The Duke's Proposal

by Sophie Weston

  Niall met her angry glare head-on. ‘It’s inferior to being a glorified coat hanger; I can see that,’ he agreed amiably. ‘But in this case I was gathering information for someone else.’

  Jemima appeared surprised. ‘Is that legal?’

  The others came out of their shock. ‘Come on, you probably remember Philip from school. He’s just got back from China,’ said Dom, linking his arm hurriedly with Niall’s and urging him towards the other room.

  ‘I couldn’t find anything to put the pistachio shells in,’ said Izzy. ‘Can you help me, Jay Jay?’

  So they dragged them apart like playground combatants, thought Niall. He let himself be delivered to Philip from China without a fight.

  He was shaken. In desperation, he had begun to pull ducal strings to contrive a meeting with Jemima. And here it was, offered to him on a plate. And she hated him.

  They circled each other like enemies throughout the party. But eventually, as people were beginning to leave, he cornered her in the cramped hallway.

  ‘Jay Jay—’

  Quick as a snake, she said, ‘Don’t ever call me that. What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m in the UK full-time now.’

  She tittered. ‘Lucky UK. But I don’t care about your travel arrangements. What are you doing in my house?’

  ‘I thought it was Izzy’s house,’ he pointed out. He thought she flinched, but she recovered so fast she couldn’t be sure.

  ‘Oh, yes, you’re the hopeless not-quite cousin,’ said Jemima. Niall could see she was working herself up to be as nasty as she could. ‘I wondered what was wrong with the mystery man. I suppose being a duke of no fixed abode is getting you down?’

  ‘I have several fixed abodes,’ said Niall, stung. ‘A tumbledown castle in Scotland and leases on several flats that my father and brother took for their own dubious purposes.’

  ‘And you’re living in a hotel?’

  ‘While I work out what to do next.’ He decided this nastiness was actually quite encouraging. ‘You’re very interested in my living arrangements.’

  She flushed bright red. ‘I don’t give a damn where you live. As long as you don’t try to worm your way into my life.’

  ‘Worm my way?’ He was outraged. ‘You’re out of your mind.’

  ‘Oh, am I? Do you really expect me to believe that you came here tonight just because Dom took pity on you?’ The words bit.

  He looked at her very straightly. ‘Why wouldn’t you believe it? When have I ever lied to you?’

  ‘Not in so many words, maybe. But you didn’t tell me you were a duke, did you?’

  The beautiful sensual mouth was trembling. Niall was furious with her. But he also wanted to kiss that tremulous mouth until she stopped hitting out and listened to the truth.

  He said, with all the calm at his command, ‘And you didn’t tell me that you were running away from a stalker. That makes us even, I’d say.’

  Calm didn’t work. Flames shot out of Jemima’s eyes.

  ‘I didn’t tell anyone about Basil,’ she shouted.

  Niall froze at that. Suddenly, calm was not an effort. His brain worked at the speed of light.

  He said quietly, ‘You didn’t tell them? Not anyone? Not even your sister?’

  She shrugged, not answering. But her breath was coming fast and there was a tiny pulse hammering frantically at the base of her throat. She wanted him to think she was angry, but there was a lot more than that going on here. Oh, God, he wanted to take her away and—

  He stopped himself. Patience, Niall. Patience.

  ‘And have you told them now?’ he said in a still voice.

  The flames subsided. Jemima’s eyes slid away from his. ‘What’s to tell?’

  He snorted disbelievingly. ‘So I’m the only one who knows that Basil hounded you halfway round the world? Oh, that’s just great.’

  She was instantly defensive. ‘Why should it matter to you?’

  ‘It matters,’ said Niall deliberately, ‘because for a day you were mine.’

  She gave a sort of gulp, as if she had fallen into a swimming pool and was drowning.

  That was when he lost his cool completely.

  ‘And should be again,’ he said savagely.

  He had never kissed anyone like this—harsh and desperate. When he let her go her eyes were wide with shock and she was shivering. All the sweet responsiveness of that day on the boat might have been a fantasy of his own imagination.

  He stepped away from her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Niall. He felt chilled to the bone, like marble. ‘I shouldn’t have come. I won’t again.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  JEMIMA got along just fine on her own until Pepper’s wedding.

