The Prospective Wife (4 page)

‘That must be a weight off your mind, Matt.’ Joe’s voice quivered ever so slightly.

Straight from the heart!
The muscles of Matt’s throat worked overtime as he fought back unexpected laughter… Watching her face fall as she realised what she’d just said struck him as one of the funniest things he’d seen in ages… But then, if his nearest and dearest were to be believed, he had a particularly warped sense of humour.

‘I have to tell you there are some serious flaws in your seduction technique, Miss Wray.’ The gibe was delivered in a manner that suggested he was generously offering her advice.

He didn’t normally get a kick out of seeing people grovel, but there were exceptions…! No man, no matter how secure he was, liked being told a beautiful woman didn’t fancy him. He speculated—in a lazy, objective kind of way—how hard it would be to make her change her mind. Rejection didn’t occur to Matt.

Kat’s cheeks grew hotter as she squirmed under his malicious scrutiny… So she’d put both feet in it. It wasn’t very charitable of him to labour the fact…and enjoy it so much!

‘If you automatically assume every woman you meet is out to seduce you, perhaps you need the services of a good psychologist, not a physio!’ Go on, Kat, you tell him; it’s not as if you
need
the job, is it?

Matt met her defiant glare with a thoughtful expression. So, no grovelling.

She braced herself, pretty sure he was going to say something blighting, and pretty sure she deserved it, but when those heavy lids lifted he just stared… Kat had never personally encountered a stare quite like this. She found she could readily visualise innocent men confessing to heinous crimes if forced to endure that expressionless intensity for too long! She was glad that the only thing she was guilty of was clumsiness!

‘It’s not personal or anything.’

His sardonic stare underlined the stupidity of her stilted announcement.

‘I mean, I’m sure you’re a very nice person…
underneath…
’ Underneath being a dyed-in-the-wool misogynist, that was.

Was this meant to soothe his bruised ego…? Nobody as far as Matt could recall had ever called him ‘nice’ before as if they meant it, let alone as if they didn’t mean it!

The dangerous glitter in his eyes made Kat feel even more flustered. She decided it might be a good time to change tack.

‘I suppose you think it’s odd that Drusilla didn’t tell you about me… Actually,’ she conceded truthfully, ‘I do too.’

‘I’m sure she had her reasons.’

Kat tried to ignore the nasty
knowing
note in his voice and racked her brains for a reasonable explanation to account for Drusilla Devlin’s strange behaviour in dropping her in it like this.

‘She was probably worried you wouldn’t want me,’ she mused half to herself.

That had a nice self-effacing note to it. A cynical smile twisted his lips as Matt’s eyes slowly travelled the length of her curvaceous figure; this wasn’t a woman who lay awake at nights worrying about rejection.

Kat continued her meandering explanation, oblivious to his cynical observations.

‘I really needed the job you see.’ It was probably way too late to remember that.

Now there was a statement that just begged a question, and if he asked it he’d have laid money on her being able to produce a first-class sob story… Ironically, he was half inclined to believe it might even be true! If this was acting, it was Oscar-class stuff.

‘Simple philanthropy rarely covers my mother’s behaviour…’

‘It’s true,’ Kat fired back, angry on Drusilla’s behalf. ‘Your mother was being
kind
to me, offering me the job…not that I’m not very well qualified.’ She frowned fiercely and divided her glare that said she was willing to defend her credentials between both men. ‘You see, she went to school with my mum and she knew I was in a bit of a fix…moneywise…’ An uncomfortable flush mounted her smooth cheeks as she hastily skipped over this subject.

‘I can’t help but feel it might have been simpler all round if she’d just given you the money, not foisted you on me.’

Kat’s eyes widened in indignation. ‘I don’t take charity!’

‘A girl with principles,’ he drawled.

‘You find that funny?’ she snapped from between clenched teeth.

‘I find it commendable,’ he replied with such patent insincerity that Kat felt like hitting him over the head with one of his crutches. She didn’t normally have such violent inclinations, but he was an
extremely
trying man.

‘I’m more than capable of working for my money…’

‘And is this…project paying very well?’

