Marriage Bargain With His Innocent. Cathy Williams

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      ‘I didn’t think you would.’

      ‘Because I’m so predictable?’

      ‘Because you’re not the sort.’ He paused. ‘I will come down to Cornwall,’ he murmured thoughtfully. ‘Maybe next weekend, and I’ll stay for a little longer than I usually do.’

      ‘I’ll make sure to keep out of your way,’ Georgina inserted politely. ‘It might make for fireworks if we’re supposed to be in the throes of a hostile break-up.’

      Matias looked at her and reluctantly grinned. ‘Tell me why you’ve always been able to make me laugh even though we fight like cat and dog? No, scrap that. You’ll probably end up fighting with me again. What story will you spin for my mother when you break the disappointing news that we’re no longer a hot item?’

      ‘I don’t know. I’ll think of something.’

      ‘This was your idea,’ Matias mused, ‘but I’ll shoulder the blame for the break-up of a relationship that never was. It’ll be far more believable that I’m the baddie in this scenario anyway. I won’t be letting my mother down too much.’

      He saw the flash of curiosity in her eyes and sidestepped it adroitly.

      ‘Fair’s fair, after all. Now... Safe trip back, Georgie.’ He hesitated. What else was there to say?

      Georgina didn’t hang around. His chauffeur-driven Mercedes was waiting by the pavement, engine idling, and she didn’t look back as she ducked into the back seat.

      Mission Impossible had turned into Mission She Must Have Been Crazy. She consoled herself all way to the bed and breakfast by telling herself that she had done her best and there was nothing more she could have done.

      The bed and breakfast was not in the most salubrious of locations, but it was reasonably priced and it was clean. Her room was so small that everything seemed to be squeezed in, with only just enough free space to allow passage from bed to bathroom without minor injuries occurring en route.

      She had a shower and stuck on the little tee shirt and skimpy shorts she always wore to sleep. At night, in the darkness of the bedroom...that was the time she felt most self-confident about her body.

      She could have been married by now. She could have had a child! It was bizarre to think it, but it was true. Lying there in the dark, something about seeing Matias’s dark, beautiful face brought to mind thoughts of Robbie and the marriage that had never been.

      They were memories that she kept locked away in her head, but now, like imps released from captivity, they stretched and decided to have a little fun at her expense. Memories of being engaged, planning her big day, only to be told a handful of weeks before they were due to tie the knot that he just couldn’t go through with it.

      ‘It’s not you!’ he had declared magnanimously, in what had to be the most over-used craven expression in any break-up. ‘It’s me. I just don’t feel the same way about you that I used to... I don’t understand it...’

      They had parted ways and she had had to endure months of sensing the whispered pity behind her back every time she entered a room.

      Robbie had stopped being attracted to her. Had he ever been attracted to her? Maybe not. Maybe he had been carried along on a tide of wanting to please her parents, because he had been her mother’s star pupil.

      In her darkest, deepest thoughts she had sometimes wondered whether a part of her hadn’t simply been drawn to a guy who was diametrically different from Matias—a guy on whom she could pin all her hopes, finally snuffing out that silly, girlish flame that had continued to burn long after she should have grown out of it.

      She cringed when she’d remembered the way Robbie had tried to encourage her to lose a bit of weight. Afterwards, when the dust had settled, she had discovered that he had met and married someone else in record time. Someone long and thin. Ever since then Georgina had made even more of an effort to conceal the body that had let her down.

      Yes, it was silly—and, yes, it was nonsensical. But since when did feelings make sense?

      She drifted into a restless sleep and had no idea how long she had been asleep when she heard a knocking on her door.

      She surfaced, feeling drugged and disorientated. It didn’t occur to her to be careful when she tentatively pulled the door open because the bed and breakfast was securely locked against intruders. Which meant that the owner, a lovely woman in her fifties, could be the only person knocking.

      And it wasn’t that late. Only a little after eleven. But she had been so shattered after her pointless visit to Matias that she had climbed into bed and fallen asleep almost immediately.

      Her eyes started at the bottom. Loafers—expensive ones. Black jeans—low-slung. Black close-fitting jumper. Muscular body.

      Georgina knew that it was Matias before her eyes collided with his silver dark gaze.

      ‘Let me in, Georgie.’

      ‘What are you doing here?’

      ‘We need to talk.’

      ‘How did you get in? Who let you in?’ She peered angrily past him in search of the culprit. ‘Whoever let you in had no right to do so!’

      ‘She sensed I wasn’t going to steal the family heirlooms. Let me in.’

      ‘Do you know what time it is?’

      ‘Not bedtime on a Saturday evening for most people under the age of forty-five. And time for me to tell you that there’s been a slight change of plan.’

      Matias raked his fingers through his hair and shot her a look of brooding unease.

      ‘Whatever you have to say will have to wait until morning.’ Her heart beating like a sledgehammer, and feeling acutely aware of her lack of clothing, Georgina made to shut the door. In response Matias neatly wedged his foot in the open gap before he could be locked out.

      ‘I realise this is not the most convenient place in the world for a conversation, but what I have to say can’t wait. My mother called.’

      Georgina hesitated. With a sigh, she reluctantly opened the door, then told him to sit at the dressing table so that she could at least get dressed.

      She knew the sort he went for. Tall, leggy blondes who weighed next to nothing. She knew that what she had on was no more revealing than what most girls would wear to the park on a hot day. But she still had to swallow down a sickening feeling of self-consciousness as she scuttled into the bathroom clutching jeans and a tee shirt.

      She’d disappeared in under ten seconds. But that was all it had taken for Matias to realise that the body she had always been at pains to keep hidden away was voluptuous, with curves in all the right places, and a derriere as round and as perfect as a peach. She wasn’t overweight. She was sexy.

      His libido, which had been sadly tepid during the last few weeks of his tempestuous relationship with Ava, roared into shocking life, forcing him to conceal a prominent bulge by sitting on a stool by the window.

      ‘You СКАЧАТЬ