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He broke off as Sorrel gasped in indignation.
‘Something wrong,’ he asked her, lifting dark eyebrows.
‘When I want your opinion on my body, I’ll ask for it,’ Sorrel told him grimly.
‘No need to get so uptight. I was just curious to know why a woman like you hasn’t had a lover. When I was your age …’
He was somewhere in his mid-thirties, Sorrel guessed, although, with the deep tanning of his skin and the tiny lines that fanned out from his eyes, it was hard to be accurate. There was certainly no grey in his hair. No discernible excess of flesh on his hard-muscled frame.
‘I have no wish to know about your sexual experiences,’ Sorrel told him frigidly.
‘No man in your life, eh? Now …’
Sorrel had had enough. ‘As a matter of fact, there is a man in my life. I’m engaged to be married, and if Andrew has too much respect for me to … to rush me into bed, then …’
She broke off as she heard his laughter. Hot spots of colour burned in her face as she glared at him.
‘Too much respect? More like not enough guts,’ Val told her forthrightly. ‘What kind of man is he?’
‘A decent, respectable, hardworking kind,’ Sorrel told him grittily. ‘Not that it’s any business of yours.’
He was looking at her rather oddly, an almost devilish glint of amusement in his eyes.
‘I see. And I suppose the sober, respectable … worthy fiancé would not approve of you spending the next three days and nights alone here with me?’
Sorrel opened her mouth to protest that Andrew would understand, and then she remembered how very narrow-minded he could be on occasions, how much importance he placed on respectability, and she swallowed back the words. He would understand, of course he would. And no one outside the family need know. The kind of speculation and gossip that Andrew would abhor wasn’t going to arise because no one outside the family would ever know, would they?
She looked up and found that Val was watching her with cool amusement.
‘Of course Andrew would understand,’ she lied, tilting her chin and staring him down. ‘He trusts me implicitly, and besides, there’s no question of anything … well, illicit. It’s just that there’s been a mistake.’
‘He trusts you, but he doesn’t desire you. Sounds an odd basis for a lifetime commitment to me.’
‘Just because sex isn’t the most important part of our relationship, that’s no reason to sneer at it,’ Sorrel told him angrily.
‘As far as I understand it, sex doesn’t form any part of your relationship,’ Val threw back at her. ‘Lord, I thought your kind had gone out with the Victorians. What do the rest of the family think about this engagement?’
‘They … they like Andrew,’ Sorrel fibbed valiantly.
‘You don’t sound so certain. It seems to me that this engagement of yours has been a bad mistake.’
Sorrel couldn’t believe her ears. She knew that Australians believed in frank speaking, but this was sheer rudeness. Thoroughly affronted, she opened her mouth to tell him that her private life was no concern of his when he forestalled her by changing the subject and saying, ‘Any chance of anything to eat? We were late landing at Heathrow, and I never eat plane food.’
He made it sound as though he travelled a great deal, and Sorrel felt a faint unwanted stirring of curiosity about him.
His clothes, now that she looked at him properly, were expensive and well-tailored, despite their casual appearance. Looking at him, it would be impossible to judge just where he was from or what he did for a living.
‘I’ve got a home-made shepherd’s pie I could heat up. It will take about half an hour in the range.’ She went to put it in. ‘Your letter said that you had to come to England on business,’ she went on abruptly. ‘What kind of business?’
‘I have a boat-building business in Perth, and I’m over here to check out a new British technique for making super-lightweight craft.’
‘And you thought you’d look us up … just like that?’
Her aggression made him smile mockingly at her. Was there no way she could get under his skin the way he did hers? Sorrel thought crossly as she got the pie and put it in the oven, this time taking care to use protective oven gloves.
‘Ancestry’s very big back home at the moment. Something to do with the recent bicentennial fever, I guess. I knew that my family came originally from Wales, and I thought it might be interesting to have a go at seeing how far I could trace it back.’
