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It’s In His Kiss
It’s In His Kiss
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It’s In His Kiss

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‘Huh?’ Why had she thought this conversation would be safer again? And why, for the love of God, was she suddenly thinking about Luke and the way his jeans fit him and whether or not he preferred to go commando?

‘You know – someone who prefers not to wear any underwear.’

‘Yes. Thank you. I do know what going commando means.’ She would not look at him. She would not. Reaching forward she put her plate carefully back on the coffee table and tried to surreptitiously add another one or two millimetres of breathing space between them as she tucked a leg under her and eased back against the back of the sofa.

‘I guess,’ she said, as casually as she could manage, ‘if a person prefers not to wear underwear, well then I guess they’re not my customer.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Luke said with a quiet intensity that had her breath coming shorter. ‘I think your designs could convince them.’

‘I know you could,’ she whipped back.

Luke grinned. ‘And that’s absolutely all you’re asking me to do by posing in those photos? You really think I could help you sell more lingerie?’

‘Of course.’

‘And my head would be cropped from all the shots?’

Sephy felt the leap of excitement and tried not to get carried away. Slowly, she turned to face him more fully. ‘What exactly are you saying, here?’

‘I’m saying okay.’

‘Okay…?’ She had to have this wrong, didn’t she? Somehow the combination of pheromones and heat caused by her proximity to him had jumbled up the connections in her brain. He wasn’t really saying…

‘Okay, I will be your model.’

Sephy’s hand came up to her mouth. Oh. My. God.

She could kiss him.

Wait – no.

She really couldn’t.

A huge weight felt as if it had been lifted off her shoulders, making her want to jump up and happy-dance all over the living room.

‘On two conditions,’ Luke said.

The carousel of joy inside of her wound down and came to an abrupt halt.

‘What are your conditions?’ she made herself ask because, suddenly, with what she had asked for within touching distance, she realised she needed to keep her business head-on.

‘First condition: you are the model in the photographs with me.’

Sephy snorted. ‘Very funny. What’s your real condition?’

‘I mean it, Sephy. You are the model I model with. They’re your designs. You shouldn’t really have a problem with that.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not a –’ she stopped because Luke was looking at her like he was about to say touché. ‘What’s your second condition?’ she asked, needing something to take her mind off what it would feel like to have Luke see her in her underwear, because telling herself it would be like posing in a bikini wasn’t in any way having a dousing-with-cold-water effect.

Luke looked her calmly in the eye and said, ‘My second condition is that you agree to pose as my fiancée when my parents show up for a visit in a couple of weeks.’

CHAPTER FOUR (#ubb881ea2-9388-550c-aac5-b8e62c800f99)

It was crazy, Sephy thought, upping the intensity level of the elliptical she was on at Heathstead’s branch of Love Leisure.

‘Stupid’, she muttered under her breath, determined to work up a sweat and work off some of her feelings.

In fact, what it was – was crazy-stupid.

And she was certifiably both of those things to be even considering agreeing to Luke Jackson’s ridiculous conditions.

Sephy’s finger stabbed at the volume button on the MP3 player attached to her arm. Heavy dance beats dropped through her ear-buds, helping her push her body harder, faster. She only wished they were loud enough to completely drown out thoughts of Luke and how much she really wanted him to model in her lingerie shoot and what she would have to do in return.

Last night, when he had named his second condition, it was as if someone had opened up the cabinet of emotions inside of her, chosen the bottle marked hysteria, taken out its stopper and upended its contents.

She had totally misunderstood and had heard ‘actual fiancée’ instead of ‘fake fiancée’.

Scary-quick, she had jumped in her head from fiancée to wife to married. To Luke Jackson. All the while hysteria had bubbled and fizzed under her skin. Had Luke somehow got wind of her financial situation and concocted a convoluted plan to provide her with financial assistance? She wouldn’t totally put it past his level of generosity.

But thankfully Luke had kept talking as she had stared at him dumbfounded. Finally his continued explanation about how helping him out with his little white lie would be fair exchange for him helping her out had filtered through.

There was no way Luke could have found out about her father’s letter. The only people who knew its contents were Jared and Nora and they would never betray her like that.

