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‘Damn, damn, damn,’ she muttered under her breath. She had forgotten that earlier today she had dragged some tea chests down from the attic and left them in the centre of the hall.
‘Paige, are you OK?’
Brad’s voice from outside the front door was very unwelcome.
‘Yes. Go away,’ she called out, wanting to be left alone.
He ignored her completely and she heard the door open. The next moment the overhead light flicked on.
He came quickly across to her, an expression of concern on the handsome features. ‘What the heck have you done?’
‘I was playing football and a tea chest fell on me,’ she muttered sarcastically.
‘You always were a bit of a tomboy,’ he grinned as he bent down and pushed up her jeans to have a look at her foot.
She winced with pain as his fingers touched her flesh. ‘You’ll live... You’ve just bruised yourself.’ He straightened and for a moment she thought he was just going to leave. Instead, he walked away in the direction of the kitchen. ‘I’ll get you some ice to put on it.’
‘There’s no need. I’ll manage on my own.’ She stood up and found her foot still throbbed too much to put her full weight on it, so she leaned against the chest.
He came back with a tea towel filled with ice cubes and knelt down beside her to put it against her foot.
For some reason his gentleness filled her with a feeling of acute sadness. She looked down at the darkness of his hair and for a moment was overcome by an irrational desire to touch him, to reach out a hand and stroke it through the soft thickness of that hair.
‘Feel any better?’ He looked up at her and she nodded.
‘Thank you.’ Her voice was husky.
He straightened and looked at her.
Paige could feel her anger against him evaporating in a wave of stronger emotion, a feeling that this was the man she had always loved...always looked up to. Sorrow filled her blue eyes, darkening them to the shade of deepest violet. If only her father hadn’t turned to Brad for financial help, she thought miserably. She didn’t want to think badly of Brad; she wanted to push all those thoughts away and turn to him as she had always felt able to turn to him in the past, trust him as she had always trusted him.
His eyes lingered gently on her face. ‘I hate to see you so sad, Paige; it tears me apart.’
She swallowed hard. She wouldn’t cry, she told herself staunchly. ‘You... you should have thought of that when my father asked you to extend your time limit.’ Her words held none of the accusing tones of before; now her voice was just filled with regret. ‘All we needed was a couple more months—’
He shook his head. His eyes moved around the hallway, taking in the large tea chests cluttering the area. ‘I never wanted it to come to this,’ he muttered grimly. ‘I certainly had no idea that you were already starting to pack things up. I had thought it would be a while yet before you came to that.’ He raked a distracted hand through his hair. ‘It will be a mammoth task packing everything from this house.’
She nodded. ‘Three generations of my family have lived here. It will take me some time to sort everything out.’
‘What will you do? Put it in storage?’
She shrugged. ‘The real-estate people have advised me to sell everything. But there are a number of things that are of great sentimental value so I’ll sort through and take what I can.’ She tried to sound practical, tried not to let him know that this was breaking her heart.
‘You love this place so much, don’t you?’ he asked softly.
She took a deep breath. ‘It’s my home...’
His eyes met hers. ‘No matter what you might think, this isn’t what I wanted,’ he said softly. ‘Just for the record, it was my mother who first lent your father the money he needed, not me,’ he said calmly. ‘And she did it out of a desire to help. She was very fond of you, Paige.’
The words stilled her. ‘I was fond of her, too.’ For a moment tears shimmered in the bright blue of her eyes. ‘And it was very kind of her,’ she admitted huskily.
‘Don’t cry, Paige.’
‘I’m not crying,’ she denied angrily, brushing away a tear as it dared to trickle over the smooth pallor of her skin.
He moved closer and folded her into the warmth of his arms. For a moment she leaned against him, breathing in the comfort of being held. Then she looked up at him and subtly the feelings of grief changed to an awareness of him and the way he was holding her.
He breathed her name in a whisper-soft way that made her skin prickle with consciousness. She wanted him to kiss her; the desire that flared inside her was so strong it was overwhelming.
Then his head lowered and she felt his lips against the cool salt of her tears, caressing warmth back to her body, stirring feelings of desire and need alive with vivid intensity.
For years she had secretly dreamed that one day he would kiss her. She had imagined that it would be passionate, but she hadn’t been prepared for the storm of desire it unleashed.
When he moved back from her she was breathless. She stared wordlessly up into the darkness of his eyes.
