A Scandalous Engagement

by Cathy Williams

  ‘You have to stop being so afraid,’ he said in a low voice, thick and velvety and disarmingly soft. ‘You have to stop pulling away.’

  ‘And you have to start remembering that people have feelings!’ she burst out, blushing with dismay as she heard the words resound through the room like bullets from a gun.

  ‘What do you think I’m talking about?’

  Jade was confused. She didn’t like the way he was looking at her, as though he was privy to some piece of knowledge that she wasn’t. His wayward hand now discovered the new, bare territory of her thighs, which the tee shirt only partially covered, despite her attempts to stretch it down.

  ‘I’ve spent the past few weeks humouring you,’ he murmured roughly, ‘and I think it’s time to call it a day.’

  ‘Humouring me? Humouring me?’ she squeaked, outraged and mystified. The offending thigh, meanwhile, had been lulled into a delicious state of security and was resisting all attempts at movement. He stroked it and looked at her intently. She ignored the stroking and returned his gaze without flinching. Transfixed as she was by this weird conversation, she wasn’t so transfixed that her mind couldn’t amble off down a side road and window-shop in the place labelled ‘How Would It Feel If His Hand Stole Up A Little Higher?’

  ‘I was willing to wait for you to work through your problems.’

  ‘Work through my problems?’

  ‘Stop repeating everything I say. You’re beginning to sound like a parrot.’

  ‘Can I help it? Can I?’ Jade demanded. ‘Nothing you’re saying makes any sense. What do you mean you were willing to wait for me to work through my problems?’

  ‘I knew you were afraid of involvement,’ he said slowly. His hand had crept a little higher and she felt the breath catch in her throat. ‘And I don’t blame you. I knew it the minute I laid eyes on you, and the more I looked at you, the stronger the feeling got. Half of you wanted me; the other half wanted to run away. When you told me about your sister, it all made sense.’

  She didn’t like where this was heading. Oh, no. She had never confessed any of that stuff to him. How did he know?

  Because, a little voice whispered, he knew her.

  ‘I think we should stop this right here and now,’ she said in a timid, small voice which he didn’t appear to hear at all.

  ‘But I need to know your decision. Are you going to marry me or not? If we marry, then I stay here, but in the meantime there are appointments waiting to be made upon my departure.’ His hand slipped underneath the tee shirt, caressing her waist, and she made a feeble attempt to still it, which unfortunately left it painfully close to her breasts, inches away from the soft mound of flesh and nipples that had tightened in response to his touch.

  ‘Why me?’ she asked, skirting round the question rather skilfully, she considered. ‘London is full of young girls who would love to play hostess to your dinner parties. Why not go and fish one of them out of obscurity and offer her the job?’

  ‘Because, if you really want to know, I’m not interested in taking any of them to bed. In fact, I’ve discovered that I’m not interested in taking anyone to bed apart from you.’

  ‘So we’re back to that, are we?’ she asked, bristling.

  ‘No, we’re back to something quite different. A marriage proposal.’

  ‘Arrangement, you mean.’

  ‘Will you marry me?’

  ‘Because you want to take me to bed? That’s quite a big price to pay for sleeping with someone you’ll grow sick of within months, isn’t it?’ It felt good to punish herself for wanting his hand where it was, for wanting it to go further and further and further, for wanting to marry this man when every instinct told her to back off.

  ‘Not too big a price to pay for someone who’s in love with me.’

  It took a few seconds for the words to hit home, but when they did her body jerked back as though scalded. His hand, comfortably but motionlessly resting on her skin, became tangled with her tee shirt, and as soon as it was free she drew her legs up, enfolding them with the flimsy cotton.

  ‘What gives you the idea that…that…?’ She choked on a laugh. ‘You’re mad if you think that…that…’

  ‘Just say it.’

  ‘I suppose you think that you’re holding a trump card, don’t you?’ she yelled, swinging her legs off the sofa and standing up. She angled away from him, bumping into a chest of drawers and righting her position without taking her eyes off his face. ‘I suppose you think that you can finally have what you want! Just because I happen to have been stupid and insane enough to have made the mistake of falling in love with you, you imagine that you can now just talk me into getting into bed with you! Well, let me tell you something, buster. I might have climbed into the sack with you if I didn’t love you! Hah! Now do you think you’ve been clever? Yes, I love you, and that’s precisely why I don’t intend to sleep with you and I certainly don’t intend to marry you!’

  Earlier temptation had been tossed through the window. In her humiliation and rage, she couldn’t imagine how on earth she could ever have contemplated bending to his persuasion. She must have been even crazier than she imagined!

  ‘I suppose you do this all the time, do you? Seduce women and then make them fall for you hook, line and sinker? Gives you some kind of sick kick, does it?’ She paused for breath and folded her arms belligerently across her chest, arching her body forward as though gearing up to run full head-on tilt at him. ‘You’re forever talking to me about challenges…challenges, challenges, challenges! Is that your ultimate challenge? Worming your way under a woman’s skin until she can’t think of anyone but you, and then discarding her like an old shoe that no longer has a use in the wardrobe? Is that how you get your thrills?’

