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‘I agree. Real confirmation that fact can be stranger than fiction.’
‘And real love so strong that nothing can diminish or destroy it,’ Jenny added softly. ‘In all the years they were apart, neither of them was ever tempted to marry someone else.’
‘But at least they’re together now and so deeply in love that Bobbie complains that despite the fact that they were all married at the same time, Ruth and Grant are a far more romantic couple than her and Luke.’
‘Well, Bobbie and Luke do have a young child and two busy careers,’ Guy commented, ‘while her grandparents are both retired and free to concentrate exclusively on one another.’
“They may both be retired but Ruth is still on half a dozen local committees as well as running her single-parent units,’ Jenny reminded him. ‘And Grant has an extraordinary spread of business interests to keep him busy. I sometimes feel exhausted just listening to what they’ve been doing. I can’t help comparing their energy and the enjoyment they get out of life with Ben’s growing lack of interest in everything.’
Jenny’s forehead pleated in a worried frown as she reflected on her father-in-law.
‘Is he still going ahead with his hip-joint replacement operation?’ Guy asked her.
‘I hope so,’ Jenny told him feelingly. ‘It’s scheduled for the end of the summer and the plan was that Maddy would be there when he comes out of hospital to look after him. He responds far better to her than he does to any of us. partially because she’s Max’s wife, of course, and so far as Ben is concerned, Max can do no wrong.’
‘But not so far as you, Max’s mother, are concerned,’ Guy offered shrewdly.
Jenny shook her head. ‘Ben has always spoiled Max and Max has never needed any encouragement to believe he deserves to receive preferential treatment. I did hope that when he and Maddy married...’ She stopped and shook her head, changing the subject to ask, ‘Anything interesting in that lot?’
‘Not really,’ Guy replied, taking his cue from her and letting the subject drop, switching from discussing personal matters to their shared business interests. ‘I’ve had a call to do another house clearance this morning although I doubt that there’ll be anything there of any interest. Charlie Platt,’ he added grimly.
‘Charlie Platt?’ Jenny queried, frowning again, then her expression clearing. ‘Oh yes, I know who you mean.’
‘Yes,’ Guy went on. ‘By all accounts he virtually drank himself to death.’
‘Oh, poor man,’ Jenny sympathised compassionately.
‘Poor man nothing,’ Guy told her grimly. ‘He was the biggest con man in town. His parents publicly disowned him. He died leaving debts all over the place.’
From the tone of his voice, Jenny wondered if Guy was one of the people he had owed money to. If so, she doubted that Guy would admit, even to her, that he had been taken advantage of.
Normally an easygoing, compassionate man, generally inclined to judge others gently rather than harshly, he also possessed a surprisingly fierce streak of pride, accentuated, Jenny suspected, by the fact that his family, the Cooke clan, various members of whom were spread throughout the town, had originated, so local history had it, from the unsanctified union of one of a band of travelling Romany Gypsies and the naively innocent daughter of a town schoolmaster. They were generally held in a mixture of awe and contempt by their less enterprising and energetic peers.
The girl had been married off in haste and disgrace to a local widowed tavern keeper desperately in need of someone to take charge of his sprawling brood of existing children.
Dependent upon where you stood in the local hierarchy, there was a tendency to regard the activities of the Cooke clan, both professionally and privately, as extremely suspect or extremely enviable.
Over the generations, the name Cooke had become synonymous, not just with the local taverns and public houses that they ran, but also with such disparate activities as poaching, gaming and other enterprising methods of increasing their income, a habit the more God-fearing local folk were inclined to put down to the genes they had inherited from their roving-eyed Gypsy forebears.
Not that any members of the family went in for poaching or its equivalent these days. That practice had died out with his grandfather’s generation, Guy had once wryly told Jenny, along with the bulk of his then-adult male relatives, most of whom had been with the Cheshire Regiment during the First World War.
‘But that kind of reputation is hard to lose,’ Guy had told Jenny. ‘Once a Cooke, always a Cooke!’
‘And having those brigandish dark good looks of yours doesn’t help,’ Jenny had teased him gently.