Then reality crashed around her. She thought about her father, thought about the broken words he had murmured to her, the words of hate against Brad Monroe. ‘Cold, hard, ruthless’, he had called him. The words drummed through her mind like a reproach and she felt heavy with guilt, her passion for Brad somehow seeming a vast disloyalty to her father’s memory.
She pushed him away from her. ‘I don’t know why that happened, but it was a big mistake.’
One dark eyebrow lifted. ‘I thought it was quite enjoyable myself,’ he murmured flippantly.
‘I don’t suppose your girlfriend would be quite so amused,’ Paige said tersely.
‘I don’t have a girlfriend,’ Brad retorted. ‘So it’s nobody’s business but my own.’
Paige frowned. She knew for a fact that Brad was dating Carolyn Murphy. He had been seeing her for the last six months and most people were expecting the sound of wedding bells. ‘So what about Carolyn?’ she enquired.
‘Carolyn and I have split up.’
‘But I thought... Everyone thought that you two were, well, going to get married.’
His eyebrows rose even further at that. ‘Everyone takes a lot for granted around here,’ he muttered dryly. ‘But no, it’s all over between Carolyn and me.’
‘Oh!’ She stared at him, really startled by this news. ‘Are you upset?’
Brad’s lips twisted. ‘Why, do you want to comfort me?’ he drawled sardonically. ‘A few more kisses like that one and I might start to feel a heck of a lot better.’
‘Don’t be absurd.’ Her heart missed several beats. It didn’t matter whom he was involved with, how free he might be, she told herself fiercely. She wasn’t interested. And yet a small part of her was remembering that kiss...remembering how good it had felt to be in his arms.
She turned away from him. ‘I think you should go now.’
‘If that’s what you want.’ Silence fell between them. ‘I hope you’ll believe me, Paige, when I tell you that I never intended to ruin your father.’
She didn’t say anything to that...didn’t know what to think any more. She was bewildered and scared and had never felt more alone in her life.
‘If it will help, I want you to know that I can wait for the money you owe me. It doesn’t matter when you pay it back.’
She spun around at that. ‘I can’t believe you!’ she said with a stunned shake of her head. ‘Just a few months ago I begged you to extend our time limit. You refused point-blank. Now my father is dead and you have the audacity to calmly tell me it doesn’t matter when I pay you back.’
‘I want to help you.’
‘Well, it’s too late.’ Her voice was anguished now. ‘And you know damned well it is.’
‘I can’t stand by and watch you go to the wall,’ he muttered.
‘At the risk of repeating myself, you were willing to stand by and do just that a few months ago.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Either you’ve got a massively guilty conscience or you’re a damn good actor.’
‘I don’t have a guilty conscience,’ he told her swiftly. ‘I had my reasons for refusing your father. They were good reasons.’
‘So good that I can’t understand them,’ she snapped. ‘Well, I’m not so unintelligent that I don’t see behind this charade of an offer now.’ She put one hand on her hip. ‘You are bothered about what people will think if I blab about the details of my father’s financial problems. A man who is running for mayor wouldn’t want this kind of blot on his copybook. So you come over here with the grand, charitable gesture of letting me off the hook a while longer.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t need or want your charity, Brad.’
‘I’m not offering you charity,’ he rasped dryly. ‘I’m extending the hand of a concerned neighbour—’
‘Oh, please!’ She cut across him with laughing disdain. ‘As you are well aware, Brad, it’s too little, too late. That’s the problem when you’re heading towards bankruptcy, you see...’ Her voice shook with derision. ‘It’s like a domino effect. You get behind with one debt then others pile up... Then someone demands their money immediately and one by one things start to collapse.’ She glared at him. ‘I’m the last domino standing in place and all I can do is sell up fast before I fall flat on my face. You offering, oh, so benevolently, to prop me up for a little while longer won’t make a scrap of difference now. I needed your support several months ago... It’s no damn good to me at all now.’
‘Things are that bad, then?’ he asked quietly.
She slanted him a dry look. ‘You were the one telling me how bad things were as we walked in from the vineyard.’
‘I didn’t realise that things had moved quite so quickly.’ He shook his head. ‘Have you spoken with the bank?’
She nodded and bent to lift the icepack from her foot. It had stopped throbbing now, maybe overshadowed by the greater pain inside. ‘They strongly urge me to go ahead with the auction...and not to waste a moment.’
