Bridegrooms Required: One Bridegroom Required / One Wedding Required / One Husband Required

‘Now watch this,’ said Holly, switching off the main light and pointing to her window display. She had dressed the window to dazzle both during the day and by night, and the effect was exactly what she had been aiming for.

A single spotlight illuminated the prize-winning gown, turning the heavy satin into a buttery gold, while the moonlight added a contrasting silvery sheen all of its own.

For a moment he was silent. ‘It’s absolutely spectacular,’ he told her quietly, and Holly’s heart leapt with pleasure as she heard his unequivocal praise. ‘Quite stunning.’

‘Would you...?’ Her words disappeared into the air; she was terrified he would misinterpret them.

In the shadowy half-light his gaze was quizzical. ‘Would I what?’

The words spilled out like grain from a sack. ‘Would you like to come upstairs and see what they’ve done to the flat?’

He didn’t hesitate, even though the voice of his conscience, the voice of his sanity, told him that he should have done. ‘Love to,’ he answered.

‘After all—you were the one who paid for its decoration!’ She wondered why she was tripping over herself to justify the invitation, which was pretty ridiculous when you thought about it. After all, she had shared his house without incident—she was hardly inviting him upstairs in order to start leaping on him!

Luke saw that she was trembling, and frowned. ‘Have you had anything to drink?’

She shook her head. ‘No, not even a sip. I wanted to keep a clear head, and I was so busy filling up everybody else’s glasses that I wouldn’t have had time to drink my own with any degree of enjoyment!’

‘Then how about we open some champagne? To celebrate properly?’

‘That would be lovely—but there isn’t any, I’m afraid. My budget didn’t run to champagne, but perhaps the offlicence might be open?’

Luke laughed, went into the kitchen, and returned—carrying a frosted, foil-topped bottle. ‘No, but this very soon will be!’ He saw her look of bafflement. ‘I brought it with me when I arrived,’ he told her softly. ‘Didn’t you notice? No. Come to think of it, you were too excited to notice anything—’

Not quite true, thought Holly guiltily. She had noticed how wonderful he looked.

‘So why don’t you take me upstairs now?’

Holly was glad of the half-light, grateful that it would provide some camouflage for the mass of confusions which must have flitted across her face. When he said things like that, he could sound very provocative... She grabbed two glasses and a spare bag of peanuts.

‘Come—this way,’ she said unsteadily, and the blood pounded like thunder to all her pulse-points.

Upstairs, too, Luke had given her the complete freedom to decorate the flat in the colours of her choice. The leaks were no more, and there was fresh plaster on the ceilings. Luke followed her from room to room and Holly noticed how clean everything smelt—of fresh paint and new wood.

The sitting room was painted a sunny yellow, graduating into deep tangerine in the kitchen. By contrast, the bedroom was blue, although Holly didn’t linger there and she noticed that Luke stuck his head round the door only briefly. The tiny bathroom was made to look double its size by the judicious use of mirrors on every wall and Holly was particularly proud of it.

Luke made all the right murmuring sounds of approval, then opened the champagne, and they drank it in the sitting room, in front of the coal-effect gas fire, whose flames flickered convincingly up the chimney.

Sitting on the rug opposite him, Holly drank half a glass of champagne, feeling the alcohol take effect almost immediately, her limbs starting to unfurl as the tensions of the day slowly seeped out of her body.

Luke watched her obsessively, though he was doing his best not to, and wondered just why he had allowed a situation such as the one he now found himself in to develop. Was he merely being protective towards her? Or was he arrogant enough to imagine himself immune to that colt-like beauty of hers?

Holly felt that she ought to say something formal. Something which would remind her that, however kind he was, and however friendly, he remained her landlord—and that he had never shown the remotest sign of wishing to change that relationship. And from today that relationship would change irrevocably, whether she wanted it to or not. Because she would no longer be living with him and that would automatically create a distance between them.

She cleared her throat. ‘Thank you for everything you’ve done for me, Luke. I mean that. Today was a big success—I hope!—and I could never have pulled it off if I’d had to handle everything on my own. I probably wouldn’t have opened until late summer—and spent most of my capital beforehand. So thanks.’

