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Whilst it might have been wiser to leave him in ignorance, given the dangerous sexual chemistry in the air, she wanted the satisfaction of establishing herself as a mature woman of the world in his eyes. Perhaps for once in her life she wanted danger…? Her eyes slid over his tall, rangy frame before coming to rest on his face, and she gulped; he registered high enough on the danger scale to satisfy the most reckless risk-taker, she conceded.
‘Nineteen…twenty maybe.’
‘I’m twenty-seven.’
His chin came up and the dark veil of lashes lifted from his high, chiselled cheekbones. His narrowed eyes raked her face. ‘Not possible.’
‘Furthermore,’ she continued, breathless after his intense scrutiny, ‘I’m not some teenage virgin.’ Like he really wanted to know that, Darcy.
‘What are you, then?’
‘Your best hope of getting home, mate.’
His mobile lips quirked; his expression was still rapt. ‘I’d not forgotten that. I was actually wondering what you do when you’re not doing the angel-of-mercy act.’
A wistful expression flitted across her face. ‘At this moment I should be skiing.’
‘But you were lured away by the glamour of deepest, darkest Yorkshire?’
His sneering irony brought an annoyed frown to her face. She took any criticism of her beloved Dales very personally.
‘There was a family crisis,’ she told him tersely.
‘So they called you.’ That would figure.
Darcy resented his tone. ‘I don’t mind,’ she flared. ‘Who else would they call?’
‘You tell me. My recollection is a bit cloudy, but there didn’t seem any shortage of family members from what I saw.’
‘You don’t know the half of it,’ she mumbled. ‘I get a panic attack every time I think about how many people I’m meant to be cooking Christmas lunch for.’
‘Is this the same girl—sorry, woman, who considers every strand of tinsel sacred…?’ he taunted gently.
‘This is the woman,’ she countered angrily, ‘who is trying to step into her mother’s shoes and failing miserably!’ The instant the impetuous retort emerged from her lips she regretted it; she regretted it even more when she saw the curiosity on his face.
‘Your mother’s ill…?’
‘No, she’s not. She’s…away.’
His dark brows lifted. ‘Another man…’ It might have been a trick of the light but Darcy thought his hard eyes actually softened. ‘Bad luck, kid. It happens.’
Darcy was furious and horrified by his casual assumption that her mother would have an affair. ‘Not to my family! My mother has gone to a retreat to recharge her batteries, that’s all…’ Tears prickled the backs of her eyelids and her voice thickened emotionally. ‘And I’m not a kid.’
Reece looked down into her stormy upturned face. ‘Want to talk about it?’ he was surprised to hear himself offer; he wasn’t prone to encouraging soul-baring.
‘Not to you.’ Darcy thought he looked relieved rather than disappointed by her blunt response.
‘Fair enough.’
She eyed him suspiciously before she eventually nodded and blew on her icy fingertips. ‘If the interrogation’s over, perhaps we should get along before hypothermia sets in.’
Face burning with embarrassment and humiliation, she turned abruptly on her heel. She deliberately turned her face to the icy embrace of the cold north wind and, as luck would have it, found the car almost immediately.
‘I can’t find the keys,’ she admitted after turning her pockets and handbag inside-out and upside-down.
Reece, who had watched her feverish attempts silently, walked around the car to join her.
‘Might these be what you were looking for?’
Relief was mingled with chagrin as she saw he was indicating the familiar bunch of keys inserted in the driver’s door. He pulled them out, and instead of dropping them into the palm she held out he placed them in a way that meant his fingers brushed against her wrist. The tingle that shot up her extended arm was neat electricity.
‘Thanks,’ she mumbled without looking at him. She couldn’t decide whether or not that touch had been as artless as it had appeared.
He inclined his glossy head graciously. ‘My pleasure.’
The fit inside the car was even snugger than she remembered. His head brushed the top of the car and in order to accommodate his legs he had to draw his knees up towards his chest at an awkward angle.
She went to turn the ignition key but he reached out and covered her hand with his, and if anything this time the sensation was even stronger.
