Jessica Hart - Business Arrangement Bride

“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

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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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

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

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 lifts, Mary was surreptitiously wriggling the toes on her left foot and wishing she had the nerve to take off her right shoe as well.

The shoes had seemed a good idea when she’d put them on too. The news that Tyler Watts, the North’s very own bad boy made good, was moving the headquarters of his phenomenally successful property company out of London and back to York had riveted the business community, while his construction of a cutting edge building on the river front had divided opinion across the city. It had outraged conservationists and delighted others who claimed it as stunning proof that the city could not only hold on to its historical heritage but also stake a claim as being at the fore-front of architectural design in the twenty-first century.

Either way, the champagne reception to celebrate its opening was certain to be the networking opportunity of the year, and Mary was determined to make the most of it. She wouldn’t be the only one lobbying for a contract with Watts Holdings, and she might make some useful contacts even if she didn’t get the big one.

So she had chosen her outfit carefully. This was her first public outing as a professional woman since Bea’s birth, and she wanted to look elegant and…well, professional. A smart suit and stylish shoes would create the perfect impression. Mary knew; she had read all the magazines.

Sadly, the magazines didn’t tell you what to do when you realised, five minutes before you were due to go out, that you were a good two sizes larger than you had been the last time you put on your best suit. Nor did they remind you what agony it was standing around on high heels, and that was before you tried walking on what some bone-headed architect had decided was cutting edge flooring, apparently forgetting that a glassy sheen was more appropriate to an ice rink than an office building.