Liz Fielding – Fairytale Christmas: Mistletoe and the Lost Stiletto / Her Holiday Prince Charming / A Princess by Christmas (страница 2)
Mistletoe and the Lost Stiletto
Liz Fielding
Lucy was drowning in raw sensation. Lying in the arms of a total stranger, drowning in the quicksilver heat of his eyes, his touch, parting her lips to gasp in air, struggling to breathe.
What was she thinking? What was she doing?
On some distant level she knew she had to move, run, but here, now, only the most primitive sensations were getting through…
She squirmed away from him in alarm, using her hands and feet to scrabble backwards.
“No!”
It was the cry of a man bereft.
“Stop!”
But the urgency of Nathaniel’s words spurred her on, dodging through moving shoppers, taking the stairs two at a time, fear driving her escape.
Nathaniel forced himself to move, pick up the shoe that had tumbled unnoticed from her bag.
He turned it in his hand.
It bore an expensive, high-end designer label at odds with the damp edge around the platform sole, splashes of pavement dirt on the slender and very high, very slender stiletto heel. This was not a shoe for walking in the rain. It had been made to ride in limousines, walk along red carpets, to be worn by the consorts of very rich men. The kind who employed bodyguards…
LIZ FIELDING was born with itchy feet. She made it to Zambia before her twenty-first birthday and, gathering her own special hero and a couple of children on the way, lived in Botswana, Kenya and Bahrain – with pauses for sightseeing pretty much everywhere in between. She now lives in the west of England, close to the Regency grandeur of Bath and the ancient mystery of Stonehenge, and these days leaves her pen to do the travelling.
For news of upcoming books visit Liz’s website: lizfielding.com
Wednesday, 1st December
RUBBING at the base of her engagement ring with her thumb so that the huge diamond sparkled, Lucy Bright made an effort to shake off the feeling that things weren’t quite as fairy tale as media coverage of her romance with Rupert Henshawe would suggest. Determined to shake off the feeling, she logged into Twitter to update her followers on what she’d be doing for the rest of the day.
‘Is that the time?’ Lucy squeaked.
‘We are running a little late, miss.’ Rupert’s chauffeur held the umbrella aloft as she ran from the photoshoot to the car.
‘There’s no time to go home for the wedding file, Gordon. We’ll have to stop by the office.’ Rupert’s deadly efficient PA maintained a duplicate in the office. She could borrow that.
‘LIAR!’
The only sound in the room was the clatter of motor drives as tycoon, Rupert—just-call-me-Prince-Charming—Henshawe’s press conference was hijacked by his fiancée, Lucy—I-feel-like-Cinderella—Bright as she tugged off her engagement ring and flung it at him.
‘Cheat!’
Every lens in the room zoomed in on the bright splash of blood where the huge diamond found its mark on Henshawe’s cheek.
The gathered press pack—city newsmen, financial pundits, television news teams—held their collective breath.
They’d been summoned to a full dress press conference by the Henshawe Corporation. Whatever Henshawe did was news. Good news if you were one of his shareholders. Bad news if you happened to be on the receiving end of one of his corporate raids. At least until recently.
The news now was all about how he’d changed. How, having met his ‘Cinderella’, he had been redeemed by love and was no longer Mr Nasty, but had been transformed into Prince Charming.
Boring.
This was much more like it.
‘Why?’ Lucy demanded, ignoring the cameras, the mikes, dangled overhead, pushed towards her face. The larger than life-sized images of herself, wearing her own custom-made originals of the Lucy B fashions, being flashed across a screen. All she could see was the man on the podium. ‘Why did you do it?’
Stupid question. It was all there in the file she’d found. The one she was never meant to see. All laid out in black and white.
‘Lucy! Darling…’ Rupert’s voice was deceptively soft as, using the power of the microphone in front of him, he drowned out her demand to know
His smile was tender, all concern for her. It was familiar, reassuring and even now it would be so easy to be sucked in…
‘I don’t know what’s upset you but it’s obvious that you’re tired. Let Gordon take you home and we’ll talk about it later, hmm?’
She had to fight the almost hypnotic softness of his voice. Her own weakness. Her longing for the fairy tale that had overtaken her life, transformed her into a celebrity, to be true.
She had a Lucy B fan page on Facebook, half a million people following her every word on Twitter. She was a modern day Cinderella, whisked from the hearth to a palace, her rags replaced with silken gowns. But Prince Charming’s ‘bride ball’ had been a palace-generated crowd-pleaser, too. There was nothing like a royal wedding to keep the masses happy.