The Matchmaker Bride Read Online Free PDF Page B

had suddenly snapped between them; he knew she’d felt it. He certainly had. Now he slid her a sideways glance as he revved the engine, causing Emily to laugh a little as she instinctively grabbed the door handle. ‘Can’t I?’ he murmured.
    ‘Well, honestly,’ she said once he’d pulled out of the office’s underground car park and begun to drive down Euston Road at quite a sedate speed. ‘You’ve always been—’
    ‘Boring?’ He heard the slight edge to his voice and strove to temper it. This was not how he’d pictured this evening starting.
    ‘Well, not boring precisely,’ Emily allowed. ‘But…predictable. Cautious. Steady.’ Jason kept his face expressionless although he felt his brows start to draw together in an instinctive glower. She was actually patronising him. ‘You never took part in the games and scrapes we got into—’
    ‘By “we” I assume you mean you, Isobel and Jack,’ Jason returned dryly. At Emily’s nod, he continued, ‘You might do well to remember, Em, that you’re twelve years younger than I am. While you were getting into these so-called scrapes, I was in university.’ His hands tightened on the wheel as the difference in their ages struck its necessary blow. Emily might be twenty-five, but she was still young. And in many ways, naive. Innocent, if not utterly, not to mention scatty, silly and far too frivolous. She was entirely wrong for him. Wrong for what he wanted.
    Wrong for a wife.
    ‘Well, of course I know that,’ she said. ‘But, even so…you’ve always been a bit disapproving , Jason. Even of Jack—’
    ‘You didn’t have to live with him,’ Jason returned, keeping his voice mild. Of course everyone loved Jack. Jack was fun , except when it was Jason fetching him from boarding school after he’d been expelled, or from a party where he’d passed out. Fortunately, Jack had settled down since he’d been married, but Jason still remembered his younger brother’s turbulent teen years. He’d helped him out because their father never would, and Jack had no memories of their mother. He had precious few himself…and the ones he did, he’d sometimes rather forget.
    ‘Still,’ Emily persisted in that same teasing tone, ‘I remember the lectures you gave me. When I picked a few flowers from your garden, you positively glowered. You terrified me—’
    ‘By a few flowers you mean all the daffodils.’ They had been his mother’s favourite, and he’d been furious with her for beheading them all, as he remembered.
    ‘Was it all of them?’ Her eyebrows arched in surprise. ‘Oh, dear. I was a bit of a brat, wasn’t I?’
    ‘I didn’t want to be the one to say it,’ Jason murmured, and was rewarded with a gurgle of throaty laughter that made him feel as if he’d just stuck his finger in an electric socket. His whole body felt wired, alive and pulsating with pure lust. This evening really had been a mistake. He was playing with fire, and while he could handle a few burns, Emily surely couldn’t. That was why he’d always stayed away, and why he should keep at it. Right now he could have been sitting down to dinner with Patience Felton-Smythe, a boring woman with a horsey face who liked to garden and knit and was on the board of three charities. In short, the kind of woman he intended to marry.
    Emily gazed out of the window at the blur of traffic, the streets of London slick with rain. Although it was only the beginning of November, the Christmas lights had already been strung along Regent Street and their lights were streakily reflected on the pavement below.
    ‘Where are we going?’ she asked as Jason turned onto Brook Street.
    ‘Claridge’s,’ he said and Emily let out a little laugh.
    ‘I should have known. Somewhere upscale and respectable and just a little bit stodgy.’
    ‘Like me?’ Jason filled in as they pulled up to the landmark hotel.
    Emily smiled sweetly. She had offended Jason with her offhand remark. ‘You said it, not