  Even that should have been okay. Between them Izzy and Jemima had talked her out of her worst excesses in the matter of bridesmaids’ dresses. In the end, one of the young designers who worked for Out of the Attic came up with a shimmering bronze gown for Pepper and put the bridesmaids in simple dresses from the same bit of the spectrum—dark honey for Izzy, summer peach for Steven’s delighted ward, greeny-gold for Jemima.

  ‘It will be lovely,’ he assured them. ‘All that red hair and sunshine colours. You’ll be spectacular.’

  Pepper looked nervous. She had already vetoed a white wedding dress on the grounds that it would make her look like a sheet on somebody washing line, bulging with wind.

  ‘I don’t want be spectacular. Clean and tidy will do just fine,’ she said.

  But the sisters laughed her into submission.

  And then Izzy suddenly got worried that Jemima would walk into the party afterwards alone.

  ‘Do you want to bring someone? That new photographer of yours, maybe?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Oh, but why? I’m sure Pepper would love to have him there.’

  ‘Maybe she would. I can do without him.’

  Izzy searched her sister’s face. She was very serious suddenly.

  ‘Are you sure? I mean, it must get you down—Pepper and me flitting about with twigs in our beaks, nest-building all the time.’

  ‘It’s pretty tough to take,’ Jemima agreed dryly. ‘But I can handle it.’

  ‘And it really wouldn’t be fun to have a guy of your own to take you to the wedding?’

  Oh, Niall, Niall.

  ‘It really wouldn’t be fun,’ Jemima confirmed steadily.

  Izzy said slowly, ‘You’re different.’

  Jemima was flippant. ‘I’m out from under your apron strings. It had to happen some time.’

  ‘It’s not that. When Basil Blane messed you up like that, I thought you came back brilliantly. But it seemed as if you were watching yourself all the time, in case you slipped over the edge again. Now—I don’t know—it’s as if you’ve stopped worrying, somehow.’

  ‘Got my bottle back,’ said Jemima lightly.

  But Izzy didn’t laugh. ‘Yes, I think maybe you have.’

  ‘Good.’

  Izzy hadn’t finished, though. ‘That isn’t why you don’t want to bring Phil the photographer to the wedding, though, is it, Jay Jay? In case he’s another Basil?’

  Jemima put her hands down on the table—they were in the kitchen, surrounded by files and wedding lists—and stood up.

  ‘Listen,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t give a flying fig about Basil. And I’m not afraid of men. I am afraid of pretending.’

  Izzy frowned, puzzled.

  ‘You’re in love, right?’ said Jemima.

  Izzy nodded enthusiastically, her face breaking into a smile as it always did whenever she thought of her Dom.

  ‘Well, I’m not. And I don’t want a man on my arm like some sort of jungle camouflage. If I’m in love—’ She corrected herself. ‘If I fall in love with someone who loves me, sure, fine—I’ll show him off proudly. If I’m not—well, I’m just as proud to be on my own. Being in love is too important to play games with.’

  ‘You have changed,’ said Izzy
slowly. ‘When did you get to learn so much about being in love?’

  When I met a one-woman man.

  Jemima shrugged, not answering aloud.

  ‘Maybe you’ve found someone?’ said Izzy, unusually hesitant.

  Jemima sat down again and gathered Pepper’s lists about her. ‘And maybe I was born to be alone. Either way, I’ll survive.’

  The day of wedding dawned, as all the best weddings should, bright and clear. It was taking place in the chapel at Steven’s Oxford college. So the photos—and the party, if the weather was kind—were scheduled for the Master’s Garden.

  Jemima got through the ceremony pretty well. She managed to look misty-eyed when Pepper promised to have and to hold, instead of screaming in pain, which was what she wanted to do. She prevented an enterprising pageboy from standing on Pepper’s train. And by sheer force of personality she made Windflower— ‘call me Janice’—give the bride’s flowers back after the couple signed the register.

  She sat for some lovely photos with the other honey and gold bridesmaids. She did some dreamy shots in a cloud of roses on her own. She did not flinch when Izzy unselfconsciously reached up to her Dom and said, ‘Our turn next, lover.’

