Under the Boss's Mistletoe (10 page)

‘D
ON’T
say anything!’ Unbuttoning her coat, Cassie collapsed onto one of the sofas in Jake’s office. ‘I was so determined I was going to be on time for once, but it’s really not my fault this time,’ she told him. ‘I’ve been stuck on the tube for
forty
minutes!’ She groaned at the memory. ‘Some problem with the signals, they said. I thought I was never going to get here.’

Jake didn’t sit down. He needed a few moments to readjust. Had he actually been worrying about her? He had certainly started looking at his watch a good half-hour before she was even due to arrive, and as the minutes ticked past six o’clock he had looked more and more frequently.

And now she was here, lying on the sofa in a pose of exaggerated exhaustion, looking extraordinarily vivid. Her coat had fallen open to reveal a party dress. Jake had an impression of a vibrant blue colour, and some kind of satiny material, but all he really noticed was that it was rucked up over Cassie’s knees, and in spite of himself his eyes travelled over the legs sprawled over the leather. His mouth dried. Had Cassie always had those spectacular legs? Surely he would have noticed if she had?

Clearing his throat, Jake made himself look away. ‘If you’re too tired, we can always give the party a miss.’

‘Absolutely not.’ Cassie sat up. ‘How can we convince everyone we’re engaged if we don’t turn up? I’m fine,’ she said, pushing back her hair.

Getting to her feet, she crossed to the window, and looked down at the street below. The traffic was nose to tail, the pavements choked with umbrellas, everyone anxious to get home or heading for the nearest pub. Thousands of people, all with somewhere to go and something to do, even in the rain. She loved London like this, busy, purposeful and pulsating with energy.

Jake was reaching for his coat when he stopped. ‘Oh, I nearly forgot…’ He patted his jacket and pulled a small jewellery-box from the inside pocket. ‘You’d better have this.’

Cassie turned from window. ‘What is it?’

‘Open it.’

Jake handed the box to Cassie, who opened it almost fearfully and found herself staring down at a ring set with three large square-cut rubies separated by two dazzling diamonds.

‘Oh…’ she said on a long breath.

Watching her face, Jake found himself rushing into speech. ‘I remembered how all the other brides at the wedding fair had a ring,’ he said. ‘I thought you needed one for tonight. It would be odd if we’d got as far as announcing our engagement and you didn’t have one. Do you like it?’ he finished abruptly.

Cassie raised her eyes from the ring to look directly into his, and Jake felt as if a great fist was squeezing his heart. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said.

‘Perhaps I should have gone down on one knee.’ He tried to joke in a weak attempt to disguise his relief. He didn’t want to admit even to himself how long he had spent choosing the damn thing, or how determined he had been to find exactly the right ring for her.

The brown eyes flickered and dropped again to the ring. ‘There’s no need for that,’ she said. ‘It’s just a prop.’

A prop he had spent a whole afternoon agonising over. ‘Yes,’ said Jake.

Cassie pulled the ring out of the velvet and slipped it onto her finger. She couldn’t help imagining what it would have
been like if this was a real engagement ring, if Jake had bought it for her because he loved her.

She swallowed the tightness from her throat. ‘It’s really lovely,’ she told him. ‘It must have been terribly expensive. Will you be able to take it back when this is all over?’ she said, just to reassure him that she hadn’t forgotten that they were just pretending.

Jake was shrugging himself into his coat. ‘I expect so,’ he said.

‘I’ll take great care of it,’ Cassie promised, overwhelmed by the feel of the ring on her finger.

She had never worn anything remotely as beautiful or as valuable, and the thought that Jake had chosen it for her made the breath snare again in her throat. He could have picked out a plain diamond, which would have done the job just as well, but instead he had bought
this.

‘It’s gorgeous,’ she said, turning her hand so that the gems flashed in the light. ‘Look what a beautiful warm glow it has.’

Jake didn’t need to look. The glowing warmth was the reason he had bought the ring. It had reminded him of her.

‘Does it fit?’ he asked.

‘It’s a tiny bit loose, maybe,’ said Cassie, turning the ring on her finger. ‘But it’ll be fine just for a couple of evenings. How on earth did you know what size to get?’

‘One of the assistants in the shop had hands about the same size as yours.’

