‘I wasn’t any good at abseiling, but I still had to do it,’ Tilly pointed out tartly. ‘Yes, I’ll be there, just as you were at the top of the cliff, but I can’t do it for you. This time it’s your challenge.’

Campbell sighed. ‘Why does it have to be so complicated? A cake is a cake!’

‘When you were in the army, were all operations the same?’

‘I was in the Marines, but no, they weren’t.’

‘And now you’re in business, is every deal exactly the same?’

‘No.’

‘Well, it’s the same with cakes.’

Tilly could see that he wasn’t convinced. ‘Every time I make a cake, I’m making it for different people, and a different situation. Even if they choose exactly the same cake, the way I mix it and bake it and decorate it is all different. If it wasn’t, my customers might as well go to a supermarket and buy one made in a factory.’

‘The next time I’m negotiating an important deal I’ll think of you and remind myself that it’s just like a cake,’ said Campbell dryly.

Tilly couldn’t help warming to the idea that he might be thinking about her in the future. ‘Will you have to do much of that in your new job?’

‘Negotiating? I imagine so. This will be my most challenging job yet. I’m going to a global corporation that’s been on a downward slide for some time. I’ve been appointed to turn it round, but it won’t be easy.’

‘Oh, but surely it’s just a question of reading some instructions?’ Tilly murmured provocatively.

Campbell looked at her sharply. She met his gaze blandly, but the dark blue eyes gleamed and, in spite of himself, he laughed.

‘It would be nice to think that there would be some instructions to read!’

Tilly found herself smiling back at him, even while wishing that she hadn’t made him laugh. It was so obvious that Campbell thought that making cakes was beneath him that she had been doing a good job of disliking him again, and now he had gone and spoilt that by smiling.

All at once she was tingling with awareness again and, instead of thinking about how arrogant and disagreeable he could be, she was thinking about the fact that the two of them were alone in the house, and trying not to notice how tall and lean and tautly muscled he was, how out of place he seemed in the cosy kitchen with that air of tightly leashed power.

Looking at him in that pink apron, Tilly had the unnerving sensation that she had tied a bow around a kitten only to realise that it had turned into a fully grown tiger, complete with swishing tail, and she only just stopped herself from gulping.

She pushed back her chair so that it scraped on the tiles. ‘Tea?’ she asked brightly.

‘Thanks.’

Campbell sat down at the table and pulled her sketchbook towards him. As he flicked idly through it, his brows rose. Her designs were quick and clear, and she had somehow captured each idea in a few clever lines.

‘These are good,’ he said, unable to keep the surprise from his voice.

Tilly switched on the kettle and turned to lean back against the sink, determinedly keeping her distance.

‘It’s not exactly turning round a global corporation, is it?’

Campbell turned another few pages. ‘I’m beginning to wonder if that might not be easier than coming up with ideas like these.’

‘Well, that’s why you’re a hotshot international executive and I’m the provincial cake-maker,’ said Tilly. ‘If you think about it, we don’t have a single thing in common, do we?’

Campbell looked at her standing by the kettle. Her nut-brown curls gleamed with gold under the spotlights, and he remembered how soft her hair had felt under his cheek as they had lain together in the tent up on the Scottish hillside. Funny to think they had only spent a matter of hours together. She seemed uncannily familiar already. Campbell wasn’t a fanciful man, but it felt as if he had known the glint of fun in her eyes, the tartness of her voice, the gurgle of laughter, for ever.

‘No, I don’t suppose we do,’ he agreed, his voice rather more curt than he had intended.

And they didn’t. Tilly was right. They had absolutely nothing in common.

It hadn’t taken Campbell nearly as long as he had expected to adjust to civilian life. He had always been too much of a maverick to fit that comfortably into naval life, even within an elite unit. An unorthodox approach and a relentless drive to succeed at whatever cost came into their own on special operations, but were less of an advantage in the day-to-day routine.

He hadn’t regretted leaving all that behind. Lisa hadn’t intended to change his life for the better when she’d walked out, but he was grateful to her in an odd way for making him so determined to prove that he could make twice as much money as her new husband that he had gone into business. It had turned out that he was made for the ruthless cut and thrust of corporate life. Campbell didn’t do emotions, or talking or any of the things women thought were so important, but he knew how to make money, and that was what counted.

When it came down to it, Campbell believed that everybody was motivated by money at some level. Tilly wouldn’t agree, he was sure. That was another thing they didn’t have in common.

‘We just have to get along for a fortnight with nothing in common,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll be gone.’

Thanks for the reminder, Tilly thought, piqued in spite of herself. It was all very well deciding not to get involved with him, but quite another thing to be hit over the head with the fact that he was planning to leave the country soon. She had a nasty feeling he had done it to make sure that she got the message that he wasn’t available. Why didn’t he just hang up a sign saying ‘don’t bother’?

Not that she had any intention of letting him know that she had even considered the possibility of getting involved. That really would make him laugh.

‘Of course, you’re moving to the States, aren’t you?’ Tilly was Ms Cucumber Cool as she carried the teapot over and found two mugs. She could do couldn’t-care-less as well as anyone, even Campbell Sanderson. ‘Where exactly are you going?’

‘New York.’

‘Is that where your ex-wife lives now?’

Campbell looked at her, startled. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Well, you said she lived in the States, and you don’t seem the kind of man who lets go easily. I wondered if you were going there because you wanted to see her.’

‘Not at all,’ he said sharply. ‘It just happens that’s where the head office is.’