‘No,’ Guy had agreed shortly. He had lost count of the number of fathers who had sternly admonished their daughters against dating him when he had been younger. He thought now that he must have been the only teenage boy in the locality to have gained the reputation of being wild and dangerous whilst still possessing his virginity.
It was half-day closing, and after Jenny had left and Guy had locked up the shop, he went home to work on his other business interests, which ranged from a half share in the very popular local restaurant owned by one of his sisters and her husband to a smaller share in a firm of local builders owned by yet another relative.
He had recently been considering the validity of investing in small local properties that could be renovated and then let out on short-term leases to employees of one of the large multinationals that had recently started to move into the area.
Antiques, especially furniture, were his first love but the business he shared with Jenny was hardly sufficient to keep him fully occupied.
He frowned as he studied the post. He and Jenny were the prime motivators behind the Antiques Fair that was due to be held at Fitzburgh Place the following month, a combined event to promote the area and hopefully raise money for Jenny and Ruth’s pet charity, the single mothers homes scheme, which Ruth had started as a result of her own experiences as an unmarried mother.
As Guy started to check off the list of exhibitors to the fair against the list of invitation letters he had sent out, he remembered what Jenny had said about Charlie Platt.
He and Charlie had been at school together... just. Guy had entered the school just as Charlie was on the verge of leaving it to move up to the seniors.
A thin, pale boy, who had suffered badly from childhood asthma, which thankfully he had later outgrown, Guy had shown no signs then of the fact that as an adult male he would grow up to be strong and muscular. He had been small and vulnerable-looking, the youngest of his mother’s brood, a quiet, studious boy whom his female siblings had mothered and whom Charlie Platt had immediately and instinctively focused on as an ideal victim for his practice of blackmailing the vulnerable into parting with their dinner money.
Guy had tried to resist, refusing trenchantly to hand over the money—he was, after all, well used to being cuffed and teased by his much larger and far more boisterous male cousins—but he had had one fear he kept hidden from his family and that was of water. Because of his asthma, he had never been allowed to learn to swim or to play in the river that bounded the town in case the cold water brought on an attack.
Charlie Platt had very quickly discovered Guy’s fear, both of the river and, even more importantly, of other people’s discovering how he felt. Predictably he had made use of it.
Guy knew he would never forget the day Charlie Platt had held him under the water for so long that Guy had really believed he was going to die, probably would have died if one of his bigger and older cousins hadn’t happened to come along, seen what was happening and treated Charlie Platt to the kind of rough justice that boys of that age could mete out to one another, blacking his eye, bruising his pride and putting an end to Guy’s torment.
That summer, Guy had taught himself to swim, and after Charlie had left the school Guy hadn’t come across him again until they were both adults, by which time Charlie was already drinking heavily and gaining something of an unsavoury reputation for himself.
And now Charlie was dead. Guy couldn’t feel surprised, nor sorry, and he certainly had no desire to accommodate the terse telephone instructions he had received via his answerphone from the young woman who had announced herself as Chrissie Oldham.
Who exactly was she? She had sounded too crisp and businesslike to be one of the steady stream of women who, at one time or another, had shared Charlie’s roof. She must have been employed to sort out the estate.
Guy’s frown deepened. One thing Charlie’s death had done was to focus his own mind on the fact that he was close to forty with little to show for his life other than a healthy bank balance and a small group of friends.
Avril, his next to eldest sister, had complained to him at Christmas that it was high time he got married and produced a family of his own, as she watched him playing with her own grandchildren. Grandchildren!! But then Avril was fifteen years his senior.
He had no plans to follow her advice, though. There was no way he could share his life, commit his life...his self to another person without loving her to the point where life without her would quite simply be an untenable option.
And he had only once come even close to feeling like that and she... He got up and walked across to the window, then stood staring out at the view in front of him.
He had moved to his present house six months earlier. In a prestigious part of town, it was one in a small close of similar properties originally built to house local members of the clergy. Ruth, Jenny’s aunt-in-law, lived there, three doors down; several highranking executives from the town’s largest corporate employer, Aarlston-Becker, owned adjacent properties.