She was safe from screaming from the rooftops that she wasn’t living in a Jane Austen novel and that she was more than capable of providing for Daisy without having to resort to marriage. Getting mixed up in a kind of fixed arrangement that elevated her out of a bad situation smacked of what her father had assumed she would do when he had tied up her inheritance.

A hand brushed against her arm and Sephy let out a squeal. Turning, she saw her ex and Daisy’s father, Ryan Love, standing beside her. Reaching up she pulled out her ear-buds and turned down the music.

‘Want to tell me what this machine has ever done to you?’ Ryan asked her with a grin.

‘Sorry,’ her breath came out in a rush and she realised she’d been pressing every button on the darned thing in her quest to exhaust her overactive imagination and beat it back into submission.

Ryan reached out and re-set the pace on the machine, and Sephy started to feel like she wasn’t going to have a heart attack after all.

‘You okay?’ he asked, running his gaze over her. ‘Only Ethan will kill me if I let one of our clients get injured.’

Ethan Love was the founder and CEO of the chain of deluxe gyms that made up Love Leisure. When Ryan had gone to him for help with his gambling addiction, Ethan had wanted to ensure his brother had a place to live and a place to work when he got out of rehab, so he had bought and refurbished this building, turned it into a branch of Love Leisure, and had then trained Ryan to manage it for him.

‘Actually, it’s good you came along,’ Sephy admitted. ‘I guess I got a little carried away trying to work through my –’ she stopped. She definitely didn’t need to be telling Ryan what was going on with her.

‘Frustrations?’ Ryan quipped.

Sephy felt herself blush as she heard the sexual connotation in the word. ‘Er, yes.’ Good grief, what was the matter with her? This was testament to how shaken up she was after Luke’s proposal. Non-proposal proposal, she reminded herself. She really was going to have to do better at remembering the fake part.

The fake part, after all, was probably what was going to allow her to agree to it.

Sephy’s stomach lurched – was she going to agree to it, then?

‘So you want to tell me what has you so frustrated, over a coffee?’ Ryan invited, thankfully interrupting her tracking mentally back to the one person she’d come in here to get a break from. ‘I seem to remember that was your drink of choice.’

Sephy stepped off the machine. ‘Can’t think of a better legally addictive stimulant, can you? Oh, crap,’ she put a hand up to her mouth, feeling all kinds of stupid. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to –’

‘Use the “A” word?’ Ryan shrugged. ‘An addict is what I am – what I’ll always be.’

‘Put a “recovering” in front of it and we’re all good here,’ Sephy said, and then was immediately worried. Aside from having Daisy’s best interests at heart, she wasn’t sure she should be telling Ryan how to talk about, or deal with, his problems. ‘Okay,’ she muttered, ‘Not my place, so sorry again.’

‘Relax. No offense taken. Come on. I know a great place around the corner that’s opened up. Or did you come in here for a quick workout before needing to be somewhere else?’

As Sephy eased into a couple of light stretches to cool down she determined to ignore the fact that she could feel Ryan’s eyes making a slow sweep of her again. Straightening up she confessed, ‘Actually I came in here hoping you would be around so that I could talk to you.’

The smile that lit up his face held such a potent reminder of the charming bad-boy she used to know that Sephy caught her lip between her teeth. She was under enough stress to be feeling like one sharp shock away from a meltdown as it was, so she pushed down the fear he was flirting with her.

As his eyes came up to meet hers she returned his stare steadily. Ryan’s old modus operandi had been to hide pain under slow, sure, wicked smiles and easy flirtation, so maybe that was what he was doing now.

‘I wanted to see how you were,’ she said, hoping her serious tone would cut through the mask.

‘Me? I’m fine.’

‘You are?’ Sephy searched his face for signs, but found it hard to get past that swagger of his. ‘Look, Heathstead is a small town. I heard about the breakup with Michelle and so I wanted to check. But if you say you’re fine…’

Ryan simply shrugged and went with, ‘Her loss, isn’t it?’

‘I guess.’ She supposed these days she didn’t deserve more than the ‘nothing touches me’ casual approach from him, but it irked that she recognised the attitude as one she had once mimicked to the max. ‘It must be hard, though,’ she pushed.

Ryan looked around the gym and then brought his gaze back to hers and lowered his voice. ‘You think I’m about to head for the nearest betting shop to numb the pain?’