Her eyes, wide and startled, lifted to his. ‘What’s wrong?’
Besides the state of imminent collapse of my nervous system, that is?
‘This kissing thing.’
Darcy wriggled her hand from beneath his and clasped it protectively to her heaving chest. ‘What kissing thing?’ she asked, desperately affecting amnesia.
‘You wanting to kiss me.’
‘You wanting to kiss me.’
‘That too,’ he agreed. ‘The point is, now that you know I’m not a married man and I know you’re not a teenager…or for that matter a virgin…’ A choking sound emerged from Darcy’s throat. ‘Incidentally we have that much in common. There’s no actual reason we shouldn’t.’
‘Shouldn’t…?’ She hoped he wasn’t going to say what she thought he was going to say—he did.
‘Kiss.’
She almost kept the wobble from her cool response. ‘Other than the fact I’d scream blue murder, probably not.’ She sent up a silent prayer that her claim would never be put to the test.
‘Ah…! You’ve gone off the idea… Maybe it’s for the best,’ he conceded casually, before leaning back in his seat and closing his eyes.
Just like that! Heavens, she didn’t expect him to get suicidal because she’d said she didn’t want to kiss him, but he could at least have the decency to look as if he cared! It was, she decided, eyeing his profile with loathing, a matter of simple good manners!
Darcy knew straight off she’d not fall back to sleep for some time—her feverishly active mind was racing like an overwound clockwork toy. She glanced at the illuminated fingers of the clock on the bedside table and groaned: it was only two a.m.
Her tiny bedroom set beneath the eaves faced due north, and the wind was battering against the window-panes, sneaking through every odd crack or cranny in the well-insulated room. The Hall wouldn’t be well-insulated…
‘Oh, hell, why did I go and think that…?’ She rolled onto her stomach and pulled a pillow over her head to drown out the noise. I will not think about him, she told herself angrily.
Trouble was, she did.
Her family had been surprised when on her return she hadn’t brought home the invalid to eat with them. Their collective comments to this effect had served to add to the burden of her own guilty conscience until she’d eventually exploded.
‘If you want to feed him, feel free, but don’t expect any thanks. Me, I’ve had enough of him for one evening!’ she’d announced.
After that they’d let it alone, but she’d been able to tell that they thought she was being mean and she’d caught Nick regarding her speculatively several times during the evening.
Thirty minutes after she’d woken from her restless sleep Darcy, armed with a torch, blanket and a flask of coffee, made her way up the lane towards the Hall.
There was no front door to knock. The beam of her torch feebly illuminated a very sorry state of affairs. Horrified, Darcy explored further; things didn’t get any better.
‘And I didn’t even offer the man a cup of tea,’ she moaned, stepping over a pile of ladders that lay across her path. ‘And why…? Just because he accepted no means no. If I find him dead from hypothermia or in a coma it’ll be my fault.’ The knowledge increased the urgency of her search for signs of life.
A room with a door seemed a logical place to look. Her efforts were rewarded with the sight of the smouldering embers of a large fire in the wide inglenook.
Tentatively she approached the large human-sized bundle on the floor. She put down everything but the torch and knelt down beside the figure. Her ears were straining for signs of healthy breathing—in her present frame of mind she’d have welcomed the odd wheeze or two!
One minute she was shuffling a little closer to the figure with her hand raised, the next she was flat on her back, pinned beneath a heavy figure. An ungentle hand was pressed over her mouth.
‘If you don’t want to get hurt, stop struggling,’ an ugly growl advised her. ‘Are you alone?’
How the hell did he expect her to reply with a dirty great paw over her mouth…? It seemed her assailant’s thoughts were running along similar lines.
‘I’m going to take away my hand, but if you try and yell to your mates you’ll regret it. Understood…?’
Heart pounding, Darcy shook her head as vigorously as her position would allow. If she hadn’t known this was Reece she’d have already died of heart failure. To her relief the suffocating hand lifted.
‘For heaven’s sake, get off me, you idiot; I can’t breathe!’ she gasped.
‘Darcy!’
