www.millsandboon.co.uk

      Table of Contents

       Cover

       Concept Page

       About the Author

       Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

       Chapter Four

       Chapter Five

       Chapter Six

       Chapter Seven

       Chapter Eight

       Chapter Nine

       Chapter Ten

       Copyright

       End Page

CHAPTER ONE

      ‘AND HE’S ACTUALLY had the gall to invite you to his engagement party?’

      ‘Yes,’ Holly agreed glumly, her normally gamine features doleful. ‘And I can’t get out of it because he already knows I’ve got the weekend off. When he asked me to keep it free, I thought it was because he was going to propose to me, and all the time… Besides, I can’t not go. All our old crowd will be there, and if I don’t…’

      ‘Yes, I know what you mean,’ her employer agreed thoughtfully. ‘What you could do with is a new man to show off in front of him.’

      ‘To make him jealous, you mean?’ Holly exclaimed, immediately brightening. ‘You’re right.’ And then her face fell again. ‘But where on earth would I find one? Eligible, available men aren’t exactly beating a path to my flat door at the moment.’

      ‘No… not to make him jealous,’ Jan Holme said with exasperation. ‘He’s getting engaged to someone else, Holly. No, what I meant was that if you had someone else to go with you to the engagement party, it would boost your ego and make you feel better.’

      ‘Nothing could make me feel better,’ Holly announced mournfully, clinging on to her mood of self-pity. ‘I love him, Jan.’

      Privately, Janet Holme doubted it. And, as she looked down at her youngest and favourite employee, she suspected that, as yet, for all her pretence to sophistication, Holly had hardly any idea what love was.

      Certainly she had imagined herself in love with the charming and very shallow young man she was presently mourning, but at twenty-two Holly Witchell was still touchingly naïve in many ways, and what she had been in love with had been the idea of love.

      When she had first come to London a year ago she had had a vulnerable quality about her that had made Jan take her firmly under her wing, and she still hadn’t quite lost it.

      ‘I take it this engagement party’s not being held in London?’

      ‘No… at home,’ Holly told her briefly. ‘Rosamund, the girl he’s getting engaged to, wants to have it at her parents’ house.’ She made a face. ‘They’re the richest people in the village and very much aware of it. Pots of money… You know the kind of thing.’

      ‘Indeed I do,’ Jan agreed wryly. As a well-known London interior designer, she had a good cross-section of clients, but her least favourite was the type of couple just described by Holly.

      ‘All our old crowd will be there. Rosamund and I were in the same class. I didn’t like her then,’ she added inconsequentially, and then said woefully, ‘What I can’t understand is why he didn’t say something before. He must have known that I was expecting him to propose to me.’

      ‘Men can be cowards about things like that,’ Jan told her gently, repressing a faint sigh. For a very attractive and intelligent young woman, Holly seemed to have a blind spot where the facts concerning the average male of the species was concerned. Jan had already elicited during the twelve months that Holly had worked for her that her newest protégé had very little experience