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He didn’t have time for mood swings and tantrums. He had more than he could handle of those from Megan at the moment. That was why coming to Whitehaven was such a good distraction on a Sunday afternoon. It soothed him.
He looked Miss High-and-Mighty right back in the eyes. ‘And I’m getting off your land as fast as I can.’ Even though he had a strange sense that she was the trespasser. She was the one spoiling the peace and quiet of the one perfect spot in this world.
Her lips pressed together in a pout. One that might have been quite appealing if he weren’t so angry with her for being here. ‘The road is that way.’ She jerked a thumb in the direction of the drive.
‘I know.’ He deliberately didn’t elaborate for a few seconds. Just because he was feeling unusually awkward, although, in the back of his mind, he knew she was bearing the brunt of his frustration with someone else. But the woman in front of him was cut from the same cloth—exclusive designer cloth, by the look of it—and he just couldn’t seem to stem his reaction. He took a deep breath. ‘But my boat is tied up down by the boathouse.’
He blinked, waiting for more of her frosty words.
‘I have a boathouse?’ Once again, the tide had changed and she was suddenly back to being wistful and dreamy and far too beautiful to be real. That just got his goat even more. When she spoke again she was staring off into the bare treetops above his head. ‘It’s real? It wasn’t just a film set?’
He shrugged and set off down the path and his features hardened as he heard her following him.
‘Now what? I’m going, okay?’ he called out, only half-turning to let the words drift over his shoulder.
‘I want to see the boathouse.’
Ben normally loved the walk back down the hill on an autumn afternoon, but today it was totally ruined for him. He couldn’t appreciate the beauty of the leaves, ranging from pale yellow to deep crimson. He didn’t even stop to watch the trails of smoke snaking from the cottages of Lower Hadwell, just across the river. All he could hear were the footsteps behind him. All he could see—even though she was directly behind him and completely out of sight—was a pair of intense, dark eyes looking scornfully at him. It wasn’t a moment too soon when he spotted the uneven stone steps that led down to the jetty.
As he reached the top step he heard a loud gasp behind him. Instinctively, he turned and put out a hand to steady her. But she hadn’t stumbled. And she hadn’t even registered his impulsive offer of help. She stood with her hands over her mouth and her eyes shining. Great. Now it was time for the waterworks. He was out of here.
As quickly as he could, he made his way to where his boat was tied and started untying the painter, busily ignoring her slow descent of the steps behind him. Just as he was about to step off the jetty and into the dinghy his mobile phone chimed in his back pocket. He would have ignored it, but it was Megan’s ring tone. Something might have happened to their daughter.
And, since she was standing within reaching distance, not doing much but staring at the old stone boathouse, he slapped the end of the rope into the frosty woman’s hands and dug around in his jeans pocket for his phone.
‘Dad?’ Not Megan, but Jasmine.
‘What’s up, Jellybean?’
There was a snort on the other end of the line. ‘Do you have to keep calling me that? I’m almost twelve. It’s hardly dignified.’
Ben’s brows lowered over his eyes. Less than twenty-four hours out of his custody and she was already starting to sound like her mother. ‘What’s up, Jas?’
‘Mum says she can’t drop me off this evening. She’s got something on. Can you come and get me?’
Ben looked at his watch. Jasmine had been due back at five. It was past three now. ‘What time?’ Maybe it was just as well he’d had to leave Whitehaven early. It would take all of that time to cross the river, walk back to the cottage and drive the ten miles to Totnes.
He waited while his daughter had a muffled conference with her mother.
‘Mum says she has to be out by four.’
Ben found himself striding along the jetty in front of the boathouse. ‘I can’t do it, Jas.’ He kept walking while Jasmine relayed the information back to Megan. And when he reached the end of the jetty he turned and went back the way he’d come.
‘Mum says she wants to talk to you.’
There was a clattering while the phone changed hands. Ben steeled himself.
‘Ben? I can’t believe you’re being difficult about this! I know you’ve still got a soft spot for me, but it’s time to let go, move on… This kind of behaviour is just childish.’
He opened his mouth to explain there was nothing difficult about not doing the physically impossible, but Megan didn’t give him a chance.
‘Everything always has to be on your terms, doesn’t it? You’d do just about anything to sabotage my new life, wouldn’t you?’
His voice was more of a growl than he’d intended when it emerged from his mouth. ‘I do hope you are not letting our daughter overhear this. She doesn’t need to witness any more arguments.’