There were those who, Guy suspected even now, felt that such a house was far too grand, far too good, for a mere Cooke, even one like himself who had gone from grammar school to university and from there to all the art capitals of Europe before returning home to set up in business.
He glanced at his watch. He still had another hour before he needed to leave for Charlie Platt’s house, but he had a good two hours’ worth of paperwork on his desk in front of him, he reminded himself sternly.
Chrissie groaned as she straightened up and her aching back muscles protested. She had spent virtually the whole of her time since arriving in Haslewich cleaning her late uncle’s small house, a task she could only relate, in terms of stress levels, to the mythical job of cleansing the Augean stables.
Every racing paper that Charlie had bought during his tenure in the house—and there had been many of them—instead of being thrown away had simply been tossed in an untidy pile on the spare-bedroom floor. This was the very room that Chrissie had planned to occupy during her hopefully brief stay. And that was just for starters. Letters, bills, in the main unpaid, junk mail, you name it—Uncle Charles had kept it.
Chrissie suspected they must have grave doubts about her at the local supermarket when she had very nearly cleaned them out of their supply of rolls of black plastic refuse sacks.
Her initial idea had been to burn the waste paper on a bonfire in the terraced cottage’s small back garden, but she had soon recognised that there was far too much of it for such easy disposal and instead she had been forced to apply to the local authority for their advice and assistance on its disposal.
This morning, a couple of friendly workmen plus an open lorry had arrived in the street to remove the sacks of paper she had prepared for them.
The cottage was one of a terrace of similar properties built into what had originally been one of the town’s boundary walls using, Chrissie suspected, stone ‘reclaimed’ from the walls themselves and the castle, which had been virtually destroyed during the Civil War.
It could, she admitted judiciously, with a little imagination and an awful lot of determined hard work, be turned into a very attractive home for a single person or a young childless couple.
Several of the other cottages in the street had already undergone or were undergoing this process and the shiny brightness of their painted front doors highlighted the air of shabby neglect that hallmarked her uncle’s cottage.
Now that she had emptied the small second bedroom, she did at least have somewhere to sleep. Her mother would have been grimly approving, no doubt, had she seen the fervour with which she had scrubbed and sanitized both the bathroom and kitchen before allowing herself to use them. She still had her reservations, though, about the wisdom of using the ancient fridge, which had formerly been home to various, thankfully unidentifiable, mouldy pieces of food.
But the worst ordeal of her visit still lay ahead of her and that was her appointment tomorrow with her late uncle’s solicitors.
His clothes she had already consigned to another much smaller collection of plastic liners ready for collection by a representative of a local charity.
The house had, as she and her parents had already guessed, revealed no material assets likely to provide enough money to help to settle his debts, with the exception of a rather attractive small yew desk.
When Chrissie had mentioned this item to her mother, she had said instantly that the desk had originally belonged to her grandmother, Chrissie’s great grandmother.
‘Don’t arrange for it to be sold, Chrissie,’ she had begged her daughter. ‘We’ll have it valued instead and I’ll buy it from the estate. I asked Charles what had happened to it after Mother died and he said he didn’t know.’ She had given a small sigh. ‘I suppose I ought to have guessed that he’d keep it for himself. I’m just glad that he didn’t actually sell it. I suppose it’s too much to hope that he kept Nan’s Staffordshire figures, as well?’
‘I’m sorry, Mum, but they’re definitely not here,’ Chrissie had told her, promising that she would have the desk appraised independently as well as by the dealer she had arranged to come and value the small, and she suspected, mainly worthless bits and pieces she had found round the house.
The desk certainly was a very attractive piece, all the more so now that she had cleaned and polished it; sturdily made it was, at the same time, very prettily feminine.
Chrissie glanced at her watch. The dealer she had been recommended to contact by her late uncle’s solicitors would be here any minute. Once he had checked over and removed the bits and pieces she had placed on one side along with all the cottage’s furniture—apart from the desk that was in the front room—she could arrange for the estate agent to view the cottage and put it on the market.