This was one nasty insinuation too many, as far as Kat was concerned. ‘Let’s just say that I’d need to be getting an awful lot more if the job description included trying to get romantic with you! I don’t mean to be rude—’

‘You do surprise me—’

‘—but you did ask,’ she finished defiantly. ‘And I don’t know why you’re acting so offended. Nobody’s suggested
you’re
stupid and avaricious enough to agree to marry someone if you were paid enough!’

‘I don’t think my mother paid you.’

He didn’t add that the prospect of being his wife would be financial inducement enough for a lot of women… Maybe not this woman…? Definitely not this woman! It had been some time since he’d met a starry-eyed idealist, which no doubt accounted for the fact it had taken him so long to recognise this one. In his opinion, idealism was a dangerously unpredictable trait.

Her brows shot up in elaborate surprise. ‘You think I’d do it for free?’ she flung back childishly.

For the first time she glimpsed a flicker of genuine humour in his electric blue eyes.

‘I think she was relying on propinquity and my natural charm to do the job,’ he responded drily. He smiled and provided her with a brief but dazzling flash of that charm. ‘You look dubious…but, you see, mothers,’ he explained gravely, ‘are notoriously blind when it comes to their off-spring.’

‘I didn’t mean to be—’

Matt waved aside her protest with a faint movement of his long tapering fingers. ‘Personal…I know. For someone who is keen on professional detachment, you cram in more insults per minute than anyone else I’ve ever met.’

‘But…’

‘Calm down, that’s not bad.’

‘It isn’t?’

‘I can’t abide boot-lickers,’ he announced blandly. ‘Let’s say for one minute that you can swear hand on heart—’ his focus shifted to the region where that organ was housed, and lingered there ‘—that you’re only here to continue the torture inflicted on me by members of your profession in the clinic.’

Kat let out a silent sigh of relief as his eyes finally lifted. She just hoped and prayed her top was thick enough to hide the tingling activity of her nipples.

‘That doesn’t alter the fact that if I decide I need a resident nurse or physio I’d prefer one of my own choosing…’

Kat was still too preoccupied by the inexplicable behaviour of her body to summon up the necessary energy to fight him on this; besides, as much as she needed this job, she wasn’t about to beg.

‘It won’t take me long to pack.’ She made a conscious effort to belatedly put a bit of dignity back into the proceedings. Actually, some things were worse than being in debt—things like being eaten up with lust for a man you didn’t even like!

‘I thought you needed the job…?’

Anyone would think he gave a damn! Kat fixed him with an angry incredulous stare. He definitely was the most perverse man she’d ever encountered.

‘She does, she does…’

Kat had almost forgotten the other man’s presence.

‘Your concern for my well-being is touching, Joe. I’m well aware that it wouldn’t suit your plans if I went for a male physio built like a barn…’ Matt taunted his lust-sick friend with idle affection.

Joe blushed and glanced uncomfortably in Kat’s direction. ‘If you weren’t ill…’

‘Don’t sulk in front of the lady, Joseph…’

‘I wasn’t sulking!’

Kat, happy to be distracted from the wantonly indiscriminate behaviour of her own body, gave a weak indulgent smile as she watched the two men good-naturedly bicker; the rapport between them obviously went deep.

An extraordinary notion occurred to her, and her jaw dropped as her eyes darted rapidly from one man to the other and back again. It couldn’t be,
could it
? As unlikely as the explanation seemed, it would explain why his mother felt Matt wasn’t going to get a wife without a lot of encouragement.

‘Heavens, I didn’t realise!’ she blurted out, without thinking. Her mind was racing. Why hadn’t that possibility occurred to her before? After all, one of the most masculine,
straight
-looking men she knew was gay.

‘Realise what?’ Matt asked

‘It’s all right,’ she explained soothingly. ‘One of my best friends is gay, and his parents found it hard to accept at first too, but they came round eventually and…’

‘Gay!’
Joe, his eyes round, looked at his hand, innocently resting on Matt’s shoulder, and with a horrified snort jerked it away.

Kat smiled in what she hoped was an open-minded nonjudgmental sort of way as she tried to analyse her somewhat ambivalent response to this discovery. There didn’t seem any harm now to acknowledge that the prospect of treating a man who she found so physically attractive—in a butterflies-in-the-belly…
tingly
sort of way—had been bothering her. She ought to be feeling much happier…much less cheated…
Cheated?
Where had that come from?