‘Can’t you just sell off pieces of the property, without losing your house?’ he asked. ‘I’d be interested in acquiring some of your land.’
‘I’m sure you would.’ She flashed him a knowing look. ‘I knew that’s what you were angling for—’
‘That’s not what I want,’ he cut in tersely.
‘So which piece of land are you thinking of?’ she carried on swiftly, as if he hadn’t spoken.
He shrugged. ‘How about the slice that runs along the far back of my property?’
‘You mean the piece that contains the only water I have?’ Her voice trembled with fury. ‘This place won’t fetch very much on the open market, not in this rundown state, but without that water it will be virtually worthless.’
‘You can modernise. Install a new irrigation system in—’
‘Do you have any idea how much money you are talking about?’ she demanded fiercely.
‘Of course,’ he replied coolly.
‘Then you’ll know that even if I did sell you that land there wouldn’t be enough left over from paying back my debt to you and the others to install a bore hole, never mind anything else.’ She raked a hand through her hair. ‘No, I’ll have to sell the whole place... There’s no alternative.’
She swung away from him and walked over towards the kitchen to put the rapidly melting ice in the sink. For a moment her eyes moved over the rustic charm of the place. The dresser, the pine scrubbed table and the dried flowers on the farmhouse rack... Her home. Her heart twisted painfully.
‘So where will you go?’
Brad’s voice in the doorway behind her made her turn and look at him.
She shrugged. Tve got friends that I made when I was away at college. I’ve had letters of condolence and an offer that I can share a friend’s flat while I look around for a job.’
‘A male friend?’ Brad asked, a caustic note in his voice.
She frowned. The offer had been from a girlfriend, but she wasn’t about to enlighten him. ‘That’s none of your damned business,’ she grated with annoyance. ‘The fact remains that I have very little option but to move away from this area altogether. I need to get myself a job, start again.’
‘There are always other options.’
‘Such as?’
‘We could become partners,’ he said quietly.
She was so surprised she could hardly say anything for a moment ‘You mean you would write off my loan and straighten out all my other debts if I made you a sleeping partner in the vineyard?’
‘In a roundabout way... yes.’
She was incredulous now. ‘You do want the vineyard, then?’
He shrugged. ‘I’m more in need of the partner than I am of the vineyard.’
When she continued to stare at him, perplexed, he smiled. ‘I need a wife.’
‘A wife?’ She looked at him blankly. ‘I’m sorry, Brad, I don’t understand.’
‘I’m asking you to marry me,’ he said quietly.
She stared at him. This had to be some kind of a joke! Her lips curved and she found herself laughing. She couldn’t help herself. It was the nerve-tingling absurdity of the suggestion. ‘You can’t possibly be serious!’
‘I’m not talking about a lifelong commitment. I’m talking about twelve months.’
‘It sounds like a jail sentence.’ Paige was rewarded by a momentary expression of anger on his face. It gave her a certain amount of pleasure to strike through that cool, smug exterior of his. What on earth was he playing at? she wondered grimly. She had no illusions about his feelings for her... They might have been friends in the past, but he had never given her any indication that he wanted that friendship to deepen, no matter how much she had secretly yearned for it.
‘You want me for twelve months... What do I get?’ she asked derisively. ‘A purple heart for living with the enemy?’
‘You get this place. I’ll build it up for you, stick it back together and write off your loans.’ His voice was tight.
‘That’s a pretty expensive package.’ Her heart thundered against her breast. ‘And you’d be willing to do that to have me as your wife for twelve months?’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t understand this at all. Why a year? What’s in it for you?’
His lips curved in a mirthless smile. ‘I want a dutiful wife... Someone who will look up at me adoringly.’
Suddenly it clicked with her. ‘This is all because you are running for mayor here, isn’t it? You want the right image? The loving husband, a family man—’
‘Hold on there.’ He cut across her swiftly. ‘I’m not looking to start a family with you... Children are not part of the equation.’
Heat licked through her at the insulting undertone of that statement, but before she could coherently formulate a cutting reply he continued, ‘But yes, it has been suggested that I will find it easier to get elected if I’m married.’
‘And when we part... How would that look to your precious image?’
He laughed. ‘I’ll tell everyone you married me for my money... It won’t be so far from the truth, will it? I’ll probably be voted in again out of sympathy.’
