Jessica Hart - Last-Minute Proposal

‘You are the best,’ said Cleo loyally. ‘You’re funny, generous, warm, caring and sexy, if only you’d admit it. And you’re a fabulous cook. What more does a man want?’

‘A size six with legs up to her armpits?’

Cleo clicked her tongue. ‘You are so screwed up about your weight, Tilly! Listen, you are not overweight, you’re just curvy. That’s the way women are meant to be, and that’s how most men like them if the truth be told. Why do you think their tongues hang out whenever they spot a cleavage? You’re never going to be a stick insect, true, but you shouldn’t just accept that, you should celebrate it!’

‘Maybe I would if I could just lose a stone,’ said Tilly, reaching glumly for the biscuits. ‘Anyway, don’t get your hopes up about Campbell Sanderson. He’s hung up on his ex-wife, if you ask me, and I don’t want to get involved with that again. I had enough of being a consolation prize with Olivier.’

‘Then why not think of Campbell as your consolation prize?’ Cleo suggested.

The more she thought about it, the more Tilly had begun to wonder whether Cleo might have a point. She was over due a good time, after all. She deserved a treat, and it wasn’t as if she would have any expectations. A brief affair to boost her ego and make her feel good about herself again-was that so much to ask?

Then Tilly would catch a glimpse of herself in a mirror and she would catch herself up, appalled at her presumption. What was she thinking? There was no way Campbell would be interested in her, even if she laid herself out on a plate for him.

Anyway, she was probably building him up in her mind, she reassured herself. When she saw him again, she would probably wonder what she had made all the fuss about and be very glad that she hadn’t made a fool of herself.

EXCEPT it didn’t work out like that. The moment Campbell came through the door, Tilly’s heart gave a sickening lurch into her throat, where it lodged, hammering so hard she could hardly speak.

He was exactly as she remembered him, but somehow more so. Everything about him seemed very definite, and she was aware of him in startling detail, down to the buttons on his shirt, the fine hairs on his wrist, the faint line between his brows as he watched the crew bustling around the kitchen, talking about light and angles.

Momentarily sidelined with him, Tilly cleared her throat and forced her heart back into position. ‘How have you been?’

‘Busy,’ said Campbell succinctly. ‘I’m moving to the States in three weeks, and there’s a lot to do before then.’

So he clearly wasn’t going to have time for a little seduction on the side.

Tilly told herself that it was just as well. Her confidence was so low that he would be boarding his plane before she got up the nerve to try a little light flirtation. She had never been any good at that.

Anyway, look at him, so cool, so detached, so self-contained. It was all very well for Cleo to talk about having fun, but how could she have fun with a man like Campbell? It would be like trying to have fun with a granite rock.

No, forget it, she told herself. Just do the programme. Think about Mum and what this could do for the hospice. Teach him how to make a cake and don’t for one second let him think you might even have considered the possibility of fun!

There was a pause. It didn’t seem to bother Campbell but the silence made Tilly uncomfortable. ‘Where are you staying while you’re here?’ she asked, hating how inane she sounded. The two of them had shared a tiny tent. They had laughed on top of a mountain. She had clung to him and begged him not to let her go. And now she was treating him as if he were a stranger she had met at a cocktail party.

If Campbell noticed the incongruity of it, he made no comment. ‘In a hotel,’ he said. ‘The Watley…’ He twiddled his hand to indicate that he had forgotten the rest of the name.

‘The Watley Hall.’

‘You know it?’

‘Everyone here knows the Watley Hall, even if we can’t afford to eat there. It’s the best hotel in Allerby.’

She might have known that was where he would be staying.

‘It’s not very enterprising of you,’ she commented tartly. ‘I thought you would be pitching a tent in the garden!’

Campbell glanced at her. His face was perfectly straight but there was a glimmer of a smile at the back of his eyes, and her heart tipped a little, as if she had missed a step.

‘Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m just a boring businessman nowadays, wanting a place to work.’

‘I thought you were supposed to be learning how to make a wedding cake?’

‘During the day,’ he agreed. ‘I will need to catch up with work in the evenings, so a hotel will suit me rather more than a tent. And you’ll no doubt be glad to know that I’ll be out of your hair once the baking lesson is over for the day.’

