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“Let’s start again. Imagine you’re in love with me,” Mary ordered him.
Tyler blew out an irritable breath, but turned obediently back to study her.
She looked different tonight, he realized, looking at her properly for the first time. Her hair was a soft cloud around her face. She was wearing a floaty sort of skirt, and a top with a plunging neckline that emphasized her generous cleavage. Beneath it she wore a lacy camisole, the discreet glimpse of which hinted deliciously at hidden delights, and made Tyler’s head spin suddenly with images of sexy lingerie and silk stockings.
He swallowed. “All right,” he said. “I’m imagining.”
The odd thing was that the more he looked at her, the more he could imagine it. Not the whole being in love thing, obviously, but it wasn’t that difficult to imagine wanting to kiss her, wanting to discover if those lips were as sweet as they looked, wanting to unwrap that top and see what that lace was concealing.
“What am I supposed to say?” Tyler asked
“Make me believe that you love me,” she said.
Jessica Hart
Vibrant, fresh and cosmopolitan, Jessica Hart creates stories bursting with emotional warmth and sparkling romance!
Jessica Hart won the prestigious RITA® Award for Best Traditional Romance 2005!
You’ll love her sparkling stories—they are the essence of feel-good romance!
Barefoot Bride #3939
Business Arrangement Bride
Jessica Hart
MILLS & BOON
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Jessica Hart was born in West Africa, and has suffered from itchy feet ever since, traveling and working around the world in a wide variety of interesting but very lowly jobs, all of which have provided inspiration to draw from when it comes to the settings and plots of her stories. Now she lives a rather more settled existence in York, where she has been able to pursue her interest in history, although she still yearns sometimes for wider horizons. If you’d like to know more about Jessica, visit her Web site, www.jessicahart.co.uk
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
WHERE had he seen her before?
Tyler watched the woman across the room as she smiled and shook hands with a group of men in suits. He had noticed her as soon as she arrived, and it had been bugging him ever since that he couldn’t work out why she seemed so elusively familiar.
It wasn’t as if she was the kind of woman who would normally catch his eye. Apart from that luminous smile, there was nothing remarkable about her at all. She had nondescript features and messy brown hair, and she was squeezed into a suit that was much too small for her. Stylish and beautiful she definitely wasn’t.
And yet…there was something about her. Tyler couldn’t put his finger on it and it was making him cross. He was a man who liked to know exactly what he was dealing with, and he was irritated by the fact that his gaze kept snagging on this very ordinary-looking woman who was taking not the slightest notice of him.
He had been watching her for nearly an hour as she circulated easily around the crowded room. She obviously had the ability to relate to people that he so conspicuously lacked, according to Julia, anyway.
‘You’re a lovely person, Ty,’ his best friend’s wife had told him with her usual candour, ‘but honestly, you’ve got the social skills of a rhinoceros!’
Tyler scowled at the memory.
Unaware that his glower had caused several of the people around him to flinch visibly, he took a morose sip of champagne and surveyed the crowded foyer of his new building. He hated occasions like this. He couldn’t be bothered with all the social chit-chat that woman seemed to be able to do so well, but his PR director had insisted that a reception to mark the opening of his controversial new headquarters would be politic. So now he was stuck here in a roomful of civic dignitaries and businesspeople, all of whom seemed to be hovering, hoping for a chance to ingratiate themselves, to lobby for his support for their pet schemes or to suggest mutually beneficial business opportunities. They all wanted to talk to him.
All except her.
She hadn’t so much as glanced his way all evening.
Some councillor was boring on about the city’s local transport plan, and Tyler let his gaze wander over the room once more, wondering how long it would be before he could decently leave. Why had he agreed to such a tedious PR exercise anyway?
Suddenly he realised that he couldn’t see the woman any more, and he felt oddly jolted to have lost her. Frowning, he searched the crowd with hard eyes. Had she gone? Surely she would have—
Ah, there she was! She had found a quiet corner by herself and was easing off her high-heeled shoes. Tyler saw her grimace. Her feet were obviously killing her. If she had any sense she would go soon, and he would never find out who she was. The thought was oddly unsettling.
He could ask someone, he supposed, but the group around him were still droning on about Park and Ride schemes.
Or he could go over and ask her himself.
‘Excuse me,’ he said brusquely—who said he didn’t have social skills?—and, leaving the rest of them in mid bus lane, as it were, he headed across the room towards her.
In her quiet corner near the