His Housekeeper Bride

With an endearing self-consciousness she pulled her robe around her. ‘I’d feel better if you smiled.’ Her eyes were big as she stared at him with haunting uncertainty. China-doll lovely, and so tempting…

‘Please, Sylvie, call me Mark,’ he murmured—and smiled.

She swallowed and moistened her lips, her eyes still huge, unsure. ‘Thank you—Mark.’

A little half-smile lingered on her mouth. She always smiled—unless her prickly pride was touched. She seemed to have hidden laughter lurking around her, a delicious mirth he thought she might share with him if he got close enough. He took a step forward, obeying the imperative urge to imbibe her sparkling warmth, to touch—

Sylvie caught the back of her slipper on a mat as she took a hasty step back.

And he remembered at the worst possible moment what he was doing, where this was going. She was his employee, in a vulnerable position—and, much as he wanted to forget it, she was Shirley Temple. Her memory shone in his mind like starlight: for five years she’d been the girl who’d given him silent empathy when no one else had understood he didn’t want to talk, who’d been there for him when he’d felt lost and alone, cared for him when she’d had no one to care for her. She’d simply given him what he’d needed when he’d needed it, in a no cost or agenda way.

She was still doing it now—giving without taking back—and while his craving body was reminding him that she was most definitely a woman, she was only here because he’d ordered her inside. Hours after duty ended.

Her duties haven’t even begun yet, jerk. She’s barely had time to move her stuff in.

She’d suffered enough in her life, if the report he’d received this afternoon was true. She didn’t know the shallow games he played with women; she’d been too busy caring for her father until his death, bringing up her brothers. She’d only begun to have a life of her own when Joel had moved into the dorm rooms at his university. Three months ago.

His hands curled into fists of denial. He couldn’t be the hard-hearted man on the town. No matter how much he wanted to forget what this day was, he couldn’t do it to her.

‘So…what did you want to talk about?’she asked, the breathless sound in her voice sweet and pretty.

Everything about Sylvie was pretty—from her tousled curls to her pink-painted toes peeping out from the open-ended slippers. And so were the changes she’d made to his house.

His anger seemed ridiculous now. ‘I owe you an apology for my rudeness at the office.’

She yawned behind her hand with a puzzled look. ‘You yelled the street down at 2:47 a.m. to apologise?’

He felt heat creeping up his neck.

Her grin was as sweet as the look in her eyes—a mixture of woman and imp. ‘I was sure you were going to bawl me out for the presents I brought you.’

‘Why did you do it?’ he asked abruptly.

She shuffled her slippers on the floor, staring at her feet. ‘Every good thing in my life has come from you.’ She shrugged with one shoulder, her neck tilting to meet its uplift, and he knew what she was about to say. ‘It isn’t in me to do nothing but take, Mark. I know there’s nothing I can give you to thank you for rescuing my family—but I wanted to try.’

Any lingering anger, any urge to bawl her out or freeze her out, withered and died under the pure, humbling honesty of her. ‘Anything I ever gave you can never repay what you did for me.’

She looked up again, her smile shy and eager, and though he saw an echo of the Shirley Temple he remembered, she was a rosy, tumbled woman at the same time. She was both and more—and she fascinated him too much for her own good. He had to get her to stay away from him, because he wasn’t having any success in staying away from her.

‘When the deed for the house came, and the trust for us, and the card from you…You have no idea what you did for me—us.’

Her words, sincere and choked with emotion, annihilated his normal method of making a woman keep her distance. ‘You, Sylvie,’ he said quietly, wondering why he said it. ‘I did it for you.’

‘You saved my life.’ She looked at him as if he was wonderful. ‘Literally, you saved me, Mark. When the money came I was drowning. Dad was too sick to work, I was working part-time at a restaurant to make the rent, going to school, cleaning houses, doing homework at midnight. I—’ She swallowed, and then said abruptly, ‘Owning the house helped me put food on the table, paid for a housekeeper. I could stay at school, study and pass my exams.’

‘It was just money.’ He wanted to turn away, but he couldn’t stand not to see her flushed prettiness, the shining gratitude and hidden pain in those lovely eyes.

‘No.’ She took a step towards him, tender, hesitant. ‘Your house is so beautiful. I can feel your love for it in all the old furniture. I love it, too. It’s like you.’

Too many emotions crowded him; he hadn’t felt this confused since he was about thirteen, and her last comment heightened his bemusement. ‘Like me?’

