скачать книгу бесплатно
Naturally she was relieved to see that the clouded vagueness had gone from his eyes, but she didn’t consider the cool, analytical detachment that had replaced it to be an unqualified improvement!
‘I’m not in any position to complain…?’ The fleeting smile might have softened his hard eyes but Darcy was making a point of not looking—she didn’t want a repeat performance of that silliness! The little shudder that chased its chilly pathway up her slender spine had nothing to do with the weather.
‘Darcy.’ For a fleeting, selfish moment she almost regretted not letting Nick, even in his exhausted condition, drive him.
‘Of course…Darcy. I’m in your debt, Darcy.’
Darcy could almost hear him thinking, Outlandish name…outlandish family. She had a strong suspicion that had this man not considered himself in her debt he would have had no qualms about complaining; he didn’t give her the impression of someone who had a particularly high patience quotient. She just couldn’t see him suffering in silence.
‘I’m not keeping score.’ She decided to make allowances for his attitude. I probably wouldn’t want to smile either if I’d just bashed my head and bust my arm, she reasoned.
‘You’re just being neighbourly, I suppose?’
This time it was impossible to misinterpret the acerbic scepticism in his voice. She twisted the excess moisture from the ends of her wet hair as she slid in beside him. With a wet splat the hair was casually flicked over her shoulder. There was a faint puzzled line between her feathery eyebrows as she turned in her seat and levelled her thoughtful gaze at him.
‘Is that so unusual?’ she asked, unable to keep the edge from her voice.
‘Only slightly less so than an honest politician.’
Reece had noticed straight off that at some point during the last few minutes she’d paused to anoint those wide lips with a covering of glossy lipstick, and the soft colour clung stubbornly to the damp outline. This evidence of female vanity amused Reece; it also drew his attention to the soft lushness of her mouth.
Through the miasma of dull pain he felt his libido drowsily stir. It was the sort of mouth it was a crime not to kiss. Reece shifted uncomfortably as she gazed trustingly over at him. That was definitely one for the modern-man-is-a-myth school.
‘Well, it looks like your cynicism has survived the crack on the skull intact—congratulations.’
‘You sound disapproving…?’
Darcy shrugged; she didn’t fight with people who were in urgent need of medical attention—even if they were misguided.
‘In my experience people rarely do anything for nothing,’ he announced, authoritatively doling out some more of his homespun cynicism.
This was a man who had very definite opinions, she decided, and a strong belief in his own infallibility. Darcy was beginning to suspect it might be mixed blessings that Reece Erskine had recovered his wits—he was one seriously joyless individual. In a different situation she might have been tempted to put up a strong argument against this jaundiced slant on life, but under the circumstances she contented herself with a gentle, ‘I promise you, I have no hidden motives.’
Despite her assurance, his silent response—this man could do things with an eyebrow that defied belief!—made it abundantly clear that he wouldn’t have taken her words at face value if she’d had her hand on a stack of Bibles.
She found it increasingly hard to hide her growing antipathy as she carefully scraped a clear area in the condensation on the windscreen in a businesslike manner.
Reece couldn’t decide if he was being reprimanded or not. However, there was nothing ambiguous about her disapproval—the stuff was emanating from her in waves! He caught the full force of it almost as clearly as the light perfume that pervaded her smallish person—his nostrils twitched; it was light, flowery and vaguely distracting, but it made a pleasant change from the wet-dog smell that wafted every so often from the direction of the old blanket flung over the back seat.
He watched as she wiped the excess moisture from her face with the back of her hand; her skin was remarkably clear, creamy pale and very lightly freckled.
‘She doesn’t like wet weather,’ Darcy explained defensively as the engine spluttered and fizzled on the first three attempts.
‘Who doesn’t…?’
‘Bingo!’ Darcy gave a gentle sigh of relief when the engine eventually came to life. ‘She’s temperamental sometimes,’ she explained, banging the dashboard affectionately.
Reece wasn’t really surprised that she endowed the rusty pile of metal with human characteristics—it was entirely in keeping with the sentimental, mawkish traits this girl had displayed so far.
‘The heater will warm up in a minute,’ she promised with another trusting beam in his direction—she wasn’t the type to hold a grudge, it seemed. ‘I’ll take the back road and we’ll be there in no time at all.’
‘Good,’ he said, turning his face deliberately to the dismal view through the window. He hoped she’d take the hint and leave him in peace, since there wasn’t any place he could escape if she didn’t.
