Undertaking Love Page 0,62

hogging all of her time.

His little tiger stirred against his thigh at the thought of Marla in flagrante on her white cotton sheets, and he stepped into the shower to let the beast roar.

Marla lay on her back and stared at the smooth white bedroom ceiling. Pointless anger surged through her as her mother and Brynn banged around in the kitchen downstairs. She craved the solitude of an empty cottage and her own counsel. The idea of going downstairs to rake over the coals of last night’s events turned her stomach. She dragged the quilt over her head and closed her eyes, but still the memories played behind her eyelids. Everyone around their table last night had fallen silent the moment that Rupert dropped down on one knee. Actually, a Mexican wave of silence had fallen over the entire restaurant. She’d even spotted the chef pop out from the kitchens to lean against the doorframe with a spatula in his hand.

No pressure, then.

Time had seemed to slow down Matrix-style as Marla glanced around at the faces of her nearest and dearest.

Her mother, fascinated.

Emily, shocked.

Tom, grinning like a drunken loon.

Melanie, outraged. Outraged? What was that woman’s problem?

Jonny, surreptitiously shaking his head from side to side and mouthing ‘say no’.

And finally Gabe, whose expression she’d been unable to read at all. Her eyes had moved from his to Rupert’s, who had sprung onto to his feet to stare expectantly at her.

Had she actually said the word yes? Had she? Surely not.

She’d cried, certainly, which Rupert had presumed to be tears of joy and popped the cork on a celebratory champagne bottle he’d produced out of thin air.

Could she love Rupert? She lay still and tried the idea on for size. It was too big. It swamped her. She was fond of him, but fond wasn’t the same thing at all, was it? Love was bigger than her feelings for Rupert. More painful, more blinding, more destructive. Rupert was good company. He could make her laugh and he could make her come, but that was really all she wanted from him. Up until last night she’d assumed he felt the same way.

Strictly between Marla and her coffee cup, the fact that she could never emotionally invest in him was one of his main attractions. Poor Rupert. He wasn’t to know that the local wedding guru had an acute case of love-phobia, was he?

Marla flipped face down into the mattress and decided to stay in bed, because, for better or worse, she had an engagement to break off when she did get up.

Gabe hit the accelerator, breaking the speed limit by a long way in an attempt to blow away his anger and frustration from the night before. What a fucking fiasco. Melanie had managed to royally screw up the arrangements for the work dinner to the extent that the rest of the staff had ended up in a completely different restaurant ten miles away. He’d been almost grateful for Marla’s pushy mother’s insistence that they gatecrash their party, right up to the point when Rupert had dropped down on one knee. Gabe stamped down hard on the accelerator and wished wholeheartedly that it was actually Rupert’s throat under his foot.

Why the hell had Marla agreed to marry that spineless excuse for a man?

The possibility that she might truly love Rupert bled into his consciousness and refused to go away, even at breakneck speed.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Marla left the cottage before her mother and Brynn had a chance to surface on Monday morning. If she’d had to stomach any more wedding talk she’d have thrown up her muesli all over the kitchen table.

She stirred sugar into her coffee in the quiet chapel kitchen and wondered why Cecilia seemed to have completely forgotten about Marla’s profession as a wedding coordinator and insisted on taking over. But then, her mother did have far more personal experience in the matter than most women, she mused uncharitably as she made her way upstairs to her office.

Marla couldn’t handle any more questions.

Dresses. Bridesmaids. Cupcake tower or traditional wedding cake?

She had ended up drinking too much red wine and lurking in her room like a teenager.

Not the most auspicious start to an engagement, she admitted to Jonny when he arrived half an hour later and listened to her grumble over tea and HobNobs.

‘Marla, darling.’ He crossed his legs gracefully and screwed up his nose. ‘Do you actually want to marry Henry?’

‘Rupert,’ Marla corrected with a frown.

‘Sorry, he’s Hooray Henry in my head.’