masterful nose identical to those she’d seen on several of his ancestors’ portraits. She’d seen the paintings that covered the walls of his family’s ancestral home, Monksleigh Manor. She’d visited the house during its one open day a year—the one occasion mere mortals like herself were given the opportunity to drool over the accumulated wealth and history of the Wesley family.

‘Thank you.’ He smiled.

Holly felt suddenly less confident. On the whole, she preferred the snooty disdain to that heart-stopping grin.

‘For what?’ she wondered suspiciously.

‘Handsome…?’ One dark satanically slanted brow quirked.

Holly gave an exasperated sigh. ‘Like you had no idea.’

He gave a modest shrug of his shoulders, but behind the cynical amusement in his eyes she thought she glimpsed something that was more weary acceptance. Did he find it hard to be judged by most people on his startling good looks? Holly dismissed this revolutionary idea with a frown. Who wouldn’t like having conversations stop when they walked into a room?

‘What did you want Rowena for, anyway?’ She thought for a second he was going to tell her to mind her own business, but then his sensual lips twisted into a wry smile.

‘Why not?’ he said to nobody in particular. ‘I was going to ask her to be my fiancée tonight.’

The breath whooshed out of her lungs in one noisy gasp and Holly plonked herself down on the nearest chair. ‘You wanted to ask Rowena to marry you?’ Under the circumstances, he was allowed to look a little piqued—at the very least!

‘Did I say that?’

Holly, who had just started breathing again, felt her hackles rise when he looked at her as though she was incredibly dense. ‘You said you wanted her to be your fiancée.’

‘I’ve every intention of never getting married again. I only need a fiancée for tonight. The only halfway plausible reason for getting married, in my opinion, is to have a family—I’ve already got one, end of story.’

It was a plausible theory if you’d never seen the gorgeous Tara. ‘You can’t expect anyone to believe the only reason you married Tara was to have babies!’ she hooted. She was no expert on male mental processes, but no man she’d ever come across looked at a supermodel and thought about babies.

‘Although,’ he conceded, choosing to loftily ignore her snide little interjection. ‘Rowena is probably the only woman I’d even consider…’ Knowing Rowena’s opinion of the married state, he felt quite comfortable making a claim like this.

With shocked disgust, Holly recognised the knife twist in her guts as jealousy. She suddenly had a nauseating vision of herself in a dire frilly pink bridesmaid dress stumbling up the aisle behind the glowing vision of her sister. He might be an ex-fantasy figure, but she’d have to be a saint to be actually happy for her sister under these circumstances, and unhappily she was no saint.

‘You’re not making any sense.’ Except with the bit about Rowena being the only woman he’d marry—he was being very clear there.

Had he asked, and been turned down? she wondered, her imagination now working in top gear. Rowena had some very inflexible ideas about a career and marriage and she often said that a girl couldn’t have both if she wanted to succeed in either.

‘You’re just not listening. It’s quite simple. I wanted Rowena to pretend to be my fiancée for tonight.’ He carelessly flicked an invisible speck off his immaculate dark trousers.

‘Pretend?’ The man made it sound a completely normal suggestion. ‘Why…?’ She cleared her throat and continued before he could tell her it was none of her business. ‘Do you drop in many mornings and make requests like that?’

The blue eyes lifted once more to her face. ‘You did say…morning?’

‘So…?’ With a bolshy little glare, she got to her feet. The dignified action was spoilt somewhat by the fact she tripped over the overlong leg of her pyjama trousers. She half-expected to see him smirking when she shot him a dark warning glance, but he wasn’t.

It occurred to Niall for the first time that the pyjamas that totally swamped her diminutive figure belonged, in fact, to a man. Somewhat bizarrely, the idea that she might have been sharing the bed in the adjoining room with a man shocked him.

He supposed he still had her fitted into the niche in his brain marked Rowena’s baby sister, a funny intense little thing with braces. He checked…No, they were gone. There were other changes too, notably the clear creamy complexion. Niall suddenly felt depressingly past his prime.

‘It’s not morning.’

Disbelief showed in her heart-shaped face, closely followed by panic. He was in no position to judge; he’d had some pretty wild nights in his time, too.

‘What day is this?’ she asked after a small frozen pause.

Niall blinked. His hadn’t been that wild! ‘It’s Wednesday evening.’ He watched her sink weakly back down into the chair she’d just vacated.

‘Are you serious?’ she asked hoarsely.

‘What day did you think it was?’

‘I thought it was Tuesday morning.’

‘It must have been some party.’

Even though a stunned Holly was still coming to terms with the fact she’d slept around the clock, and then some, she couldn’t miss that definite austere note of disapproval in his deep voice.

‘You sound like my mother.’ It wasn’t parties that her mother disapproved of, it was the hours that her younger daughter—as a newly qualified junior doctor—was expected to work. The farewell party after a straight sixty hours on call in the busy casualty department had probably not been a good idea. She had meant it as a joke when she’d laughingly said she was going to spend her fort-night’s holiday sleeping!

‘I hope you’ll respect Rowena’s property while you’re staying here.’ Niall suddenly had alarming visions of this girl and her equally wild friends trashing the place. ‘Rowena does know you’re staying here?’

Holly thought a little guiltily of the smashed pig. If only, she thought wistfully, he’d sounded this stuffy when I was sixteen, I’d never have lost a single night’s sleep. Mind you, there was a certain novelty value to being regarded as a dangerous person.

‘My secret’s out: I’m a squatter!’ She gave him a scathing look that would have shrivelled lesser mortals where they stood, or in this case sat. ‘I need a drink. Don’t worry, I mean coffee,’ she added acidly.

‘Feeling hung over?’

‘No!’ Holly glanced angrily over her shoulder.

She continued to futilely open cupboard doors in her search of a jar of coffee, aware that he followed her as if he was well used to treating the place like home. His next words confirmed his familiarity with his surroundings.

‘The coffee’s in here,’ he informed her, reaching into an eye-level cupboard—well, eye level for him, anyway; she’d have needed a step ladder. ‘Rowena always drinks the instant stuff.’

Holly, who had trouble finding time to eat, let alone brew proper coffee, snatched the jar from his unresisting hand. ‘I haven’t found my way around the kitchen yet. I’ve not actually been in that much.’

That he could believe. He watched as she filled a glass with water.

‘Alcohol sends your electrolytes up the chute. That’s why you’re so thirsty.’ Now I’ve started sounding like my father! Hell! What is it about this girl that brings out the stern parent in me? He hadn’t forgotten the last time he’d had to step in to save her from her own stupidity—nor what he had got for his troubles!

‘I don’t need a lecture on physiology,’ she told him drily. Even if she hadn’t read her books like the good student she had been, she’d had a wealth of practical evidence to back up the theory since she’d been working in Casualty. The gentle tap that had given her the black eye hadn’t been the first time a drunk had got physical with her! This one had taken exception to her efforts to suture up his head wound.

‘I take it black.’ Holly regarded him blankly. ‘Coffee: I take my coffee black, no sugar.’

‘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.