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Only ever having watched her sister from the sidelines, laughing and amused at the way Alice fell in and out of love, she had lacked the confidence to make the first move.
And in the end, thank goodness, because, had she done so, then she would have been roundly rejected. The boy she had considered her soul mate, the boy she had fancied herself spending her life with, had not been interested in her as anything but a pal. She had thought him perfect for her. Steady, hard-working, considerate, feet planted firmly on the ground...
He, on the other hand, had not been looking for a woman who shared those qualities.
He had wanted frothy and vivacious. He had wanted someone who shoved his books aside and sat on his lap. He had wanted tall and blonde and beautiful, not small, dark-haired and plump. He hadn’t wanted earnest.
As the dark night began to shed its first flurries of snow, Becky wondered whether retreating to the Cotswolds had been a good idea. She could see herself in the same place, doing the same thing, in ten years’ time. Her kid sister felt sorry for her. Without even realising it, she was becoming a charity case, the sort of person the world pitied.
The house was falling down.
She was going to be jobless in a matter of months.
She would be forced to do something about her life, leave the security of the countryside, join the busy tide of bright young things in a city somewhere.
She would have to climb back on the horse and start dating again.
She felt giddy when she thought about it.
But think about it she did, and she only stopped when she heard the sharp buzz of the doorbell, and for once didn’t mind having her precious downtime invaded by someone needing her help with a sick animal. In fact, she would have welcomed just about anything that promised to divert her thoughts from the grim road they were hell-bent on travelling.
She headed for the door, grabbing her vet’s bag on the way, as well as her thick, warm, waterproof jacket, which was essential in this part of the world.
She pulled open the door with one foot in a boot, woolly hat yanked down over her ears and her car keys shoved in her coat pocket.
Eyes down as she reached for her bag, the first things she noticed were the shoes. They didn’t belong to a farmer. They were made of soft, tan leather, which was already beginning to show the discolouration from the snow collecting outside.
Then she took in the trousers.
Expensive. Pale grey, wool. Utterly impractical. She was barely aware of her eyes travelling upwards, doing an unconscious inventory of her unexpected caller, registering the expensive black cashmere coat, the way it fell open, unbuttoned, revealing a fine woollen jumper that encased a body that was...so unashamedly masculine that for a few seconds her breath hitched in her throat.
‘Plan on finishing the visual inspection any time soon? Because I’m getting soaked out here.’
Becky’s eyes flicked up and all at once she was gripped by the most unusual sensation, a mixture of dry-mouthed speechlessness and heated embarrassment.
For a few seconds, she literally couldn’t speak as she stared, wide-eyed, at the most staggeringly good-looking guy she had ever seen in her life.
Black hair, slightly long, had been blown back from a face that was pure, chiselled perfection. Silver-grey eyes, fringed with dramatically long, thick, dark lashes, were staring right back at her.
Mortified, Becky leapt into action. ‘Give me two seconds,’ she said breathlessly. She crammed her foot into wellie number two and wondered whether she would need her handbag. Probably not. She didn’t recognise the man and, from the way he was dressed, he wasn’t into livestock so there would be no sheep having trouble giving birth.
Which probably meant that he was one of those rich townies who had second homes somewhere in one of the picturesque villages. He’d probably descended for a weekend with a party of similarly poorly equipped friends, domestic pets in tow, and one of the pets had got itself into a spot of bother.
It happened. These people never seemed to realise that dogs and cats, accustomed to feather beds and grooming parlours, went crazy the second they were introduced to the big, bad world of the real countryside.
Then when their precious little pets returned to base camp, limping and bleeding, their owners didn’t have a clue what to do. Becky couldn’t count the number of times she had been called out to deal with weeping and wailing owners of some poor cat or dog that had suffered nothing more tragic than a cut on its paw.
In fairness, this man didn’t strike Becky as the sort to indulge in dramatics, not judging from the cool, impatient look in those silver-grey eyes that had swept dismissively over her, but who knew?
‘Right!’ She stepped back, putting some distance between herself and the disconcerting presence by the door. The flurries of snow were turning into a blizzard. ‘If we don’t leave in five seconds, then it’s going to be all hell getting back here! Where’s your car? I’ll follow you.’
‘Follow me? Why would you want to follow me?’
His voice, Becky thought distractedly, matched his face. Deep, seductive, disturbing and very, very bad for one’s peace of mind.
‘Who are you?’ She looked at him narrowly and her heart picked up pace. He absolutely towered over her.
