But he had no option in this instance. He had to contact James Abbott, and then tell Nanny Briggs and Harry they were welcome to dance at his wedding provided they kept quiet about his identity and showed no surprise whatsoever if Allie referred to them as Granny and Gramps!
And he had to persuade Harry to let him borrow this wreck of a van for the duration, arrange for the safe-keeping of his Jag for an indefinite period, contact the gardener and housekeeper at his country home and tell them to make themselves scarce for the next couple of weeks. He could do none of this if Allie was with him.
The fiction of the down-at-heel, feckless character with a losing streak had to be maintained. If she knew who he really was, that the sum she’d offered for his part in the deception had hardly more relevance to him than the loose change in his pocket, she would know he had an ulterior motive in agreeing to be her husband, bought and paid for.
And she would call the whole thing off, Studley or no Studley.
That, he told himself firmly, was not going to happen.
CHAPTER FIVE
LAURA arrived home much earlier than Allie had expected. She had watched Jethro drive away with a totally unwarranted feeling of abandonment, and spent the intervening half an hour trying to talk herself out of that ridiculous state of mind, foolishly letting her thoughts dwell exclusively on him instead of deciding how to break the news of her imminent marriage to a hunky but apparently feckless window-cleaner.
And now her mother was here, and Allie didn’t have a clue about how she was going to dress the news up to make it sound believable.
‘I cancelled this afternoon’s stint with Mrs Thompson,’ Laura explained, perching on a stool at the breakfast bar and pushing a limp strand of hair away from her forehead. ‘She wasn’t too pleased, but that can’t be helped. I suddenly realised it’s not fair on you, leaving you kicking your heels here while I’m working all hours—especially when you’ve put your career on hold to spend some time with me. I thought we might do something together this afternoon—look round the shops, if you like, maybe take in a film, if there’s anything on you fancy seeing. But first I could murder a cup of tea.’
Grasping the momentary reprieve, Allie turned to fill the kettle at the sink, reach the teapot and a couple of mugs from the wall cupboard. Her mother looked as downtrodden as a pair of old socks. She wasn’t frail, and at forty-one she certainly wasn’t old. It was spiritual weariness that was oppressing her, the drudgery of the work she had to do to scrape a living, the feeling she must have that there was no light at the end of the tunnel.
Well, that was going to change. Allie poured boiling water onto the leaves in the pot, her chest filling with the need to tell her everything was going to be fine. But she knew she had to hold back and make the acquisition of Studley sound like a very secondary consideration.
Allie had never lied to her mother, but she was going to have to now. Jethro had been perfectly right when he’d said Laura would be unhappy with the truth. Her mother had always been a hopeless romantic—from an early age Allie had recognised that both her parents had lived with their heads in the clouds—and she would view marrying for the sole purpose of material gain, even if that gain was Studley, as being totally distasteful.
She would never be completely content back at her beloved Studley if she knew the price her daughter had paid to get it for her.
The tea poured, chocolate digestives laid out on a plate, there was no longer an excuse for delay. Allie cleared her throat nervously, avoided her mother’s eyes, and stated, ‘I’ve got something to tell you.’
‘Something nice?’ Laura was nibbling a biscuit, spooning sugar into her tea at the same time. She had the type of metabolism that allowed her to pack in the calories and not gain an ounce, and Allie had inherited that enviable trait. But right now she didn’t think she’d ever want to eat again.
‘I think so!’ Allie tried to sound the way she imagined an excitedly fluttery bride-to-be would sound. She knew she’d failed miserably when Laura responded, ‘From where I’m sitting, it doesn’t look like it. You look as if you’re about to confess to breaking every last piece of Fran’s best china!’
There was no easy way to lead up to this, so Allie stretched her mouth into a smile and stated, ‘I’m going to be married.’
