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The look he gave her was as corrosive as acid.
A cool wind had sprung up, and even within the comfort of her small car she could feel its chill. No wonder that he, standing outside it, should suddenly shiver, his skin lifting in a rash of goose-bumps.
She almost weakened then, the caring, vulnerable nature which had been her undoing so often with Louise urging her to help him, but even as the words were forming on her tongue he was straightening up, his eyes brilliant with anger.
He said curtly, ‘No, that won’t be necessary,’ and then, sketching her a swift and insulting half-bow that oddly enough did not make him look in the least ridiculous, he said sarcastically, ‘That’s what I like so much about the female sex—its compassion and understanding…’
And then, as she reached for the car door to close it, he lifted his hand and stopped her, the unexpected contact of his cool, damp fingers touching hers, almost like an electrical impulse passing through her body, freezing her into immobility as she stared at him, her heart pounding like that of a terrified rabbit.
‘Do you really think that if I were intending you some harm I couldn’t quite easily have overpowered you already? You know damn well I don’t intend you any harm,’ he added with soft bitterness, ‘but, like the rest of your sex, you obviously enjoy torment for torment’s sake. A small act of human charity, that’s all I asked for.’
Her guilt increasing with every word he spoke, Harriet was just about to say she had changed her mind when, without warning, he removed his hand from hers and slammed the car door shut, leaving her feeling oddly bereft and hurt.
He had already turned his back on her and was disappearing in the direction from which he had come. Her car’s headlights briefly picked out the lithe, powerfully male body, and then he was gone!
A shudder wrenched through her, and she realised that she was sitting there like someone in a trance.
Jerkily she put the car in gear and drove away.
Half an hour later, when her heartbeat had still not returned entirely to normal, she drove through the village, and slowed down carefully, looking for the lane which led to her cottage.
In the village she hesitated, wondering if she ought perhaps to report the incident to the police, anyway. Then, recognising that to do so would probably cause the man more embarrassment than relief, she did not stop.
Embarrassment…she had been the one to feel that, not him, she admitted wryly, remembering the shock of her first realisation that he was virtually nude. Strange how one accepted the sight of men on the beach wearing the briefest of attire without giving it a second thought, and yet when one was confronted by the same image in totally different surroundings—
She swallowed nervously, remembering how difficult she had found it to keep her eyes focused on the man’s face without betraying her idiotic discomfort with his unclothed state. He should have been the one to feel discomposed, not her!
And as for telling her that it was his niece who was responsible for his plight…She frowned as she turned into the lane, forced to admit that both his anger and his words had held an undeniable ring of truth.
She had gained the impression that he was a man who did not have a particularly high opinion of the female sex. Why? she wondered. Given his looks, she would have thought that almost all his adult life he would have been surrounded by admiring women.
At last her car headlights picked out the shape of the cottage. It was properly dark now, and she wished yet again that she had not left it so late to leave London. There was something depressing about arriving alone and unwelcomed at her new home to find it all in darkness.
Apparently the cottage had originally been part of a large local estate, but had been sold off as being of no further use when the estate had been split up and sold several years ago, which accounted for the isolated position of the little house.
Previously it had been inhabited by the estate’s gamekeeper, the agent had told her, and then, after the gamekeeper’s death and until the estate had been broken up eighteen months earlier, the cottage had remained uninhabited.
Two local farmers had apparently bought most of the land, with the main house and its grounds being sold to a local businessman.
As Harriet unlocked the cottage door and switched on the lights, she felt a sense of relief. The light that flooded the small hall helped to banish the sense of apprehension and guilt that had filled her as she drove away from that uncomfortable interlude by the roadside.
Guilt… Why should she feel guilt? She had offered to report his plight…
She stood still, remembering the bitter look he had given her, his curt denunciation of her sex, and found herself hoping that, whoever he was, he lived far away enough to ensure that she didn’t run into him again.
It was still relatively early, barely ten o’clock, and despite her long drive she was filled with a restless urgency that drove her not only to unpack her personal possessions from her car, but also to set up her typewriter on the table in the cottage’s comfortably-sized kitchen-cum-living-room. There she started drafting out the beginnings of an idea which had occurred to her as she’d brought her things in.