‘It was my pleasure—and I mean that.’ There was a pause while he considered the wisdom of his next words, but something more powerful than reason made him say them anyway. ‘I’m going to miss you, Holly.’

‘Will you?’ She turned to him with pleasure and surprise.

‘Of course I will. You’re very good company.’

Holly gave a slightly woozy smile. ‘So are you. And I’ll miss you, too.’

‘Do you suppose we’re what’s known as a mutual admiration society?’ He laughed, and his blue eyes crinkled at the corners.

‘I suppose we are,’ said Holly breathlessly. He was looking at her in a way that made her heart patter erratically, her skin prickle with heat and excitement. It was as though her body had shifted into a gear she didn’t recognise.

He lifted up the bottle. ‘Here—have some more champagne.’

‘Do you really think I should?’

‘Oh, I really do,’ he teased, remorselessly slamming the door shut on his doubts.

‘Okay, then.’ She held her glass out languidly while he topped it up in a cascade of creamy foam, shifting her legs comfortably as she sipped it. Though the oddest thing about champagne was that the more you drank, the thirstier you got. Holly put her head back and sighed dreamily. Everything was too good to be true. Her shop was going to be a success—she just knew it was—and sitting opposite her was the most gorgeous man she had ever met. She was floating on a sea of happiness and champagne bubbles.

Luke wished that she wouldn’t sit like that. Well, part of him did. The other part of him wanted to replay every movement she had made in slow motion. The tiny cream overskirt had ridden right the way up her legs, and it was proving an extremely distracting sight. He cast around for a safe topic, something which would lead his thoughts away from the milky-white heaven of her thighs. ‘So does this feel like home yet?’ he asked.

The words were blurted out before she could stop them. ‘It does with you here.’

Luke’s eyes glinted dangerously. Wasn’t she aware that when she said something as silkily as that, with those big green eyes widening up at him like a cat’s, he wanted to capture that rosebud mouth of hers and to spend the rest of the night kissing it?

Go, said a voice in his head. Go, now. Before something happens. Before it’s too late.

But, for the first time since his teens, desire took precedence over wisdom. His throat felt as though it had been constricted by a vice. Every word a victory. ‘Oh?’ he asked unsteadily.

Holly shrugged, drained her glass and put it down on the fireplace. ‘I’ve kind of got used to having you around, I suppose. And these last few days...’ She hesitated, aware that, if she was totally honest with him, she might come over as weak. And pathetic.

‘These last few days....what?’ he prompted.

‘Well, they’ve been easy. Relaxed. Civilised.’

‘Civilised?’ he laughed.

‘Sure.’ She nodded passionately, too tempted by the clear blue light in his eyes not to lay her feelings bare. ‘When I was a student I lived in houses which were too cold and too crowded,’ and when I was a child I lived in lots of different houses Houses where I was a stranger—tolerated simply because whoever owned the house really only wanted my mother. I never felt I fitted in—not anywhere. I used to have dreams about proper houses with proper fires, where people made proper meals and ate them sitting at proper tables. Storybook houses that I never really believed in. Except...‘ and her voice went very quiet ’...that yours was exactly like that.’

There was silence while he thought about the import of what she had just told him. Did she not realise just how potent was the power of her vulnerability? The enormous compliment she had just paid him? She was an enigma—with the face and the body of a sorceress and the trusting vulnerability of a little girl. So which was the real Holly Lovelace?

Had he been weak to come up here, or merely foolish Luke wondered if she could see the tussle on his face. Wondered whether she was deliberately tucking her legs up beneath her like that, so that the movement not only emphasised their length, but also drew attention to the pert thrust of her breasts. His hands felt shaky, his mouth as dry as tinder and, all the while, there was the slow, painful build-up of desire.

He diverted his thoughts by focussing on her words instead of her body. ‘Then yours is an upbringing I can identify with,’ he told her. ‘Only mine was the more institutionalised version of solitary confinement.’

Her hand stilled over the peanuts. ‘Tell me.’

The women he had known had not wanted to hear sad stories about dispossessed little boys—they’d wanted hard, strong bodies and hands that knew exactly how best to please them. He shook his head, aware of the dangers m baring a soul which necessity had clothed in secrecy many years before.