The snub was deliberate enough to bring a flush of annoyance to her cheeks. There was nothing Darcy would have liked more than to let her moody passenger brood in peace; he wasn’t her idea of the ideal travelling companion—not by a long chalk!
The problem was he’d had a bump on the head; for all she knew, he might have a fractured skull! If he dozed off, how was she to know if he’d just fallen asleep or lapsed into a coma? This alarming possibility made her search his face surreptitiously for signs of imminent collapse—she found none.
But she did discover that in the subdued light her passenger’s to-die-for bone-structure had an almost menacing quality. Nick’s outlandish hypotheses were still fresh in her mind, and Darcy reasoned that this explained the small bubble of anxiety which she sensibly pushed aside—at least she thought it was anxiety that was responsible for the adrenalin surge that had her body on red alert.
The idea of being stuck miles away from medical assistance with an unconscious man had limited appeal for Darcy. No, the fastidious and reserved Mr Erskine was going to stay awake whether he liked it or not!
Trying to keep her growing uneasiness from her voice, she asked, ‘What brings you to this part of the world?’ Only a comment on the weather, she decided, could be less innocuous—not that you’d think so by his tight-lipped, rude response.
‘Solitude.’ Surely she’d take the hint now.
With anyone else Darcy would have felt inclined to put down this display of boorish bad manners to pain and discomfort—with anyone else…!
He considered himself a tolerant, patient sort of bloke, but ten minutes and what felt like several hundred questions later Reece was having trouble controlling his temper.
‘You can’t possibly be spending Christmas at the Hall!’
He hadn’t come right out and said so—actually the gorgeous but tight-lipped Mr Erskine hadn’t come right out and said anything without prompting, and then it had been as vague and uninformative as he could make it—but by a process of elimination Darcy was now pretty sure the injured hunk was actually staying at the semi-derelict Hall for the duration of the holiday.
‘Oh…?’ Reece wasn’t about to let on that he’d been thinking much the same thing himself. After all his furtive planning he was going to end up holed up in some tinsel-decked hotel again this year.
Darcy felt encouraged to pursue her point—by his standards, this response had been positively garrulous.
In the cramped conditions—the car hadn’t been constructed with his length of leg in mind—he lost all feeling in his right foot. Reece slowly shifted his right leg, rotating his ankle. His muscle-packed thigh nudged against the blonde’s leg.
A startled, gusty breath snagged in Darcy’s throat. A sensation that was all fizzing sexual awareness and no common sense dramatically surged through her, coalescing in a squirmy mess low in her belly.
Help, where had that come from?
The momentary distraction almost had disastrous consequences.
‘Hell!’ She braked sharply to allow the bedraggled cat dazed by the headlights to cross from one side of the narrow lane to the other. The feral creature disappeared into the dark undergrowth. ‘Whew! Close call.’ Her heartbeat slowed down to a steady canter as they accelerated away.
You could say that again! The abrupt halt had sent Reece’s head on a collision course with the windscreen—the seat restraint was the only thing that had stopped him making contact. The pressure against his damaged ribs was exquisitely painful. It was becoming obvious to Reece that his chauffeur was the type of bleeding heart who saw no conflict in risking life and limb to save a dumb animal—probably the less appealing the better.
‘Are you all right?’
Now she asks! ‘I’m fine!’
Darcy’s dark brows shot quizzically towards her fair hairline; his taut tone had been several degrees to the right of brusque.
‘You’re obviously not.’ No doubt such stoicism was admirable but in this instance not really practical. ‘Have you hurt yourself some more…? Shall I stop the car…?’
And prolong the agony of sharing space with Miss Sweetness and Light? Anything, he decided, was better than that—even replying to her incessant questions for another five minutes.
She obviously wasn’t going to be satisfied until he owned up to something. ‘I jarred my shoulder. Why can’t I be staying at the Hall…?’ he asked before she could press the point any further.
‘Well, leaving aside your injuries…’
‘Yes, let’s do that…’
Repressing the angry retort that hovered on the tip of her tongue, Darcy jammed her foot on the brake as the lights ahead turned red. ‘And the fact that the place is uninhabitable…’
‘I found it quite cosy.’
‘It’s Christmas!’
‘Your point being…?’
‘Time of good cheer and loving your fellow man… Does that ring any bells…?’
The cynical light in his hooded, secretive eyes intensified. ‘And come the New Year I can go back to screwing the bastards…?’ he queried hopefully.
The sound of an impatient car horn brought her attention to the green light. ‘Are you always unpleasant just for the hell of it?’
‘It does give me a nice glow,’ he admitted glibly.