Her furniture had arrived earlier in the week, and the relocation agency she had hired had ensured that it was installed exactly where she had wanted it. These last few days in a London hotel had not been particularly comfortable ones, but she had had an interview with her publisher yesterday morning and it had seemed pointless to move to her new home and then have to travel all the way back to London for a two-hour meeting.
She was soon deep in the grip of her work, and it was two hours before she stopped typing and realised how much her back and wrists were aching and how chilled she had become. Stifling a yawn, she put her typed papers tidily to one side and got up.
Time for bed now. She would check what she had written in the morning.
Smothering a second, wider yawn, she ensured that the doors were bolted and then made her way upstairs to the comfortable room with its sloping eaves, and its wonderful views of the rolling Border hills.
Her modern bed was out of place in these traditional surroundings. As soon as she could spare the time, she would have to comb the local antique shops for something more suitable, she decided tiredly as she prepared for bed.
This room with its sloping floor and uneven walls called for something heavy and oldfashioned—the sort of bed you virtually had to climb on to, the sort of bed that was stuffed with soft pillows, covered in crisp, lavender-scented cotton and topped with an old-fashioned faded quilt.
Everything was so quiet. Unlike London where the traffic never seemed to stop. Louise had told her scornfully that the silence would drive her mad and that she’d be back in London within six months, but she knew she wouldn’t.Already she found something indescribably soothing and peaceful about the vague, muted noises the house made as it settled down around her…already she was looking forward to her new life.
She frowned, fighting off sleep. She just wished she hadn’t met that man. His anger, his almost personal contempt of her, had struck a sour note she couldn’t hush. She felt stupidly as though she were in some way responsible for causing that contempt, as though he had looked at her, had found her lacking as a woman, and for that reason had shown his contempt of her. Which was all quite ridiculous when he had made it quite plain that he disliked women in general.
She was still trying to puzzle out why she should go on thinking about him when she fell asleep.
She woke up abruptly, confused by unfamiliar sounds and by the vividness of her dreams, her face slightly pink as she tussled with the extraordinariness of her sleeping thoughts.
She had been walking alongside a river, engrossed in watching its flow, her ears and eyes attuned to its sounds and sights, and then suddenly without warning as she turned a corner she saw a man coming towards her. He was dressed casually in jeans and a cotton shirt, and as he came towards her and she saw the way he was looking at her, she realised in horrified shock that she was completely naked.
Every instinct clamoured to her to conceal herself from him, but it was already too late, and above the now urgent sound of the river she heard him saying mockingly, ‘Now it’s your turn…See how you like it…’
She shivered as she sat up in bed, trying to dismiss the symbolism of the dream. Outside it was raining, and heavily, raindrops spattering against her windows; the cause of the ‘river’ she had heard in her dream, perhaps?
Angry with herself for allowing an incident which she ought by now to have dismissed completely from her mind to occupy so much of her attention, she swung her legs out of bed, and decided that it was time she got up.
The relocation company had provided a certain amount of food, but there were things she would need, a certain amount of stocking up to do, which meant driving to the nearest market town.
Breakfast first and then she would make plans later, she decided, finding and filling the coffee filter and switching on the machine.
Two mugs of fragrant coffee and a piece of toast later, she decided that she might as well brave the wet weather and investigate a little of her immediate surroundings. From the field at the bottom of her wilderness of a garden, ran a footpath that went from the village right through up into the hills. Harriet didn’t want to walk quite that far, but she decided that a breath of fresh air would help to settle her breakfast and her thoughts.
Pulling on her red boots, and adding a bright yellow shiny oilcloth jacket with a hood, she stepped outside.
Underfoot the ground was squelchy and muddy, and she was glad she had had the forethought to buy the boots. Her garden gate swung creakily as she opened it.
She walked through, across the lane and on to the footpath in the field beyond it.
CHAPTER TWO
HARRIET walked for almost half an hour without seeing or hearing anyone, in sheer bliss after London’s frenetic streets and busy, uncaring crowds. She had learned a long time ago that it was possible to be far more lonely in the midst of a great press of humanity than it was in solitude, but she knew that Louise could never have understood her feelings.