  She was yelling so loudly that she was pretty sure her voice was tearing through the closed door, down the hall and straight into Andy’s room. If he hadn’t stormed out of the house he would probably have been charging right now into the bedroom at the thought of imminent homicide. She couldn’t help it, though. Her emotions were so big and wild and bloody furious that she couldn’t have modulated her tone if she’d tried. It didn’t help that Curtis wasn’t shouting back.

  He stood up and walked across to her. Fisticuffs! If he so much as uttered one laugh of derision, he would discover the meaning of the word. She balled her hands into tight fists and every muscle in her body tensed to receive some awful body blow.

  He was smiling, a slow, gentle smile that she distrusted, even though the messages flying to her brain were confusingly urging her to respond.

  ‘This,’ he murmured, putting his arms around her, wrapping himself around her, ‘is why I love you so much. You’re so utterly unpredictable and fragile and passionate and everything else that would take far too long for me to put into words. Aside from which…’ he bent slightly so that he was whispering directly into her ear ‘…I don’t have the vocabulary.’

  For the space of a heartbeat time stood still, then she said in a high, wobbly voice, ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Put your arms around me, little darling.’

  She did. But tentatively. ‘I still don’t believe you.’ But was she mistaken? He was stroking her hair in a very tender manner and she could feel him kissing the top of her head.

  ‘Why did you let me rant and rave? Why didn’t you just tell me from the start and save me the mortification…?’

  ‘Because I wasn’t sure if you would rush in with accusations of saying the right thing just to get you into bed or persuade you into marriage because it happened to suit me. You don’t stop to think, do you…?’ He pushed her away from him so that he could tilt her face up to his and look at her.

  ‘I think I fell in love with you long before we went to Scotland, even though I hadn’t come close to admitting it to myself. Life as a bachelor was easy. I didn’t intend to give it up without a fight. I certainly never entertained the idea that I would become so fixated with a woman that I’d end up doing every
thing in my power to keep her by my side. I knew you felt something for me, but I also knew that it wouldn’t take much to have you running in the opposite direction so fast I’d never be able to catch you. I knew that I had to proceed cautiously, like someone defusing a bomb…’

  ‘Does that mean you see me as a bombshell?’ she asked, fully relaxed, her arms holding him tightly. She felt blissfully happy. It was a state of mind she had never known existed, and she figured that she could grow accustomed to it without too much difficulty.

  ‘Absolutely.’ He grinned at her, and she grinned stupidly back.

  ‘I wish you’d said something sooner,’ she murmured.

  ‘I didn’t want to make sweeping declarations of love any more than you did. Strong, powerful and dynamic as I am, I do still have an inherent teenage fear of the rebuff, you know.’

  He smiled wickedly at her and her loving fingers crept to the waistband of his trousers and inserted themselves underneath, then swivelled to the front and casually undid the button of the trousers. She could feel him pulsing against her, but she was in no hurry. They had all the time in the world.

  ‘When you said that you intended to move out of the house as soon as we returned to London from Scotland, I was so bloody terrified that I did the unthinkable. Having spent years loathing the intrusion of the media into my private life, I telephoned a journalist friend and told him that I was engaged.’

  ‘You didn’t!’ She was so stunned by this announcement that she repeated, ‘You didn’t!’ in sheer amazement.

  ‘I was desperate!’ he told her sheepishly. ‘I wanted to buy time, so that I could try and find out exactly what you felt and give you time to come to terms with whatever you were feeling.’

  ‘And if I’d decided that I wasn’t ready to feel anything…?’ She batted her eyelashes teasingly.

  ‘Got something in your eye?’

  ‘I’m being cute and kittenish.’ She pouted for good measure, and he bent and kissed her thoroughly on the lips.

  ‘Such a turn-on,’ he murmured against her mouth, and he scooped her up, giggling like a teenager, and deposited her firmly in the centre of the bed.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, disengaging himself from his clothes, which he carelessly tossed on the floor, then beginning work on her—not that there was much needed. A tee shirt hardly involved much effort. ‘The big question.’ He pulled her to his side and ran his hand smoothly along her thigh, then between her thighs, finding her wetness and massaging her there until she groaned and could hardly think, never mind answer any big questions.

  ‘Um,’ she murmured, parting her legs and moving her body sinuously against his hand.

  ‘Will you marry me?’

  ‘On one condition,’ she whispered huskily, stretching back and linking her fingers above her head so that her breasts pointed provocatively at him.

  ‘And what’s that…?’

  ‘That you never stop doing this.’

  He bent his head to suckle on one nipple, then turned to look at her.

  ‘I think—’ he licked her nipple ‘—it’s safe to say—’ he nuzzled against it, pulling it into his mouth ‘—there’s no chance of that…my love…’

  ISBN: 978-1-4592-0294-8

  A SCANDALOUS ENGAGEMENT

  First North American Publication 2001.

  Copyright © 2000 by Cathy Williams.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

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