Tiredly she stretched her body but at least she had the satisfaction of knowing that every single nook and cranny of the small house was now clean. She still had the remnants of some of the cobwebs on her person to prove it, she acknowledged ruefully as she caught sight of the small grubby mark on her once pristine white T-shirt.
CHAPTER THREE
GUY knocked briefly on the cottage door and then waited. Knowing the way Charlie Platt had lived, he had deliberately changed into a pair of faded, wellworn jeans and an equally faded and now rather closefitting T-shirt. The days when he had been considered an undersized weakling were now long past. It had caused him a certain amount of wry amusement when he attended antique fairs to be mistaken for one of the helpers brought in to carry the heavier pieces of furniture.
Chrissie heard the knock on the door and went to open it. Guy started to glance at her with brief disinterest, preparatory to introducing himself, and then looked at her again whilst Chrissie returned his look with the same shocked intensity.
She had heard, of course—who hadn’t?—of ‘love at first sight’ but had always wryly dismissed it as a fairy-tale fantasy.
Surely no one in these modern times could possibly be stricken so instantly, so totally, in the space of less than a minute, or know immediately that this was the one, the only person with whom they could spend the rest of their lives.
But none of these admirably logical and sensible thoughts came anywhere near entering her head now as she simply stood and returned the intensity of Guy’s silent visual contact with her.
Outside in the street, in the rest of the world, people went about their normal daily business, but the two of them were as far removed from that kind of mundanity as it was possible to be, transported to a world of their own where only the two of them existed.
Chrissie could feel her pulse jumping, her heart beating with frantic haste, her breathing growing far too fast and shallow, as she and Guy continued to search one another’s face, the recognition between them both instant and compelling.
That he was good-looking and very physically male she had noted automatically when she opened the door, but her reaction to him now went deeper than that, much, much deeper. It encompassed not just his outward appearance, his physical attributes, but his deeper inner self, as well.
It was almost as though there was some psychic, soul-deep bond between them that both of them had instantly recognised and responded to. There could surely be no other reason for the sheer intensity of their shared sense of recognition and awareness, Chrissie reasoned as she mechanically stepped back into the cottage knowing that Guy would follow her in.
Guy couldn’t believe what was happening to him. He knew there was a story within the family that along with the physical genes inherited from their wild Gypsy ancestor, there were those Cookes who also inherited some of his more spiritual and psychic gifts, but he had never had any occasion in the past to consider himself one of those so gifted, nor indeed to put very much credence in their existence.
He was far too much a modern twenty-first-century man for that, and yet he was intensely aware of that startling moment of unexpected insight he had experienced when the cottage door opened and he had seen her standing there, had known the moment he looked at her that he was confronting his own fate. Somehow he already knew just how that wonderful waterfall of dark red hair would feel slipping through his hands, against his body...how she would feel, how she would taste, how she would smell and even how she would look...cry out in the moment of their shared physical coming together. He knew...he knew...
He could hear the blood pulsing in his ears and feel the rapid-fire volley of his heartbeat that sounded like a warning drum roll. He knew as he looked at her that she was the woman, the one woman, who would make his life—him—complete. He knew, too, that if he were to stretch out his hand to her now, she would put her own into it and silently follow him; allow him to lead her...take her, in every sense of the word, but she was no dependent, naive clinging vine. On the contrary, he recognised that she was an extremely well-grounded and femininely powerful woman.
As he stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind him, he reached out instinctively to touch her face. Immediately Chrissie turned her head and pressed her mouth to the hard palm of his hand.
Guy heard himself groan as he drew her towards him with his other hand. Her body fitted perfectly within his, as he would fit perfectly within hers.
He didn’t know which of them was trembling harder as he bent his head and replaced the hard warmth of his palm against her lips with the even harder warmth of his mouth. He only knew that the tiny, agonized sound of delight she made beneath his kiss was echoed a thousandfold deep within his own body.
Chrissie could feel herself trembling violently as she gave herself over not just to Guy’s kiss, but to the new role that fate had devised for her. She had never imagined minutes ago when she opened the door to him that she was opening the door to her future. She had never been the kind of woman to rush into any kind of physical intimacy—just the opposite—yet here she was, knowing that no matter how far the intimacy went between the two of them, it could be nowhere near as intense as the silent, emotional bonding they had already shared.