‘I don’t think you’ve got the hang of the Christmas-spirit thing, Mr Erskine.’
‘It’s Reece, and as far as I’m concerned, Darcy, Christmas is just like any other day of the year…’
‘But…’
‘…except, of course, for the exceptionally high hypocrisy factor.’
‘You mean you don’t celebrate at all?’ Darcy knew that it was none of her business how this man celebrated or didn’t during the festive season, but for some reason she just couldn’t let it go. ‘What about your family…?’
‘I don’t have a family.’ Reece hardly even felt a twinge of guilt as he brutally disposed of his numerous relatives.
‘Oh!’ Darcy, who was pretty blessed in that department, felt guilty at her abundance. ‘That’s sad, but even someone like you must have friends,’ she insisted earnestly. She heard his startled intake of breath. Oh, dear, that hadn’t come out quite as she’d intended.
‘Are you trying to wind me up?’
‘Why would I?’ Even if it was exhilarating in a dangerous sort of way.
‘Sins of a previous life catching up with me…?’
Darcy repressed a grin. Sarcastic pig…!
‘Maybe you don’t have any friends,’ she countered nastily.
‘I have friends,’ he confirmed tightly. ‘The sort who respect my privacy,’ he added pointedly.
‘Then it’s a religious thing…?’
Her swift change of subject made him blink. ‘What is…?’
‘Ignoring Christmas.’
‘It’s a personal-choice thing,’
‘There’s no need to yell,’ she remonstrated gently.
Reece’s nostrils flared. ‘Hard as this might be for you to comprehend, I don’t like the festive season.’
‘It must be pretty spartan inside,’ Darcy mused, thinking about the bleak aspect of the old Hall.
An image of walls stripped back to bare brick ran through his mind; the draught from the open window whistling down his neck wasn’t the only thing that made him shudder.
‘Depends on what you’re used to,’ he responded evasively.
He looked to her as if he was used to the best—of everything. In fact, Darcy thought, shooting another covert glance in his direction, she didn’t think she’d ever met a man who looked more accustomed to the good life and all its trimmings than him.
That wasn’t to say there was anything pampered or soft about him—in fact, the opposite was true. Even in his present battered and bruised condition it was obvious he was in peak physical condition, and he had the indefinable but definite air of a man who would be ruthless to achieve his own ends.
Of course looks weren’t everything, and for all she knew he might be afraid of the dark and give generously to charities. Either way, why would a man like him choose to spend any time, let alone Christmas, alone in a dump like…? It made no sense…unless he was hiding out, or running away…? Perhaps Nick’s suspicions weren’t so crazy after all!
Well, even if he is a sex maniac I should be safe; he doesn’t come over as the type who goes for women who can be mistaken for boys—lucky me!
Darcy gave herself a mental shake and shrugged off the self-pitying direction of her reflections. Whilst there wasn’t much point pretending that physically this man hadn’t seriously unnerved her, there was no point advertising the embarrassing fact—though no doubt he was used to women making fools of themselves over him. As the feeling was obviously one-sided, and they were going to stay strangers, there didn’t seem much point getting bogged down with uncomfortable self-analysis.
‘Well, obviously I don’t know what the Hall is like inside at the moment, but I would have—’
Reece was not used to explaining his actions, and he decided it was time to call a halt to her interminable speculation once and for all.
‘You do surprise me,’ his acid drawl interrupted. ‘I was under the impression the locals keep fairly up-to-date with all the developments around here. I imagined I’d discovered the net-curtain-twitching capital of Yorkshire.’
Two pink spots appeared on Darcy’s smooth cheeks; she sucked in an angry breath and crunched her gears. The faintly amused condescension in his voice made her see red. Why not just call us nosy yokels with nothing better to do than gossip and be done with it? She’d have liked to bop him one on his superior nose.
‘You’ll have to make allowances for me— I’m only home for the holiday, so I’m not completely up to speed yet.’
‘That accounts for it, then.’
Darcy’s eyes began to sparkle dangerously; the man had a very nasty mouth and there were limits to how much she was willing to make allowances for his delicate condition.
‘We’re nosy? That’s pretty rich coming from someone who was spying on me from up a tree!’ She hadn’t been going to mention it because of his injuries, but he was asking for it…
Reece, who hadn’t been in a situation that made him blush for years, felt his colour rise for the second time today.
‘I wasn’t spying.’
‘That’s what all the peeping Toms say,’ she cut back with a provoking little smile.
Reece gritted his even white teeth.