The baking lesson. Tilly didn’t miss the dismissive note in Campbell’s voice, and her eyes narrowed. He obviously thought cake-making was a trivial business, easily mastered. A token few minutes in the kitchen every day and then he would be planning to head back to his hotel room to deal with real man’s business!

They would see about that.

Campbell was looking around the kitchen. He had somehow imagined Tilly living in a muddle, but although the room certainly had a relaxed feel to it, with a couple of comfortable old armchairs at the far end, he was relieved to see that it was clean and very well-organised. From what little he had seen of it so far, the whole house had a friendly, welcoming air.

‘This is a nice house,’ he commented. ‘There must be more money in cakes than I thought.’

‘Sadly not,’ said Tilly dryly. ‘This was my stepfather’s house. My mother and I moved in here when I was seven. Mum died when I was twenty, and Jack the following year, so the mortgage was paid off. We spent quite a lot of time at the hospice over those couple of years,’ she explained with a little sigh. ‘I suppose that’s why it means so much to me.’

‘How old were your brothers then?’

‘Only twelve,’ she told him. ‘Jack made me their guardian before he died so I could keep this as a home for them. We’ll have to decide what to do with it when they reach twenty-five. If they ever settle down, Harry and Seb may want to sell so they can buy their own places, but there’s no sign of them doing anything remotely sensible yet, so until then I’m happy to stay here.’

Campbell was watching her with a slight frown in his cool eyes. ‘Don’t you get a say?’

‘It’s not my house. Seb and Harry aren’t going to throw me out in the street, so it’s not as if I’m going to be destitute or anything.’

‘Still, it seems strange not to have made any allowance for you,’ said Campbell, surprised at how concerned he felt on her behalf. ‘I know you were just a stepdaughter, but presumably Harry and Seb are your half-brothers. You’re family.’

‘Don’t blame Jack,’ said Tilly loyally. ‘At the time it was the reasonable thing to do. My real father is still alive and has much more money than Jack ever had. Of course Jack assumed that I would be well provided for.’

‘And you’re not?’

Tilly looked away. ‘I asked my father for help after Jack died. We had the house, but most of Jack’s money was tied up in trust for the boys’ education, and I didn’t know how I was going to manage with day-to-day expenses.’

‘Surely your father didn’t refuse to help you?’

‘No, not exactly,’ she said. ‘He offered me a home, college fees if I wanted them and even an allowance, but he wasn’t prepared to take on the twins. I don’t think he ever forgave my mother for being happy with Jack,’ Tilly went on thoughtfully. ‘Even though he was the one who left us, for a new wife more in keeping with his oh-so-successful image,’ she added with a touch of bitterness. ‘Mum wasn’t supposed to be happier than he was after that.’

Campbell’s brows contracted. ‘So he made you choose?’

‘That’s right. I could be his daughter or I could be the twins’ sister, but I couldn’t be both.’ She smiled wryly. ‘At least it wasn’t a difficult decision to make!’

‘Wasn’t it?’ he said. ‘Not many twenty-one-year-olds would turn their back on financial support in favour of looking after two boys.’

‘What was I supposed to do? Walk away and leave them to bring themselves up?’

‘They must have had other family who could have looked after them.’

‘There was Jack’s sister, Shirley, but she was much older than Jack, and she’d never had any children. I’m not sure if she would have been able to cope with the twins, and it would have been awful for them, too. She was very strict and used to get terribly anxious about noise and mess, two things you can guarantee a lot of with twelve-year-old boys around!

‘They’d lost so much,’ Tilly remembered sadly. ‘First Mum, and then Jack. I was all they had. I wasn’t going to abandon them.’

She was watching the television crew moving around the kitchen, but the deep blue eyes were sombre and it was clear that she was lost in memories. Campbell found his gaze resting on her face, on the dark sweep of her lashes and the curve of her cheek. She had beautiful creamy skin, the kind you wanted to touch, to see if it was as warm and soft and lush as it looked.

He had thought about her much more than he had expected over the last three weeks. The oddest things would trigger a memory and he would be back on that hillside with Tilly. Campbell had been surprised at how vividly he could picture her, how precisely he remembered the scent of her hair, the feel of her squashed against him, the curve of that generous mouth and the sound of her laughter.

Most of all, he remembered how he had felt when he was with her. Her sparkiness had made him uneasy, and he had been torn between exasperation and feeling reluctantly intrigued by the contrast between her warm, sensuous body and her tart humour.