‘Sometimes you really annoy me, Lucas.’ Right now he was doing rather more than annoying her. Right now she wished that he would return to his obsessive contemplation of whatever high-powered deal he was in the middle of making, because his attention on her was making her feel all hot and bothered.
Having travelled with nothing suitable to wear for warmer temperatures, she was in a thermal T-shirt, jeans, her thick socks and trainers and the whole ensemble made her skin itch.
‘I’m just trying to... Wondering how...to pretend to be someone I’m not.’
‘You mean how to pretend to be someone in a relationship with me?’
‘I’ve never done anything like this before. I’m not the sort of girl who likes fooling people. It doesn’t seem kind and, whether you want to believe me or not, yes, the paybacks will certainly make my life a whole lot easier when I get back to London but mostly I’m doing this because I hate thinking that your mother’s had her hopes raised only to have them dashed, and cruelly dashed at that. I honestly can’t believe that anyone could tell such a horrendous lie to someone who hasn’t been well, just to get revenge because you let her down.
‘Has your mother ever been keen on any of your girlfriends?’
‘Not that I can recall offhand...’ And that had never bothered him until she began making noises about wanting him to settle down because ‘who knew what lay round the corner for her?’.
He knew what she thought of the Isobels of his life, the never-ending stream of decorative supermodels who enjoyed basking in his reflective glow; who simpered, acquiesced and tailored themselves to his needs. He, personally, had no problem with any of those traits; his work life was high-powered and stressed enough without adding more stress to the tally in the form of a demanding girlfriend. His mother, always grounded, was of a different opinion.
It occurred to him that this little game of make-believe might have an unexpected benefit.
Milly was as normal and as natural as the day was long. Were it not for his inherently suspicious nature, he would truly believe that, as she had stated, she had agreed to this well-intentioned charade from the goodness of her heart. She was just the sort of wholesome girl he would never seriously consider as a life partner in a million years. No; like it or not, if and when he decided to tie the knot, it would be with someone who saw marriage through the same eyes as his. It would be with someone who didn’t need his money, someone who understood the frailty of the institution and recognised, as he did, that marriage stood a far better chance of success if it was approached as a business proposition.
If his mother saw for himself just how unsuited he was for a girl like Milly—and for Milly read all women like her—not only would she accept it when they ‘broke up’ but she would understand that her dreams of romance and falling in love were not his. She would get it that his plans for himself lay in a different direction. It would be a salutary learning curve that would succeed where explanations had in the past failed.
‘My mother is a firm believer in true love and happy-ever-after endings,’ Lucas intoned with a corrosive cynicism he made no attempt to disguise. ‘She married the man she fell in love with as a teenager and they stayed married and in love until the day he died. She has high hopes that I might continue the tradition and she doesn’t see it happening in the arms of any of the supermodels I’ve ever dated.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with true love and happy-ever-after endings. You might have had one bad experience, but you can’t knock the real thing because of that.’
‘I’m surprised to hear you say that after what you’ve been through.’ But he wasn’t. She struck him as just the sort of hopeless romantic who nurtured secret dreams of the walk down the aisle in a big wedding dress, with a sprawling line of best-friend bridesmaids in her wake. The sort of girl who eagerly looked forward to testing her culinary skills in her very own kitchen while lots of little Millies pitter-pattered at her feet. Just the sort of girl his mother imagined for him and precisely the sort of girl he would run a mile from, because he’d had his learning curve when it came to all that nonsense about love.