‘Married?’ Laura repeated, and dropped the second biscuit she was about to take back onto the plate. ‘You? You always insisted that getting married and settling down was the last thing you were interested in.’ The slight shoulders went rigid beneath the plain grey cotton blouse she was wearing. ‘Has it anything to do with that stupid condition of your uncle’s?’ she questioned grimly. ‘When you told me you thought you knew of a way to get our old home back I imagined you’d consult with your own solicitor, see if you could overturn his will because that condition was ridiculous.’
Laura slid down from the stool and carried her mug over to the sink. ‘So if you’re thinking of overturning your convictions and getting married to see me back at Studley, then forget it. Because I promise you I’ll never set foot in the place if you do!’
She held the mug under the fierce gush of the hot water tap and scrubbed at it as if she aimed to wash the pattern clean off the surface, and Allie knew she had to act her socks off. Her mother hadn’t even asked whom she was marrying—that was how little she believed in her daughter’s sudden desire to rush to the altar!
Willing herself to get it right, she went and hugged the older woman, made herself giggle. ‘Are you nuts? I know how much you long for the old place, but there are limits to what I’d do to help you get back there, and prostituting myself is one of them!’
She hated lying to her mother. Hated it! But what else could she do when the poor dear’s future contentment was at stake? And at least she wasn’t lying about the prostitution part, because Jethro wouldn’t lay a finger on her. It was part of the agreement.
Laura would never find out that the marriage had been a means to an end, a business contract, and for her own part, being legally tied to Jethro for a year would be nothing more than a vague nuisance. A small price to pay.
She knew her words had penetrated her mother’s suspicions when she shrugged the hugging arms away and turned to fix Allie with a very determined eye.
‘If you tell me the ceremony’s due to take place within the next three weeks then I’ll know I’m right. So look me in the eye and tell me it isn’t!’
‘Of course it is.’ Allie injected a note of exasperation. ‘It’s called killing two birds with one stone!’ Then she added, more gently, ‘We would have waited a little longer, given ourselves time to have a wedding with all the trimmings. But not much longer, because we would have married before my next shoot in any case. So we thought about it and decided to set a date some time within the next three weeks. So we get each other and you get Studley and everyone’s happy—except possibly, Fabian, who will be looking down on us and gnashing his teeth!’
‘So who’s the lucky man? Do I know him?’
Laura still looked far from convinced, and no doubt would look totally sceptical when she learned who her future son-in-law would be. Allie bit the bullet. ‘Of course you do. It’s Jethro Cole.’ And, to her amazement, she watched a lot of the suspicious tightness leach out of her mother’s face.
‘The window-cleaner?’ she queried, as if to make sure there weren’t two Jethro Coles she ought to know about.
‘That’s the one,’ Allie responded. ‘Don’t tell me you think a mere window cleaner is beneath me!’
A sudden mental image of Jethro’s hard, very male naked body beneath her own equally naked, much softer one sent a violent rush of blood to her face, staining her ivory cheeks a vivid scarlet. But at least she now had her mother on the defensive instead of the attack, because no one could accuse Laura Brannan of snobbishness and hope to get away with it.
‘Of course not! I never despise an honest day’s work, whatever it is—I would have thought you knew me better than
that! And you can tell just by looking at him that he’s more determined than most. He’ll probably end up with his own window-cleaning empire.’
‘And he’s very sexy with it!’ Allie put in, and wondered where those words had come from. And why. But her subconscious mind must have told her they were necessary, because for the first time since she’d dropped her bombshell Laura’s eyes were twinking.
‘So you noticed?’ she commented drily. ‘The way you always looked through him, I assumed you hadn’t. I knew he was smitten, the way he called round on any pretext—or no pretext at all—the way he couldn’t take his eyes off you. But you always froze him off. The last time I saw him I took pity on him and told him he was wasting his time because you weren’t interested in men.’
So that was why he’d wondered if she was gay! Not, as she’d thought, because of his monumental male conceit. A lilt of pleasure she didn’t bother to question stole into her heart, and she let it stay there because it made her feel good. He hadn’t been speaking out of the kind of crass male vanity that made a man call a woman gay just because she didn’t want to go to bed with him. She had maligned his character when she’d thought it.
