Page 14 of One Bridegroom Required!

He was sitting on the floor by a roaring fire in the first-floor drawing room, a tray of tea in front of him, half-read newspapers at his side. He watched as she came in, noticing how the pure white of the robe emphasised the firelight-red of her hair, while the soft fluffy material accentuated the carved delicacy of her bone structure. She looked a creature of contrasts, midway between angel and imp.

A pulse flickered at his temple and he felt the blood begin to pound in his head, but he had been the one who had invited her here. Was he crazy, or what? ‘Would you like some tea?’ he said evenly.

‘Please.’

‘How do you like it?’

‘Just milk—no sugar.’ She took the cup he handed her and sat in front of the fire, folding her long legs up beneath her and then carefully tucking the robe closely around her thighs until she saw him watching her, and stopped. She had meant to cover her legs, not draw attention to them.

Luke watched the flicker of amber and copper as the firelight danced across her face and wondered why he felt this random longing for her. Because of the apparent contradiction of her looks? Those sensual movements of the born siren—made all the more potent by that startled look of wide-eyed innocence she must have spent years perfecting?

His voice was a growl. ‘Why don’t you bring your tea through to the kitchen—I’m just about to make something to eat. I’m starving,’ he lied. ‘And you must be, too. Unless you brought provisions with you, which, judging by your general standards of preparation, I doubt.’

Holly felt too flustered by the way he had been looking at her to even bother acknowledging the critici

sm. Food was the very last thing on her mind, even though it had been hours since breakfast, when she’d eaten a banana on the run. But food would be a distraction, and Holly sorely needed something to distract her from those amazing blue eyes, and from the underlying tension which was crackling through the air like sparks from a newly lit bonfire. And besides, if they didn’t eat, there was one hell of a long evening to get through...

‘Starving,’ she echoed dutifully. ‘But surely there’s no food if you arrived in the middle of the night?’

‘I wasn’t proposing anything fancy,’ he drawled. ‘But the freezer was filled in any case,’ he explained. ‘In time for my arrival.’

‘How luxurious.’

‘Yes,’ he replied shortly.

Caroline again, of course, smooth and efficient. ‘I know a company who will fill it for you,’ she had told him briskly. ‘With enough of the kind of food you like to see you through until I arrive.’ She had playfully tapped the end of his nose with one of her professionally manicured nails. Caroline had smooth and beautiful hands, white and soft and unlined. ‘Because we can’t have you starving, can we, my darling?’

Luke found himself sneaking a glance at Holly’s hands, as if to reassure himself of their unsuitability. Her nails were short, two were broken, two looked bitten and there were calluses on her palms.

The kitchen was downstairs, in the basement, and it looked as if it had been lifted from an illustration in a lifestyle magazine. It had been, as was the trend, ‘sympathetically modernised’. There were light, carved wooden cupboards, and marble surfaces for chopping things, which even Holly—who could barely tell one end of a leek from another—could see were about as upmarket as you could get. At the far end of the room was a fireplace piled with apple-wood logs, which glowed like amber, with two squashy-looking chairs on either side.

She sat down next to the fire and shook her damp hair out, watching while he began to boil up pasta and heat through a sauce.

‘Like a beer?’ he asked.

‘Love one.’

He opened two bottles and handed her one, and she sipped it while he strained the pasta and stirred the sauce and pushed a bowl full of freshly grated Parmesan into the centre of the table.

‘You look like a man who knows his way round a kitchen,’ she observed slowly.

He shrugged. ‘I’m used to fending for myself.’

‘I thought people had lots of help in Africa?’

His smile was arcane. ‘Some people do. I chose not to—just help with the cleaning, same as here. A woman named Margaret starts in the morning—I guess I’d better warn her that I have company.’ He gave the sauce a final stir. ‘I always think that, if you don’t cook for yourself, then you lose touch with reality.’ He looked up to where she sat, looking at him intently, and he thought that reality seemed a long way away at this precise moment.

Soon he had heaped two plates with pasta and sauce and they ate at the table in front of the fire.

Forcing himself to eat, Luke struggled to free himself from his rather obsessive study of the way the firelight warmed her skin tones into soft apricot and cream, casting around for something to say. Something which might make him forget that she was a very beautiful woman. ‘So what were you doing before you came to Woodhampton?’

She shot him a half-amused glance. ‘Just checking that you haven’t given refuge to some gun-toting maniac?’

‘We could always talk about the weather, if you prefer,’ he told her deliberately. ‘But we have a whole evening to get through.’

So they did. Holly took a hasty sip of her beer. It was difficult to concentrate when those amazing blue eyes were fixed on her with such interest. ‘After school I went to art school, where I studied textile and design.’

‘And were you a model student?’ he mocked.

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