Christmas Eve Marriage (HQR Classic)

by Jessica Hart

  The waiter was bearing down on them, plates stacked up his arm, and Thea’s mouth watered at the appetising smell. Clara, attuned to food like her aunt, had already noticed the arrival of the meal and was galloping back across the square, followed by Sophie.

  ‘I’m starving!’ she said, flopping down into her chair.

  Thea caught Rhys’s eye and knew that he was thinking about the huge breakfast they had consumed not so long ago. ‘Martindale girls have healthy appetites,’ she said.

  ‘So I see,’ he said with a smile, and his gaze travelled on to his daughter who was picking up her knife and fork with an enthusiasm Thea guessed was unusual. Her thin little face was flushed, and her eyes were brighter as she tucked into grilled chicken.

  Wisely, Rhys refrained from commenting on her improved appetite, but waited until they had finished eating before outlining their plan so casually that Thea could only gape at him with admiration. He made it sound a perfectly reasonable idea that two complete strangers should go to such elaborate lengths just to avoid a tedious neighbour.

  Clara certainly didn’t have any problems with it. ‘Cool,’ she said, and her bright eyes sparkled, and her enthusiasm won over Sophie, who was clearly uncertain how to react at first.

  ‘The thing is, you two are in on the secret. You won’t have to say or do anything, but we’d need to know that you weren’t going to give us away,’ said Rhys carefully. ‘How would you feel about that?’

  ‘I think it would be fun,’ said Clara buoyantly, but then she would. Thea could practically see her calculating opportunities to throw her aunt together with Rhys.

  ‘What about you, Sophie?’ he asked. ‘Would you mind?’

  She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. It sounded grudging after Clara’s effervescence, but it was a big step for Sophie.

  ‘I think you should be engaged, not just girlfriend-boyfriend,’ Clara was saying, oblivious to the way Rhys was looking at his daughter.

  Thea frowned her down. ‘There’s no need to go that far, Clara.’

  ‘But if you’re just a girlfriend, this Kate person won’t think Rhys is really serious,’ Clara protested.

  ‘You know, I think Clara might have a point,’ said Rhys, eyeing her niece with respect. ‘I wouldn’t put it past Kate to keep thinking up potential girlfriends for me in case you turn out not to be suitable after all. What difference does it make, after all? We’ll still be pretending.’

  ‘True.’ Thea looked from her niece’s bright face to Rhys and back again. Really, that girl was going to go far. She was only nine, and already she had manipulation down to a fine art. But she could hardly tell Rhys that she didn’t want to pretend to be his fiancée because it might give Clara ideas, could she?

  ‘Oh, well, in for a penny, in for a pound.’ She sighed, resigned, and Clara sat back with a smug smile.

  ‘What about a ring, things like that?’ To Thea’s consternation, Rhys was actually looking to Clara for advice. Didn’t he realise that she was only nine, for heaven’s sake?

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ she intervened quickly before Clara could pronounce. ‘We’ll just say that you were so thrilled to see me at five o’clock this morning that the scales fell from your eyes. You want to spend the rest of your life with me, and you don’t want to waste any more time, so you asked me to marry you there and then.’

  ‘What, at five in the morning?’ said Rhys incredulously.

  It didn’t sound that convincing put like that, Thea had to admit. Would she really want to be proposed to in the early hours after a drive like that without her make-up on? No.

  ‘OK, we got engaged this morning, when you’d had a chance to realise that we really do belong together.’

  There was one of those sizzling pauses you couldn’t plan in a million years, when Thea’s words seemed to echo round the village square, booming back at her. We belong together.

  Rhys broke it first. ‘This is our engagement lunch, then?’ he said, and Clara seized her lemonade, playing it for laughs. ‘Congratulations!’ she said, lifting her glass.

  What a little drama queen she was! Thea shook her head at her, but she and Rhys laughed and chinked their glasses against hers and, after a moment, Sophie lifted her glass too.

  ‘Congratulations!’ she said, and when she smiled Thea felt as if she’d conquered Everest.

