Engaged at the Chatsfield by Melanie Milburne Page A

with her immaculate makeup and perfectly coiffed hair.
    Juliet felt like a basset hound turning up at a pedigree poodle show.
    ‘You’re the last one to arrive.’ Harriet’s gaze swept over Juliet’s retro dress. ‘Wow, don’t you look nice?’
    Juliet knew that was code for “You look like a fat sow,” but she smiled anyway and sucked her tummy in a little harder. ‘Sorry, am I late? I had to change trains because of a breakdown on the line.’
    ‘No, we don’t kick off high tea till half-three.’ Harriet glanced at her watch. ‘That gives you thirty-two minutes to freshen up and change.’ She gave a smile that wouldn’t look out of place on an orthodontist’s website home page. ‘If you’re lucky you might even get a glimpse of Lucca Chatsfield. He arrived a few minutes ago. I just got a tweet about it. He’s staying the weekend.’
    ‘Not for Kendra’s hen party, I take it?’
    Harriet laughed. ‘No, but I wouldn’t say no to him doing a little striptease show for us, would you?’
    Juliet hated that she blushed so readily. It made her appear as naive and gauche as she felt. Newsfeeds and social media buzzed constantly with Lucca Chatsfield’s latest shenanigans. Not that she moved in the circles he stirred. She didn’t have a circle...apart from one of loneliness. Her job as a library-based rare book expert was her dream career, but it made for a pretty quiet social life.
    ‘I’m sure he’s very attractive, but I prefer intelligence over looks,’ she said, immediately thinking of Ben’s best friend since childhood, Marcus Bainbridge. But then, she thought of him a lot. Too much . Way, way too much. It was a bit of an obsession she had developed since Christmas, when he had joined Ben and their mother in Bath instead of dividing his time between his bitterly divorced parents and their new partners and families.
    Aloof and reserved, which most people mistook for arrogance, Marcus was a perfect counterpoint to Ben’s outgoing daredevil personality. He’d been like a second older brother to Juliet since she was ten, when he had fixed a puncture on her bike because Ben, at sixteen, had been too busy chatting up his latest conquest.
    But last Christmas something had changed.
    It had been the first time they’d been alone together since The Incident . Her eighteenth birthday party. Blush . Too much alcohol. Double blush . Cornering Marcus in the study. Cringe . Him politely but firmly rejecting her clumsy advances. Him sternly lecturing her on the dangers of excessive drinking. Cringe. Blush. Cringe .
    He had avoided her ever since.
    Until last Christmas...
    Six months on and she remembered as if it were yesterday. They had been washing up after lunch while her mother made a phone call to an elderly relative and Ben talked to his agent in L.A. Marcus handed her a wineglass to dry and her fingers brushed against his as she took it from him. Their gazes collided. Meshed. Stilled. Heated.
    A sensation like a fizzing electrical pulse travelled from his fingers to hers, raced all the way up her arm and then through her body to light a fire in her core. She saw the flare of his pupils, the way they made his eyes darken to a midnight blue. The way his fingers didn’t jerk away, but lingered. Burned against hers.
    His gaze went to her mouth. Paused there. Her lips felt scorched from the heat of his gaze. She heard the scuff of his shoe on the tiled floor as he closed the half-step distance between their bodies....
    But then Ben came bounding in to announce he had got the part for the rom-com. Champagne was opened. Toasts and celebrations were conducted. There were no more private moments. Marcus kept his distance. Business as usual.
    ‘So—’ Harriet smoothed an imaginary hair behind her ear. It was a ploy Juliet knew was so Harriet could showcase her glittering and ridiculously huge and brand new—as of last week—diamond engagement ring. ‘Are you seeing anyone?’
    Juliet was going to say no.