Megan gave a heavy sigh. ‘That’s right. Change the subject, as always!’ Still, he got the distinct impression she had moved into the hallway as her voice suddenly got more echoey.
‘Megan, I’m at Whitehaven. This has nothing to do with sabotage and everything to do with being too far away to get there by four o’clock.’
He waited. He could almost see the pout on his ex’s face. And, as he found himself back by his boat, he noticed a similar expression on the woman standing there watching him. He abruptly turned again and carried on pacing. Not exactly the same expression. The lips were fuller, softer.
‘Fine! Well, if you’re too selfish to come and get her, I’ll just have to take her with me. I’m having supper with…a friend. I’ll drop her back at eight.’
And, with that, Megan ended the call. He was tempted to hurl his phone into the slate-grey waves. This was what that woman did to him—riled him until he couldn’t think straight, until he was tempted to do foolish things. And he never did foolish things.
He jabbed at a button to lock the keypad, then stuffed his phone back in his pocket. Then he marched back to his boat.
‘Thanks a lot for giving me some privacy,’ he said dryly as he got within a few feet of the glowering woman on the jetty.
She gave him what his grandmother had used to call an ‘old-fashioned look’ and waved the rope she was holding from side to side. Incredible! How did the woman manage to make a gesture sarcastic?
‘You didn’t give me much choice, did you?’ she said.
Ben ran his hands through his wind-tousled hair and made himself breathe out for a count of five. He had to remember that this wasn’t the woman he was angry with, not really. ‘Sorry.’
He’d expected the pout to make a reappearance, but instead her lips curved into the faintest of smiles. ‘Divorced?’
He nodded.
‘Me too,’ she said quietly. ‘That half of your conversation was giving me déjà vu. I bet I could fill in the blanks if I thought hard about it.’
Against his will, he gave half a smile back. ‘You’ve got kids?’
‘A boy,’ she said, her voice husky. When she caught him glancing up towards the house, eyebrows raised, she added, ‘He’s staying with his father while I move in down here.’ She turned away quickly and stood perfectly still, staring at the woods on the hillside for a few long seconds.
When she turned back to him, a smile stretched her face. ‘What do you know about the history of the boathouse?’
He played along. The same smile had been part of his wardrobe in the last two years. Thankfully, he was resorting to it less and less often. ‘As far as I know, it was built long before the house. Some people say it’s sixteenth century. And, of course, it featured prominently in the film A Summer Affair, but you know that already.’
The defiant stare vanished altogether and she now just looked a little sheepish as she stared at the glossy seaweed washed up on the rocks nearby. ‘Busted,’ she said, looking at him from beneath her long fringe. ‘It was a favourite when I was younger and when I saw the details of the house, I knew I had to view it.’ She turned to look back at the two-storey brick and wood structure. ‘I didn’t realise this place was real. I suppose I thought it was just fibreglass and papier mâché, or whatever they build that stuff out of…’
‘It’s real enough. I ought to…’ Ben looked at the rope in his hand ‘…get going.’
She nodded. ‘I’m going to explore.’
Ben stood for a few moments and watched her climb the steps up to a door on the upper level. It hadn’t been used for years. Laura hadn’t been steady enough on her feet to make the journey down the hill for quite some time before she’d died.
He climbed into the dinghy because it felt like a safe distance and carried on watching. The wooden floor could be beetle-infested, rotten. He’d just stay here a few moments to make sure the new owner didn’t go through it.
His hand hovered above the outboard motor. Any moment now, he’d be on his way. He readied his shoulder muscles and brushed his fingertips against the rubber pull on the end of the cord. The loosened painter was gripped lightly in his other hand.
The boathouse was on two levels. The bottom storey, level with the jetty, had large arched, panelled doors and had been used for storing small boats. The upper level was a single room with a balcony that stretched the width of the building. He was waiting for her to walk out on to it, spread her hands wide on the railing and lean forward to inhale the glorious, salty, slightly seaweedy air. Her glossy dark hair would swing forward and the wind would muss it gently.
A minute passed and she didn’t appear. He began to feel twitchy.
With a sigh, he climbed out of the boat and planted his boots on the solid concrete of the jetty. ‘Are you okay back there?’
No response. Just as he was readying his lungs to call again, she appeared back on the jetty and shrugged. ‘No key,’ she yelled back, looking unduly crestfallen.
All his alarm bells rang, told him to get the hell back in the boat and keep his nose out of it. Whitehaven wasn’t his responsibility any more. Only the message obviously hadn’t travelled the length of his arm to his fingertips, because he suddenly found himself retying the boat and walking back up the jetty to the steep flight of steps that climbed up to the boathouse door.