  Another silence threatened, and this time it was Thea who rushed to fill it. ‘You know, you could be difficult if you wanted to, Sophie,’ she suggested. ‘You could pretend to make a big fuss and say you hate me, then that would be a reason for you to go off on your own with your dad.’

  ‘But then I wouldn’t be able to play with Clara,’ Sophie objected.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. You could be nice to Clara because you feel sorry for her stuck with me all the time. And whenever I come by you could glower and look sulky.’ Thea demonstrated by putting on a moody face, and Sophie was surprised into a reluctant giggle.

  ‘I think she’d be pleased if you were her dad’s girlfriend,’ said Clara loyally. ‘Thea’s my favourite aunt.’

  She turned to Sophie, but Thea could tell that her words were aimed elsewhere. ‘It’s always fun when she comes round. I wish my dad had married someone like her,’ she added, one eye on Rhys. ‘My stepmother’s really boring. I’m not allowed to make a mess when I’m there, and she never lets me try on any of her make-up or clothes. I could never curl up on a sofa and have a chat with her the way I can with Thea. She makes yummy meals, too, not all low-fat and healthy like my stepmother does.’

  Such blatant promotion made Thea cringe. She didn’t dare look at Rhys to see how he was taking Clara’s transformation into professional matchmaker. Any more of this and she would be negotiating a dowry.

  ‘Yes, well, none of this matters, Clara,’ she said hastily. ‘We’re just pretending here, remember? Sophie doesn’t really want me to be her dad’s girlfriend.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ said Sophie shyly, and Clara shot Thea a triumphant look.

  Oh, God, here came another of those awkward pauses. Thea still hadn’t risked a glance at Rhys, but she was very conscious of Clara’s bright eyes whisking interestedly between them and she rushed into speech before her niece could do anything else to embarrass her.

  ‘We should decide how we met. Kate’s bound to ask. What about at a party?’

  Rhys looked unconvinced. ‘I’m not really a party animal,’ he said. ‘I’m sure Lynda will have told Kate that. It was one of the things she always used to complain about me.’

  ‘You could have decided to change your life since you’ve come back to the UK,’ Thea pointed out. ‘You could say you’d had a personality transformation.’

  He made a face. ‘I don’t think I could carry off being the life and soul of the party, particularly as I’ve spent the last week trying to convince Kate and Nick how unsociable I am. How about if we met on a blind date? I could have seen your ad in a newspaper and thought you sounded interesting.’

  Thea bridled. ‘I’m not telling Kate that I’ve been advertising! She’ll think I’m desperate.’

  ‘She’s going to think that anyway if you’re pursuing me out to Crete.’

  ‘Look, who is it who invented the girlfriend in the first place?’ she said crossly. ‘I don’t mind appearing pushy, but I’m not going to be sad!’

  Rhys held his hands up in mock surrender, and she subsided slightly. ‘Could we have met through work? That’s where most people get together, after all.’

  ‘I don’t know. What do you do?’

  ‘Oh, a bit of this and a bit of that, as they say. I’m still waiting to stumble into a career,’ said Thea with a sigh.

  It must be nice to be able to answer the dreaded What do you do? question with confidence. I’m a doctor. I’m a solicitor. I’m a gardener. I’m in sewage disposal. Anything as long as you sounded like you knew what you were doing with your life.

  ‘I keep changing jobs,’ she went on. ‘It drives my m
other wild! I’m a PA in a public relations company at the moment.’ She brightened. ‘Maybe we could have been raising the profile of your organisation, or changing the focus of your sales? Or—I know!—the key element of what you do needs re-branding, so of course you needed to talk to my boss but as soon as you laid eyes on me, you knew I was the one and naturally you couldn’t concentrate on business after that and—’ She stopped, seeing Rhys’s face. ‘What?’

  ‘I was just trying to imagine how you could re-brand rocks.’

  ‘Rocks?’ echoed Thea, completely thrown. She had been getting quite carried away there, imagining just how it would have been when he walked into her office and their eyes had met…a bit like the way they had met earlier, in fact.

  ‘I’m a geologist,’ Rhys explained. ‘I’m interested in rocks that are millions of years old. Geology is the most important thing there is.’

  Thea, Clara and Sophie exchanged a look. ‘More important than shoes?’ asked Thea innocently.

