His Housekeeper Bride. Melissa James

of grief, guilt and regret. All he wanted now was to talk to a friend in a black-labelled bottle.

      He’d been wishing that for the past fifteen years. All he could drown himself in now was meaningless sex…and it never helped him forget who he was. What he was.

      Sylvie closed the door of her new home, closed her eyes and gulped in shaking breaths.

      She should never have said it. The agony in his eyes had told the truth about the infamous Heart of Ice. He wrapped himself inside a coldness that could shatter at a touch. But it was nothing but a delicate veneer, hiding his private emotions from a world that didn’t want to see, didn’t want to know the man beneath the legend.

      So stupid! She’d known it was too early.

      If he snarled at her like that again he wouldn’t have to fire her; she’d run like the frightened jackrabbit she was—even though she knew he’d never hurt her.

      Leaning against the door, because she didn’t think her legs would carry her further, she kept trying to breathe while her ears strained for the sound of his footsteps. She was pulling herself together, ready to smile in the face of disaster. Waiting and waiting.

      Only the soft lapping of waves behind her cottage greeted her.

      He wasn’t coming. Of course he wasn’t—because he was Mark and she was Shirley Temple, the girl who’d handed him a wet flannel, a few glasses of water, given him some hugs and held his hand. And yet he’d treasured what little she’d done for him enough to seek the family out and save them when she’d reached desperate measures to pay the rent and put food on the table, with threats of Welfare stepping in to take the boys away.

      From the moment Brenda had recognised her at the job interview today, her words had cemented what Sylvie had long suspected. Mark’s family loved him but didn’t understand him. They wanted to push him into happiness so they could stop worrying about him. It was love, but not the love he needed.

      Just like her brother Simon, who tried to match her up with men all the time: men who were gentle, who wouldn’t rush her. Men who might as well have been invisible for all she could feel for them.

      ‘Stop reaching for the stars,’ Simon always said. ‘You’ll never see him again.’

      But she’d rather live her life alone than with any man who wasn’t the one. Mark had been her childhood prince, but he might have faded from her memory if he hadn’t saved her life, saved her family…saved her from the unbearable choice facing her when the money came. And the prince of her little-girl fantasies had become her teenage hero. Then finally, when she’d seen the tabloid stories on him, seen the frozen suffering beneath the wolfish smile, he’d become her love, so entwined in her heart she’d never leave him behind.

      The Heart of Ice wasn’t the boy she remembered, who’d stood beside a dying girl for years, even marrying her rather than running when it all became too hard. The boy who’d felt sick at the thought of giving a promise to love another girl because it would be a lie. Maybe all he wanted was to be left in peace with his memories but she’d given a promise, made sacred by death. At the right time she’d given up her home, her job security—and most importantly, her secure anonymity—to come to Mark and keep her vow.

      Though she had nothing to speak of, she had something she could give Mark that he didn’t have: a true home, a friend…And if she could pull off a miracle, maybe she could help him learn to live again.