Engaged To Her Ravensdale Enemy

She. Would. Not.

Jaz’s father wasn’t even here to referee. He was away on a cruise of the Greek Islands with his new wife. Her father didn’t belong to Jaz any more—not that he ever had. His work had always been more important than her. How could a garden, even one as big as the one at Ravensdene, be more important than his only child? But no, now he belonged to Angela.

Going back to London was out of the question. Jaz wasn’t ready to announce the pause on her engagement. Not yet. Not until she knew for sure it was over. Not even to Miranda. Not while there was a slither of hope. All she had to do was make Myles see what he was missing out on. She was his soul mate. Of course she was. Everybody said so. Well, maybe not everybody, but she didn’t need everyone’s approval. Not even his parents’ approval, which was a good thing, considering they didn’t like her. But then, they were horrid toffee-nosed snobs and she didn’t like them either.

Jaz did everything for Myles. She cooked, she cleaned, she organised his social calendar. She turned her timetable upside down and inside out so she could be available for him. She even had sex with him when she didn’t feel like it. Which was more often than not, for some strange reason. Was that why Myles wanted a break? Because she wasn’t sexually assertive enough? Not raunchy enough? She could do raunchy. She could wear dress-up costumes and play games. She would hate it but if it won him back she would do it. Other men found her attractive. Sure they did.

She was fighting off men all the time. She wasn’t vain but she knew she had the package: the looks, the figure, the face and the hair. And she was whip-smart. She had her own bridal design company and she was not quite twenty-four.

Sure, she’d had a bit of help from Jake’s parents, Richard and Elisabetta Ravensdale, in setting up. In fact, if it hadn’t been for them, she wouldn’t have had the brilliant education she’d had. They had stepped in when her mother had left her at Ravensdene on an access visit when she was eight and had never returned.

Not that it bothered Jaz that her mother hadn’t come back for her. Not really. She was mightily relieved she hadn’t had to go back to that cramped and mouldy, rat-infested flat in Brixton where the neighbours fought harder than the feral cats living near the garbage collection point. It was the principle of the thing that was the issue. Being left like a package on a doorstep wasn’t exactly how one expected to be treated as a young child. But still, living at the Elizabethan mansion Ravensdene in Buckinghamshire had been much preferable. It was like being at a country spa resort with acres of verdant fields, dark, shady woods and a river meandering through the property like a silver ribbon.

This was home and the Ravensdales were family.

Well, apart from Jake, of course.

* * *

Jake tossed the bag on his bed and let out a filthy curse. What the hell was Jasmine Connolly doing here? He had made sure the place was empty for the weekend. He had a plan and Jasmine wasn’t part of it. He did everything he could to avoid her. But when he couldn’t he did everything he could to annoy her. He got a kick out of seeing her clench her teeth and flash those grey-blue eyes at him like tongues of flame. She was a pain in the backside but he wasn’t going to let her dictate what he could and couldn’t do. This was his family home, not hers. She might have benefited from being raised with his kid sister Miranda but she was still the gardener’s daughter.

Jaz had been intent on marrying up since she’d been a kid. At sixteen she’d had her sights on him. On him! What a joke. He was ten years older than her; marriage hadn’t been on his radar then and it wasn’t on it now. It wasn’t even in his vocabulary.

Jaz did nothing but think about marriage. Her whole life revolved around it. She was a good designer, he had to give her that, but it surely wasn’t healthy to be so obsessed with the idea of marriage? Forty per cent of marriages ended in divorce—his parents’ being a case in point. After his father’s love-child scandal broke a month ago, it had looked like they were going to have a second one. The couple had remarried after their first divorce, and if another was on the way he only hoped it wouldn’t be as acrimonious and publicly cringe-worthy as their last.

His phone beeped with an incoming message and he swore again when he checked his screen. Twenty-seven text messages and fourteen missed calls from Emma Madden. He had blocked her number but she must have borrowed someone else’s phone. He knew if he checked his spam folder there would be just as many emails with photos of the girl’s assets. Didn’t that silly little teenager go to school? Where were her parents? Why weren’t they monitoring her phone and online activity?

