Unwanted Wedding. PENNY JORDAN

just…just that a church wedding is so much more fuss,’ she fibbed lamely. ‘And…’

      She could feel her skin colouring under the look Guard was giving her. This morning, in the sharp, clear daylight, it seemed impossible that those clear, cold eyes could ever really have burned with that heat, that desire…that intensity she had seen last night. Nervously she looked quickly away from him. She had told herself last night, after he had gone, that that interlude—that incident—was something she was simply not going to think about. Guard had done it for Edward’s benefit, and she supposed she ought to be grateful to him for going to so much trouble, but…

      But it was something that most definitely must not happen again.

      ‘Stop hedging, Rosy,’ Guard told her sharply. ‘You don’t want to get married in church because it isn’t a “real” marriage. That’s typical of you and your muddled, ideological outlook on life. Try thinking things through from a more logical viewpoint. Like it or not, you and I in our different ways both have a certain standing in the local community. Edward isn’t going to be happy about what we’re doing, we both know that. There’s no point in adding fuel to the flames of his suspicions. A small, quiet ceremony is something we can get away with—just—particularly in view of the recent deaths of your father and grandfather. Not to have a church ceremony isn’t. And as for the fuss, you can leave all the arrangements to me. Which reminds me, you’d better have a word with Mrs Frinton and ask her if she’s free to come back here to work full-time.’

      ‘What for?’ Rosy asked him. ‘I’m only using a few of the rooms and—’

      ‘You may be, but after we’re married we’re bound to have to do a certain amount of entertaining. I have business associates who’ll want to be introduced to my new wife, and unless you’re proposing to give up your work at the shelter to be here full time—’

      Give up her work at the shelter? ‘Certainly not,’ Rosy told him vehemently.

      ‘Good. So it’s agreed then. You’ll contact Mrs Frinton, tell her that we’re getting married and that I’ll be moving in here and ask her—’

      ‘You’re moving in here?’

      ‘Well, it is the normal thing for a married couple to live under the same roof,’ Guard pointed out to her sardonically. ‘Unless of course you want to move into my apartment. Although…’

      His apartment? Rosy stared at him. When Peter had first mooted the idea of her asking Guard to marry her, she hadn’t been able to think very far past the ordeal of actually having to propose to him.

      ‘But we can’t live together,’ she began, panic suddenly beginning to infiltrate her voice. ‘We don’t…’

      ‘We don’t what? Oh, come on, Rosy…how old are you? You can’t be that naïve. You must have realised when you came up with this plan of yours to stop Edward inheriting this place that you could hardly convince the world that this is a genuine marriage if we’re living at separate addresses. Have some sense.’

      Rosy could hear the exasperation creeping into his voice.

      ‘I hadn’t really thought that far ahead,’ she admitted weakly. ‘I just wanted—’

      ‘You just wanted to save the house from Edward. I know,’ Guard finished for her. ‘You’re twenty-two years old, Rosy. Isn’t it time you started to grow up?’ he asked her scathingly.

      ‘I am grown-up,’ Rosy responded indignantly. ‘I’m an adult now, Guard, a…’

      ‘A what?’ he asked her softly. ‘A woman?’

      ‘Yes,’ she told him fiercely, her eyes darkening with anger as she saw the look he was giving her as he crossed the room.

      ‘Turn round,’ he commanded, ‘and look at yourself in that mirror and tell me what you see.’

      She was tempted to refuse, but the memory of how quickly and easily he had overpowered her the previous evening stopped her.

      Reluctantly, instead, she did as he had demanded, staring defiantly not at her own reflection in the huge Venetian mirror over the fireplace, but at him.

      How tall he looked in comparison to her own meagre height and how broad, the powerful, muscular structure of his torso clearly evident beneath the soft, checked woollen shirt he was wearing.

      Her own top, in contrast, wide-necked and baggy, revealed all too clearly the vulnerable delicacy of her own bone-structure, the soft black wool somehow highlighting the translucency of her pale skin, the feminine curves of her breasts.

      ‘A woman! You look more like a child,’ Guard mocked her. ‘In years you may be a woman, Rosy, but you’re still hiding behind the attitude and looks of a child.’ He moved in front of her, his thumb-tip rubbing briefly against her mouth, its touch gone as she instinctively lifted her hand to his wrist to push him away, her eyes dark with shock and anger.

      ‘No lipstick,’ he told her. ‘No make-up of any kind.’

      ‘It’s Saturday morning,’ Rosy protested. What she didn’t tell him—what she couldn’t tell him—was that she had overslept, that last night she had been unable to sleep because…because…

      She could feel the flesh of her bottom lip prickling sensitively where he had touched it; instinctively she went to catch it between her teeth and then stopped abruptly, remembering.

      ‘No make-up,’ Guard continued remorselessly, ‘clothes that hide your body, deliberately de-sexing it. Has any man ever seen your body, Rosy? Touched it? Touched you here?’

      The fleeting touch of his hand against her breast made her tense in outraged protest, even while her body registered that there was nothing remotely sexual in his touch.

      ‘I don’t have to apologise to you or anyone else for not wanting to indulge in casual sex,’ Rosy defended herself angrily. ‘And just because I don’t jump into bed with every male who asks me, that doesn’t make me immature, or less of a woman!’

      ‘No, it doesn’t,’ Guard agreed. ‘But the way you blush whenever I say anything with even the remotest sexual connotations, the way you back off from me, the way you so openly betray your inexperience sexually, they all say that you’re not a woman, Rosy, and they’ll certainly say that you’re not a married woman.’

      ‘Well, there’s nothing I can do about that, is there?’ Rosy snapped at him, turning away from him so that he wouldn’t see either that she was blushing or that his comments had, for some odd reason, actually hurt her. ‘Unless you’re suggesting that I go out and find a man to go to bed with just so that I don’t embarrass you with my—my lack of womanliness…’

      ‘My God, if I thought…’

      Rosy gasped as she felt Guard take hold of her, shaking her almost, and then releasing her just as abruptly, so that she didn’t even have time to open her mouth to protest at his rough treatment of her. She could hear anger in his voice as he told her, ‘This isn’t some game we’re playing, Rosy. It’s reality—and a damn dangerous reality at that. Have you actually thought of what could happen to both of us if Edward takes it into his head to bring a case against us for fraud?’