‘Everyone knows what British boarding-schools are like,’ he said dismissively.

‘Not unless they’ve been to one, they don’t. And I haven’t. So I don’t. Tell me, Luke!’

He shrugged. ‘It’s a system which works well on many levels,’ he conceded levelly. ‘So it isn’t necessarily bad—just different.’

Holly smiled. ‘It’s okay—you don’t have to defend the status quo to me, you know.’

She was chipping away with her persistence, each soft word exposing the hard, cold core of pain he had hidden away for so long.

‘So which particular aspect would you like me to reveal to you?’ he demanded. ‘The isolation? The lack of physical warmth? The total lack of time to just sit and think? The disgusting food? The freezing dormitories? The even more freezing early-morning showers which followed the equally freezing cross-country runs?’

‘You must have been pretty fit,’ she observed slowly, and cast him a long look from beneath lashes which could not quite obscure the glittering of her eyes.

Luke started. Of all the things she could have said... He had expected and been dreading the kind of cloying sympathy which most women seemed so comfortable with. Not a light, teasing kind of comment delivered with a little glint in her eye which made the slow pulsing of his desire escalate into an insistent pounding.

This was a game he was familiar with...

He bent his legs, just in case his exquisite hardness would be revealed to damn him. He needed to get out of here fast, but first he needed to kill that desire stone dead. And the only way he could think of doing that was by getting Holly and her long, long legs out of his line of vision.

‘How about some coffee?’ he suggested throatily, as his vocal cords joined in with his body’s conspiracy by telling her how much he wanted her.

Coffee? Holly was both startled and disappointed. She wanted much more than coffee. She wanted him. And she wanted him badly—just as she had done from the moment she had first set eyes on him. When she had experienced an attraction towards him which had started with a thunderbolt and just continued to grow.

She had thought that he felt something for her, too—if not exactly the same in terms of intensity, then something very similar. Or had she simply been imagining that raw gleam of hunger which sometimes illuminated his eyes with a deep blue radiance? The easy companionship they had shared during her time at his house? Easy enough for her to think that there might be something more than just friendship...

Shakily, and trying to use as much grace as possible—which wasn’t easy, given the length of her skirt—Holly rose to her feet and stood looking down at him.

‘Coffee it is, then,’ she said quietly, but still she didn’t move, and there was a question in her eyes.

During his life, Luke had faced the very real adversities of hunger and pain and physical danger—and yet now he found himself in a situation far more threatening. He had a will of steel, forged by need in the long, lonely hours of his childhood, and yet that will now seemed to have deserted him.

He put his hand out towards her, and looked at it with bemused detachment, as if that hand were not under his control any more. It alighted on the slender curve of her ankle, and he felt the tiny shudder which thrilled her flesh as he made that first contact.

Slowly, lingeringly, he let his hand move upwards, so that it encircled her calf, and that calf suddenly seemed like the most erotic zone he had ever encountered. He let his middle finger trickle along the silken swell, in a way that made his body shudder as he imagined the natural path for that finger to now travel...

Holly didn’t dare move, didn’t dare speak, some instinct telling her that to do either would be to break this bewitching spell he had cast on her. His hand felt like the centre of a furnace. Or maybe his touch had transformed her into a furnace—for she could feel a fire beginning to blaze at the fork of her legs, the honeyed wetness which followed doing nothing to quench the remorseless heat building up inside her.

Luke’s hand reached her knee. Never had he felt such an erotic contrast between bone and velvet-soft skin. He felt for the fleshy pocket behind the knee itself and sighed with pleasure. Using his thumb, he circled the skin there, round and round, over and over, until he felt it tremble helplessly beneath his touch. His hand crept inexorably upwards; he knew where he wanted to touch her most and, from the give-away little sag of her knees, he knew that she wanted it, too.

He knelt before her then, tightening his arms around her bottom, burying his face in the softness of her belly through the filmy voile of her dress. He felt her sway, and pulled her down so that she was kneeling, too, their eyes almost on a level, her expression one of breathless curiosity as she waited to see what he would do next.