  So she was doing fine. And then—

  She had been a bit surprised when Pepper wanted to ask Abby Diz. Sure, the woman had worked on the Out of the Attic account. But they were hardly close friends. In fact Jemima saw more of her than Pepper did.

  But Steven had an enormous guest list—family, old friends, mates from the business he had built up from nothing, colleagues from the college. Pepper needed to boost her side of the chapel, she said. And Abby was going to be Izzy’s sister-in-law. She was nearly family.

  So Abby came, with her dashing, adoring Argentine husband. And a very distinct bump.

  Not even that would have mattered, if only…if only….

  Jemima left the amateur photographers in the rose garden and walked back towards the party and saw—

  And saw Niall Blackthorne, almost unrecognisable in grey morning clothes and a pearly cravat, talking to the gorgeous Lady Abigail.

  A heartbreaking ghost whispered her ear, ’Not my Abigail.’ And she remembered where she had first heard about the island of Pentecost.

  ‘Where’s that?’ she had said. ‘South Seas?’

  And Abby—Abby—had shaken her head and said, ‘Who knows? Could be. He gets around.’

  Jemima felt as if someone had poured ice down her gold silk back. Suddenly her legs were trembling. She sank down onto a wooden bench, gift of a former master’s wife, and tried to get her head round it.

  ‘He’s known me since I had spots and braces on my teeth,’ Abby had said.

  Why hadn’t she remembered? Why? She’d had all the clues. She had even asked Abby if her husband should be worried.

  ‘Stupid. I’ve been so stupid.’

  But she was not the only one, Jemima realised. Because Abby had said something else too, secure and blind in her love for her husband. ‘If there’s one man in the world for whom I have no mystery, it’s him.’

  How wrong she was. Mystery? She had his whole heart. She was his dream. His not impossible she.

  And now she was standing there in the garden, blooming with her husband’s baby. And finally, totally, out of his reach.

  What had Al said? ‘Marriages end. Don’t give up hope.’ Was that it?

  But looking at Abby, so happily in love, so fulfilled, Niall must know there was no hope for him.

  He must be so hurt, thought Jemima. Her heart turned over as if his pain were her own.

  Bloody Pepper, bloody wedding guests, bloody Abigail. Between them, they have cut my love to the heart.

  She was across the garden to save him before she had time to think how this was going to hurt her too.

  Somehow it didn’t matter. Somehow all that mattered was that he should have someone beside him. If he was going to have to say goodbye to The One Woman, he wouldn’t have to do it in front of a crowd of curious strangers. He would do it with a friend to hold his hand. A friend who knew the pain of love as well as he did himself.

  And that was when she acknowledged it at last. Reluctantly. A little ruefully. With resignation. Walking across a summer-scented garden with rose pollen on her fingers and her heart in her eyes.

  I’m a one-man woman. Damn it. And Niall Blackthorne is it.

  It was a terrifying thought. She could just see the headlines: The Duke and the Tramp. Well, maybe not a tramp exactly. But—what was it that Niall had called her? A substitute for a coat hanger? It wasn’t exactly aristocratic.

  But what did aristocracy matter? Niall, she remembered, had kept on sending her messages, though she had never responded. Hell, he had even sent her a mango. She had cried over that, remembering their magical day.

  Why would she cry if she didn’t love him?

  And then the thought came—why would he send it if he didn’t love me? A little, anyway. Maybe I’m not the woman of his dreams. But he did love me a little that day on the boat. He did say, For a day you were mine. Surely that counts for something.

  She was three steps away from him, looking at the back of his head. Jemima swallowed. She was about to risk the biggest brush-off of her life. And she minded; she really did. But she didn’t have any choice and she knew it.

  She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and stepped up to his side.

  ‘Niall,’ she said, slipping her hand into his, as she had done on the beach all those months ago. ‘I didn’t know you were coming.’

  He looked down at her, startled.