‘Llewellyn’s a very common Welsh name,’ Sorrel pointed out.
‘I have a great-aunt who swears that she remembers hearing from her grandmother how her husband’s father came originally from this part of Wales. He was a Daniel, too, like your father. And the family diaries—’
‘Your family keep diaries, too?’ Sorrel’s face lit up, her animosity forgotten. ‘Oh, I’d love to see them. Ma asked Simon to bring ours down. She thought you might be interested in reading them. It’s a tradition that the women of the family always keep a diary.’ She stopped, annoyed with herself for forgetting how much she disliked him.
‘What’s this?’ he asked her suddenly, staring at her tapestry frame.
She told him reluctantly, but her love and enthusiasm for her craft refused to give way to her desire to be abrupt with him.
‘I’ve done the first three seasons,’ she heard herself telling him, in a voice that was suddenly, for no reason at all, slightly breathy. It couldn’t be because he had bent his head over her work, just in the direction she was pointing, so that his dark hair brushed against her wrist, causing tiny tingling sensations to race along her veins, heating her entire body, could it? No, of course not. It was unthinkable … ridiculous … impossible that she should react to this abrasive Australian in a way that she had never reacted to Andrew, the man she had agreed to marry.
Various alien and disturbing thoughts filled her mind, making the colour come up under her clear Celtic skin.
‘And the final season?’ Val prompted.
‘Winter,’ she told him curtly.
‘Yes … The last time I experienced snow like this was in the Canadian Rockies during my university days. I hadn’t realised you could have this kind of weather so late in the year.’
‘Half a dozen or more climbers who think the same thing lose their lives in these mountains almost every year,’ Sorrel told him. ‘You were lucky not to be trapped inside your car. Why did you go to university in Canada?’
He raised his eyebrows a little but, if he could ask her impertinent questions about her relationship with Andrew, then she was quite sure that she could reciprocate. It was odd how curious she was about him. Dangerous, too. She shivered a little, a tiny frisson of unfamiliar apprehension-laced excitement going through her.
‘I wanted to study geology, and I spent a postgraduate year in the Rockies doing fieldwork.’
‘Geology? I thought you said you built boats.’
‘I do—now. The pie smells as though it’s ready.’
In other words, no more questions. He was adroit at concealing more of himself than he revealed, and even more adroit at getting her to reveal far too much, she acknowledged as she went over to the oven.
The pie was almost ready. There were fresh vegetables to go with it, and rhubarb fool for pudding.
‘We ought to be toasting our new-found cousin-ship,’ Val remarked as he asked Sorrel where he could find the cutlery. ‘Is there anything to drink?’
Her mother had packed a couple of bottles of her home-made wine, and Sorrel produced one of them. She saw his eyebrows lift in a way that was becoming familiar as he studied the label, and she explained to him what elderberry wine was.
‘A resourceful woman, your mother.’
‘She’s a home-maker,’ Sorrel told him, ‘and she thrives on hard work. She’s spent her life doing all the things we’re told turn the female sex into drudges, and yet I’ve never met a more fulfilled woman than my mother. She’s interested in everything and everyone … and she knows so much about the history of the wife’s role in the running of a farm like ours. She sometimes gives talks on it to local WI meetings. She loves it … standing up on the stage, talking to them … and they love her. I asked her a few years ago if she had ever thought what she might have done if she’d had a career. She laughed at me. She said that being married to my father gave her the best of everything: a man whom she loved, his children, the pleasure of running her own home, and the business aspects of keeping the farm accounts, of being free to order her own day, to enjoy the countryside. I know what she means … I don’t think I could ever work for a large organisation with regimented rules and regulations after being my own boss.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Val told her, surprising her. ‘When I started off in mineral exploration, it was very much a free and easy life. You got a job working for a newly formed company. They bought the mineral right to a certain tract of land and sent you out to discover what, if any, value it might have. You lived in the outback … often for weeks at a time, turning in a report when you’d finished the job. But once the boom came, the pleasure went out of it.’
