Loving Our Heroes

He looked at her, suspicious of her enthusiasm. ‘What are you going to be doing?’

‘Oh, I’ll be here working on a few designs,’ she said, plonking herself down at the table. ‘Feel free to ask if you can’t find anything.’

Campbell set about his task with grim determination. Working his way down the list, he managed to assemble all the ingredients, but the eggs were cold, the butter hard and he had obviously dismissed the difference between caster and granulated sugar as irrelevant. Tilly could practically see him thinking flour is flour is flour before deciding that plain flour would do just as well as self-raising, and he picked out a cake tin at random without any thought for its size or whether or not it needed to be lined.

It was odd that a man so focused, so competent, so coolly logical, should have such a cavalier approach to baking, she thought. But then, Campbell wouldn’t see cooking as important, would he?

Still, she had to give him marks for perseverance. He got points for tidying up, too, after he had put the cake in the oven. ‘There,’ he said at last, laying the cloth out to dry on the edge of the sink at a precise right angle. ‘That’s done.’

Realising that he was still wearing the stupid apron, he wrenched it off and tossed it aside.

Tilly was sitting at the end of the table, idly turning the pages of a magazine, and he eyed her sardonically.

‘Working hard?’

‘I am, as a matter of fact,’ she said equably. ‘I’m researching. I’ve got clients coming in to choose a twenty-first birthday cake for their daughter, so I want to be able to give them some fun ideas. I do a lot of bags and shoes, but I’m wondering if I might do a complete outfit like this one.’ She turned the magazine so Campbell could see the photograph she was considering.

He looked at it uncomprehendingly. ‘Why don’t you just make her a nice chocolate cake?’

‘Because anyone can do that—even you, apparently! I’m offering something different, and I can’t do that unless I’ve got a real sense of the person the cake is for. Actually, making the cake is the easy part. You need to be able to talk to people, and listen to what they tell you.’

She fixed him with a stern gaze. ‘That means when Cleo comes in tomorrow you can’t just fob her off with a traditional three tier cake. You need to find out what kind of wedding she’s planning, what sort of cake she really wants, and come up with some ideas for her. Cleo’s my friend, and she’s agreed to let you do her cake as a favour to me, so you’ve got to make it really special for her.’

‘You’ll be there, too, won’t you?’ Campbell asked with a touch of unease. He couldn’t imagine having much to say to an excited bride full of wedding plans. ‘I’m not very good at talking at all, let alone about that kind of stuff.’

‘I wasn’t any good at abseiling, but I still had to do it,’ Tilly pointed out tartly. ‘Yes, I’ll be there, just as you were at the top of the cliff, but I can’t do it for you. This time it’s your challenge.’

Campbell sighed. ‘Why does it have to be so complicated? A cake is a cake!’

‘When you were in the army, were all operations the same?’

‘I was in the Marines, but no, they weren’t.’

‘And now you’re in business, is every deal exactly the same?’

‘No.’

‘Well, it’s the same with cakes.’

Tilly could see that he wasn’t convinced. ‘Every time I make a cake, I’m making it for different people, and a different situation. Even if they choose exactly the same cake, the way I mix it and bake it and decorate it is all different. If it wasn’t, my customers might as well go to a supermarket and buy one made in a factory.’

‘The next time I’m negotiating an important deal I’ll think of you and remind myself that it’s just like a cake,’ said Campbell dryly.

Tilly couldn’t help warming to the idea that he might be thinking about her in the future. ‘Will you have to do much of that in your new job?’

‘Negotiating? I imagine so. This will be my most challenging job yet. I’m going to a global corporation that’s been on a downward slide for some time. I’ve been appointed to turn it round, but it won’t be easy.’

‘Oh, but surely it’s just a question of reading some instructions?’ Tilly murmured provocatively.

Campbell looked at her sharply. She met his gaze blandly, but the dark blue eyes gleamed and, in spite of himself, he laughed.

‘It would be nice to think that there would be some instructions to read!’

Tilly found herself smiling back at him, even while wishing that she hadn’t made him laugh. It was so obvious that Campbell thought that making cakes was beneath him that she had been doing a good job of disliking him again, and now he had gone and spoilt that by smiling.

All at once she was tingling with awareness again and, instead of thinking about how arrogant and disagreeable he could be, she was thinking about the fact that the two of them were alone in the house, and trying not to notice how tall and lean and tautly muscled he was, how out of place he seemed in the cosy kitchen with that air of tightly leashed power.

Looking at him in that pink apron, Tilly had the unnerving sensation that she had tied a bow around a kitten only to realise that it had turned into a fully grown tiger, complete with swishing tail, and she only just stopped herself from gulping.

She pushed back her chair so that it scraped on the tiles. ‘Tea?’ she asked brightly.

‘Thanks.’

Campbell sat down at the table and pulled her sketchbook towards him. As he flicked idly through it, his brows rose. Her designs were quick and clear, and she had somehow captured each idea in a few clever lines.

‘These are good,’ he said, unable to keep the surprise from his voice.

Tilly switched on the kettle and turned to lean back against the sink, determinedly keeping her distance.

‘It’s not exactly turning round a global corporation, is it?’

Campbell turned another few pages. ‘I’m beginning to wonder if that might not be easier than coming up with ideas like these.’

‘Well, that’s why you’re a hotshot international executive and I’m the provincial cake-maker,’ said Tilly. ‘If you think about it, we don’t have a single thing in common, do we?’

Campbell looked at her standing by the kettle. Her nut-brown curls gleamed with gold under the spotlights, and he remembered how soft her hair had felt under his cheek as they had lain together in the tent up on the Scottish hillside. Funny to think they had only spent a matter of hours together. She seemed uncannily familiar already. Campbell wasn’t a fanciful man, but it felt as if he had known the glint of fun in her eyes, the tartness of her voice, the gurgle of laughter, for ever.

‘No, I don’t suppose we do,’ he agreed, his voice rather more curt than he had intended.

And they didn’t. Tilly was right. They had absolutely nothing in common.

It hadn’t taken Campbell nearly as long as he had expected to adjust to civilian life. He had always been too much of a maverick to fit that comfortably into naval life, even within an elite unit. An unorthodox approach and a relentless drive to succeed at whatever cost came into their own on special operations, but were less of an advantage in the day-to-day routine.

He hadn’t regretted leaving all that behind. Lisa hadn’t intended to change his life for the better when she’d walked out, but he was grateful to her in an odd way for making him so determined to prove that he could make twice as much money as her new husband that he had gone into business. It had turned out that he was made for the ruthless cut and thrust of corporate life. Campbell didn’t do emotions, or talking or any of the things women thought were so important, but he knew how to make money, and that was what counted.

When it came down to it, Campbell believed that everybody was motivated by money at some level. Tilly wouldn’t agree, he was sure. That was another thing they didn’t have in common.

‘We just have to get along for a fortnight with nothing in common,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll be gone.’

Thanks for the reminder, Tilly thought, piqued in spite of herself. It was all very well deciding not to get involved with him, but quite another thing to be hit over the head with the fact that he was planning to leave the country soon. She had a nasty feeling he had done it to make sure that she got the message that he wasn’t available. Why didn’t he just hang up a sign saying ‘don’t bother’?

Not that she had any intention of letting him know that she had even considered the possibility of getting involved. That really would make him laugh.

‘Of course, you’re moving to the States, aren’t you?’ Tilly was Ms Cucumber Cool as she carried the teapot over and found two mugs. She could do couldn’t-care-less as well as anyone, even Campbell Sanderson. ‘Where exactly are you going?’

‘New York.’

‘Is that where your ex-wife lives now?’