‘So?’ Laura prodded. ‘What made you change your mind so suddenly?’
‘I thawed! We met up this morning and we went for coffee, and—’ Oh, Lordy, Laura was never going to buy it. Falling in love, supposedly, and deciding to marry after knowing the man for only a week and giving him the cold shoulder for all of that time. Then, on a sudden burst of inspiration, she continued, ‘I don’t know if you’re going to believe this, but it was like a bolt of lightning. I just knew he was the only man in the world who could matter to me.’
It wasn’t an out-and-out falsehood, not really. He had become the man most important to her by virtue of her not knowing another who would be willing to let her buy a year of his life! But she seemed, as she had hoped, to have punched the right button. Her mother, the perennial romantic, hugged her, all smiles now.
‘Why wouldn’t I believe you? It happened just like that for your father and me!’
‘Did you find the glasses?’ Allie asked her mother several hours later. ‘Jethro should be here any time now.’
‘They’re in the kitchen and the champagne’s in the fridge. Should I pop out to the corner shop and get some nuts for nibbles?’
Excitement made Laura look like a young girl again. Her daughter had fallen head over heels in love at last and was marrying a man she herself thoroughly liked. And as a bonus she would be able to live at Studley, again, put all those dreams of a nursery garden into practice.
‘No,’ Allie said firmly. ‘No nibbles. Just a glass of champagne, then Jethro and I will be off—we do need to spend the evening on our own.’ She pressed her fingertips to her aching forehead as Fran, sitting on the chair near the window and apparently absorbed in the evening newspaper, snorted derisively.
She had to get Jethro out of here and become herself again. Cool, in control, distant. She didn’t need to play-act for him, thank heaven.
She was pleased, of course she was, with the way she’d handled this very tricky situation. Laura now believed that she and Jethro, whom she had liked on sight, ever since he’d picked her up off the pavement, were besottedly in love, and was happy. And this afternoon they’d gone to the shops, because that was what Allie had believed was expected of her, and chosen something to wear for the ceremony, because Allie had said she had nothing suitable with her and Laura had commented that she had nothing suitable full stop.
Watching her mother come really alive as they had tried on hats, Allie had known that she’d got everything right. It had been hard to pretend an interest, discuss the comparative merits of a classic little suit in deep blue silk and a simple shift dress in bronze-coloured linen topped by matching straight-line jacket when she’d known all the time that the blue silk would do, that anything, provided it wasn’t a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, would do.
But the hardest part was still to come: acting the part of a woman who was besottedly in love in front of the scornful Fran and the doting Laura. Already the palms of her hands felt damp with perspiration and her heart was racing.
Fran put her newspaper aside and made a big production of looking at her watch.
‘He’s late.’
‘Only by ten minutes,’ Laura responded tartly. She still hadn’t forgiven her sister for her reaction to the news.
‘God save us, Allie,’ she had snorted. ‘Have you gone mad? You hardly know the man. He’s probably heard of your earning power. He’ll stick around for a couple of years, grab all the goodies he can, and then dump you. He’s got a fantastic body, I’ll give you that, and if you want to go to bed with him, go ahead. You don’t have to marry him, for pity’s sake!’
Ten more minutes ticked by with excruciating slowness, and Allie knew that if Fran didn’t stop looking at her watch every few seconds, if her mother plumped the cushions or tweaked the curtains one more time, she would scream!
Suddenly her mood changed from taut annoyance to dragging, draining defeat. He wasn’t going to come. He’d chickened out. All her plans were going pear-shaped.
So when he did walk in off the street, looking too handsome for his own good, her relief was so great she didn’t have to tell herself to give him a smile of welcome, it just came.
He looked so good. The fresh white T-shirt he was wearing emphasised the taut lines of his upper body and deepened the tanned, olive tones of his skin, and his legs looked even longer and leaner in semi-respectable black denim jeans that fitted his narrow hips and excessively masculine backside like a second skin.
