Theo heard the hesitancy in her voice and immediately knew that he had done the right thing in contacting her, had made the right decision. When he had driven away from her house two weeks ago, he had told himself that he had had a good time, but at the end of the day she had been a virgin and he’d been driving away from a potential problem. She had laughed off the fact that he had been the first man she had slept with, had told him that she was attracted to him, and why not?
‘You’re not the right guy for me,’ she had said seriously. ‘But, if I carry on waiting for Mr Right to come along, I might be waiting for a very long time.’
‘In other words, you’re using me!’ he had laughed, amused, and she had laughed back.
‘Are you hurt?’ she had teased.
‘I’ll survive...’
And she hadn’t been lying. There had been no clinging when the time had come for him to go. She hadn’t tried to entice him into carrying on what they’d had. There had been no awkward questions asked about whether he would miss her. Her eyes hadn’t misted over, her lips hadn’t trembled and she hadn’t clung to the lapels of his coat or given him one final, lingering kiss. She had smiled, waved goodbye and shut the door before he had had time to fire up the engine.
He might have been her first but he certainly wasn’t going to be her last. Maybe that was another reason why he hadn’t been able to get her out of his head. He’d effectively been dumped, and he’d never been dumped in his life before, simple as that.
‘Becky...’
Becky heard that wonderful lazy drawl and the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. She steeled herself to feel nothing, but curiosity was eating her up. Had he missed her? Had he been thinking about her every second of every minute, which was what it had felt like for her? Thinking about him all the time...
‘How are you?’
‘Been better.’ They could spend time going around in polite circles before she asked him the obvious question—why have you called?—and Theo decided that he would skip the foreplay and get down to the main event. ‘Becky, I could beat around the bush here, but the fact is I’ve called to ask you for...a favour. This would be a favour better asked face to face but...time is of the essence, I’m afraid. I just haven’t got enough of it to woo you into helping me out.’
‘A favour?’ Of course he hadn’t called because he’d missed her. Disappointment coursed through her, as bitter as bile.
‘Do you remember I spoke to you about my mother? It would appear that...’ He sighed heavily. ‘Perhaps it would have been better to be having this conversation face to face after all. I know that this is asking a lot, Becky, but there have been some...unfortunate problems with my mother—problems that do not appear to have a straightforward solution.’ The direct approach was failing. He stood up, paced and sat back down. ‘I need you, Becky,’ he said heavily.
‘Need me to do what?’ Her voice had cooled.
‘Need you to come to London so that I can talk to you in person. I can send my driver for you.’
‘Are you crazy, Theo? I don’t know what’s going on with your mother. I’m sorry if she’s having problems but you can’t just call me up out of the blue and expect me to jump to your summons.’
‘I understand that what we had was... Look, I get it that, when you closed your front door, you didn’t anticipate me getting in touch with you again.’ Theo seriously found it hard to believe that this could actually be the case because the shoe was always on the other foot. Women were the ones desperate for him to make contact and he had always been the one keen to avoid doing any such thing.
He instinctively paused, waiting to hear whether she would refute that statement. She didn’t.
Becky thought that he was certainly right on that count—she hadn’t anticipated it—but she had hoped. It hadn’t crossed her mind that she would indeed hear from him and he would be asking a favour of her!
That certainly put paid to any girlish illusions she might have had that their very brief fling had meant anything at all for him. She was thankful that she had waved him a cheery goodbye and not made any mention of hoping that they might meet again.
‘You’re right—I didn’t—and I don’t see how I could possibly do you any favours in connection with your mother. I don’t even know her.’
‘She fell,’ Theo said bluntly. ‘I’ve just come off the telephone with her sister. She apparently...’ He paused, dealing with the unpalatable realisation that he was actually going to have to open up about a situation which felt intensely personal and which he instinctively thought should be kept to himself.
‘Apparently what...?’ Becky could feel vulnerability in his hesitation. He was so strong, so proud, so much the archetypal alpha male that any sort of personal confession would seem like an act of weakness to him.
Despite herself, she felt her heart go out to him, and then banked down that unwelcome tide of empathy.
‘She’s been depressed. The recovery we had all hoped for has been a physical success but...’
Again, that telling pause. She had a vivid picture of him trying to find difficult words. She felt she knew him, and then she wondered how that was possible, considering they had spent a scant three days in one another’s company. Knowing someone took a long time. It had taken her nearly two years before she had felt that she knew Freddy, and then it had turned out that she hadn’t known him at all, so how likely was it that this sensation of being able to sense what Theo was feeling from down the end of a telephone was anything other than wishful thinking?
She wasn’t going to give in to any misplaced feelings of sympathy. By nature, she was soft. It was why she had chosen to study veterinary science. Caring for sick and wounded animals was straight up her alley. But Theo was neither sick nor a wounded animal. He was a guy she had slept with who hadn’t bothered to get in touch with her until now, when he obviously wanted something from her.
‘She fell because she was drinking,’ he said abruptly.
‘Drinking?’
