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‘It’s bad enough that you were using it as a race track—’
Oh, great. There you are lying in a ditch, entangled with a bent bicycle, with a strange man’s hand on your backside—he’d better be trapped, too—and his first thought was to lecture her on road safety.
‘—but you weren’t even looking where you were going.’
She spat out what she hoped was a bit of twig. ‘You may not have noticed but I was being chased by a donkey,’ she said.
‘Oh, I noticed.’
Not sympathy, but satisfaction.
‘And what about you?’ she demanded. Although her field of vision was small, she could see that he was wearing dark green coveralls. And she was pretty sure that she’d seen a pair of Wellington boots pass in front of her eyes in the split second before she’d crashed into the bank. ‘I’d risk a bet you don’t have a licence for fishing here.’
‘And you’d win,’ he admitted, without the slightest suggestion of remorse. ‘Are you hurt?’
Finally…
‘Only, until you move I can’t get up,’ he explained.
Oh, right. Not concern, just impatience. What a charmer.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, with just the slightest touch of sarcasm, ‘but you shouldn’t move after an accident.’ She’d written up a first-aid course she’d attended for the women’s page and was very clear on that point. ‘In case of serious injury,’ she added, to press home the point that he should be sympathetic. Concerned.
‘Is that a fact? So what do you suggest? We just lie here until a paramedic happens to pass by?’
Now who was being sarcastic?
‘I’ve got a phone in my bag,’ she said. It was slung across her body and lying against her back out of reach. Probably a good thing or she’d have been tempted to hit him with it. What the heck did he think he was doing leaping out in front of her like that? ‘If you can reach it, you could dial nine-nine-nine.’
‘Are you hurt?’ She detected the merest trace of concern so presumably the message was getting through his thick skull. ‘I’m not about to call out the emergency services to deal with a bruised ego.’
No. Wrong again.
‘I might have a concussion,’ she pointed out. ‘You might have concussion.’ She could hope…
‘If you do, you have no one but yourself to blame. The cycle helmet is supposed to be on your head, not in your basket.’
He was right, of course, but the chairman of the Planning Committee was old school. Any woman journalist who wanted a story had better be well-groomed and properly dressed in a skirt and high heels. Having gone to the effort of putting up her hair for the old misogynist, she wasn’t about to ruin her hard work by crushing it with her cycle helmet.
She’d intended to catch the bus this morning. But if it weren’t for the blackfly she could have caught the bus…
‘How many fingers am I holding up?’ Mr Grumpy asked.
‘Oh…’ She blinked as a muddy hand appeared in front of her. The one that wasn’t cradling her backside in a much too familiar manner. Not that she was about to draw attention to the fact that she’d noticed. Much wiser to ignore it and concentrate on the other hand which, beneath the mud, consisted of a broad palm, a well-shaped thumb, long fingers… ‘Three?’ she offered.
‘Close enough.’
‘I’m not sure that “close enough” is close enough,’ she said, putting off the moment when she’d have to test the jangle of aches and move. ‘Do you want to try that again?’
‘Not unless you’re telling me you can’t count up to three.’
‘Right now I’m not sure of my own name,’ she lied.
‘Does Claire Thackeray sound familiar?’
That was when she made the mistake of picking her face out of the bluebells and looking at him.
Forget concussion.
She was now in heart-attack territory. Dry mouth, loss of breath. Thud. Bang. Boom.
Mr Grumpy was not some irascible old bloke with a bee in his bonnet regarding the sanctity of footpaths—even if he was less than scrupulous about where he fished—and a legitimate grievance at the way she’d run him down.
He might be irritable, but he wasn’t old. Far from it.
He was mature.
In the way that men who’ve passed the smooth-skinned prettiness of their twenties and fulfilled the potential of their genes are mature.
Not that Hal North had ever been pretty.
He’d been a raw-boned youth with a wild streak that had both attracted and frightened her. As a child she’d yearned to be noticed by him, but would have run a mile if he’d as much as glanced in her direction. As a young teen, she’d had fantasies about him that would have given her mother nightmares if she’d even suspected her precious girl of having such thoughts about the village bad boy.
Not that her mother had anything to worry about where Hal North was concerned.
She was too young for anything but the muddled fantasies in her head, much too young for Hal to notice her existence.
There had been plenty of girls of his own age, girls with curves, girls who were attracted to the aura of risk he generated, the edge of darkness that had made her shiver a little—shiver a lot—with feelings she didn’t truly understand.
