Knight's Possession

‘Why did you do it?’ she groaned.

‘Cheer up,’ he told her lightly. ‘It will only be for a few weeks.’

‘A few weeks!’ she repeated aghast. ‘Reece, we can’t possibly——’

‘Of course we can,’ he dismissed her objections. ‘I’m quite enjoying myself, actually,’ he grinned.

Anger darkened her eyes, making them look bigger than ever. ‘I’m not!’ she snapped.

‘I can see that,’ he said amiably. ‘I don’t have to be the consolation prize, you know.’

She frowned. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

He shrugged broad shoulders. ‘Well, we are engaged. It seems a pity to waste the opportunity——’

‘The opportunity doesn’t arise,’ she told him firmly, abruptly ending the dance. ‘Ask my mother to dance, Polly is getting a little frantic,’ she added scornfully, several other couples dancing with them now, David and Amanda one of them, David obviously enthralled by her mother.

Reece frowned down at her. ‘Amanda can’t help her beauty and warmth.’

‘Can’t she?’ Laurel said brittlely. ‘Don’t tell me you are another one, Reece?’ she derided the fallibility of men falling for a beautiful face and sexy body, oblivious of the woman inside the body.

‘I like your mother very much,’ he told her firmly. ‘In fact, sometimes I wonder how she could be your mother!’ he reproved.

She drew in an angry breath. ‘Believe me, there’s no doubt about that, I checked it out myself years ago!’

‘Laurel——’

‘I have to go and powder my nose!’ She walked away from him, her head held high, looking at no one, although she knew people were watching her. My God, no one believed for a minute that this engagement to Reece was a real one!

That wasn’t so surprising. She had made no secret of the fact that she was marrying Giles for anything but love. She was fond of him, he was charming and pleasant to be around, made no demands on her that she wasn’t prepared to give.

None of the people that really knew her would ever believe she had chosen arrogant, sensually attractive Reece Harrington in his place!

Then she would just have to make them believe it, make them think she had been so overwhelmed with love for Reece that for once she had thrown caution to the wind and given in to an impulse, that of marrying Reece. When the engagement was broken that would only reaffirm the claim she had always made that a relationship should be founded on liking and respect rather than the painful emotion of love.

But that would never be with Giles now. Even if he should get over his attack of nerves and change his mind and ask to come back she would never let him. He had forfeited any right to her affection by the humiliating blow he had dealt her tonight. If it hadn’t been for Reece…

Reece. She had known from the moment he helped her from her wrecked car that he was a dangerous man to be around, that any woman that became involved with him would have to give her soul as well as her heart and body.

But she had no intention of becoming involved with him, merely of letting him continue to pretend to be her fiancé. And she was about to start pretending to be his fiancée.

He was standing near the bar talking to Amanda, Polly and David when she entered the room, setting her shoulders determinedly as she walked over to his side. ‘I hope I wasn’t gone too long, darling.’ She stretched up to kiss him, even the high heels on her shoes meaning she still had to go a long way to reach his lips. ‘I missed you,’ she told him throatily.

Humour glinted in his eyes as he quickly masked his surprise at this sudden change in her. ‘I missed you too, darling.’ He teased her lips with his own as he curved her body up into his. ‘Five minutes is too long to be apart,’ he murmured mockingly.

‘Wait until you’ve been married almost five years,’ David derided. ‘Then you would be glad of five minutes to yourself!’

‘That’s all the thanks I get after becoming his child-bride at only nineteen, giving him all of my youth!’ Polly gave him a playful punch on the arm, the couple more in love now than they had ever been, and looking it.

‘What about my youth?’ he teasingly complained. ‘Have you seen how many grey hairs I have on my chest now?’

‘Six,’ his wife taunted. ‘I counted them last night. Afterwards.’

David gave Laurel and Reece an abashed smile. ‘She only treats me this way because she knows I lust after her body!’

Reece laughed softly. ‘I know the feeling!’ He looked warmly down at Laurel.

And she had thought her acting was good! If only a ‘slightly slimmer’ version of the woman he had looked at in the book illustration earlier this evening was his taste for a bed-partner then she fell far short of the required inches. What she had was all in proportion, but those proportions were minimum. Nevertheless, Reece managed to look as if he really couldn’t wait to get her into bed with him later this evening.

And secure in the knowledge that it wasn’t going to happen Laurel played the part of besotted fiancée for the rest of the evening. She was so convincing that as she and Reece languorously danced the night away she could feel the hard desire of his taut thighs against her stomach!

But none of her friends looked at her curiously any more, and even Giles’s work-mates looked convinced by her act, Laurel having assured them they had no need to leave, most of them convinced that Giles had been working this evening as a way of compensation for his broken engagement. They had assured Laurel he didn’t look too broken-hearted, and that they were sure he would quickly recover from his disappointment. Somehow that didn’t make Laurel feel better at all!

But her friends seemed to accept that, like the rest of them, she had fallen into the love-trap, that all her avowals in the past that it would never happen to her had fallen by the wayside when confronted with Reece Harrington. She was content to let them think that, knew it would only make her opinion more right when her engagement to Reece floundered.

‘I can’t tell you how happy I am for you both,’ her mother told them warmly, Reece insisting on driving them both home after the party had broken up after one o’clock in the morning, driving Amanda home first, even though Laurel had argued that he would only have to drive back again after taking her home. Reece had been adamant. ‘Robert is going to be so surprised when he gets home tomorrow,’ she added lightly. ‘You could have let me in on the secret before the party, Reece,’ she chided her stepson indulgently.

‘Amanda——’

‘Laurel had to talk to Giles first.’ Reece’s warning look in the driving mirror as Laurel sat in the back of the car effectively silenced her, her mother sitting beside Reece in the sleek silver sports model Jaguar. ‘It wouldn’t have been fair for us to tell anyone else until she had had a chance to explain to him.’

‘No,’ her mother conceded, turning to smile at Laurel. ‘When is the wedding to be, darling?’

‘Give us time to catch our breaths, Amanda,’ Reece derided lightly. ‘We only realised this evening that we’re in love.’

Amanda’s eyes widened in the semi-light of the streetlamped streets. ‘When you went to the shop to see Laurel about my invitation?’

‘Yes,’ he nodded.

‘Goodness, Reece, you’re an even faster worker than your father,’ Amanda chuckled. ‘At least he waited a week after we met before proposing.’

‘But I’ve already known Laurel for a year,’ Reece reminded.

‘And suddenly realised you were in love with her when you knew she was going to marry another man! That’s so romantic,’ Amanda sighed happily. ‘Do you realise that once you and Reece are married, Laurel, that our last names will once again be the same?’

This time she ignored the warning look in the mirror, her mouth twisting derisively. ‘And it’s certainly been a long time since that happened,’ she rasped.

‘Has it?’ Amanda frowned. ‘Yes, I suppose it has,’ she nodded slowly. ‘You could have taken Frank’s name——’

‘I didn’t want it,’ she dismissed sharply, having disliked her mother’s second husband intensely.

‘No,’ Amanda grimaced. ‘You and Frank never did get on.’

She had never felt the need to tell her mother the reason she disliked Frank Shepherd so much, of the advances he always made to her whenever she came home from the expensive boarding-school they had sent her to after their marriage. She had been on the edge of sixteen at the time, just budding into womanhood, a late developer physically, and Frank had obviously found the way that she was developing extremely erotic.

‘Frank was a——’

‘We’ll get straight off if you don’t mind, Amanda,’ Reece cut in tightly as he stopped the Jaguar outside the impressive Harrington home, several lights glowing welcomingly inside the house. ‘Laurel has to open the shop in the morning.’