‘No one knows how long it’s been going on but it’s reached a stage where she’s drinking during the day and...a danger to herself. God knows what might have happened if she had been behind the wheel of a car...’
‘I’m so sorry to hear that,’ Becky said sincerely. ‘You must be worried sick...’
‘Which is why I called you. If my mother’s problems are alcohol related, then it’s obvious that she’s slipping into a depressed frame of mind. There were signs of that happening before she left for Italy...’ He sighed heavily. ‘Perhaps I should have insisted that she go for therapy, for counselling of some sort, but of course I thought it was a straightforward case of being down because she had had a stroke, because she had had a brush with her own mortality.’
‘That’s understandable, Theo.’ Becky automatically consoled him. ‘I wouldn’t beat myself up over it if I were you. Besides, there’s nothing you can do about that now. Weren’t you the person who made a big deal about telling me how important it was to live in the present because you can’t worry over things that happened in the past which you can’t change?’
‘I told you that?’
‘Over that tuna casserole you told me you hated.’
‘Oh, yes. I remember...’
Becky’s skin warmed. His voice had dropped to a husky drawl with just the ghost of a satisfied smile in it and she knew exactly what was going through his head.
He had pushed the dish of tuna bake to one side, pulled her towards him and they had made love in the kitchen. He had laid her on the table, her legs dangling, the dishes balanced in a heap that could have crashed to the floor at any given moment. He had parted her legs and had licked, sucked and nuzzled between them until she had been crying and whimpering for him to stop, for him to come inside her—and come inside her he had,with urgent, hungry, greedy force that had sent her soaring to an orgasm that had gone on and on and had left her shattered afterwards.
‘So,’ she said hurriedly, ‘you
couldn’t have foreseen. Anyway, I’m sure everything will be fine when you bring her back to London, where you can keep an eye on her. You could even employ someone...’
She wondered whether that was the little favour he had phoned about. Perhaps he had returned to his busy tycoon lifestyle and was too preoccupied with making money to make time, so he’d decided that she might be able to see her way to helping him out. She’d been short-sighted enough to mention to him that the practice was going to close. Maybe he thought she’d have lots of free time on her hands.
‘She’s refusing to return to London.’
‘Yes, well...’
‘Nothing to come back here for, were, apparently—her words.’
‘I still don’t see why you’ve called me, Theo. I don’t see how I could possibly help. Maybe you should...’
‘Needs something to live for.’
‘Yes, but...’
‘She’s old-fashioned, my mother. She wants what her sister has. She wants...a daughter-in-law.’
Becky thought she had misheard and then she figured that, even if she hadn’t, she still had no idea what that had to do with her.
‘Then you should get married,’ she said crisply. ‘I’m sure there would be hundreds of women falling over their feet to drag you up the altar.’
‘But only one that fits the bill. You.’
Becky burst out laughing, manic, disbelieving laughter. ‘You’ve telephoned out of the blue so that you can ask me to marry you because your mother’s depressed?’
Theo’s mouth compressed. He hadn’t asked her to marry him. He loved his mother but even he could see a limit to the lengths he would go to in order to appease her. But, if he had, hysterical laughter would not have been the expected response.
‘I’m asking you to go along with a fake engagement,’ he gritted. ‘A harmless pretence that would do wonders for my mother. We go to Italy...an all-expenses-paid holiday for you...and you smile a lot and then we leave. My mother will be delighted. She will have something to live for. Her depression will lift.’
‘Until she discovers that it’s all been a complete lie and there won’t be any fairy-tale white wedding.’
‘By which time two things will have been achieved. She will no longer be so depressed that she’s dependent on a bottle to help her through, and she will realise that I’m capable of having a relationship with someone who isn’t a bimbo.’
‘So let me get this straight,’ Becky said coldly. ‘I’m the one for this harmless pretence because I have a brain and because—I’m reading between the lines here—I’m not tall, blonde and beautiful. I’m just an ordinary girl with an ordinary job so your mother will like me. Is that it?’
‘You’re not exactly what I would call ordinary,’ Theo mused.
‘No.’ She was shaking with outrage and, underneath the outrage, hurt.
‘Why not?’
‘Why do you think, Theo? Because I’m not into deceiving people. Because I have some morals—’
‘You’re also heading for the unemployment line,’ he said, cutting her off before she could carry on with her list of high-minded virtues. He was still scowling at her roar of laughter when she had thought he might have called to ask her to marry him. ‘Not to mention living in a house that’s falling apart at the seams.’
‘Where are you going with this?’
‘I could get you up and running with a practice of your own. You name the place and I’ll provide the financial backing and cover all the advertising. In fact, I can do better than that—I’ll set my team on it. And I’ll get all those nasty little things that are wrong with your house repaired...’
‘Are you trying to buy me so I do what you want?’ And the weird thing was...she had thought about him so much, wanted him so much, would have picked up where they had left off if he had made the first move and called her. But this...