‘Was that why you build boats instead?’
‘Sort of. This wine smells good … Not quite up to our better Australian vineyards’ products, of course.’
‘It’s very potent,’ Sorrel warned him, dishing up their meal and putting a plateful of food in front of him.
It had surprised her a little that he had so readily and naturally helped her with the preparation of the meal, but perhaps if he had lived alone in the outback he was used to fending for himself. She had always thought that Australian men were very chauvinistic, and considered women to be little more than chattels.
Fair-mindedly, she acknowledged that she did not really know enough about the continent or its inhabitants to separate truth from myth, and it was probable that Australian men, like any men, were a mixed and varied bunch of human beings who should not be typecast.
‘This is good,’ Val told her appreciatively, tucking into his food. ‘Your mother’s an excellent cook.’
Sorrel bent her head over her own plate, not telling him that she had made the pie. She enjoyed cooking, and firmly believed that any form of creative achievement could be satisfying when one was well-taught. Although her mother was what was normally referred to as a plain cook, she took a pride in the meals she placed before her family, and she had passed on that pride to Sorrel.
Val had poured them both a glass of wine, and now he put down his knife and fork and picked up his glass, motioning to Sorrel to do the same.
‘To you, Sorrel Llewellyn,’ he toasted her softly. ‘I’m delighted to make your acquaintance … Drink it,’ he urged her when she barely touched her lips to the glass. ‘Otherwise I’m going to think it’s poisoned. You certainly looked at me as though you’d have loved to slip me a glass of hemlock when I first arrived.’
‘It was a shock to discover you were a man,’ Sorrel protested, letting the warming wine slide down her throat. It tasted delicious but, as she well remembered from past occasions, she really did not have a strong enough head to cope with her mother’s potent home-made brews.
Over their meal they talked, or rather Val talked and she listened, so that by the time they were ready for their pudding she was beginning to feel almost lazily content.
She started to get up to take their plates to the sink, but Val forestalled her, announcing that it was his turn to do some work.
As he walked past her chair he refilled her glass and she stared at it owlishly. Was that the third or fourth time he had filled it? She felt too pleasantly hazy to worry … too interested in the stories Val was telling her about his research into the family.
He had already explained to her that his name was Russian in origin, and that his mother had Russian blood. He had three sisters, he had informed her, all of them older than him and all of them married with families.
‘It’s a wonder I didn’t grow up in terror of the female sex,’ he told her with a grin as he handed her a generous helping of rhubarb fool. ‘You wouldn’t believe how much they bullied me.’
‘No, I wouldn’t,’ Sorrel agreed darkly. ‘They probably spoiled you to death.’
‘Not a bit of it,’ he assured her with a grin.
‘What did they think of you coming over here to meet your English relatives?’
‘Oh, they were all for it,’ he told her promptly. ‘In fact, they bet me that I’d probably go back with a …’
‘With a what?’ Sorrel asked him, curious not so much to know what he had been going to say, but the reason he had stopped so abruptly, giving her a look that was almost wary.
‘An English wife,’ he told her smoothly. So smoothly that she felt sure, for some reason, there was something he wasn’t telling her.
But the wine had made her feel so woozy and relaxed that it was too much of an effort to hold on to the thought, and so she let it slip away, asking instead, ‘Why should they think that?’
‘Because that’s what our original Llewellyn ancestor did. He was shipped over as a convict. He stole a loaf of bread. He was lucky it was only one loaf, otherwise he’d have been hanged and not transported, and that would have been the end. He was lucky in being chosen as an overseer by one of the colonists, mainly because he had some knowledge of farming methods—and after he’d served his seven years, he came back to England.’
‘To find a wife?’ Sorrel asked him, fascinated, but for some reason Val seemed reluctant to tell her any more.
‘This is delicious,’ he told her. ‘Is there any more?’