‘Am I being silly? Do you really have this locked down?’ she pressed.

That slow grin teased as he leaned in and whispered, ‘How about if I admit that I’m going to extra meetings at the moment?’

‘Good.’ She took a subtle step back because it had been a long time since Ryan had whispered into her ear and it felt weird. ‘Is it helping?’

‘Well it’s certainly helping me not to gamble, at any rate.’

‘Great.’ Sephy pointed to the changing rooms. She could see she wasn’t going to get anywhere checking up on him in his place of work. ‘I’ll go grab my bag and we can head out for that coffee.’

Twenty minutes later Sephy peered over the top of her latte at Ryan and realised that agreeing to have coffee with him had upped the level of complication between them. Until now she had only met with him while Michelle, who had seemed nice enough, was there, or, with Daisy.

She decided he was going to have to put up with her butting in and came right out with, ‘Have you told Ethan about what’s happened?’

There was a flash of surprise in his eyes, but she couldn’t afford to let this go. Not if there was a chance he was struggling and had no one else to lean on. If Sephy had to step up and be there for him, well, hadn’t she had already implied she would, by agreeing to Ethan’s plan to help his brother all those months ago?

‘Ethan trusts me,’ Ryan said. He took a sip of his cappuccino, set it down on the hammered aluminium surface of the café table and added sombrely, ‘I understand why you might not.’

‘I’ll admit that this isn’t entirely comfortable territory for me.’

‘Trust me, it’s no picnic for me either. You think I want my ex stopping by to check I’m getting over a breakup simply because she doesn’t know me well enough to know whether or not I’ll relapse?’

‘Do you know yourself well enough to know whether or not you’ll relapse?’ she shot back.

Ryan laughed and the laughter seemed to relax something in him. ‘You know, I really never imagined you acting as my conscience. Although I admit you’re much prettier than the one I have.’

Again with the flirting and again she hoped it was simply a defence mechanism.

‘How about instead of seeing me as your conscience,’ she asked carefully, ‘you see me as a friend who has a vested interest in making sure you’re okay?’

‘How about you let me take you to dinner tonight and we discuss further how okay I am?’ Ryan replied, without missing a beat.

Sephy’s latte went down the wrong way. She hadn’t got this wrong. He was totally flirting with her. As she grabbed the napkin he held out to her, she blinked back her watering eyes, took in his giant grin and dragged in a steadying breath.

‘Ryan, I didn’t come here for a date. I came to check you were okay. For Daisy.’

At the mention of their daughter his face turned serious. ‘I’m not going to mess that up.’

‘Okay. Well, that’s good, then.’

‘So it’s a “no” to dinner?’

‘You’ve only just stopped seeing Michelle.’

‘Usually a woman thinks it’s a bonus when the man she accepts a dinner invitation from is single.’

‘I am not going to go out to dinner with you.’

She tried not to worry that she was making things harder for him, not easier. Luke had told her Ryan wasn’t her responsibility, but if she wanted him to have a good relationship with Daisy, he kind of was.

Sephy glanced to his hands holding his cup and making it look small. They were nice hands. They were hands that had travelled over every inch of her body, she remembered, taking a quick sip of coffee.

But they weren’t Luke’s hands, is that what it came down to?

Surreptitiously she swept her gaze over Ryan. The man managed a gym. He worked out. What was the matter with her that when she looked objectively at his body she didn’t see it in those banners sexing up her lingerie line?

‘You know, I thought it would be hard to see you like this,’ Ryan said, breaking into her inventory of his model looks.

‘This?’ she asked, hoping he wasn’t about to call her on her looking him over and use it to up the flirting.

‘You’re so different from how you were when we were –’

Oh. She couldn’t help the smile. ‘You mean when we were the ultimate cliché?’

He laughed. ‘I guess we were. The poor little rich kids running around town partying.’

‘It would be easier to look back on and not cringe if we had been much younger than we were.’ Sephy cleared her throat and raised her gaze to his. ‘We stayed with each other longer than we should have, Ryan. We fell into a lifestyle and had no one to pull us out of it.’

‘I guess having Daisy finally pulled you out of it,’ he said, nodding as he stared down at his coffee.

‘Having her made me grow up, yes.’

‘I wish I could tell you that if I’d stuck around I’d have grown up too.’