Sharon Kendrik - Make-Over Marriage

‘And they are...?’ He looked around.

‘Dancing. Downstairs.’

‘And don’t you want to dance?’ he questioned, thinking that it would be heaven to have her swaying in his arms to the music.

Anna considered the question briefly. She wouldn’t have minded dancing with him . Not one bit. But did she dare risk taking him back downstairs to the dance floor? He was the best-looking man she had seen all night. Wouldn’t the others just leap all over him, like slavering dogs confronted with a bone? ‘Not really,’ she shrugged. ‘It’s too crowded.’

‘A drink, then? Or a coffee, perhaps?’

‘Oh, I’d love a coffee,’ she said fervently. ‘Do they sell it here?’

He shuddered. ‘I believe they do a foul brown liquid masquerading as coffee but I know a little expresso bar just around the corner which serves the best coffee in the whole of London. If you’re interested, that is?’

Anna hesitated. She had listened and learnt her lessons in personal safety well, and yet some bone-deep instinct told her that she could trust this man.

‘Bring along a chaperon, if it makes you happier,’ he prompted gently as he correctly interpreted her hesitation.

No fear! Anna shook her head and her bright blonde hair shimmered in the subdued bar lighting. ‘That won’t be necessary—I happen to have a black belt in karate, in case I need protecting.’

‘Do you really?’ he quizzed her in admiration.

‘No!’ she laughed. ‘But I had you worried there for a moment, didn’t I?’

He laughed back. ‘Todd Travers,’ he murmured, and held his hand out.

‘Anna Marshall,’ she told him as they shook hands.

They spent an innocent and absorbing hour over coffee, though afterwards Anna could barely remember what they had talked about. She was glad that she had paid so much attention to all her subjects in class, and also glad that her father had always insisted she read the newspapers thoroughly, because she was more than able to hold her own with the remarkably well-informed Todd Travers.

They stepped out together into the neon-lit street and he hailed a black cab, then accompanied her back to Knightsbridge. Anna was awfully glad that it was dark, because she started blushing wildly when the driver pulled over outside her building, desperate for Todd to ask to see her again.

Todd had tussled with his conscience during the journey. She was not like the women he usually dated. There was something pure and clean about her which, ironically, made him feel awfully protective of her, an emotion he had only ever experienced with his little sister, and his friend from school, Elisabeta. And he had never fancied Elisabeta...

As the cab stopped, his conscience got the better of him, and he forced himself to ask, ‘Just how old are you, Anna?’

It was the moment of truth and Anna refused to heed it.

‘Twenty,’ she told him blithely, saw his relieved smile, and the die was cast.

During the next few weeks, Anna managed to meet with Todd every single day, while keeping him well away from her father. This proved to be easy since Todd had no desire to share her company with anyone else, and she felt exactly the same about him.

She was evasive when she chose to be, telling him simply that she was on her Easter vacation; when he assumed that she was at university, she let him carry on believing it, justifying it by telling herself that she would be at college before long. She, who was normally as honest as the day was long, soon discovered that deception was terribly, terribly easy when you wanted something badly enough.

And Anna wanted Todd...

She didn’t care that she was duping him. She had fallen in love with him, but knew that he would drop her like a hot potato if she told him how old she really was. And love was love. Anna had already lost her mother; it had made her grow up fast. More than most people she recognised the ephemeral nature of happiness—embraced the idea that you had to grab at it when you got the chance, because you never knew when it might be snatched away from you. She would, she decided, do almost anything to keep Todd Travers in her life...

Todd was in far deeper than he wanted to be too; he had never been in love before either, and it had knocked him for six. For the first time in his life, he was conscious of being in the throes of something much more powerful and much more exciting than reason.

In a way, his life had been as fractured as Anna’s. He had inherited a run-down plastics factory in Islington on his eighteenth birthday, and this had played a big part in his decision not to take up a scholarship to Oxford. His father had gambled away what little money the family had left, before running off to Australia and dying penniless just a year later from an excess of alcohol.

It had been left to Todd to support his mother and little sister, and the anger he had felt at his father’s betrayal he had channelled into turning the factory into a dynamic and successful business manufacturing luxurious ice-creams made out of the best natural ingredients. It had been a perfectly timed strategy. People were just beginning to rebel against impersonal mass production and were prepared to pay more for quality. Todd hadn’t realised at the time that he was setting a trend, but then he had always been ahead of his time.

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