She wished her sister well in her new life, and felt that this time she had found in her American husband a man who would give her order and direction.
Wrapped up in her bright yellow oilskin and her waterproof boots, Harriet was not bothered by the heavy rain and cool wind, and, walking past her overgrown garden, she smiled a little ruefully, remembering how in London she had dreamily planned to spend those hours when she wasn’t writing in turning her small private wilderness into the kind of secret, romantic garden she had always dreamed of having.
Here, deep in this wet glade, it was impossible to look up clearly at the sky, but she suspected that the rain had set in for the day, which meant that, instead of wilfully wasting time walking, she ought to be at her typewriter. For the first of the four commissioned books her publishers had given her a deadline which should not prove too arduous to meet, but that did not mean that she could necessarily spend her time walking around dreamily in the rain, she told herself severely, deciding regretfully that it was time she returned to the cottage. She would have a certain amount of decorating to do over the next twelve months if she was to turn the cottage into the home she had envisaged, but decorating was a task she had set aside for the winter months.
Gardening…decorating…solitude…she was fast turning into the archetypal ‘old maid’ Louise had so often accused her of being. She would be thirty-five years old in three months’ time. Not old precisely, but not young either, and age was after all a state of mind, and while a man of thirty-five and even of forty might be considered to be in his prime, for a woman—even in these liberated days…She stopped walking, and found that somehow or other, without her knowing how it had happened, a mental image of a tall, dark, and very damp man had slipped into her head and refused to leave it. A very male man…a very angry man…a man who had plainly not seen her as a desirable woman at all, but rather as an object of irritation and contempt.
Would it really have hurt her to give him a lift? A neighbourly act of charity and kindness? Had the years of living in London, celibate, alone in so many ways, and with so many responsibilities, turned her into the kind of timid, over-imaginative single woman who thought that every man she met represented some kind of danger?
She didn’t like the picture her thoughts were drawing, and dismissed it as irrational. Of course she had been quite right to refuse his request. The police via the media were constantly warning women about the dangers inherent in exactly the kind of situation she had found herself in last night. No, she had nothing to reproach herself with, and yet—Her reverie was abruptly shattered as a large and very muddy chocolate-brown Labrador suddenly came crashing through the undergrowth towards her, hotly pursued by a small, slim red-haired girl, bare-headed despite the rain, and dressed in enviably well-worn and well-used dark green jacket, faded jeans and dark green wellingtons.
‘Come here at once, Ben,’ she shouted to the dog, her eyes rounding in surprise as she saw Harriet.
‘Oh! I didn’t know anyone else was here—I thought that Ben had got the scent of a rabbit. He never catches them, thank goodness, but I’m in enough trouble already, without having to spend half the morning chasing him all over the countryside. Oh, no, Ben…down, you bad dog!’
It was too late. Ben, evidently a gregarious animal, had flung himself enthusiastically at Harriet, almost knocking her over in the process, and was now proceeding to lick her, despite the girl’s attempts to call him to heel.
Harriet didn’t mind. She loved dogs and always had done. In London it had been impossible to keep one, but perhaps here…
‘Oh, dear, I am sorry,’ the girl apologised, rushing up to Harriet to rescue her from her pet.
She had wide-set hazel eyes, a retroussé nose, and the kind of warm smile that illuminated her whole face. She looked about sixteen or seventeen, and Harriet guessed probably had the kind of quick, almost intuitive intelligence that matched her manner. Altogether something of an enchantress, who would probably drive the male sex mad once she was old enough to recognise her own power, Harriet reflected, gently pushing the dog down and holding on to his collar for her.
‘Oh, goodness, look what he’s done to your jacket!’ The girl grimaced guiltily.
The front of Harriet’s yellow oilskin was covered in muddy pawprints, but she shook her head in dismissal of another apology.
‘They’ll wash off, there’s no real harm done.’