Her eyes had never looked greener—luminous and bright as leaves which had just been rained on—nor more inviting. He saw her lips pucker helplessly, noted that the lush, dark lashes were in danger of fluttering to a close.

‘I want to kiss you,’ he told her, in a voice which sounded as heavy and as sweet as syrup.

‘Then kiss me,’ she managed drowsily, half despairing of her passivity.

‘God, yes...’ He would have kissed her anyway, invitation or not, for it would have been impossible to resist those lips. He lowered his mouth slowly... brushing it against hers with the merest whisper of contact... and Holly felt her lips part immediately.

Steadying himself with a hand now buried in the rippling copper ropes of her hair, Luke deepened the kiss with his tongue and felt her meet it, matching his own passion and need, and yet inciting it further...demanding more...

Fireworks threatened to explode inside his head and in his aching groin, and he thought how intoxicating this kiss was...

Intoxicating...

The word began to batter relentlessly at his conscience like rain lashing against a window, and Luke felt his body freeze with rejection, his lips stilling against hers.

For this was the act of a fool. This woman was like a glass of champagne: the sudden high, the slaking of a sensual thirst and then—what? The dry mouth, the headache and the regret of a hangover—that was what.

He was not in the market for any woman—but particularly not one who was everything he most feared and despised in a woman. With her fey, enchanting beauty, and all the restless inner energy of the creative personality, she was the kind of woman who was bad news. Very bad news indeed.

He plucked his mouth away from hers, and something in his attitude must have unnerved her, for he saw the sudden whitening -of her face and the way that her eyes had grown leaf-dark and startled.

And, even then, that treacherous protective instinct which she alone seemed to inspire in him reared its interfering head once more, and he reached out automatically to steady her, afraid that she might simply crumple to a heap in front of him.

‘Luke—what on earth is the matter?’ she demanded, as she unseeingly let him gently propel her back towards the sofa, where she slumped down like a puppet whose strings had just been cut. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m doing what I should have done about ten minutes ago,’ he told her grimly. ‘I’m leaving!’

‘But why? I don’t understand!’

‘And you don’t need to understand,’ he gritted, his mouth hardening into an ugly line as he thought of how close he had come to... to... ‘Forget it ever happened, Holly, because it meant nothing! It was an aberration, that’s all.’

‘An “aberration”?’ she challenged, then wished she hadn’t because the look he threw her in response was insulting. ‘What a horrible word!’

‘Like me to explain it to you?’ he queried, with silky condescension.

‘I think I can just about work it out for myself, thank you!’

With the grace of a natural predator, he rose to his feet and came to stand over her, and Holly found that the trembling simply would not leave her. From her position on the sofa, Holly thought that his towering height made him look impossibly intimidating.

And distant.

Their eyes met, and in hers remained a query he could not ignore.

‘That wasn’t in my general scheme of things,’ he told her brutally, in answer to the unasked question.

‘You mean that kiss?’ she demanded, her voice incredulous. Why was he making her feel like some nightclub stripper over a simple kiss? ‘Is that all?’

‘All? Kisses like that generally lead on to something else, but I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that.’ His eyes were wintry. ‘But maybe that’s why you invited me up here? To “christen” the new flat in the way you like best?’

‘You flatter yourself,’ she observed furiously.

He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’ A muscle began to work in his cheek as she frantically pulled at the hemline of her dress. ‘Or are you denying that we’ve had the hots for each other since the moment we first met?’

So she hadn’t been imagining it! ‘No, I’m not denying it!’ she told him, as she sat up straight and looked at him, her voice softening as she said, ‘It isn’t a crime1’

‘No, it’s just sex,’ he told her. ‘And that’s all it is, Holly’

‘Sex?’ she demanded. ‘Sex? What an insulting thing to say!’

He made an impatient movement with his hands. ‘Call it chemistry, then—or mutual attraction. Whatever words you want to use if the truth offends you.’ His voice dropped to a throaty whisper. ‘And it’s powerful, this feeling—I don’t deny that. Potent as hell itself—but nebulous. Insubstantial. It peaks and then it wanes and leaves all kinds of havoc and destruction in its wake.’

Anger laced her voice with sarcasm ‘Aren’t you overstating your case a little?’

