The Bachelor's Bargain. Jessica Steele

didn’t like it. ‘You’d deceive them, carry on deceiving them? For a year?’

      ‘Until Piers gets back and they can turn their attentions on him.’

      She still didn’t like it. ‘Can’t you just explain that you don’t want their attention? That you’re happy as you are?’

      ‘Do you think I haven’t tried?’

      ‘It didn’t work?’

      ‘Three weeks at most is the longest they’ve backed off. You’ve a family yourself. You know the pressure that sometimes brings.’ Didn’t she just! If it wasn’t for Robert and that two thousand pounds he needed she wouldn’t be in this mess. ‘Friends, acquaintances, they understand the word “No”; families just don’t recognise it. Unfortunately, where you can tell friends or acquaintances where to go, if you’re so minded, some family members—who take liberties friends wouldn’t dream of entertaining—cannot be told.’

      ‘But have to be shown?’ Merren queried.

      ‘Exactly.’

      Merren still didn’t like it any better. But she owed him. ‘What would I have to do?’ she asked reluctantly.

      ‘Probably nothing at all,’ Jarad answered. ‘But if for the next twelve months you could be “on call”, as it were, it should resolve matters to everyone’s satisfaction.’

      ‘By “on call” you mean, let you have my phone number, and be available to drive here the moment you ring—that sort of thing?’

      ‘I doubt very much that I’ll have to bother you,’ Jarad commented easily. ‘Though, with your permission, I’d like to drop your name into the conversation whenever I feel it appropriate. My mother seldom calls to see me—which is why today’s visit has such ominous overtones. Ye gods, my brother only left the country a couple of days ago!’

      ‘You—um—don’t think you’re being just a little unfair to your mother and sister—fooling them…?’

      ‘Unfair! Was it fair of them to poke their matrimonially-minded noses in, and then to spoil what is a very enjoyable lifestyle?’

      ‘Life’s a toad!’ she commiserated, though with not much sympathy. But seriously needed to recap. ‘You’re saying, Mr Montgomery, that all I have to do to repay that loan is to be ready to shoot over here to your home occasionally when the call comes?’

      ‘The situation may never arise, as I’ve said. But that’s about it.’

      ‘Two thousand pounds seems a lot of money to pay for something that may never arise,’ her innate honesty compelled her to point out.

      Steady grey eyes pinned her deeply blue ones. ‘Call it a retainer,’ he suggested, and before she could comment on that, he added, ‘Just in case, you’d better recite the name “Jarad” ten times a day.’

      Merren laughed. She guessed it wouldn’t look good were she to dash ‘on call’ to see him, to greet him as ‘Mr Montgomery’ in front of his mother. ‘I’ll practise,’ she promised, and, unable to think of anything else they might need to discuss, she got to her feet.

      Jarad went to the front door with her. But before he opened it he looked down at her as they stood there, and told her, ‘I think you and I are going to fare very well together, Merren Shepherd.’ Then he gave a sigh, ‘Such a pity—I may never need to see you again.’

      Merren laughed again. He seemed to have that effect on her—or was it just that she was relieved that she wasn’t going to have to work every night and all weekends? ‘We can only hope,’ she grinned, and went home still smiling.

      When she thought over all that had been said, as she did on that drive home, Merren realised that, when it came to it, even though it was pretty obvious that she’d have to drop everything and dash if his phone call came—a two-thousand-pound retainer wasn’t half bad.

      She pulled up at her home, fancying that she could see a glimmer of a silver lining behind her dark cloud.

      CHAPTER THREE

      SUNDAY passed with Merren unable to get Jarad Montgomery out of her head. Today it seemed incredible to her that all she had to do to earn the money he had so generously given her was to pretend, though only to his mother and sister, that she and Jarad were an ‘item’.

      All she had to do in order to earn that ‘retainer’, it seemed, was to respond to a telephone call—that, according to Jarad, might never come—and rush to his home. Merren owned that she wasn’t very comfortable with the idea of having taken that money when most likely she would have to do absolutely nothing to earn it. On the other hand, she wasn’t very comfortable either with the notion of deliberately taking part in the deception of his two female relatives if called upon to do so.

      Having thought that, as the days progressed, the arrangement she had agreed with Jarad would sit more comfortably with her, she found herself mistaken. She woke up on Monday—and it didn’t seem right. And on Tuesday she knew that it just wasn’t right—and that nothing would make it right. Nothing would except paying him back that two thousand. It had nothing to do with pride—they had made a bargain. But she was getting the better part of the bargain—and she should never have agreed to it, should never have taken the money.

      Merren couldn’t think what else she could have done in the circumstances but have agreed to it—and have taken that money. But as she made her way home from her place of work that night—Robert had borrowed her car—she decided that as soon as her brother found himself a job and was no longer in need of her help she would start saving, and would pay Jarad Montgomery back every penny.

      Perhaps it was pride after all, she mused as she turned into the avenue where she lived. In any event, it was important to her that she lost the ‘waif and stray’ label that Jarad had once stuck on her.

      All thoughts of the man she had made that most unusual contract with went abruptly, though only temporarily, from her mind when, reaching the house, she saw a dilapidated old car standing on the drive.

      Hoping against hope that Robert hadn’t accumulated fresh debt by purchasing the piece of scrap metal, or, worse, that he hadn’t done a part exchange deal, handing her car in for cash and that rusting heap, Merren hurried indoors and was relived on two fronts. The car wasn’t a new acquisition of her brother’s. It belonged to her father—her father had arrived.

      ‘When did you get here?’ she asked, after greeting him.

      ‘About ten minutes ago. Carol was going to make me something to eat, but…’

      Carol, a tired and worn-out-looking Carol had her hands full with yelling Samuel and peevish Queenie and Kitty, who ‘didn’t want to’ whatever was suggested.

      Merren automatically held out her arms for the baby. He still yelled, but at least Carol looked relieved to hand him over for a few minutes while she had a stern parental word with her daughters.

      ‘Can you stay for a few days?’ Merren asked her father, when the baby’s cries had lessened a few decibels.

      ‘I thought I might,’ he replied, and Merren relinquished the attic bedroom, to which she had so recently moved. Still, the sitting room sofa was large, and at five foot eight, she was of slender build, and it would only be for a few days.

      She heard her car on the drive, and when Robert came in, and had greeted their father, she handed the baby to her brother and set about making a meal for them all. She sorely wanted to ask her father if he’d received her letter, if he’d arrived in response to it. Oh, wouldn’t it be wonderful if he’d come to help them out of the financial mess they were in?

      Correction, the financial mess she was in. By now Robert was debt-free. But she would much prefer to owe her father two thousand than she would Jarad Montgomery.