  ‘Or shopping?’ added Clara, never one to be left out.

  Rhys rose beautifully to the bait. ‘Shopping? Shoes?’ he echoed incredulously. ‘You can’t even begin to compare them! Everything you do, everything you see, everywhere you walk, is shaped by geology,’ he argued, roused to passion, Thea was interested to note, by a few rocks. ‘How can you understand the world around you if you don’t understand how it’s made? They ought to teach geology in primary schools. If I had my way—’

  He stopped as he saw Thea and Clara giggling as they mimed falling asleep with boredom, closing their eyes and letting their elbows slip off the edge of the table, and he grinned reluctantly.

  ‘OK, so not everybody finds rocks as interesting as I do,’ he conceded.

  Sophie was watching them with huge eyes. It had obviously never occurred to her that it was possible to tease her formidable father, but when she saw that he was laughing too, she giggled.

  Thea judged that it was time to bring them back to the business in hand. ‘Well, if geologists are too grand to deal with PR, we’d better fall back on that tried and trusty match-making activity, the dinner party. We can say a friend of mine works with a friend of yours or something, and we both ended up at the same dinner.’

  Rhys shrugged. ‘Sounds reasonable enough to me—and not something Kate can disprove either. She’s an intimidating woman, but I’d have thought even she would draw the line at demanding names and addresses.’

  ‘OK, a dinner party it was, then. And naturally, when you talked about rocks and showed me how important they were in my life, I was completely dazzled!’

  Rhys acknowledged her mockery with another grin. ‘Ah, so it was love at first sight for you, too, was it?’

  Thea looked at the old men playing backgammon at the next table and wondered what had happened to the air in her lungs. ‘I think it probably was,’ she said.

  The alarm dragged Thea out of a deep sleep, and for a while she lay utterly still, groggily wondering where she was and why there was bright sunshine outside when her body was telling her it was the middle of the night.

  She felt totally disorientated. Vivid images kept coming to her in puzzling flashes, none of which seemed to connect in any way. Clutching the steering wheel as she drove endlessly through the dark—she remembered that—but then she had a very clear image of Clara positively smirking as well. Surely not?

  Then there was a checked tablecloth and a man’s arm and Rhys…Rhys!

  Thea jerked upright. It was all coming back to her now. Yes, she had had coffee with him, and then they had driven down the mountain together. That had all been fine.

  But that ridiculous plan they had concocted…What had she been thinking of? The retsina must have gone to her head.

  ‘Oh, God!’ Thea dragged her hands through her hair. What had she got herself into?

  The worst thing was remembering how reasonable it had all seemed at the time. They had talked about it as they drove home with their shopping, the girls giggling in the back seat. They had actually laughed about it!

  Thea blenched, thinking about it now. Nell would have a fit if she knew that Thea had thrown herself and Nell’s precious daughter’s lot in with a perfectly strange man for the entire holiday!

  She would have to get up and explain that she hadn’t been thinking clearly, and that they couldn’t possibly go through with it. Rhys had seemed the sensible type. He had probably been having second thoughts himself, Thea reasoned, and as for the girls, well, they could just pretend that it had all been a joke.

  How did she get herself into these things? Thea wondered in despair, as she struggled to disentangle herself from her sheet. She had only been in Crete a matter of hours!

  It was very hot still, even in the shady bedroom, and the thought of getting dressed properly was just too much to contemplate on top of all the other disastrous situations she seemed to have got herself involved in. Digging out her favourite sarong, she wrapped it around her. Its soft cotton was cool and comforting against her bare skin.

  Tiredness had hit her like a freight train on the way back. One moment she had been gaily chatting away in the front seat—extraordinary how she had seemed to have so much to say to Rhys, considering that she didn’t know him from Adam…maybe that had been down to the retsina too—and the next her head had been lolling on to her chest.

  It had been all she could do to unpack the shopping and shove most of the contents of the bags into the fridge before collapsing into bed. Clara had opted to keep going in the pool, and now Thea wished that she had done the same. She felt lousy, dopey, disorientated, faintly sick and shivery. It was a bit like having a monumental hangover, but without the headache.