Infuriatingly, though, Tilly’s words had made him pause and examine his own motives for the first time. ‘Of course I’ve considered the chance that I might bump into her,’ he went on after a while. ‘New York is a big city, but Lisa’s new husband is in a similar line of business, so it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that we’ll meet.’

‘Gosh, I hope he’s not more successful than you,’ said Tilly, only half joking, and Campbell smiled grimly.

‘Not any more,’ he said.

CHAPTER SIX

TILLY poured the tea. She could just imagine how Campbell would have been driven to out-perform the man who had taken his wife away from him. It would have hurt anyone, but to a man like Campbell the implication that she had left him for someone more successful must have been an extra dose of salt in the wound.

‘What will it be like, seeing her again?’ she asked.

He shrugged, and she rolled her eyes as she pushed a mug across the table towards him.

‘Come on, you must have thought about it! I’ve spent the last eighteen months practising what I would say to Olivier if I ever saw him again-not that I’ve had the chance to say any of it,’ she added ruefully. ‘It’s probably just as well.’

‘Olivier?’

‘The beat of my heart for two years,’ she said, blue eyes bleak with memory.

And presumably the man who had taught her that the absence of children didn’t make a break-up any easier. Campbell was remembering now.

‘Ah,’ he said. Were commiserations in order? These kinds of emotional conversations always made him uncomfortable. He couldn’t understand why women insisted on talking about this kind of stuff the whole time.

‘What would you have said?’ he asked at last, opting for a practical approach.

Tilly thought about it. ‘It depended on the mood I was in,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I was determined to make him realise just what he’d lost, so I was going to pretend to have a fabulous new lover and carry on as if I’d almost forgotten him. At other times I wanted him to acknowledge how he’d hurt me, but either way I would be very cool and calm.

‘In reality, of course, if I had bumped into Olivier, I would have burst into tears and begged him to come back, and then none of my friends would ever have spoken to me again!’

Campbell studied her across the table. Her generous mouth was twisted in a self-deprecating smile, but the blue eyes were wistful, and he wondered what Olivier was like. Campbell didn’t like the idea of him at all. He didn’t like the idea of anyone hurting Tilly.

She wasn’t beautiful, not like Lisa. Her features were too quirky for that, but there was something alluring about her all the same, he realised. She had warmth and wit and a charm that Lisa had never had, and in a strange way she was sexier, too.

The thought was startling, but Campbell decided it was true. Lisa was slender and elegant and perfect, but she was a woman most men admired from a distance. Tilly was quite different-all soft curves and luminous skin-and there was something irresistibly touchable about her. Any man’s fingers would be twitching with the need to reach out and slide through her hair, to smooth and stroke and explore that warm, lush body, and then he would want to take that mouth and see if it tasted and felt as good as it looked…

Alarmed by how quickly his thoughts had drifted out of control, Campbell slammed on the brakes and gave himself a mental slap.

He drank his tea, feeling jarred and vaguely uneasy. Tilly was the one with the vivid imagination, not him. Campbell Sanderson was famous for his coolness under pressure, for his single-minded pursuit of a goal. He wasn’t a man who let himself get distracted, especially not by a woman. The last time that had happened, he had ended up married to Lisa, and look what a mistake that had been! No way was he doing that again.

‘If you cried, there really would have been no chance of getting him back,’ he said caustically to make up for the fact that while his mind was firmly back under control, his hands were taking rather longer to catch up and were still tingling at the idea of touching Tilly.

Scowling at the sign of weakness, Campbell gripped them firmly around the mug.

‘I know.’ Tilly sighed. ‘What is it with men? Look at you. You’re happy to jump off a cliff but show you a woman in tears and I bet you’d run a mile!’

This was unfortunately so true that Campbell could only glower. ‘I like dealing with facts,’ he said. ‘Emotions are messy.’

Tilly stared at him and shook her head. ‘How on earth did you ever manage to get married in the first place? You must have had to succumb to a teensy little emotion then, surely!’

‘The attraction between us was a physical thing. It was never about hearts and flowers and all that stuff. Lisa’s not like that. She’s like me in lots of ways. She knows what she wants, and she goes after it, and she gets it. And for a time,’ he said, ‘she wanted me.’

Campbell paused, remembering. ‘It’s hard to resist a woman who looks the way she does. You’d have to see her to understand,’ he said, catching Tilly’s sceptical expression.

‘I can’t see you being pushed into doing anything you didn’t want to do, let alone marriage,’ she said. ‘You’re not the passive type.’

‘No,’ he admitted. ‘I did want to marry her.’

‘Because you loved her, or because you could show her off, prove that you had a more beautiful wife than anyone else?’

A very faint flush stained Campbell’s cheekbones. ‘I suppose there’s some truth in that,’ he acknowledged. ‘But marriage was Lisa’s idea. I’d never imagined myself as a marrying type, but she wanted a wedding, and I was mad for her. I didn’t care what happened as long as I could have her. I should have known it wouldn’t last.’

What would it be like to be so beautiful you always got your own way? Tilly wondered. What would it be like to be desired so much by Campbell that he would do whatever you wanted?

‘How long were you married?’ she asked instead.

‘Just three years,’ said Campbell. ‘There was great sexual chemistry but not much else going for the marriage. I was away on operations most of the time, and Lisa wasn’t prepared to sit at home waiting for me. She liked to have fun, and she liked money, and it didn’t take her long to get bored and start to want something more glamorous. Arthur offered her the lifestyle she wanted, so she took it.’