Never had she imagined that she could react like this to a man’s touch, to his kiss, that she could want him so immediately and so overwhelmingly, that she could feel the urgent almost violent desire within him to tear aside the barriers of their clothing and know her utterly and completely and to share that desire, to know just how much he ached for the feel of her skin against his, beneath his, and how much she shared and returned that ache.
She could hear him whispering beneath their shared hungry kisses how much he wanted her, how much he had longed for her in his life—unintelligible, disjointed words that ran together from a raw trickle of sound into a sensual flood.
How long they stood there, kissing, touching... wanting, Chrissie had no idea; she only knew that when he finally released her, she was trembling so much she could hardly stand up, that her mouth felt swollen and bruised, that his mouth looked... looked...
She swallowed as she looked at him and he reached reassuringly for her hand, then held it tenderly in the firm, warm grip of his own. ‘Coup de foudre, I believe the French call it.’
‘They would,’ Chrissie replied shakily. She ached to be back in his arms. She ached all over for him, she admitted, inside and out, and it was nothing like the aches and pains she had been suffering because of her bard physical work cleaning up the cottage, nothing at all.
God, but he wanted her, Guy recognised. He wanted her so much that he didn’t know how he was managing to keep his hands off her. He had never considered himself to be a highly sexed man, but right now...
‘I’ve never experienced anything like this before,’ Chrissie confessed.
‘Good,’ Guy told her tautly, adding rawly, ‘I think I’d want to kill any other man who might have—’
Chrissie stopped him, shaking her head, but she knew what he meant. She felt equally savage and uncharacteristically jealous of any other woman who might have had the same effect on him as she quite obviously had had.
She took a deep breath and forced herself to try to come back down to normality, but it was almost impossible. ‘I want you so much,’ she admitted shakily. Then Guy was bridging the small gap between them and taking her back in his arms.
For several long minutes, the only sound was that of their increasingly passionate kisses and strained breathing. Chrissie had no idea which of them it was who lifted Guy’s hand to her breast; she only knew that the sensation of his holding her, touching her there, made her whole body jerk in a frenzy of physical need, a sensation like a jolt of electricity running straight from her breast to her womb, convulsing her whole body with a deep-rooted, aching need.
‘Please don’t, please don’t,’ she whispered huskily, even though she was the one who arched back against him, guiding his hand whilst he rubbed the tip of his thumb over and over her T-shirt-covered nipple until she was pleading frantically with him to soothe her aching flesh with the healing suckle of his mouth.
Chrissie had never pleaded with a man to make love to her before or imagined she might want to, but this whole situation was a world apart from anything she had experienced before, completely foreign territory to her, a place where the old rules, the old guidelines, meant nothing and where the only things she had to guide her were her own senses and needs and his.
When Guy tagged up her T-shirt in response to her frenzied pleas and fastened his mouth on the hard, swollen tip of her breast, Chrissie almost felt she might faint from the intensity of her pleasure.
She could hear his soft murmurs as he caressed her and could feel the need in his body. She ached to touch him, to explore him, to know him, and suddenly the fierce suckling of his mouth against her breast wasn’t enough to satisfy the urgent clamour of her physical response to him. Only one thing, one person, could satisfy and silence that.
Her hands trembling, she lifted them to cup his face and gently ease him away from her body. As he looked into her eyes, she dropped her hands and held one of them out to him and started to walk towards the stairs.
Her hand felt small and delicate, almost lost within the grip of his as he let her lead him, but as they started to mount the stairs, she felt him pull back slightly from her.
‘You don’t have to do this, you know,’ she heard him telling her rustily.
Silently Chrissie searched his face before telling him with quiet dignity, ‘Yes, I do, but if you would rather not...’
Her honest directness made Guy’s heart ache for her. She was so trusting, so giving, so...so perfect.
‘You shouldn’t need to ask,’ he told her huskily, adding with a rueful, self-derogatory laugh as he looked briefly down at his own body, ‘The answer is, I’m afraid to say, rather too obvious.’