It had been like watching your favourite film star, or a rock god strutting his stuff on the television. You felt a kind of thrill, but you weren’t sure what it meant, what you were supposed to do with it.
Or maybe that was just her.
She’d been a swot, not one of the ‘cool’ group in school who had giggled over things she didn’t understand.
While they’d been practising being women, she’d been confined to experiencing it second-hand in the pages of nineteenth-century literature.
He’d bulked up since the day he’d been banished from the estate by Sir Robert Cranbrook after some particularly outrageous incident; what, she never discovered. Her mother had talked about it in hushed whispers to her father, but instantly switched to that bright, false change-the-subject smile if she came near enough to hear and she’d never had a secret-sharing relationship with any of the local girls.
Instead, she’d filled her diary with all kinds of fantasies about what might have happened, where he’d gone, about the day he’d return to find her all grown up—no longer the skinny ugly duckling but a fully fledged swan. Definitely fairy-tale material…
The years had passed, her diary had been abandoned in the face of increasing workloads from school and he’d been forgotten in the heat of a real-life romance.
Now confronted by him, as close as her girlish fantasy could ever have imagined, it came back in a rush and his power to attract, she discovered, had only grown over the years.
He was no longer a raw-boned skinny youth with shoulders he had yet to grow into, hands too big for his wrists. He still had hard cheekbones, though. A take-it-or-leave-it jaw, a nose that suggested he’d taken it once or twice himself. The only softness in his face, the sensuous curve of his lower lip.
It was his eyes, though, so dark in the shadow of overhanging trees, which overrode any shortfall in classic good looks. They had the kind of raw energy that made her blood tingle, her skin goose, had her fighting for breath in a way that had nothing to do with being winded by her fall.
She reminded herself that she was twenty-six. A responsible adult holding down a job, supporting her child. A grown woman who did not blush. At all.
‘I’m surprised you recognised me,’ she said, doing her best to sound calm, in control, despite the thudding heart, racing pulse, the mud smearing her cheek. The fact that her hand was jammed between his legs. Nowhere near in control enough to admit the intimacy of a name she had once whispered over and over in the dark of her room.
She snatched her hand away, keeping her ‘ouch’ to herself as she scraped her knuckles on the brake lever and told herself not to be so wet.
‘You haven’t changed much.’ His tone suggested that it wasn’t a subject for congratulation. ‘Still prim, all buttoned- up. And still riding your bike along this footpath. I’ll bet it was the only rule you ever broke.’
‘There’s nothing big about breaking rules,’ she said, stung into attack by his casual dismissal of her best suit. The suggestion that she still looked the same now as when she’d worn a blazer and a panama hat over hair braided in a neat plait. ‘Nothing big about hiding under the willows, tickling Sir Robert’s trout, either. Not the only rule you ever broke,’ she added.
‘Sharper tongued, though.’
That stung, too. The incident might have been painful but come on… She’d been chased by a donkey and every other man she knew would be at the very least struggling to hide a grin right now. Most would be laughing out loud.
‘As for the trout,’ he added, ‘Robert Cranbrook never did own them, only the right to stand on the bank with a rod and fly and attempt to catch them. He can’t even claim that now.’
‘Maybe not,’ she said, doing her best to ignore the sensory deluge, ‘but someone can.’ And sounded just as prim and buttoned-up as she apparently looked. ‘HMRC if the rumours about the state of Sir Robert’s finances are to be believed and the Revenue certainly won’t take kindly to you helping yourself.’
Buttoned-up and priggish.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, making a determined effort to lighten the mood, ‘I’ll look the other way, just this once, if you’ll promise to ignore my misdemeanour.’
‘Shall we get out of this ditch before you start plea bargaining?’ he suggested.
Plea bargaining? She’d been joking, for heaven’s sake! She wasn’t that buttoned-up. She wasn’t buttoned-up at all!
‘You don’t appear to have a concussion,’ he continued, ‘and unless you’re telling me you can’t feel your legs, or you’ve broken something, I’d rather leave the paramedics to cope with genuine emergencies.’
‘Good call.’ As an emergency it was genuine enough—although not in the medical sense—but if she was the subject of her own front-page story she’d never hear the last of it in the newsroom. ‘Hold on,’ she said, not that he appeared to need encouragement to do that. He hadn’t changed that much. ‘I’ll check.’