  She padded downstairs. Perhaps a swim would freshen her up too. She would just check to see that the dreaded Paines weren’t back. She didn’t want to face Kate for the first time in a swimsuit. That really would put her at a disadvantage. Opening the front door, she stepped cautiously out on to the terrace.

  ‘Thea!’

  Thea nearly leapt out of her skin. Clutching her sarong, she swung round to find herself staring at Rhys and an elegantly-groomed blonde who Thea had no difficulty at all in identifying as Kate Paine.

  So, instead of meeting her in a swimsuit, their first encounter had Thea tousled and half-naked in a piece of material so old and worn it was practically see-through. Her eyes were piggy with sleep still, and her hair was its usual tangled mess. Instinctively, Thea lifted a finger and wiped it under her eyes.

  It came away black. She had been too tired to take her make-up off when she fell into bed, which meant that she had mascara circles under her eyes and looked like a panda.

  Excellent.

  Rhys and Kate had evidently met on the terrace and seemed as startled to see Thea as she had been to see them. Why? Thea wondered crossly. It was her terrace.

  For a moment the three of them just looked at each other, and Thea was just wondering if she could, in fact, simply turn and walk back inside and close the door, when Rhys pulled himself together.

  ‘There you are, darling!’ he said, advancing on Thea with a warm smile. He put an arm round her before she could follow her instincts and bolt back inside. ‘I was just coming over to see if you were awake yet! How do you feel?’

  ‘A bit odd, to tell you the truth,’ said Thea huskily, finding her voice at last.

  Ooh, look, she had suddenly turned into the Queen of Understatement. Now that was odd. Odd was much too ordinary a word to use for the way it felt to have Rhys’s arm around her.

  He held her firmly, his arm strong and solid and warm through the fine material of her sarong, and Thea was agonizingly conscious of her nakedness against him. The merest whisper of cotton separated her skin from his, and the thought was peculiarly exciting. It was all very well reminding herself that she hardly knew this man, but the sad truth was that his arm felt…well, good. Right, even.

  Disturbingly so, in fact.

  ‘I’ve just been telling Kate
how you surprised me last night,’ Rhys said with a warning squeeze which Thea could have done without. Her sarong was in a precarious enough position as it was, not to mention her nerves.

  It wasn’t even as if she needed reminding of the situation when she was pressed up against his body like this. It felt satisfyingly unyielding. He might not have Harry’s glamorous looks, but he was all bone and muscle.

  ‘Remember I mentioned the family staying in the third villa?’ he was saying to Thea, as if they hadn’t spent their entire lunch working out how they could avoid them as much as possible. ‘This is Kate Paine. She’s here with her husband, Nick, and their two boys.’

  Everything about Kate said cool and crisp. She had icy blue eyes and her hair was both stylish and practical. She radiated the kind of confidence that left Thea feeling the way she had at primary school when faced with a particularly brisk teacher. It was impossible to imagine her ever getting dirty or flustered.

  Thea eyed her pristine white shirt and immaculately ironed stone-coloured trousers with disbelief. It would be bad enough to think that Kate had unpacked them looking like that, but Thea was prepared to bet on the much scarier thought that here was someone who not only took an iron on holiday, but used it!

  ‘Hugo and Damian,’ Kate was explaining graciously, but her eyes were coolly assessing as they rested on Thea in a return inspection. She didn’t look over-impressed.

  Thea couldn’t blame her. She knew what she looked like when she woke up, and it wasn’t a pretty sight.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, managing a sickly smile.

  ‘Kate, this is Thea.’ Rhys sounded positively adoring, and now he was smiling down into her face as if he thought that she was beautiful instead of ridiculously smeared with mascara.

  Who would have thought a geologist could act like that?

  ‘Kate’s kindly invited us for drinks on their terrace tonight,’ he went on with another of those alarming squeezes.

  ‘Oh, well, that’s very kind of you,’ Thea began, but Kate interrupted her before she could formulate a decent excuse.

  ‘Just a drink to welcome you,’ she insisted. ‘Rhys has explained that this is a special day for you, but we would like to help you celebrate your engagement as well.’