Theo wondered how his brilliant idea had managed to get derailed so easily. ‘Not buying you, no,’ he said heavily, shaking off the nasty feeling that yet again with this woman his self-control was not quite what it should be. ‘Business transaction. You give me what I want and I give you...a great deal in return. Becky, that aside...’ his voice dropped a notch or two ‘... I’m asking you from the bottom of my heart to do this for me. Please. You told me that you loved your parents. Put yourself in my shoes—I only want my mother to regain her strength.’
‘It’s not right, Theo.’
He heard the hesitation in her voice and breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief.
‘I am begging you,’ he told her seriously. ‘And be assured that begging is something I never do.’
Becky closed her eyes tightly and took a deep breath. ‘Okay. I’ll do it, but on one condition...’
‘Name it.’
‘No sex. You want a business transaction, then a business transaction is what you’ll get.’
CHAPTER FIVE
BECKY HAD WONDERED whether she would be given the fortnight off. She was owed it, had worked unpaid overtime for the past few months, but leaving someone in the lurch was not something she liked to do.
She had half-wished that she would be firmly told that she couldn’t be spared, because as soon as she had agreed to Theo’s crazy plan she had begun to see all the holes in it. On the contrary, her request was met with just the sort of kind-hearted sympathy that had made her realise how much she would miss working for the small practice.
‘You come and go as you please until the place closes,’ Norman had said warmly. ‘Can’t be nice for you, working here, knowing that it’s winding down and that you won’t be seeing our regulars again. Besides, you need to start thinking about your next job—and don’t you worry about anything, Rebecca, you’ll get a glowing reference from me.’
‘The faster you can make it to London, the better, Becky,’ Theo had said as soon as those fateful words—okay, I agree—had left her mouth, and he hadn’t allowed her to sit on her decision and have any sort of rethink.
She’d needed a bit of time to get things sorted with her job and her house before she just breezed off abroad for two weeks.
‘What things?’ he had demanded.
She could practically hear him vibrating with impatience down the end of the line. He’d called her several times over the two-day period she’d taken to pack some stuff, check the house for incipient problems that might erupt the minute her back was turned and anxiously leave copious notes on some of the animals that had been booked in to have routine procedures done over the two-week period.
Already regretting her hasty decision, she’d plied him with questions about his mother.
She’d repeatedly told him that it was a crazy idea. He’d listened in polite silence and carried on as though she hadn’t spoken, but he had talked about Marita Rushing and about the health problems that had afflicted her. He’d only closed up when she’d tried to unearth information prior to the stroke, to life before she had started worrying that her son might never marry and might never make her the grandmother she longed to be.
‘Not relevant.’ He swept aside her curiosity with the sort of arrogant dismissiveness that she recognised as part and parcel of his vibrant, restless personality.
‘She won’t believe that we have any kind of relationship,’ Becky told him the night before she was due to leave for London. Ever since she had laid down the ‘no sex’ ground rules, he had been silent on the subject. He hadn’t objected and she’d thought that he was probably glad that she had spared him the necessity of trying to resurrect an attraction that hadn’t lasted beyond her front door.
That hurt but she told herself that it simplified things. He had suggested that she treat his proposition as a business transaction, and there was no reputable business transaction on the planet that included sex on tap. They’d had their fling and now this was something else. This was his way of doing the best he could to try and get his mother back on her feet and her way of trying to sort out her future.
In a way,
accepting his generosity almost turned it into a job—an extremely well-paid job, but a job nevertheless—which meant she could distance herself from that flux of muddled emotions she still seemed to have for him.
It helped her to pretend to herself that there wasn’t a big part of her that was excited at the prospect of seeing him again.
‘People always believe what they want to believe, but we’ll talk about that when you come,’ he eventually said.
Becky had accepted that. She’d had too much on her mind to pay attention to whatever story line he might think up. He insisted on sending a driver for her, even though she had told him that the train was perfectly okay.
Now, sitting in the back seat of his chauffeur-driven black Range Rover, she felt the doubts and hesitations begin to pile up.
Along with a suffocating sense of heightened tension, which she valiantly tried to ignore. She told herself that he was not going to be as she remembered. She was looking back at that small window in time through rose-tinted specs. He wouldn’t be as striking or as addictive as she had found him when he had stayed with her. Locked away in the cottage with the snow falling outside, she had built their brief fling into an impossibly romantic tryst.
The fact that they were so unsuitable for one another had only intensified the thrill. It was like putting the prissy, well-behaved head girl in the company of the bad boy who had roared into town on his motorbike. No matter how much the sparks might fly, it would all come crashing down because it wasn’t reality.
When she went to London, reality would assert itself and she would see him as he really was. Not some tall, dark, dangerously sexy stranger who had burst into her humdrum life like an unexploded bomb, but a nice-looking businessman who wore suits and ties and carried a briefcase.
He would be hassled-looking, with worry lines on his face that she hadn’t noticed because she had been swept away on a tide of novelty and adventure.
He hadn’t been lying about his wealth. He’d never boasted, but he hadn’t tried to hide it. She’d briefly wondered whether he had been enticing her by exaggerating just how much punch he packed, but any such vague doubts were put to rest as the silent, über-luxurious car pushed through the London traffic to glide into a part of the city that was so quiet it breathed wealth.
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