The Tycoon's Marriage Deal. Melanie Milburne

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       CHAPTER TWO

      JOANNE CAME INTO the office before Tillie had time to pick her dropped jaw up off the desk, much less the ring box. ‘Oh. My. God. Is that what I think it is?’ she said.

      Tillie stared at the box as if it were a detonator device. ‘I’m not going to open it.’

      I’m not. I’m not. I’m not.

      Even though her finger still felt horribly empty after three years of wearing an engagement ring. Three years and another five before that wearing a friendship/commitment ring. But she had a feeling Blake’s ring wouldn’t look anything like the humble little quarter-carat diamond Simon had purchased. Actually, Simon hadn’t purchased it. She’d put it on her credit card and he was meant to repay her but somehow never did. Another clue he hadn’t truly loved her.

      Why hadn’t she realised that until now?

      ‘Well, if you don’t want it, give it to me,’ Joanne said. ‘I’m not against gorgeous men buying me expensive jewellery. What did he want to speak to you about?’

      ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’

      ‘Try me.’

      Tillie let out a gust of a breath. ‘He wants to settle all of my debts in exchange for me pretending to be his fiancée for a month.’

      ‘You’re right. I don’t believe you.’

      ‘He’s the most arrogant man I’ve ever met,’ Tillie said. ‘The hide of him marching in here expecting me to say yes to such a ridiculous farce. Who would believe it anyway? Me engaged to someone like him?’

      Joanne’s smooth brow crinkled in thought. ‘I don’t know... I think you’re a little hard on yourself. I mean, I know you’re not big on fashion but if you wore a bit more colour and a bit of make-up you’d look awesome. And you’ve got great boobs but you never show any cleavage.’

      Tillie sat down with a thump on her desk chair. ‘Yes, well, Simon didn’t like it when women paraded their assets.’

      And how could I have spent money on clothes and make-up while saving for the wedding?

      ‘Simon was born in the wrong century,’ Joanne said with a roll of her eyes. ‘I reckon you’re better off without him. He never even took you out dancing, for pity’s sake. You deserve someone much more dynamic than him. He’s too bland. Blake McClelland, on the other hand, is capital D dynamite.’

      Blake McClelland was too darn everything.

      Tillie eyed the ring box again, curling her fingers into her palms like hooks to stop herself reaching for it. ‘I’m going to take it to Mrs Fisher’s second-hand shop.’

      Joanne couldn’t have look more shocked than if she’d said she was going to flush it down the toilet. ‘Surely you’re not serious?’

      Tillie left the ring box where it was and pushed back from her desk. ‘I’m deadly serious.’

      * * *

      Blake drove the few kilometres out from the village to his family’s estate in rural Wiltshire. He had driven past a few times over the years after leaving flowers at his mother’s grave at the cemetery in the village, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to stop and survey the estate in any detail. To stare at the home that used to belong in his family had always been too painful, like jabbing at a wound that had never properly healed.

      The bank had repossessed the estate after his father’s breakdown. As a ten-year-old child it had been devastating enough to lose his mother, but to see his father crumple emotionally, to cease to function other than on a level not much higher than breathing, was terrifying. His mother’s death from a brain aneurysm had shattered him and his father. The cruel unexpectedness of it. The blunt shock of having her laughing and smiling one minute and then slurring her speech and then stumbling and falling the next. Ten days in hospital on life support until the doctors had given them the devastating news there was no longer any hope.

      The mother he’d adored and who had made his and his father’s life so perfect and happy had gone.

      Irretrievably gone.

      But somehow some measure of childhood resilience had kicked in and he’d become the parent during the long years of his father’s slow climb out of the abyss of despair. His dad had never remarried or re-partnered. Hadn’t even dated.

      But after his dad’s recent health scare, Blake was determined to put this one wrong thing right; no matter what the cost or the effort. McClelland Park was the key to his father’s full recovery.

      He knew it in his blood. He knew it in his bones. He knew it at a cellular level.

      His СКАЧАТЬ