Liz Fielding - The Bride's Baby

Even if the knees had other ideas.

‘I do have a window in my diary,’ she began, flipping open the side pocket of her bag.

If she’d hoped to impress him with her client list the strategy signally failed. Before she could locate her diary he said, ‘What’s impossible, Miss Smith, is the chance of you getting another chance to talk me into settling your outrageous account.’

Sylvie grabbed her bottom lip with her teeth before she said something she’d regret.

The man was angry. She understood that. But her account was not outrageous. On the contrary, she’d worked really hard to negotiate the best possible cancellation deals, pushing people to the limit. She hadn’t had to do that but she had felt just the smallest bit responsible for what had happened.

She would have told him so if her lip hadn’t been clamped between her teeth.

‘Your call, Miss Smith,’ he prompted, apparently convinced that he’d proved his point. ‘But if you walk away now I promise you you’re going to have to sue me all the way to the House of Lords to get your money.’

He had to be kidding.

Or, then again, maybe not.

Glacial, his voice went with the raw cheekbones, jutting nose, a mouth compressed into a straight line. It did nothing to cool her. Like a snow-capped volcano she knew that, deep beneath the surface, molten lava bubbled dangerously. That if she wasn’t careful the heat would be terminal.

Tom McFarlane was made from the same stuff that centuries ago had driven men across uncharted oceans in search of glory and fortune. He was their modern equivalent—a twenty-first-century legend who’d worked in the markets as a boy, had been trading wholesale by the time he’d been in his teens, making six-figure deals by the time he’d left school. His first million by the time he’d been twenty. The expression ‘self-made man’ could have been invented just for him.

He was the genuine article, no doubt, but, much as she admired that kind of drive and tenacity, his humble beginnings had made him a very odd choice of mate for Candy.

He might be a billionaire but he had none of the trappings of old money. None of the grace. He wasn’t a man to sit back and idle his time away playing the squire.

There was no country estate or smart London town house. Just a vast loft apartment which, according to an exasperated Candy, was on the wrong side of the river.

Apparently, when she’d pointed that out to him, he’d laughed, ridiculing those who paid a fortune for a classy address to look across the river at him.

She’d been forced to hide a smile herself when Candy had told her that. Had thought, privately, that there had to be billionaires out there who would be less abrasive, easier to handle.

But maybe not quite so much of a challenge.

The chase might have been chillingly calculated but Sylvie was pretty sure that when the quarry had been run to earth and the prize claimed, the result would have been hot as Hades.

Maybe Candy was, when it came right down to it, as human as the next woman and had fallen not for the money, but for the testosterone.

The fact that Tom McFarlane had exactly the same effect on her, Sylvie thought as, not waiting for her answer, he turned and walked across reception to the wide-open doors of his office—leaving her to follow or not, as she chose—did not make her feel one whit better.

On the contrary.

But if Candy had thought she’d got him where she wanted him, she’d been fooling herself.

She might have momentarily brought him to heel with her silicone-enhanced assets but he wasn’t the man to dance on her lead for long.

Unlike his bride, however, Sylvie wasn’t in any position to cut and run when the going got tough. This wasn’t ‘her’ money. Her account was mostly made up of invoices from dozens of small companies—single traders who’d done their job. People who were relying on her. And, sending a stern message to her brain to stay on message, she went through the motions of calling her very confused assistant and explaining that she would be late.

The call took no more than thirty seconds but, by the time she’d caught up with him, Tom McFarlane was already seated at his desk, a lick of thick, dark brown hair sliding over the lean, work-tempered fingers on which he’d propped his forehead as he concentrated on the folder in front of him.

An exact copy of the one that must have arrived in the same post as his bride’s Dear John letter. The one he’d returned with the suggestion that she forward it to the new man in his ex-bride-to-be’s life.

Except he hadn’t been that polite.

She’d understood his reaction. Felt a certain amount of sympathy for the man.

She might honestly believe that he’d had a lucky escape, but obviously he didn’t feel that way and he had every right to be hurt and angry. Being dumped just days before your wedding was humiliating, no matter who you were. Something she knew from first-hand experience.

She and Tom McFarlane had that in common, if nothing else, which was why she understood—no one better—that an expression of sympathy, an ‘I know what you’re going through’ response, would not be welcome.

If she knew anything, it was that no one could have the slightest idea what he was feeling.

Instead, she’d tucked the account and the thick wad of copy invoices into a new folder—one of the SDS Events folders rather than another of the silver, wedding-bells adorned kind she used for weddings—and had returned it with a polite note reminding him that it was his signature on the contract and that the terms were payment within twenty-eight days.

She hadn’t bothered to remind him that five of those days had already elapsed, or add, After which time I’ll place the account in the hands of my solicitor…

She’d been confident that he’d get the subtext. Just as she’d been sure that he would understand, on reflection, that coordinating a wedding—even when you were doing it for an old school friend—was, like any other commercial enterprise, just business.