Cassie didn’t think Jake had ever noticed her hands. The thought that he had felt like a tiny shiver deep inside her.

‘Well…thank you,’ she said.

An awkward silence fell. If it had been anyone else, Cassie wouldn’t have hesitated to kiss him. Just on the cheek, of course; it was the obvious way to thank him for choosing such a lovely ring for her to wear, even if only temporarily.

But Jake had stepped back after giving her the box, and now he wasn’t close enough for her to give him a quick hug or brush her cheek against his. She would have had to walk
across to him, and that would have made too much of a big deal of it, wouldn’t it? It wasn’t as if he had given her the ring because he loved her. He had agreed that it was just a prop.

Jake put an end to her dithering by looking at his watch. ‘We’d better go,’ he said. ‘We’re late.’

Outside, it was still raining. The tyres of the passing cars hissed on the wet tarmac, and the pavements gleamed with puddles. Cassie huddled into her coat. It was only the middle of September, but the temperature had dropped over the last few days, and there was an unmistakable smell of autumn in the air.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

‘The Strand,’ said Jake, and her face fell.

‘That’s miles!’

‘It’s too far for you to walk in those shoes, certainly,’ he said, nodding down at them.

‘What shall we do? We’ll never get a taxi in this weather.’

The words were barely out of Cassie’s mouth when Jake put two fingers in his mouth and produced a piercing whistle that had a taxi heading in the opposite direction, turning instantly and ignoring the blare of horns to cut right across the traffic and pull up in front of them.

‘Well, that was annoying,’ said Cassie as Jake opened the door with a mocking bow. ‘But a relief too,’ she decided, sinking back into the seat and fastening her seatbelt.

‘The Savoy,’ Jake told the taxi driver, and sat back beside her. ‘Why don’t you wear something more sensible on your feet?’ he said, half-relieved to find something to irritate him again. He scowled at her shoes. ‘Look at them—they’re ridiculous!’

‘They’re not ridiculous!’ Stung, Cassie stuck her legs straight out in front of her so she could admire her shoes. Perhaps the heels weren’t
that
practical, but she loved the sling backs, and the cute, peep-toe effect, and the hot pink was a fabulous colour. ‘They’re party shoes. I couldn’t wear sensible shoes with a party dress, now, could I? That really
would
be ridiculous!’

Jake wished she’d put her legs down. They were distracting him.
She
was distracting him.

He had to keep reminding himself that this was Cassie. He’d known her as an eager child, as an ungainly adolescent. She had never been cool, clever or graceful, or any of the things he admired in a girl. She was an unstable force, chaotic and uncontrollable.

And now that force was bouncing uncontrollably around in his carefully constructed life.

Jake didn’t like it one little bit. He had spent ten years fighting his way to the top, ten years making sure he never had to go back to Portrevick. He had changed himself quite deliberately. He had had enough of being the child wearing cast-offs, the troublemaker, the one who made eyebrows twitch suspiciously whenever he walked along the street. He had made himself cool, focused, guarded. Invulnerable.

Until Rupert Branscombe Fox had cracked his defences by taking Natasha from him, and Cassie had kicked them down completely the moment she’d laid her mouth against his.

Dragging his eyes from Cassie’s legs, Jake made himself look out of the window. They were driving along the Embankment, and the Thames gleamed grey and oily in the rain, but he didn’t see the river. He saw Cassie—her eyes dark and glowing in candlelight. Cassie perched on the table at Portrevick Hall, swinging her legs. Cassie laughing as she tried on a fancy tiara. Cassie looking down at the ring on her finger.

He was disturbingly aware of her warm, bright presence on the other side of the taxi. Her perfume was already achingly familiar. When had that happened? His careful life seemed to be unravelling by the minute, and Jake didn’t like the feeling at all.

Completely unaware of the desperate trend of his thoughts, Cassie was patting her hair, trying to smooth it into some kind of shape. Jake’s hands itched to do it for her, to slide into the soft curls, the way they had in the restaurant before that
buffoon Giovanni had interrupted them. He imagined twisting its silkiness around his fingers, tucking it neatly behind her delicate ears, and then he could let his hands drift down her throat, let his lips follow…

‘Is this it?’ said Cassie, leaning forward to peer through the window as the taxi drew up outside the hotel, and Jake had to unscramble his thoughts enough to pay the taxi driver.