She did a quick round up of her limbs, flexing her fingers and toes. Her shoulder had taken the brunt of the fall and she knew that she would be feeling it any moment now, but it was probably no more than a bruise. The peddle had spun as her foot had slipped, whacking her shin. She’d scraped her knuckles on the brake lever and her left foot appeared to be up to the ankle in the cold muddy water at the bottom of the ditch but everything appeared to be in reasonable working order.
‘Well?’ he demanded.
‘Winded.’ She wouldn’t want him to think he was the cause of her breathing difficulties. ‘And there will be bruises, but I have sufficient feeling below the waist to know where your hand is.’
He didn’t seem to feel the need to apologise but then she had run into him at full tilt. She really didn’t want to think about where he’d be black and blue. Or where her own hand had been.
‘What about you?’ she asked, somewhat belatedly.
‘Can I feel my hand on your bum?’
The lines bracketing his mouth deepened a fraction and her heart rate which, after the initial shock of seeing him, had begun to settle back down, thudding along steadily with only an occasional rattle of the cymbals, took off on a dramatic drum roll.
CHAPTER TWO
‘ARE you in one piece?’ Claire asked, doing her best to ignore the timpani section having a field day and keep it serious.
If he could do that with an almost smile, she wasn’t going to risk the full nine yards.
‘I’ll survive.’
She sketched what she hoped was a careless shrug. ‘Close enough.’
And this time the smile, no more than a dare-you straightening of the lips, reached his eyes, setting her heart off on a flashy drum solo.
‘Shall we risk it, then?’ he prompted when she didn’t move.
‘Sorry.’ She wasn’t an impressionable teenager, she reminded herself. She was a grown woman, a mother… ‘I’m still a bit dazed.’ That, at least, was true. Although whether the fall had anything to do with it was a moot point. Forget laughing about this. Hal North was a lot safer when he was being a grouch.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s try this. You roll to your right and I’ll do my best to untangle us both.’
She gingerly eased herself onto her shoulder, then gave a little gasp at the unexpected intimacy of his cold fingers against the sensitive, nylon-clad flesh as he hooked his hand beneath her knee. It was a lifetime since she was that timid girl who’d watched him from a safe distance, nearly died when he’d looked at her, but he was still attracting and scaring her in equal quantities. Okay, maybe not quite equal…
‘Does that hurt?’ he asked.
‘No!’ She was too fierce, too adamant and his eyes narrowed. ‘Your hand was cold,’ she said lamely as he lifted her leg free of the frame.
‘That’s what happens when you tickle trout,’ he said, confirming her impression that he’d just stepped up out of the stream when she ran into him. It would certainly explain why she hadn’t seen him. And why he hadn’t had time taking avoiding action.
‘Are you still selling your catch to the landlord of The Feathers?’ she asked, doing her best to control the conversation.
‘Is he still in the market for poached game?’ he asked, not denying that he’d once supplied him through the back door. ‘He’d have to pay rather more for a freshly caught river trout these days.’
‘That’s inflation for you. I hope your rod is still in one piece.’
His eyebrow twitched, proving that he did, after all, possess a sense of humour. ‘Couldn’t you tell?’
‘Your fishing rod…’ Claire stopped, but it was too late to wish she’d ignored the innuendo.
‘It’s not mine,’ he said, taking pity on her. ‘I confiscated it from a lad fishing without a licence.’
‘Confiscated it?’
As he sat up, she caught sight of the Cranbrook crest on the pocket of his coveralls. He was working on the estate? Poacher turned gamekeeper? Why did that feel so wrong? He would be a good choice if the liquidators wanted to protect what assets remained. He knew every inch of the estate, every trick in the book…
‘Aren’t they terribly expensive?’ she asked. ‘Fishing rods.’
‘He’ll get it back when he pays his fine.’
‘A fine? That’s a bit harsh,’ she said, rather afraid she knew who might have been trying his luck. ‘He’s only doing what you did when you were his age.’
‘The difference being that I was bright enough not to get caught.’
‘I’m not sure that’s something to be proud of.’
‘It beats the hell out of the alternative.’ She couldn’t argue with that. ‘I take it, from all this touching concern, that you know the boy?’
‘I imagine it was Gary Harker. His mother works in the estate office. She’s at her wit’s end. He left school last year and hasn’t had a sniff of a job. In the old days he’d have been taken on by the estate,’ she prompted. ‘Learned a skill.’