She nodded, her face serious. ‘I walked in this afternoon and felt as if it was a haven in a crazy city. I felt peace. You could have made this a showplace. Instead you chose furniture that made it mellow, gentle and welcoming. It’s a family house for a family man.’

Alarm bells shrieked in his head. Don’t do it. Don’t lose it with her. And still he stepped forward, looking over her—such a delicate woman—and snarled in a freezing tone, ‘Do you see a family here?’She jerked back fast, breathing unevenly, her face white, and with such terror in her eyes he felt horrified. ‘Sylvie, I didn’t mean to—’

She lifted a shaking hand and he stopped. Just like that. He who hadn’t obeyed any woman but his mother for over a decade. Was it their past, or the shimmering tears in her eyes that halted him before her?

When she spoke it was in a half-whisper, with the shadows of her fear hovering around her like an aura of night. ‘I see the ghosts of the family that should be here. This house is the real you…it’s your haven from being the Heart of Ice. You bought this house for her. For Chloe, for both of you—it’s everything you should have had with her. The family, the babies.’

He felt the blood drain from his head, leaving him dizzy. By God, she met a sword-thrust with gentle atom bombs—and he couldn’t take any more reminders of what he’d become, what he’d always be now: a man alone.

‘Go to bed, Sylvie. Have the weekend off to settle into the cottage. Don’t worry about my breakfast. Just don’t come in here until I’m gone.’ The words grated like sandpaper in his throat.

‘All right.’ She turned and walked to the door, not wishing him a goodnight. Probably she knew it wasn’t, and it wouldn’t be. All he wanted now was for her to leave him alone. All he wanted was to drown himself in Scotch. If only he had any of the stuff in the house.

An echo rang in his heart and head—an anthem of unending loss. Not of Chloe herself—he’d accepted that a year before her death—but loss of hope. He’d lost something vital inside himself long before her death, and he’d never found it again.

At the door, Sylvie spoke again. ‘Mark?’

He gripped a dining chair, knowing that whatever she was about to say would be unexpected. She wasn’t fooled by his cover. She didn’t see him as the Heart of Ice, wasn’t intimidated by his anger, wasn’t over-awed by his power or wealth. She saw Mark. She knew what he’d once been—believed that boy was still inside him somewhere—and that scared the living daylights out of him. He couldn’t be that person again. He couldn’t open his heart to any woman. Even Sylvie.

Especially Sylvie. She was everything he’d avoided for fifteen years—the kind of woman who’d take what was left of his heart and soul and rip it to shreds.

‘What?’ He closed his eyes, waiting for the blow. He already knew she had that power.

When she spoke, he heard the shaking in her voice as strongly as he felt the trembling in his limbs. ‘Chloe deserves you to have bought this house for her. She deserves to be remembered and to be loved still. And you deserve this refuge. Time out from the cold and uncaring person you never were inside.’

He hung on to the chair like grim death as pain raced through his body and soul like a heat blast, leaving him scalded and weak. She doesn’t know the truth. Don’t tell her. Don’t say it!

‘Just go. Please.’ The words came out in a strangled voice.

The door closed behind her, and he was left alone with the endless ghost of grief, guilt and regret. All he wanted now was to talk to a friend in a black-labelled bottle.

He’d been wishing that for the past fifteen years. All he could drown himself in now was meaningless sex…and it never helped him forget who he was. What he was.

Sylvie closed the door of her new home, closed her eyes and gulped in shaking breaths.

She should never have said it. The agony in his eyes had told the truth about the infamous Heart of Ice. He wrapped himself inside a coldness that could shatter at a touch. But it was nothing but a delicate veneer, hiding his private emotions from a world that didn’t want to see, didn’t want to know the man beneath the legend.

So stupid! She’d known it was too early.

If he snarled at her like that again he wouldn’t have to fire her; she’d run like the frightened jackrabbit she was—even though she knew he’d never hurt her.

Leaning against the door, because she didn’t think her legs would carry her further, she kept trying to breathe while her ears strained for the sound of his footsteps. She was pulling herself together, ready to smile in the face of disaster. Waiting and waiting.

Only the soft lapping of waves behind her cottage greeted her.

He wasn’t coming. Of course he wasn’t—because he was Mark and she was Shirley Temple, the girl who’d handed him a wet flannel, a few glasses of water, given him some hugs and held his hand. And yet he’d treasured what little she’d done for him enough to seek the family out and save them when she’d reached desperate measures to pay the rent and put food on the table, with threats of Welfare stepping in to take the boys away.