The Bridesmaid's Best Man

But her mother had insisted. ‘It will be so good for your business, darling. You know you always get a rash of new clients after one of my soirеes.’

Sophie couldn’t deny that. Besides, this week had been dire enough without getting her mother offside. So she’d come. But already she was regretting her decision.

She was feeling ill and tired, and more than a tad miserable, and Freddie Halverson, a dead bore, was heading her way. Without question, it was time to make a hasty exit.

Slipping out of the room, Sophie hurried up the darkened back stairs to the second floor, and then down the passage to the far end of the house to the little room that had been her bedroom until she was nineteen.

She set the champagne flute on a dresser and flopped onto the window seat, pressed her flushed cheek against the cool pane, and looked out at the faint silhouettes of the rooftops of London, and at the street below that glistened with rain. For the hundredth time, she tried to imagine where Mark Winchester had been when she’d telephoned him this morning.

What was a mustering camp, anyway? Cowboy films had never been her thing.

Twelve long hours had passed since her phone call, but she still felt wiped out and exhausted. Their conversation had been so very unsatisfactory, even though she’d been reassured to hear Mark’s voice.

She’d almost forgotten how deep and warm and rumbly it was. It had reverberated inside her, resounding so deeply she could almost imagine it reaching his baby, curled like a tiny bean in her womb.

But then static had got in the way just when they’d reached the important part, and she’d started to blub! How pathetic. After she’d got off the phone, she’d wept solidly for ten minutes, and had washed her face three times.

Now Sophie turned from the window and threw her shoulders back, determined there would be no more crying. She wasn’t the first woman in history to find herself in this dilemma.

Problem was, she didn’t only feel sorry for herself, she felt sorry for landing this shock on Mark. And she felt sorry for the baby, too. Poor little dot. It hadn’t asked to be conceived by a dizzy, reckless girl and a rugged, long-legged stranger with a slow, charming smile. It wouldn’t want parents who lived worlds apart, who could never offer it the snug, secure family it deserved.

Just the same, she couldn’t contemplate an abortion. She had wanted to explain that to Mark, and would have felt better if she’d been able to—but in the end the phone call hadn’t helped at all. She felt worse than before she’d picked up the receiver.

Ever since, she’d been wondering if she’d expected too much of Mark Winchester. After all, they hardly knew each other, and they’d said their goodbyes six weeks ago, had gone their separate ways. She’d tried to forget him, and it had almost worked.

Liar.

Sophie hugged her knees and sighed into the darkness. She could still picture Mark in perfect detail, could see his eyes—dark, rich brown and curiously penetrating. She remembered exactly how tall and broad-shouldered he was, could picture his bronzed skin, the sheen on his dark-brown hair, his slightly crooked nose, the no-nonsense squareness of his jaw.

She remembered the way he’d looked at her when they’d been dancing at the wedding, the quiet hunger that had sent fierce chills chasing through her.

And, of course, she remembered everything that had happened later…the warm touch of his fingers, the heady magic of his lips on her bare skin. She felt a flash of heat flooding her, trembled all over, inside and out—just as she had on that fateful night when they’d been best man and bridesmaid.

There was a soft knock outside. ‘Are you in there, Sophie?’

Her best friend’s slim silhouette appeared at the doorway.

‘Oh, Emma, thank goodness it’s you.’

Emma was the only other person she’d told about the baby. Jumping to her feet, Sophie kissed her. ‘I didn’t expect you to come here tonight. Haven’t you and Tim got better things to do?’

‘Not when my best friend’s in trouble,’ Emma said, giving her a hug.

Sophie turned on a lamp, and its glow illuminated the neat orderliness of the room, so different now that it was a guest room. Luckily none of the guests downstairs was using it this evening, and she closed the door.

Cautiously, Emma asked, ‘Have you called Mark?’

‘Yes.’ Sophie let out a sigh. ‘But it was pretty disappointing. The line was bad, and we didn’t really get to discuss anything important.’

‘But how did he take the news?’

‘I’m not really sure. He was rather stunned, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Emma agreed with a small smile. She sat on the edge of the single bed, kicked off her shoes and tucked her legs up, just as she had when they’d been children. ‘It would have been a bolt from the blue, poor man.’

‘Yes.’ Sophie slumped back into the window seat, reliving her dog-awful shock yesterday when the doctor had told her that the tightness in her breasts and the tiredness that had haunted her for the past fortnight had been caused by pregnancy. She’d known she’d missed a period, but she’d been so sure there had to be another explanation, and had been embarrassed beyond belief.

In the twenty-first century, an educated girl was expected to avoid this kind of pitfall. She cringed inwardly, could hear her father’s lecture already.

Oh, help.

‘Cheer up, Sox.’

Hearing her childhood nickname, Sophie smiled and quickly shoved thoughts of her parents aside. She would deal with them later. Much later.

She sighed again, heavily. ‘I suppose I was crazy to insist on talking to Mark while he’s out in the middle of nowhere, and now I’m going to have to wait another whole week until he gets home and I can speak to him. But I can’t think, can’t work out what to do about…about anything until I’ve had a chance to talk to him properly.’

‘What are you hoping for?’

Unable to give a straight answer, Sophie twisted the locket Emma had given her as a bridesmaid’s present.

‘That he’ll ask you to marry him?’ Emma suggested gently.

‘Good heavens, no.’ She might have been silly enough to get pregnant, but she wasn’t so na?ve that she believed in fairy tales.

‘It’s not the easiest option, is it?’

‘To marry a man I’ve known for less than twenty-four hours?’ Sophie regarded her friend with a sharply raised eyebrow. ‘It wouldn’t be very smart, would it?’ She gave an annoyed little shrug, and tried to ignore a stab of jealousy. Emma was newly married and blissfully happy with Tim, and not pregnant.

‘Just the same,’ she added quickly. ‘I need to know how Mark feels about—well—about everything.’ Her lower lip trembled as she remembered just how deeply she’d been smitten by him that night. Stop it.

‘For example,’ she said quickly, ‘if Mark’s going to demand visitation rights there’ll be steep air-fares to negotiate.’

Emma slipped from the bed and squeezed onto the window seat, wrapping an arm around Sophie’s hunched shoulders. ‘It’ll work out. You’ll feel better once you’re able to have a proper talk with Mark, when he gets back from this—’ She frowned. ‘What did you say he was doing exactly?’

Sophie rolled her eyes. ‘Rounding up cattle. But apparently they call it “mustering” in Australia. He seems to be way out in the very centre of the Outback somewhere.’

Emma’s upper lip curled with poorly restrained amusement. ‘It’s hard to imagine Mark Winchester doing the whole cowboy thing in all that heat and dust, isn’t it? I mean, he was so wonderfully dashing when he was best man at the wedding. Even I managed to drag my eyes away from Tim long enough to notice how tall, dark and handsome Mark was. And beautifully groomed.’

‘Yes,’ Sophie agreed with another sigh. ‘That was the problem. He was far too dashing and handsome. He had such a presence. I wouldn’t be in this pickle now if he hadn’t been quite so eye-catching.’

‘Or if Oliver wasn’t such a pig,’ Emma added darkly.

Sophie’s jaw dropped as she stared at her friend. ‘Did you guess?’

‘That you started flirting madly with Mark to show Oliver Pembleton that he hadn’t hurt you?’

Miserably, Sophie nodded.