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strange expression on his dark face. For a minute she wondered if she had annoyed him. Then he turned from his contemplation of the glowing logs and looked down at her.
    “Andrea, will you marry me?” he asked softly.

 
    CHAPTER TWO
    Andrea stared at him incredulously.
    “You seem surprised,” he said after a moment.
    “I ... I had no idea ...” She made a bewildered gesture, still too stunned by his astonishing suggestion to think clearly.
    “So you thought my intentions were dishonorable.”
    She flushed and looked down at her hands.
    “I wasn’t sure that you had any intentions,” she said in a low voice.
    “Do you mean you regarded me as a friend?”
    “Yes, I suppose so.”
    “Then you deceived yourself, my dear. There is no such thing as friendship between a man and a woman, particularly when the woman is as beautiful as you are,” he said crisply.
    There was an uncomfortable pause while she m ade an effort to collect herself.
    “But ... why me?” she asked at last, when it was clear that he expected her to make the next move.
    “A number of reasons. The principal one being you have most of the qualities I want in my wife.”
    She looked up at him. “But you’re not in love with me.”
    “Do you believe in love, Andrea?” His eyes were unreadable.
    She weighed the question carefully, wondering how he expected her to answer.
    “No, I don’t,” she said quietly.
    “Then we understand each other.”
    He sat down again, crossing his long legs, completely at ease.
    “Tell me, have you thought about getting married?” he asked.
    “Yes, naturally. I don’t expect to go on working forever.”
    “So, since you don’t believe in what people call falling in love, I take it you will marry for security.”
    “Yes. And children. I would like to have some children.”
    “Have you any brothers or sisters?”
    “No, I was an only child.”
    “When you think of security do you visualize a semidetached house in Wimbledon, with a husband who spends his Saturday afternoons mowing the lawn?”
    At that, a glimmer of amusement lighted her green eyes.
    “Not exactly,” she replied.
    “Come here.”
    After a momentary hesitation she went over and stood beside his chair.
    “Give me your hand.”
    She held out her hand and he clasped it lightly at the wrist, rubbing his thumb against the pale smooth skin and studying her polished nails.
    “You wouldn’t have time to paint your fingernails if you had shirts to wash and floors to scrub,” he said softly.
    “Perhaps not. But I do a certain amount of housework now, you know.”
    “Oh, I don’t doubt your domestic capabilities,” he said casually. “I daresay you would run the villa in Wimbledon very well if you had to. But I think this house would be a more appropriate setting for you .”
    She disengaged her hand and began to walk around the room, wishing she could be by herself for a while to review his fantastic offer in a calmer frame of mind.
    It was an ironic situation. The only motive for his interest that she had ever considered was that he wanted to make her his mistress. It had never occurred to her that he was thinking of marriage. Years ago, when she was still in her early teens, she had made up her mind that she would marry for money, and yet now when the richest man she was ever likely to meet was offering her everything she had ever wanted, something made her hesitate.
    “You know so little about me, Justin,” she said suddenly, turning to face him from across the room.
    “Isn’t there a saying that one never knows people until one lives with them? I know all that I want to. You’re beautiful and intelligent and you have a rare ability to sit still and not chatter incessantly about trivialities,” he answered.
    “I have a very bad temper,” she said.
    “Then we will be well matched, for so have I.”
    She could not imagine him in a rage, shouting and storming and banging doors like most irascible men. Somehow the whiplash of