She’d hoped for a cheque by return. What she’d got was a call from the man himself, demanding she present herself at his office at two o’clock the next day.

She hadn’t had a chance to tell him that her afternoon was already spoken for since, having issued his command, he’d hung up. Instead, she’d taken a deep breath and rescheduled her appointments. And been kept waiting the best part of an hour for her pains.

When she didn’t immediately sit down, Tom McFarlane glanced up and she felt a jolt—like the fizz of electricity from a faulty switch—as something dangerous sparked the silver specks buried in the granite-grey of his eyes. The same jolt that had passed between them on their first meeting. Hot slivers of lightning that heated her to the bone, bringing a flush to her cheeks, a tingle to parts of her anatomy that no other glance had reached since…no, forget since. She’d never felt that kind of response to any man. Not even Jeremy.

What on earth was the matter with her?

She’d never done anything at first sight. Certainly not love. She’d known Jeremy from her cradle. Actually, that might not have been the best example…

Whatever.

She certainly didn’t intend to change the habits of a lifetime with lust. Mixing business with pleasure was always a mistake.

But it meant that she understand exactly what Candida had been thinking. Why she hadn’t settled for some softer billionaire. Some malleable sugar daddy who would buy her the country estate and anything else she wanted…

‘I’d advise you to sit down, Miss Smith,’ he said. ‘This is going to take some time.’

Usually, she and her clients were on first name terms from the word go but they had both clung firmly to formality at that first meeting and she didn’t think this was the moment to respond with, Sylvie, please…

And since her knees, in their weakened state, had buckled in instant obedience to his command, she was too busy making sure her backside connected securely with the chair to cope with something as complicated as speech at the same time.

He watched as she wriggled to locate the safety of the centre of the chair. Continued to watch her for what seemed like endless moments.

The heat intensified and, without thinking, she slipped the buttons on her jacket.

Only when she was completely still and he was certain that he had her attention—although why it had taken him so long to realise that she couldn’t possibly imagine; he’d had her absolute attention from the moment she’d set eyes on him—did he speak.

‘Have you sacked him?’ he demanded. ‘The Honourable Quentin Turner Lyall.’

She swallowed. Truth, dare… She stopped right there and went for the truth.

‘As I’m sure you’re aware,’ she said, ‘falling in love is not grounds for dismissal. I have no doubt that the Employment Tribunal would take me to the cleaners if I tried.’

‘Love?’ he repeated, as if it were a dirty word.

‘What else?’ she asked. What else would have made Candy run for the hills when she had the prize within days of her grasp?

She had Tom McFarlane, so presumably she had the lust thing covered…

But, having dismissed her question with an impatient gesture, he said, ‘What about duty of care to your client, Miss Smith? In your letter you did make the point that I am your client.’ He regarded her stonily. ‘And I imagine Mr Lyall did go absent without leave?’

Oh, Lord! ‘Actually, he… No. He asked me for some time off…’

He sat back, apparently speechless.

‘Are you telling me you actually gave him leave to elope with a woman whose wedding you were arranging?’ he said, after what felt like the longest pause in history.

This was probably not a good time to give him the ‘dying grandmother’ excuse that she’d fallen for.

When Candy had borrowed Quentin for bag-carrying duties on one of her many shopping expeditions it had never crossed Sylvie’s mind that she’d risk her big day with the billionaire for a fling with a twenty-five-year-old events assistant. Even one who’d eventually make her a countess. He came from a long-lived family and the chances of him succeeding to his grandfather’s earldom before he was fifty—more likely sixty—were remote.

And, while she’d been absolutely furious with both of them, she did have a certain sympathy for Quentin; if a man like Tom McFarlane had succumbed to Candy’s ‘assets’, what hope was there for an innocent like him?

But, despite what she’d told Tom McFarlane, when Candy had finished with Quentin and he did eventually return, she was going to have explain that, under the circumstances, he couldn’t possibly continue working for her. Bad enough that it would feel like kicking a puppy, but Quentin was a real asset and losing him was going to hurt. He had a real gift for calming neurotic women. He was also thoroughly decent. It would never occur to him to go to a tribunal for unfair dismissal.

Maybe it was calming Candy’s pre-wedding nerves—she had gone into shopping overdrive in those last few weeks—that broad sympathetic shoulder of his, that had got him into so much trouble in the first place.

Tom McFarlane, however, having fired off this last salvo, had returned to the folder in front of him and was flicking through the invoices, stopping to glance at one occasionally, his face utterly devoid of expression.

Sylvie didn’t say a word. She just waited, holding her breath. Watching his long fingers as they turned the pages. She could no longer see his eyes. Just the edge of his jaw. The shadowy cleft of his chin. A corner of that hard mouth…