Love By Proxy. Diana Palmer

paper back home and would marry me on a sunny day if it weren’t too inconvenient and didn’t happen on press day.”

      Jeanette laughed softly. “We’re going to get along very well. Yes, we are.”

      Amelia thought so, too. But when she came out two hours later, Wentworth Carson was waiting outside in the yard, hands in pockets and glaring holes in her.

      “What a snit we’re in,” Amelia chided. “Talk about bad-tempered people…”

      “It is not my fault you lost your job,” he told her bluntly. “And I like my life as it is. I want no part of you here. Tell my grandmother you won’t take the job.”

      “I like your grandmother,” she said curtly. “She’s just like my mother, crusty and unflappable and impossible to fool. I’ll take care of her.”

      He stared harder. “In return for what?” he asked, narrowed eyes telling her everything he wasn’t saying.

      “How often is she taken advantage of?” she asked instead.

      “Her heart is as big as the world,” he said. “She likes strays.”

      “I am not a stray. I have owners.”

      “Go home.”

      “I can’t.”

      “Why?”

      “Because I’d have to marry Henry!” she burst out. “If he’d still have me after he saw a copy of this morning’s paper. My reputation will be in shreds.”

      “Why not marry Henry?” He frowned.

      “Because the most exciting thing he ever said to me was, ‘Amy, your nose has a crook in it.’”

      His eyebrows lifted. “Not a passionate man.”

      “No.”

      His dark eyes roamed over her neat suit. “Are you a passionate woman?”

      “That’s something you’ll never need to know. I am going to work for your grandmother, not get involved with you,” she told him firmly.

      One corner of his disciplined mouth turned up. “She likes you. She’ll spend her days throwing you at my head and her nights finding more ways to get us married.”

      “You’re safe,” she told him, turning toward her old Ford. “I don’t like older men.”

      “Forty is not old,” he said shortly.

      “At twenty-eight, it is old,” she returned, facing him squarely. “I want somebody to play with.”

      He started laughing, and only then did she realize how he’d interpreted what she said. Her face flamed.

      “Baseball!” she burst out. “Tennis and swimming and jogging, not…not…that!”

      He laughed harder. She didn’t say another word. She crawled into her car and managed with the greatest of difficulty to get it turned around and headed out of the yard. He was still standing there laughing when she drove away.

      Four

      Amelia showed up for work the next morning at eight-thirty sharp, wearing a sedate gray ensemble that made her pale blue eyes look slate-gray to match it. The skirt and knit blouse were worn with a trendy little short-sleeved cotton jacket, and she put her hair in a neat bun. She wasn’t giving Wentworth Carson any cause for complaint with the way she dressed.

      When she pulled up in front of the house, a short, elderly yardman motioned her to move the car down to the garage. She cranked the engine again, with difficulty. The old yellow Ford had a habit of refusing to turn on again after the engine got hot. It was one of those ghostly problems that several mechanics hadn’t been able to solve, so she lived with it. But today it did crank, eventually, and she pulled it with a clank and a clatter down to the elegant, spacious garage where Wentworth’s Rolls and a Mercedes were parked.

      It made her feel odd, parking between two such luxurious vehicles, and she was half afraid that she might accidentally scratch one of them. But it was obvious that Wentworth didn’t want her pitiful old wreck parked in front of his house. And that irritated her no end. Snob, she thought angrily.

      She’d worked herself into a fever of resentment by the time she got to the front door. Well, he needn’t think she was going to skulk up the back stairs like a servant. She was as good as he was, any day!

      The maid opened the door for her with a smile. “Come in, please. Mrs. Carson is still asleep, but Mr. Worth said you’re to have breakfast with him in the dining room. Follow me, please.”

      Breakfast with Worth, she thought, how lucky could a working girl get?

      He was sitting at the head of the table with a cup of coffee and a pile of toast at his elbow. He glanced up when she came into the room, his eyes dark and steady and expressionless.

      “What a treat,” he taunted. “Breakfast with the terror of the Egyptian tombs.”

      “I am not a mummy,” she countered. “And I don’t want breakfast.”

      “Yes, it’s patently obvious that you rarely eat,” he commented, glancing at her. “But if you work here, you’ll need to. You see,” he added, leaning back with a disgustingly confident smile on his tanned face, “my grandmother and I have an arrangement about you.”

      This sounded unpleasant. She sat down gingerly and eyed him suspiciously. “You have?”

      “Yes. I don’t have a private secretary. And since you’ll be here all day, every day—” he made it sound like a waking curse “—and since grandmother will need you for only a few hours a day, we’ve decided to share you.”

      Her skin chilled. “I don’t want to be shared.”

      “But then, it isn’t your choice,” he reminded her. “You can always go home and marry Henry,” he suggested mildly.

      She shuddered delicately. “Even working for you wouldn’t be that bad.”

      “Should I be flattered?” he murmured dryly. He lifted his head, craggy features relaxing a little as he studied her face. “It must take layers of makeup,” he said absently.

      He surprised her. “What?” she stammered.

      “Your complexion,” he explained. “It’s much too perfect to be natural.”

      “I use soap,” she said curtly. “Nothing else, not even powder. I don’t like artificial things.”

      “Neither do I,” he returned. His tanned fingers toyed with a spoon in his coffee. He was wearing a blue jacket with a white shirt and a speckled tie, and he looked every inch a business magnate. But the muscles under that jacket were formidable, and they rippled with every movement he made. His hair seemed even darker under the light, neat and clean, and there was a faint darkness where he shaved, as if he needed to shave often. His mouth fascinated her. She kept remembering how it felt on hers, how expert it had been. He was the kind of man who could have had any woman he wanted, and she was secretly glad that her powers of resistance weren’t going to be tested by him. She would have been defenseless in any kind of confrontation, and she wouldn’t have the sophistication to hold him. He could have broken her heart, and she was delighted that he wasn’t going to try.

      “She’s very fragile,” she ventured as she poured coffee from the carafe into a delicate china cup and added cream.

      “What?”

      “Your grandmother,” she returned. “How did she break her hip?”

      “Trying to learn how to break dance.”

      Amelia had just taken a mouthful of coffee and almost strangled on it. She gaped at him.

      “That’s right,” he said calmly. He sipped his own coffee.