At least he had a few minutes to pull himself together while Cassie disappeared into a cloakroom to leave her coat and check her make-up. Adjusting the knot of his tie, he made himself think of something other than Cassie and the strange, disturbing way she made him feel. He remembered Portrevick instead, and the grim house where he had grown up. That was always a good way to remind himself of the importance of control. He thought about his mother’s worn face, and the long, silent bus rides to visit his father in prison.

And then he thought about Rupert’s supercilious smile and his jaw tightened. If it wasn’t for Rupert, he wouldn’t be in this mess. If it wasn’t for Rupert, he and Natasha could have posed for a few photographs for this damned article and that would have been that. If it wasn’t for Rupert, he would never have kissed Cassie, and he wouldn’t be standing here now, unable to shake the feel of her, the taste of her, the scent of her from his mind.

Jake gave his tie a final wrench and looked at his watch. What the hell was Cassie doing in there? He was just getting ready to storm into the Ladies and drag her out when she appeared, smoothing down her dress. It was short and simply cut, and held up with tiny spaghetti-straps that left her shoulders bare. The colour—less a blue than a purple, he could see now—was so vivid that it dazzled the eye—or maybe that was just Cassie, Jake thought as the breath leaked from his lungs. She looked warm, lush, bright and unbelievably sexy. As she walked towards him he couldn’t help remembering another time, ten years ago, when she had walked towards him in a different dress.

Cassie was smiling as she walked towards him, but as she got closer and her eyes met that dark, deep-blue gaze she faltered and the smile evaporated from her face. All at once, the air seemed to close around them, sealing them into an invisible bubble and sucking the air out of her lungs. The babble and laughter from Reception inside the big doors faded, and there was just Jake, watching her with unfathomable eyes, and a silence that stretched and twanged with the memory of how it had felt to kiss him.

Suddenly ridiculously shy, she struggled to think of something to say. Something other than ‘kiss me again’, anyway. ‘How do I look?’ was the best she could do.

‘Very nice,’ said Jake.

He couldn’t have said anything better to break the tension, thought Cassie gratefully. ‘No,’ she told him, rolling her eyes. ‘Not “very nice”. You’re in love with me, remember? Tell me I look beautiful or gorgeous or sexy—anything but
very nice!’

‘Maybe I won’t say anything at all,’ said Jake. ‘Maybe I’ll just do this instead.’ And, putting his hands to her waist, he drew her to him and kissed her.

His lips were warm and persuasive, and wickedly exciting. Afterwards, Cassie thought that she should have resisted somehow, but at the time it felt so utterly natural that she melted into him without even a token protest. Her hands spread over his broad chest, and she parted her lips with a tiny murmur low in her throat.

It wasn’t a long kiss, but it was a very thorough one, and Cassie’s knees were weak when Jake let her go.

‘Sometimes actions speak louder than words,’ he said.

From somewhere, Cassie produced a smile. It felt a little unsteady, but at least it was a smile. At least she could pretend that her heart wasn’t thudding, that her bones hadn’t dissolved, and that her arms weren’t aching to cling to him. That she didn’t desperately, desperately want him to kiss her again.

‘That’s better,’ she said, astonished at how steady her voice sounded. ‘See how convincing you can be when you try?’

‘Let’s hope we can convince everyone else too,’ said Jake. ‘Ready?’

Of course she wasn’t ready! How could he kiss her like that and then expect her to calmly swan into a party and act like a chief executive’s fiancée—whatever one of those was like?

But she had agreed, and to make some feeble excuse now would just make it look as if she had been thrown into confusion by a meaningless kiss. Even if she had, Cassie didn’t want Jake to know it.

She drew a deep breath. ‘Ready,’ she said.

Jake kept a hand at the small of her back as they made their way through the crowd. Cassie was intensely aware of it, and even when he dropped his arm she could feel its warmth like a tingling imprint on her skin burnt through the fabric of her dress.

She was nervous at first, but Jake seemed to know a lot of people there, and everyone was very friendly. There was quite a bit of interest when he introduced her as his fiancée, and Cassie wondered how many of them had known Natasha. It soon became clear, in fact, that they should have prepared their story more carefully.