‘Thank goodness for that,’ her companion said with disarming frankness. ‘All I need right now is someone to go complaining to Rigg about me. I’m in enough trouble as it is.’ She rolled her eyes theatrically, and giggled. ‘Right at this moment, I’m supposed to be in my room contemplating my sins. Have you ever heard anything so archaic? Rigg really is the end. I keep on telling him I’m an adult, not a child.’
Her mouth became stubborn and resolute all of a sudden, striking a vague chord of memory within Harriet. She frowned a little herself, but before she could say anything the girl was speaking again.
‘I’m Trixie Matthews, by the way, and this, as you’ve probably guessed, is Ben.’
Trixie. An unusual name, and now she had heard it twice within one single span of twenty-four hours…Not merely coincidence, surely? Could this be the niece of whom the man who had stopped her car last night had spoken so furiously?
The tempation to find out was almost overwhelming; it wouldn’t have been difficult, not with this girl, with her confiding, open nature, but Harriet had a very strict personal moral code, and to ask the questions teeming through her brain would undoubtedly break it—and, besides, what did it matter? Last night’s interlude by the roadside was over and done with, and had already occupied far too many of her thoughts.
Giving the girl a polite, dismissive smile, she turned round ready to head back to the cottage. The smile was one she had perfected over the years, for keeping other people at a distance, but the girl seemed unaware of that fact, and fell into step beside her. Ben, the Labrador, having drawn his mistress’s attention to the stranger in their midst, was apparently quite content to snuffle in the undergrowth a few yards ahead of them.
‘Are you staying in the village?’ Trixie asked Harriet interestedly. ‘Not that we’ve had much of a summer this year.’ She pulled a face. ‘I keep telling Rigg that I need a proper holiday.’ She gave Harriet a mischievous smile.
‘He’s so stuffy and old-fashioned…Loads of girls my age are living on their own, never mind going on holiday with a friend and her mother.’
Many girls were, Harriet acknowledged, but not girls like this one, whose every word and gesture betrayed how cherished and protected she was.
‘Where are you staying? At the Staple?’
The Staple was the village’s ancient pub, with a history dating back to the times when the village had been one of the staging posts on the long trek south to English markets for the shepherds who raised their flocks on the Border hills. Hence its name.
‘No…actually, I’m not a visitor. I’ve just moved up here from London.’
‘You’ve moved up here?’ Trixie’s expression said quite obviously that she was surprised. ‘From London, but…You must have bought the old gamekeeper’s cottage, then. Rigg said it had been sold. To a schoolteacher.’
The girl was frowning now, and for some reason she couldn’t truly explain, Harriet found herself saying, ‘I used to teach. I don’t now.’
She didn’t say what she did instead, and Trixie’s frown disappeared, to be replaced with a wide grin.
‘Thank goodness for that, otherwise Rigg would probably try to persuade you to give me extra lessons during the holidays.’ She pulled a face again. ‘He’s got this obsession about keeping me occupied. Just because both my parents were up at Oxford.’ She pulled another face. ‘I keep on telling Rigg that they may have been brilliant, but I’m not. Don’t you think that, at almost eighteen, I’m old enough to go on holiday with a girlfriend and her mother, without Rigg kicking up such a fuss?’ she then demanded indignantly.
Harriet, who suspected there was something she wasn’t being told, could only offer a gentle palliative. ‘Perhaps, but if your uncle has refused to give his permission…’
‘Refused! I thought he was going to have forty fits,’Trixie told her gloomily, ‘and all because of a silly mistake. I tried to tell him what had happened, but he wouldn’t listen, and then I tried to show him how easily circumstances can be misinterpreted, but instead of understanding what I was trying to prove he was furious with me…’
Indignation showed in the hazel eyes, and Harriet felt a sudden surge of sympathy for her uncle. The responsibility of a girl like this one could not be an easy one.
Trixie gave another faint sigh. ‘I suppose I’d better get back before he discovers I’ve broken out. Of course, he wouldn’t be like this at all if he wasn’t such a mis…such a missy…one of those men who hate women,’ she elucidated, leaving Harriet to supply the word automatically.
‘You mean a misogynist.’
‘Mmm…and all because some woman walked out on him years ago,’ Trixie told her, with all the scorn of youth.
