A Winter Proposal / His Diamond Bride. Lucy Gordon
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was unusual. Interesting.
Annoying.
The floor was getting crowded. Dancers jostled each other until suddenly one of them stumbled, crashing into Pippa, driving her forward against Roscoe, cancelling the distance he’d kept so determinedly between them. Taken by surprise, she had no time to erect barriers that might have saved her from the sudden intense awareness of his body—lithe, hard, powerful.
It was too late now. Something had made her doubly aware of her own body, singing with new life as it pressed up to his, and the sensation seemed to invade her totally—endless, unforgettable. Shocking.
She tried to summon up the strength to break the embrace, but he did it for her, pushing her away with a resolution that only just avoided being discourteous.
‘We’d better return to the table,’ he said.
Then he was walking off without a backward look, giving her no choice but to follow. Which was discourteous. She might have been irritated if she hadn’t had an inkling of what was troubling him. She too needed time to think about what had just happened; time to deny it.
Charlie had reached the point of talking nonsense and Teresa looked relieved to see them.
‘How did you get here?’ Roscoe said, placing a hand on his brother’s shoulder with a gentleness that contradicted the roughness in his voice.
‘I hired Harry and his car. He’s waiting for us.’
‘Good. He can take you home while I take Pippa.’
‘Hey, Pippa’s with me—’
‘And the less she sees of you in this state the better. Waiter!’
In a few minutes he’d settled everything—Charlie’s bill as well as his own. They escorted Charlie out to the side road where the chauffeur was waiting. Teresa helped to settle him in the back seat, which gave Pippa the chance to mutter to Roscoe, ‘I’ll take a taxi home.’
‘You will not.’
‘But I don’t want to be a gooseberry,’ she said frantically. ‘You and she…I mean…’
‘I know exactly what you mean and kindly allow me to make my own decisions.’
‘Like you make everyone else’s?’ she snapped.
‘I won’t pretend not to understand that, but you can’t have known my brother a whole two days without realising that he’s vulnerable. I don’t want people to see him like this. Do you?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Just let me say goodnight to him.’
But Charlie was dead to the world and she stood back while Harry drove off with him. Watching Roscoe get into the driving seat of his car, she realised that she’d seen him drink only tonic water, and after several hours in a nightclub he was stone cold sober and completely in control.
Which was typical of him, she thought crossly.
Teresa didn’t seem annoyed at having Pippa foisted on her when she would no doubt have preferred to be alone with Roscoe. As they sat together in the back she chatted merrily, mostly about Charlie, whose company she had enjoyed, especially as he had entertained her by running through some routines by another more talented comedian he’d recently seen perform.
‘He’s really good,’ she recalled.
‘You shouldn’t encourage him,’ Roscoe said over his shoulder. ‘He’s a sight too fond of playing whatever part he thinks people want.’
‘Which will surely be useful in a stockbroker,’ Pippa observed. ‘He must need various personalities, depending on whether he’s buying shares or selling them, manipulating the market, or manipulating people. With any luck, he’ll be almost as good at that as you.’
Teresa rocked with laughter. The back of Roscoe’s head was stiff and unrevealing.
Outside her apartment block, he got out and held open the door for her, a chivalrous gesture that also gave him the chance to fix her with a cool, appraising stare. She returned it in full measure.
‘I hope your evening was enjoyable, Miss Jenson.’
‘I hope yours was informative, Mr Havering.’
‘More than I could have imagined, thank you.’
‘Then all is well. Goodnight.’
Once in her apartment with the door safely shut behind her, Pippa tossed her bag aside, threw herself into a chair and kicked off her shoes, breathing out hard and long.
‘Phew! What an evening! Get him! More informative than he could have imagined. I’ll bet it was! Hello, Gran! Don’t mind me. I’m good ‘n mad.’
She was addressing the photograph that she kept on the sideboard, showing the wedding of Grandmother Dee and Grandfather Mark. Dee had once confided to her that there had been complications about that wedding.
‘I was pregnant,’ she’d said, ‘and that was scandalous in nineteen forty-three. You had to get married to stay respectable, and I wondered if he was only marrying me because he had to.’
‘And was he?’ Pippa had wanted to know.
Dee had smiled mysteriously. ‘Let’s say he had his own reasons, but it was a while before I discovered what they were. On our wedding day I still couldn’t quite believe in his love.’
Yet the young Dee in the picture was beaming happily, and in Pippa’s present mood it all looked delightfully uncomplicated.
‘Fancy having to be married before you could make love,’ she mused.
In her mind she saw Roscoe dancing with Teresa, holding her in an embrace that spoke of passion deferred, but not for long. Right this minute they were on their way to her home, or perhaps to his, where he would sweep her into the bedroom and remove her clothes without wasting a moment.
She knew the kind of lover he would be: no-nonsense, not lingering over preliminaries, but proceeding straight to the purpose, as he did with everything. As well as pleasuring his woman efficiently, he would instruct her as to his own needs, with everything done to the highest standards. Afterwards, Teresa would know she’d received attention from an expert.
For a while Pippa’s annoyance enabled her to indulge these cynical thoughts, but another memory insisted on intruding—his care for his mother, his patience, his kindness to her. All these spoke of a different man, with a gentle heart that he showed rarely. Was that gentleness also present in the lover?
‘And why am I bothering? ‘ she asked aloud. ‘Honestly, Gran, I think you had it better in your day.’
Dee’s smiling face as she nestled against her new husband seemed to say that she was right.
Pippa sighed and went to bed.
The night that followed was the strangest she’d ever known. Worn out, she had expected to sleep like a log, but the world was fractured. Two men wandered through her dreams—one gentle, protective and kind, the other a harsh authoritarian who gave his orders and assumed instant obedience. Both men were Roscoe Havering.
In this other world he danced with her, holding her close, not briefly but possessively, as though claiming her for ever. Unable to resist, she yielded, resting against him with a joy that felt like coming home. But then she awoke to find her flesh singing but herself alone.
In a fury, she threw something across the room. It was time to face facts. Roscoe had appeared at The Diamond the night before in order to study her and see if she was doing her job as a hired fancy woman. Whatever gloss he tried to put on it, that was the truth. Curse him!
Unable to lie still, she rose and began to pace the room, muttering desperately. ‘All right, so I felt something. Not here—’ she laid a hand quickly over her heart ‘—no, not there, but—’ she looked down at her marvellous body ‘—just