‘Yes. I’ll get you some.’ She stood up and then sat down again abruptly as her legs turned weak and wobbly and the room spun dizzyingly around her.
‘Something wrong?’
‘The wine. I’ve drunk too much of it … It’s so strong.’ And yet it didn’t seem to have affected him, Sorrel noticed.
What she needed now was a couple of cups of strong coffee to sober her up, but when she tried to say as much the words became hopelessly tangled.
‘I think you’d better just come and sit down by the fire,’ Val told her, grinning at her.
‘Not the fire,’ Sorrel mumbled, ‘fresh air.’
‘In this weather? You’re kidding!’
‘Fire needs stoking. Upstairs as well,’ Sorrel told him as she tried to stand up for a second time.
‘Leave everything to me. Hey, it has gone to your head, hasn’t it?’ she heard Val saying in a voice that seemed to hold more of a suspicion of laughter than concern, and then she was swept up into his arms and deposited in front of the range in one of the two easy chairs, her head spinning so badly that she closed her eyes and moaned faintly. It was the wine, of course, and nothing to do with the wholly unexpected sensation of being picked up and carried in Val’s arms, her head resting against his shoulder, her face turned into his skin so that her lips were almost touching the warm brown column of his throat. His skin fascinated her. She wondered woozily if he was tanned all over, and then blushed guiltily at the wantonness of her thoughts.
‘Fire too hot?’ she heard him asking her solicitously, and she opened her eyes reluctantly to find he was leaning over her, arms braced either side of her on the arms of the chair.
His shirt was open at the throat and she was sure she could see dark hair growing there. She had an odd squirmy feeling in her stomach—a sensation hitherto unknown to her. Andrew’s torso was almost hairless, his skin very pale. He hated sunbathing and she remembered had only reluctantly removed his shirt when they had spent a day in Pembrokeshire, walking along the cliffs with Simon and Fiona during the summer. Her brother had laughed at him, Sorrel remembered, and although she knew she hadn’t been meant to see it she had not missed the look of pity Fiona had given her.
Perhaps it was true that Andrew wasn’t a very male man, certainly nothing like as male as Val. She gave a tiny shiver and, to her consternation, felt the hard, calloused weight of Val’s palm against her forehead.
‘Just checking to see if you had a fever,’ he told her when her eyes opened wide.
‘If anyone should have a fever, it would be you,’ she told him crossly. ‘Walking through that snow …’
‘What would you have preferred me to do? Stayed in my car and frozen to death?’
The sensation of pain that struck her astounded her. She looked at him with confused, anguish-glazed eyes and suddenly his face came properly into focus and in his eyes she saw a predatory male look that made her body tense; then she blinked and it was gone, and she knew that she must have imagined it.
‘Bed for you, I think,’ she heard him saying wryly, ‘before you pass out on me down here.’
‘Won’t pass out,’ Sorrel told him indignantly. ‘Can’t—can’t go to bed … not with you …’
She thought she heard him chuckle as he bent to pick her up, but her head was whirling round so much that she had to concentrate all her attention on that.
‘If it bothers you that much, I can always doss down on the floor. It won’t be the first time. I slept rough often enough when I was prospecting.’
‘Prospecting?’ Sorrel questioned him drowsily as he headed for the stairs. She could get quite used to being held in his arms, she decided woozily. There was something very pleasant about the sensation of him all around her. She liked the scent of his body, the maleness of him. It made her want to nestle and cuddle up against him.
‘I’m a geologist, remember?’ he told her.
The stairs were steep, but he reached the top barely out of breath, Sorrel recognised admiringly. She tried to imagine Andrew picking her up and carrying her to bed once they were married, but the image refused to form, and the wine-induced elation spinning through her body suddenly turned to dejection.
She wanted to marry Andrew, she reminded herself. And there was more to marriage than having a husband strong enough to pick her up in his arms. Andrew had different strengths … far more important strengths. But, dredge her brain though she did, she couldn’t for some reason recall just what they were.