  He was thinner, she thought. Or maybe it was the grey tailcoat. Something made him seem taller and thinner and more formidable, somehow. Unreadable, certainly. She ached for her sexy beach bum with his disgraceful shorts and his laughter. Even for the devil-may-care guy in jeans who had turned up at the flat, before she hacked him to pieces with her nasty tongue. If he was a cool-eyed stranger now, it was her own fault. For a moment Jemima quailed.

  She did not let it show. ‘Great to see you,’ she said, projecting enough warmth to light a barbecue.

  Niall’s eyebrows twitched together. ‘Jemima,’ he said cautiously.

  She beamed love and support at him. ‘Call me Jay Jay. How have you been?’

  He did not look at Abby. Oh, how he must hurt. Sure, he felt something for Jemima. But Abby was still his not impossible she.

  I am going to show him there’s an alternative. That people can fall in love a second time, Jemima vowed. He won’t come round at first. But in time he will see that what he feels for me is enough.

  But, still, she could have wept for what he must be feeling now.

  ‘Fine, thank you,’ said Niall, still wary.

  Abby said, ‘Oh, it’s so exciting. He’s a hero, Jay Jay. He’s been busting criminals.’

  It was the last thing she had expected. ‘What?’

  Niall looked uncomfortable. ‘Not all on my own, Ab.’

  The pet name stabbed Jemima as viciously as a sudden blow from a stiletto. Neither of them even noticed it, she thought. Intimacy just came so naturally to them.

  Oh, this was hopeless. Abby was just so utterly entwined in his heart and mind there was nothing anyone else could do to help.

  She withdrew her hand from his. Or she tried to. Only his fingers tightened like a vice and she couldn’t move. She turned her head, shocked, and found that he wasn’t unreadable any more. His eyes gleamed. The sexy beach bum was clearly still alive and kicking under the elegant morning clothes.

  Her exquisitely made-up cheeks warmed.

  For a day you were mine. Maybe—more than a day?

  ‘He’s been tracking money launderers,’ burbled Abby, oblivious.

  Jemima tried hard to be interested. He had started to rotate his thumb in that secret place in the centre of her palm, and it was nigh on impossible to concentrate on anything else. But she did her best.

  ‘I thought you were a gambler,’ sh
e said breathlessly.

  ‘I am. I was only moonlighting as a cop.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Niall shrugged indifferently. But the wicked thumb still did its work, telling her that he was not indifferent at all.

  Jemima’s insides began to turn to treacle. Warm treacle.

  ‘Money launderers often use casinos to pass funds around. You can’t trace the stuff back anywhere because nobody has paid it to you for anything. It just looks as if you won it. Rather clever. So I watched who won more than the average. And who lost. And then tried to see if they were working together.’

  ‘It must have been so exciting,’ said Abby, thrilled. ‘Were you in danger?’

  ‘Only from passing redheads.’

  Jemima choked.

  Abby was delighted. ‘A honey trap. Isn’t that what they call it? Were they on to you, then?’

  ‘No. But there was a point when I thought they were.’ He looked at Jemima very steadily. ‘This woman turned up with the thinnest story you’d ever heard.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ said Jemima. The thumb was driving her demented and she felt some fighting back was due. ‘What did you do about it?’

  ‘Checked her out,’ said Niall blandly.

  ‘That must have been hard.’

  ‘It was worth it.’

  Has his mouth always been so sensual? She couldn’t take her eyes off it. Soon, even cheery Abby was going to notice something.

  ‘And was she all she seemed?’ said Jemima breathlessly.

  ‘Oh, a lot more. A whole lot more.’

  The dark eyes took on a brooding look. Suddenly she remembered the feel of his mouth against her heated skin; the brilliant sky above; the smell of the boat; the swish of the waves. And the totally absorbed lover worshipping her body as if they had belonged together since the beginning of time.

  For a day you were mine. Could a day turn into for ever?

  Jemima was having difficulty in breathing. She cleared her throat.

  ‘Was that a good thing?’

  ‘I thought so at the time.’

  Abby said, ‘Don’t tell me you’ve been seducing a master spy, Niall?’

  Jemima could have groaned aloud. Oh, God, how could the woman be so blind?

  Niall laughed suddenly and stopped teasing. ‘You’re just too easy to wind up, Ab. I took notes and made a few phone calls. It really wasn’t glamorous at all.’