He shook his tawny head. ‘Am I? I don’t think so, Holly. All I know is that I’ve had a fortnight of torture, of watching you move with that unconscious grace you have. Of imagining you undressing in the room down the hall from me. I’ve had to contend with the sight of you drifting around in one of my robes, knowing that you’re buck-naked underneath, and I’ve had to stay sane and control my baser impulses. And it’s been hard.’

Or, rather, I’ve been hard, he thought ruefully. Bad choice of word, Luke. ‘But now that you’re safely settled in your new home, our paths need hardly cross. And I think that’s for the best.’

Best for whom? she almost yelled, but suspected she already knew the answer to that one. There was just one question she needed to ask him. ‘Why, Luke?’ And then she plucked up courage to add, ‘When we both want to.’

But he shook his head, steeling himself against that plaintive little appeal. ‘Why spend time going over it—when the outcome will remain the same? My reasons are both simple and complex and you don’t need to know them.’

‘Well, that’s bloody insulting to me!’ she stormed.

He raised his eyebrows. It was the only time he had ever heard her swear, and the zeal with which she did it only reinforced all his prejudices. The shutters came crashing down and he clicked out of emotion and into formality. Old habits died hard...

‘Thank you for inviting me to your opening,’ he. finished politely. ‘And I wish you every good fortune in your new endeavour. Goodnight, Holly.’

Still sitting collapsed on the sofa, her long legs sprawled in front of her, made Holly feel at a definite disadvantage, but she was damned if she was going to stumble to her feet to show him out. She would be bound to fall flat on her face, or something equally humiliating.

She gave him an unfriendly smile, his kindness to her forgotten in the face of sexual frustration and the accompanying rejection and bewilderment. ‘Thanks for everything, Luke,’ she told him insincerely. ‘But you’ll forgive me if I don’t show you out.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

IT WAS just very fortunate that starting a new business meant that there were always a hundred and one things to think about, and to do—and for that Holly was extremely grateful. At least it meant that she didn’t allow her mind to get stuck on that frustrating loop which wanted to know just why Luke Goodwin had:

a. Kissed her (and more)

b. Then acted as though she had some kind of infectious disease; and

c. Had disappeared conclusively from her life in the days following the opening of her shop.

She supposed that she could have picked up the telephone, or even gone round to his house, to ask the great man in person—but she had her pride. Luke wasn’t a man she could imagine being railroaded into anything, and she certainly wasn’t going to march round to beg him to make love to her!

So she forced herself to be sensible, filed all these unanswered questions away under ‘Waste of Time’, and resolutely refused to dwell on them further. Even though she missed him. Missed him like mad.

She had a few long, sleepless nights asking herself what had gone wrong, and why. Then she came to the conclusion that, since she wasn’t going to get any answers, then there wasn’t much point asking the questions. It was a useful safety mechanism.

Then she happened to bump into Luke’s cleaning lady, Margaret, in the general store.

Margaret smiled encouragingly at her, and Holly plucked up courage to ask, very casually, ‘How’s Luke?’

‘I wouldn’t know, dear,’ Margaret replied, with the repressed excitement of someone who knew that the person who had asked the question was hanging onto every word. ‘He’s gone away!’

Holly nearly dropped her organic wholemeal loaf on the floor. ‘Gone?’ she echoed in horror. ‘Gone where?’

‘He didn’t say, dear. Just upped and left the day after your shop opened, I think it was.’

‘And is he coming back?’ asked Holly, her heart feeling like a leaden weight in her chest.

Margaret shrugged. ‘I expect so. He hasn’t taken much—apart from his passport.’

‘His passport?’ repeated Holly, like a parrot.

‘That’s right.’

‘But you don’t know where he’s gone?’

“Fraid I don’t dear.’ A mischievous gleam entered Margaret’s rheumy eyes. ‘Shall I say you was asking?’

‘Er, no,’ said Holly quickly. She flashed her most beseeching smile. ‘I’d rather you didn’t, Margaret.’

The article about Lovelace Brides had appeared in the Winchester Echo and captured the public’s imagination. The people of Hampshire loved the story of Holly winning a wedding dress competition and opening a bridal shop—and then offering the same wedding dress as the prize in another competition!