As he reached the bottom step, she turned and looked down at him, one hand on the metal railing, one hand bracing herself against the wall. Her thick, dark hair fell forward as she leaned towards him.
‘Do you know where the key is?’
With his fingernails, already dark-rimmed from the rich compost of the glasshouse plants, he scraped at a slightly protruding brick in the wall near the base of the stairs. At first, he thought he’d remembered it wrong, but after a couple of seconds the block of stone moved and came away in his hand. In the recess left behind, he could see the dull black glint of polished metal. Laura had told him about the secret nook—just in case.
He supposed he could have just told the woman about it, yelled the vital information from the safety of the dinghy. He needn’t get involved. Even now his lips remained closed and his mouth silent as he climbed the mossy stairs and pressed the key into the soft flesh of her palm.
There. Job done.
For a couple of seconds, they stayed like that. He pulled his hand away and rubbed it on the back of his jeans.
CHAPTER TWO
‘THANK YOU,’ she said, then shook her long fringe so it covered her eyes a little more.
She slid the key into the lock and turned it. He’d half-expected the door to fall open, but it swung in a graceful arc, opening wide and welcoming them in. Well, welcoming her in. But his curiosity got the better of him and he couldn’t resist getting a glimpse.
‘Wow.’
He’d expected shelves and oars and tins of varnish. Decades-old grime clung to the windows, and the filmy grey light revealed a very different scene. A cane sofa and chairs huddled round a small Victorian fireplace, decorated with white and blue tiles. A small desk and chair occupied a corner in front of one of the arched windows.
She walked over to the desk and touched it reverently, leaving four little smudges in the thick dust, then pulled her fingers back and gently blew the dust off them with a sigh.
‘Did she come here often, do you know? Mrs Hastings?’ she said, still staring at the desk.
Why exactly he was still here, keeping guard like some sentry, he wasn’t sure. He should just go. He’d kept his promise to Laura. He wasn’t required. And yet…he couldn’t seem to make his feet move.
She turned to look at him and he shrugged. ‘Not when I knew her. She was too frail to manage the path down, but she talked of it fondly.’
She blinked and continued to stare at him, expressionless. He wasn’t normally the sort who had the urge to babble on, but most women didn’t leave huge gaping gaps in the conversation. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and kicked at the dust on the bare floorboards with the toe of his boot. Everything was too still.
‘Not really the sort of place to interest a woman like you, is it?’ he muttered, taking in the shabby furniture, the broken leg on the desk chair, held together with string. The place was nowhere near elegant enough to match her.
Her chin rose just a notch. ‘What makes you think you know anything about what sort of woman I am?’
Just like that, the sadness that seemed to cloak her hardened into a shell. Now the room wasn’t still any more. Every molecule in the air seemed to dance and shimmer and heat. She strode over to the large arched door in the centre of the opposite wall, unbolted it, threw the two door panels open and stepped out on to the wide balcony.
He was dismissed.
He took a step towards her and opened his mouth. Probably not a great idea, since during his last attempt at small talk he’d found a great muddy boot in it, but he couldn’t leave things like this—taut with tension, unresolved. Messy.
Her hands were spread wide as she rested them on the low wall and looked out over the river, just as he’d imagined. The hair hung halfway down her back, shining, untouchable. The wind didn’t dare tease even a strand out of place. He saw her back rise and fall as she let out a sigh.
‘I thought I’d asked you to get off my property.’ There was no anger in her tone now, just soul-deep weariness.
He turned and walked out of the boathouse and down the stairs to the jetty with even steps. She didn’t need him. She’d made that abundantly clear. But, as he climbed back into the dinghy, he couldn’t help feeling that part of his promise was still unfulfilled.
This time there were no interruptions as he untied the painter and started the motor. He turned the small boat round and set off in the direction of Lower Hadwell, afew minutes’ journey upstream and across the river.
When he passed the Anchor Stone that rose, proud and unmoving, out of the murky green waters, he risked a look back. She was still standing there on the balcony, her hands wide and her chin tilted up, refusing to acknowledge his existence.
* * *
Louise had been staring so long at the field of sheep on the other side of the river that the little white dots had blurred and melted together. She refused to unlock her gaze until the dark smudge in her peripheral vision motored out of sight.
Eventually, when it didn’t seem like defeat, she sighed and turned to rest her bottom on the railing of the balcony and stared back into the boathouse.