He was sick to the back teeth with teenaged girls with crushes. Jasmine had started it with her outrageous little stunt seven years ago. He’d had the last word on that. But this was a new era and Emma Madden wasn’t the least put off by his efforts to shake her off. He’d tried being patient. He’d tried being polite. What was he supposed to do? The fifteen-year-old was like a leech, clinging on for all she was worth. He was being stalked. By a teenager! Sending him presents at work. Turning up at his favourite haunts, at the gym, at a business lunch, which was damned embarrassing. He’d had his work cut out trying to get his client to believe he wasn’t doing a teenager. He might be a playboy but he had some standards and keeping away from underage girls was one of them.

Jake turned his phone to silent and tossed it next to his bag on the bed. He walked over to the window to look at the fields surrounding the country estate. Autumn was one of his favourite times at Ravensdene. The leaves on the deciduous trees in the garden were in their final stages of turning and the air was sharp and fresh with the promise of winter around the corner. As soon as his guests arrived he would light the fire in the sitting room, put on some music, pour the champagne, party on and post heaps of photos on social media so Emma Madden got the message.

Finally.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_30f24590-f5f1-5501-931c-e395be5e9e53)

THE CARS STARTED arriving just as Jaz got comfortable in the smaller sitting room where she had set up her workstation. She had to hand-sew the French lace on Julius’s fiancée Holly’s dress, which would take hours. But she was happiest when she was working on one of her designs. She outsourced some of the basic cutting and sewing of fabric but when it came to the details she did it all by hand. It gave her designs that signature Jasmine Connolly touch. Every stitch or every crystal, pearl or bead she sewed on to a gown made her feel proud of what she had achieved. As a child she had sat on the floor in this very sitting room surrounded by butcher’s paper or tissue wrap and Miranda as a willing, if not long-suffering, model. Jaz had dreamed of success. Success that would transport her far away from her status as the unwanted daughter of a barmaid who turned tricks to feed her drug and alcohol habit.

The sound of car doors slamming, giggling women and high heels tottering on gravel made Jaz’s teeth grind together like tectonic plates. At this rate she was going to be down to her gums. But no way was she going back to town until the weekend was over. Jake could party all he liked. She was not being told what to do. Besides, she knew it would annoy him to have her here. He might have acted all cool and casual about it but she knew him well enough to know he would be spitting chips about it privately.

Jaz put down her sewing and carefully covered it with the satin wrapping sheet she had brought with her. This she had to see. What sort of women had he got to come? He had a thing for busty blondes. Such a cliché but that was Jake. He was shallow. He lived life in the fast lane and didn’t stay in one place long enough to put down roots. He surrounded himself with showgirls and starlets who used him as much as he used them.

It was nauseating.

Jake was standing in the great hall surrounded by ten or so young women—all blonde—who were dressed in skimpy cocktail wear and vertiginous heels. Jaz leaned against the doorjamb with her arms folded, watching as each girl kissed him in greeting. One even ruffled his hair and another rubbed her breasts—which Jaz could tell were fake—against his upper arm.

He caught Jaz’s eye and his mouth slanted in a mocking smile. ‘Ah, here’s the fun police. Ladies, this is the gardener’s daughter, Jasmine.’

Jaz gave him an ‘I’ll get you for that later’ look before she addressed the young women. ‘Do your parents know where you all are?’ she said.

Jake’s brows shot together in a brooding scowl. ‘Knock it off, Jasmine.’

Jaz smiled at him with saccharine sweetness. ‘Just checking you haven’t sneaked in a minor or two.’

Twin streaks of dull colour rode high along his aristocratic cheekbones and his mouth flattened until it was a bloodless line of white. A frisson of excitement coursed through her to have riled him enough to show a crack in his ‘too cool for school’ façade. Jaz was the only person who could do that to him. He sailed through life with that easy smile and that ‘anything goes’ attitude but pitted against her he rippled with latent anger. She wondered how far she could push him. Would he touch her? He hadn’t come anywhere near her for seven years. When the family got together for Christmas or birthdays, or whatever, he never greeted her. He never hugged or kissed her on the cheek as he did to Miranda or his mother. He avoided Jaz like she was carrying some deadly disease, which was fine by her. She didn’t want to touch him either.