The pressure across her ribs eased but he didn’t shift completely. ‘Of course Darcy,’ she grumbled crossly. ‘Who did you think it was?’
‘A burglar.’
She heard sounds of him searching for something just before a strong light was shone in her face.
‘Will you take that out of my eyes?’ she pleaded, screwing her watering eyes up tight. ‘I can’t see a thing.’
She felt a hand tug at the knitted cloche she wore on her head and pull it off. The same hand ran gently through the soft waves that had been crammed beneath. Suddenly the pressure over her middle was gone, as was the hand… Disturbingly she had mixed feelings about her release; there had been something very soothing about those probing fingers—no, that wasn’t quite the right word…
She struggled to sit up and managed it with both hands braced behind her for support on the dusty floor.
‘I had a torch but I lost it when you leapt on me like that.’ She squinted into the dusty corners, hoping to relocate it.
Reece regarded her incredulously. ‘Well, what did you expect, woman, creeping up on a man in the middle of the night?’
Fair question if you stopped to look at it from his point of view—something that Darcy hadn’t done up to this point. She realised how foolish her impulsive behaviour might seem.
She watched nervously as he got to his feet and moved towards the fire, pausing to choose a couple of dry logs. The fire immediately began to sizzle as the flames licked the wood. Picking up a box of matches from the shoulder-high age-darkened oak mantel, he began to light half a dozen or so candles which were laid out there in various stages of demise. As they took hold he switched off the torch and slid it into his pocket—it came as no surprise that he’d been sleeping fully clothed.
‘Don’t you just love candlelight?’ he drawled.
‘Not especially.’ His dark hair was mussed up and what had been the suggestion of a shadow over his strong jaw earlier was now a well-developed dark stubble. Neither of these factors altered the fact he looked devastatingly attractive—well, looking at him made her feel fairly devastated at any rate.
‘Now,’ he said in a don’t-muck-me-about sort of voice, ‘you can tell me what you thought you were doing.’
What had seemed a perfectly logical step to take at the time suddenly seemed extremely difficult to explain to her critical audience.
‘If you don’t speak I’ll just have to assume you couldn’t bear to be parted from me any longer…’ he warned.
The satiric taunt made the colour flare in Darcy’s pale cheeks. ‘In your dreams,’ she grunted, catching her lower lip between her teeth.
‘Talking of dreams, you owe me one—you rudely interrupted a particularly…’
‘I don’t want to know anything about your dreams,’ Darcy assured him, drawing herself up on her knees and dusting the seat of her trousers with a vigorous hand.
‘Even if you were involved…?’
He seemed to take a malicious delight in winding her up. ‘Especially if I was involved.’ Thank goodness she had a thick sweater and a windcheater over her pyjama top, because things were happening to her nipples that couldn’t be blamed on the temperature.
Reece laughed then and went to sit down on an upturned packing case. ‘I’d offer you a seat, only this is the only one.’ He fingered the rough surface. ‘It’s the only table too, for that matter.’
Darcy gathered the drifting threads of her wits—she hadn’t come here to talk furniture. ‘I only came to look at you,’ she gritted, wondering why she had ever cared if he expired in his sleep.
‘Not touch…?’ he muttered.
‘Will you stop interrupting me?’
‘Sorry,’ he responded meekly.
Meek, him…? That was the best joke she’d heard in ages.
‘I shouldn’t have let you spend the night alone just because you irritated me.’
Now that she had his complete attention, Darcy wasn’t sure that was what she wanted… She didn’t trust that innocent expression in those green eyes either.
He rapidly proved her distrust was well-placed!
‘So you decided to spend the night with me after all, Darcy. I don’t know what to say…’
Her jaw locked tight as she tried to act as if his wolfish grin didn’t do anything to her at all.
‘I’m sure you’ll manage to come up with something suitably smutty,’ she predicted acidly, rubbing her sweaty palms against her jeans.
His low chuckle was not only genuinely amused, it was also deeply, devastatingly sexy.
‘The doctor said you needed to be carefully observed. I just thought I’d pop round and see if you were all right.’