Harriet knew she shouldn’t be listening to any of this, never mind wanting, almost encouraging the next confidence.
‘Of course, I suppose it wasn’t very nice, virtually being left at the altar, so to speak,’ Trixie allowed.
Left at the altar! Harriet blinked, wondering if after all she had jumped to erroneous conclusions about the identity of Trixie’s uncle. She couldn’t imagine any woman leaving at the altar the man she had met last night.
They were back in sight of her cottage and, guiltily aware that by rights she should have stopped Trixie’s confidences some time ago, she gave the girl another smile, and said quietly, ‘It’s been nice meeting you…I hope your uncle isn’t too angry when he finds out you’ve been out.’
‘Oh, Rigg doesn’t get angry. He just sort of looks at you…you know, as though you’re the lowest of the low. I suppose it’s true that I’m a bit of a trial to him. That’s what Mrs Arkwright, our housekeeper, says. She thinks the world of Rigg, and not a lot of me. I heard her telling her husband—he’s the gardener—that Rigg was a saint for taking me on after my parents were killed…A saint! He’s more like a devil,’ Trixie told her acidly. ‘He just can’t seem to understand that I’m almost eighteen…grown up…I like your outfit by the way,’ she added inconsequentially. ‘Rigg would have a fit if I bought anything like that.’
She scowled rebelliously at her own serviceable and eminently suitable country clothes, and it occurred to Harriet that had she herself been dressed in her normal sober clothes, this girl would probably never have been quite so forthcoming with her.
A twinge of guilt attacked her. She ought not to have allowed Trixie to tell her so much. Rigg! It was an unusual name. She longed to ask how he had come by it, but, although she suspected Trixie would have been quite willing to tell her, she firmly resisted the temptation.
They parted at Harriet’s garden gate, but later in the day, as she laboured over the outline for her new book, Harriet found it increasingly hard to subdue a sub-plot which involved a slender red-headed girl with hazel eyes, a confiding manner, and an ogre of an uncle.
In the end she gave way to it, and before the day was over she discovered that her book had changed direction completely, and that her plot had been taken over by her new characters.
It was four o’clock before she remembered that she had intended to go shopping.
The market town was a good three-quarters of an hour’s drive away. She had enough food for tonight…She looked at the telephone, trying to work out the time difference between England and California, wondering if she should ring Louise and check that she had settled into her new life happily, and then she dismissed the instinct, telling herself that Louise was an adult with a husband to take care of her. Odd, how, whenever she thought of Louise, she always thought of her in terms of needing to be looked after, when in truth Louise was far more resilient than she was—far more adaptable, far more able to take care of herself. Emotionally, at least.
As Harriet pushed away her typewriter, an unfamiliar sense of happiness filled her. Freedom…freedom to be what she wanted…to do what she wanted…with no other claims on her time or her emotions, with no need to put others first. It was the kind of hedonistic bliss that was totally unfamiliar to her, and, on the strength of it, she donned her wellingtons and her oilskin for the second time that day and marched purposefully out into the wilderness, where she spent a profitable and very muddy hour removing weeds from the crazy paving path that ran along the length of the front garden to the gate, before the growing dusk drove her inside.
Her work in the garden had produced hunger pangs which sent her straight to have a bath and prepare a meal.
The heavy rainclouds had brought an earlier dusk than might have been expected, and, having listened to the news and a weather forecast that suggested that the rain was going to continue for a few days, Harriet retired to bed with a shiny-covered, deliciously smelling, luxurious hardback copy of the latest book by one of her favourite authors.
However, for once the author’s skill failed to occupy all her attention and she found her mind wandering recklessly back not just to her meeting earlier in the day with Trixie Matthews but also to that unexpected exchange with her uncle.
‘Trixie,’ he had called her before realising his mistake, with anger and resignation in his voice. Poor man, it couldn’t be easy for him, apparently totally responsible for such a spirited teenager.
She fell asleep on the thought, a soft smile curling her mouth as she wondered how on earth even so obviously enterprising and resourceful a girl as Trixie had got a man like Rigg to strip down to his underwear in the first place, never mind leaving him stranded without either any clothes or any transport!