But, instead of responding, Jake moved past her as if she was invisible and directed the women to the formal sitting room. ‘In here, ladies,’ he said. ‘The party’s about to begin.’

Jaz wanted to puke as the women followed him as though he were the Pied Piper. Couldn’t they see how they were being used to feed his ego? He would ply them with expensive champagne or mix them exotic cocktails and tell them amusing anecdotes about his famous parents and their Hollywood and London theatre friends. Those he wouldn’t bother sleeping with he would toss out by two or three in the morning. The one—or two or three, according to the tabloids—he slept with would be sent home once the deed was done. They would never get a follow-up call from him. It was a rare woman who got two nights with Jake Ravensdale. Jaz couldn’t remember the last one.

The doorbell sounded behind her. She let out a weary sigh and turned to open it.

‘I’ll get that,’ Jake said, striding back into the great hall from the sitting room.

Jaz stood to one side and curled her lip at him. ‘Ten women not enough for you, Jake?’

He gave her a dismissive look and opened the door. But the smile of greeting dropped from his face as if he had been slapped. ‘Emma...’ His throat moved up and down. ‘What? Why? How did you find me?’ The words came spilling out in a way Jaz had never seen before. He looked agitated. Seriously agitated.

‘I had to see you,’ the girl said with big, lost waif, shimmering eyes and a trembling bottom lip. ‘I just had to.’

And she was indeed a girl, Jaz noted. Not yet out of her teens. At that awkward age when one foot was in girlhood and the other in adulthood, a precarious position, and one when lots of silly mistakes that could last a lifetime could be made. Jaz knew it all too well. Hadn’t she tried to straddle that great big divide, with devastating consequences?

‘How’d you get here?’ Jake’s voice had switched from shocked to curt.

‘I caught a cab.’

His brows locked together. ‘All the way from London?’

‘No,’ Emma said. ‘From the station in the village.’

Poor little kid, Jaz thought. She remembered looking at Jake exactly like that, as if he was some demigod and she’d been sent to this earth solely to worship him. It was cruel to watch knowing all the thoughts that were going through that young head. Teenage love could be so intense, so consuming and incredibly irrational. The poor kid was in the throes of a heady infatuation, travelling all this way in the hope of a little bit of attention from a man who clearly didn’t want to give her the time of day. Jake was here partying with a bunch of women and Emma thought she could be one of them. What a little innocent.

Jaz couldn’t stand by and watch history repeat itself. What if Emma was so upset she did something she would always regret, like she had done? There had to be a way to let the kid down in such a way that would ease the hurt of rejection. But brandishing a bunch of party girls in Emma’s face was not the way to do it.

‘Why don’t you come in and I’ll—?’ Jaz began.

‘Stay out of it, Jasmine,’ Jake snapped. ‘I’ll deal with this.’ He turned back to the girl. ‘You have to leave. Now. I’ll call you a cab but you have to go home. Understand?’

Emma’s eyes watered some more. ‘But I can’t go home. My mother thinks I’m staying with a friend. I’ll get in heaps of trouble. I’ll be grounded for the rest of my life.’

‘And so you damn well should be,’ Jake growled.

‘Maybe I could help,’ Jaz said and held out her hand to the girl. ‘I’m Jaz. I’m Jake’s fiancée.’

There was a stunned silence.

Jake went statue-still beside Jaz. Emma looked at her with a blank stare. But then her cheeks pooled with crimson colour. ‘Oh... I—I didn’t realise,’ she stammered. ‘I thought Jake was still single otherwise I would never have—’

‘It’s fine, sweetie,’ Jaz said. ‘I totally understand and I’m not the least bit offended. We’ve been keeping our relationship a secret, haven’t we, darling?’ She gave Jake a bright smile while surreptitiously jabbing him in the ribs.