He couldn’t have known who he’d looked like standing there below her on the steps as he’d offered her the long black key. It had been one of her favourite scenes in A Summer Affair—when Jonathan came to see Charity in her boathouse sanctuary, the place where she hid from the horrors of her life. Not that anything really happened between them. It was the undercurrents, the unspoken passion, that made it one of the most romantic scenes in any film she’d ever seen.
He had looked at her with his warm brown eyes and, somehow, had offered her more than a key as he’d stood there. For the first time in years, she’d blushed, then hurried to hide the evidence with her hair.
And then he’d had to go and spoil that delicious feeling—the feeling that, maybe, not all men were utter rats—by reminding her of who she was.
Louise stood up, brushed the dirt off her bottom and walked back into the little sitting room. Of course, she wasn’t interested in hooking up with anyone just now, so she didn’t know why she’d got so upset with the gardener. Slowly, she closed and fastened the balcony doors, then exited the boathouse, locking the door and returning the key to its hiding place.
The light was starting to fade and she hurried back up the steep hill, careful to retrace her steps and not get lost, mulling things over as she went. No, it wasn’t that she was developing a fancy for slightly scruffy men in waxed overcoats; it was just that, for a moment, she’d believed there was a possibility of something more in her future. Something she’d always yearned for, and now believed was only real between the covers of a novel or in the darkness of a cinema.
She shook her hair out of her face to shoo away the sense of disappointment. The gardener had done her a favour. He’d reminded her that her life wasn’t a fairy tale—she snorted out loud at the very thought, scaring a small bird out of a bush. She was probably just feeling emotional because she wouldn’t see Jack for two weeks. Toby had kicked up a stink, but had finally agreed that, once she was settled at Whitehaven, their son could live with her and go to the local school. She and Jack would be together again at last.
Toby had been difficult every step of the way about the divorce. Surprising that he would lavish so much time and energy on her, really. If he’d only thought to pay her that much attention in the last five years, they might not be in this mess at the moment.
She pulled her coat more tightly around her as she reached the clearing just in front of the house. The river seemed grey and troubled at the foot of the hill and dark woolly clouds were lying in ambush to the west. She ignored the dark speck travelling upstream, even though the noise of an outboard motor hummed on the fringes of her consciousness.
Not one stick of furniture occupied the pale, grand entrance hall to Whitehaven but, as Louise crossed the threshold, she smiled. Only two rooms on the ground floor, two bedrooms and one bathroom had been in a liveable state when she’d bought the house. All they needed was a lick of paint and a good scrub so she could move into them. The furniture would arrive on Wednesday but, until then, she had an inflatable mattress and a sleeping bag in the bedroom, a squashy, slightly threadbare floral sofa she’d found in a local junk shop for the living room, and a couple of suitcases to keep her going.
She’d let Toby keep all the furniture, disappointing him completely. He’d been itching for a fight about something, but she just wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. Let him be the one waiting for an emotional response of some kind for a change. She didn’t want his furniture, anyway. Nothing that was a link to her old life. Nothing but Jack.
None of that ultra-modern, minimalist designer stuff would fit here, anyway. She smiled again. She fitted here. Whitehaven wasn’t the first property she’d owned, but it was the first place she’d felt comfortable in since she’d left the shabby maisonette she’d shared with her father and siblings. She knew—just as surely as the first time she’d slid her foot into an exquisitely crafted designer shoe—that this was a perfect fit. She and this house understood each other.
The kitchen clock showed it was twenty past eight. Ben sat at the old oak table, a lukewarm cup of instant coffee between his palms, and attempted to concentrate on the sports section of the paper instead of the second hand of the clock.
Megan had never been like this when they’d been married. Yes, she’d been a little self-absorbed at times, but she’d never shown this flagrant disregard for other people’s schedules, or boundaries, or… feelings. He wasn’t sure he liked the version of Megan that she’d ‘found’. Or this new boyfriend of hers that he wasn’t supposed to know about.
Twenty minutes later, just as his fingers were really itching to pick up the phone and yell at someone, he heard a car door slam. Jas bounced in through the back door and, before he could ask if her mother was going to make an appearance—and an apology—tyres squealed in the lane and an engine revved then faded.
‘Nice dinner?’ he asked, flicking a page of the paper over and trying not to think about the gallon of beef casserole still sitting in the oven, slowly going cold. Eating a portion on his own hadn’t had the comfort factor that a casserole, by rights, ought to have.