She kept her attention carefully trained on Joe. ‘You don’t owe me any explanations,’ she told him warmly.

Joe looked with smouldering resentment at his friend who, after a startled pause, had begun laughing.

‘This is your fault,’ he accused wildly. ‘I told you you should have got a haircut.’

‘I had no idea that sexual orientation had any direct connection with hair length.’

‘Stop mucking around, will you?’ Joe yelled.
‘Tell her…we’re not!’

‘It’s no good, Joe, she’s guessed!’ Matt intoned dramatically.

‘Cut it out, Matt!’ Joe begged, looking slightly sick. He felt unable to take this slur on his masculinity as lightly as his friend seemed to.

It was slowly dawning on Kat that yet again she’d jumped to the wrong conclusion.

‘Oh, God!’ she groaned. ‘I’ve got it wrong, haven’t I?’

‘Sorry, Miss Wray, but we’re both strictly hetero…’ If she got any redder there was a good chance she’d spontaneously combust, he thought, watching her discomfort with a degree of spiteful pleasure.

‘This could be a double bluff to get me where you want me…’ Matt mused thoughtfully.

Which presumably was flat on his back and helpless! The mental image that accompanied this maverick thought of her astride his prone body had enough detail to deepen the colour in her already pink cheeks significantly. She didn’t normally fantasise about having a man at her mercy!

‘But I’m inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt.’

Kat’s mouth fell ajar with shock and dismay.
‘You are?’

‘Unless, of course, you want to reveal that you actually find me and this broken body irresistible…?’ It bothered him like hell to detect the faint note of self-pity in his voice. As far as he was concerned, self-pity had no constructive value and therefore no place in his life. Self-pity was for losers.

‘Heavens!’ Kat exclaimed, so thoroughly thrown off balance by this remarkable change in his attitude that she forgot about professional reticence.

‘Dr Metcalf forgot to mention your mood swings.’

It was what he hadn’t forgotten to tell her that interested Matt, whose eyes narrowed to suspicious slits.

‘Sounds like good old Andrew was very obliging…’

With an exasperated sigh, Kat planted her hands on her softly rounded hips. A little toss of her head made the honey-gold ponytail dance in a way that charmed at least one of the men watching her performance.

‘Don’t start with that again, or I’m out of here…’ God, when will I learn to control my tongue? If he called her bluff, the schedule she’d worked out to repay the last of the debts would have to go out of the window. She crossed her fingers firmly.

‘Is that a threat or a promise?’

Kat heaved a sigh of relief. ‘Your mother had warned him that I’d probably be ringing…’

‘That’s Mum, all right. She thinks of everything.’

Kat loftily ignored this acid interjection. ‘As I was saying,’ she continued frostily, ‘Dr Metcalf merely supplied me with
medical
details.’ She didn’t mention that during the course of their telephone conversation the doctor’s grudging admiration for his patient had come across clearly.

‘It’s always handy to know that someone is likely to throw a wobbler if you mention
wheelchair,
’ she added slyly.

She let this sink in for a moment and watched from under the sweep of her lashes for Matt’s reaction. A slow grin slowly spread over his face; it filled his eyes with an unexpected and dangerously attractive warmth.

‘Do you
really
think you’re such a great catch?’ she grouched.

So it wasn’t tactful, but a girl had her breaking point! And it was something that Kat felt needed saying; this man had an entirely too great an opinion of himself! So what if he had a smile that could melt a girl’s bones?

Matt wasn’t a vain man, but he did take some things for granted and one of them was, to put it crudely—as Joe had, on more than one occasion—his
pulling power
! Without realising it, over the years he had come to expect a certain degree of appreciation from females.

It wasn’t as if he had any illusions about what attracted many women, and in Matt’s view it wasn’t the fascination of his blue eyes! He had money and power, and a particular sort of woman liked men who could provide them with those things. How else did you explain hordes of drop-dead gorgeous lovelies on the arms of men old enough to be their grandfathers?

Despite normally evincing a healthy cynicism for that sort of adulation, now, reading the scorn in Kat’s wide eyes, he decided that uncritical worship might not be so bad after all! Just how hard, he speculated, his lips settling into a brooding line of dissatisfaction, would it be to replace that superior disdain with indiscriminate drooling desire…? Now
that
might be the sort of therapy he needed!