If he was aware of Fran’s frosty expression he didn’t show it. He accepted Laura’s hug and bubbly congratulations with the laid-back grace and charm he seemed able to produce at will, and then advanced on Allie, whose heart was beating so fiercely she was sure everyone in the room would be able to hear it.
‘Miss me, sweetheart?’ The smooth, dark-honey tones oozed confidence, a supreme self-assuredness that made an apology for his lateness unthinkable. A lean, long-fingered hand was clamped against her narrow waist as he tugged her into the heat of his body and her heart began a fluttery dance of panic.
There was no escaping the intimacy he was forcing on her. Not while they were in the same room as her mother and her aunt. She would just have to grin and bear it and remind herself that he, too, was acting a part, that the wicked gleam in his eyes was nothing to do with the way their bodies were glued together and everything to do with the fat cheque he was well on his way to earning.
After they’d taken a sip of the champagne Laura had decided was obligatory they’d be out of here at the speed of light—she’d make sure of that—and in the meantime she’d simply imagine she was being hugged by the big brother she’d never had.
But that was before he kissed her.
Firm fingers curled around her chin, lifting her face, and before she knew what was happening he bent his dark head and feathered his lips over her mouth, his tongue tasting and moulding the lush contours.
Allie gasped as raw sensation exploded inside her and spread like quickfire into every inch of her body. And when he took advantage of her helplessly parted lips and sought a much deeper intimacy her head felt as if it were about to spin off her shoulders. The bones in her legs gave way, so she had no choice but to cling onto him, wrapping her arms around his neck…
‘Champagne, my darlings—or are you already floating six feet above the ground?’
Saved by Laura, her bottle and her glasses, Allie thought muzzily, resisting the impulse to scrub the back of her hand over the mouth that had recently been so very thoroughly plundered. She didn’t know what had come over her. Normally she would never dream of letting a man near her that way. It could only lead further and further into a sexual trap, and Allie Brannan would never knowingly put herself in that kind of danger.
But now wasn’t normal; it was fantasy, a charade—and necessary, she r
eminded herself. Totally necessary if her mother were to believe the web of lies she’d spun. And the way his kiss had made her feel—out of it and wanting it never to stop, wanting more, so much more—had to be nothing but reaction to the tension of the endless day, to the belief, towards the end, that he’d reneged on their bargain.
‘Would you do the honours, Jethro?’ Laura held out the unwieldy bottle. ‘I’m not very good at it.’
Fran got out of her chair. ‘Here, let me. He’s already got his hands full,’ she said drily. ‘A pity to spoil love’s young dream when it normally doesn’t outlast the honeymoon.’
Ignoring her aunt’s acid comments was far easier than ignoring the way Jethro’s hands were pressed into the small of her back, moulding her closer into his body. She gave him a surreptitious shove, shakily reached for a glass, and croaked, ‘Only a taste for me, Fran.’
She had to get them out of here, and fast. Then he could stop playing to the gallery. At once. No more touching, no more kissing. Then she would be back on firm ground and the annoying haze would clear from her eyes. At the moment it was like looking at everything through a gently swaying gauze curtain.
‘Only a drop for me, too,’ Jethro said regretfully, and Allie heaved a silent sigh of relief because he, too, wanted out of this necessary charade. ‘I haven’t eaten since breakfast.’
‘Oh, Allie! How could you? You expressly told me not to keep supper back, that Jethro would have already eaten.’ Laura stopped scolding her daughter and turned a motherly smile on her future son-in-law. ‘It will take me five minutes to make an omelette—which would you prefer, mushroom or cheese?’
He felt the soft, melting curves of Allie’s body go rigid against his, heard the soft hiss of her quickly indrawn breath, felt her hold it. It was tempting—so tempting—to accept the offer, to spin out his visit because his prickly Allie had no option but to play the part of his besotted future wife in front of her family.
Bought: One Husband Page 5