‘Ah. Introductions. Now we’re getting somewhere. You only have to invite me in and normality can be resumed without further delay.’
Because this sure as hell wasn’t normal.
Theo Rushing had just spent the past four-and-a-half hours in second gear, manoeuvring ridiculously narrow streets in increasingly inhospitable weather conditions, and cursing himself for actually thinking that it would be a good idea to get in his car and deal with this mission himself, instead of doing the sensible thing and handing it over to one of his employees to sort out.
But this trip had been a personal matter and he hadn’t wanted to delegate.
In fact, what he wanted was very simple. The cottage into which he had yet to be invited.
He anticipated getting it without too much effort. After all, he had money and, from what his sources had told him, the cottage—deep in the heart of the Cotswolds and far from anything anyone could loosely describe as civilisation—was still owned by the couple who had originally bought it, which, as far as Theo was concerned, was a miracle in itself. How long could one family live somewhere where the only view was of uninterrupted countryside and the only possible downtime activity would be tramping over open fields? It worked for him, though, because said couple would surely be contemplating retirement to somewhere less remote...
The only matter for debate would be the price.
But he wanted the cottage, and he was going to get it, because it was the only thing he could think of that would put some of the vitality back into his mother’s life.
Of course, on the list of priorities, the cottage was way down below her overriding ambition to see him married off, an ambition that had reached an all-time high ever since her stroke several months ago.
But that was never going to happen. He had seen first-hand the way love could destroy. He had watched his mother retreat from life when her husband, his father, had been killed suddenly and without warning when they should have been enjoying the bliss of looking towards their future, the young, energetic couple with their only child. Theo had only been seven at the time but he’d been sharp enough to work out that, had his mother not invested her entire life, the whole essence of her being, in that fragile thing called love, then she wouldn’t have spent the following decades living half a life.
So the magic and power of love was something he could quite happily do without, thanks very much. It was a slice of realism his mother stoutly refused to contemplate and Theo had given up trying to persuade her into seeing his point of view. If she wanted to cling to unrealistic fantasies about him bumping into the perfect woman, then so be it. His only concession was that he would no longer introduce her to any of his imperfect women who, he knew from experience, never managed to pull away from the starting block as far as his mother was concerned.
Which just left the cottage.
Lavender Cottage...his parents’ first home...the place where he had been conceived...and the house his mother had fled when his father had had his fatal accident. Fog...a lorry going over the speed limit... His father on his bicycle hadn’t stood a chance...
Marita Rushing had been turned into a youthful widow and she had never recovered. No one had ever stood a chance against the perfect ghost of his father. She was still a beautiful woman but when you looked at her you didn’t see the huge dark eyes or the dramatic black hair... When you looked at her all you saw was the sadness of a life dedicated to memories.
And recently she had wanted to return to the place where those memories resided.
Nostalgia, in the wake of her premature stroke, had become her faithful companion and she wanted finally to come to terms with the past and embrace it. Returning to the cottage, he had gathered, was an essential part of that therapy.
Right now, she was in Italy, and had been for the past six weeks, visiting her sister. Reminiscing about the cottage, about her desire to return there to live out her final days, had been replaced by disturbing insinuations that she might just return to Italy and call it quits with England.
‘You’re barely ever in the country,’ she had grumbled a couple of weeks earlier, which was something Theo had not been able to refute. ‘And when you are, well, what am I but the ageing mother you are duty-bound to visit? It’s not as though there will ever be a daughter-in-law for me, or grandchildren, or any of those things a woman of my age should be looking forward to. What is the point of my being in London, Theo? I would see the same amount of you if I lived in Timbuktu.’
Theo loved his mother, but he could not promise a wife he had no intention of acquiring or grandchildren that didn’t feature in his future.
If he honestly thought that she would be happy in Italy, then he would have encouraged her to stay on at the villa he had bought for her six years previously, but she had lived far too long away from the small village in which she had grown up and where her sister now lived. After two weeks, she would always return to London, relieved to be back and full of tales of Flora’s exasperating bossiness.
Right now, she was recuperating, so Flora was full of tender, loving care. However, should his mother decide to turn her stay there into a permanent situation, then Flora would soon become the chivvying older sister who drove his mother crazy.
‘Why are you getting dressed?’ Theo asked the cottage’s present resident in bemusement. She was small and round but he still found himself being distracted by the pure clarity of her turquoise eyes and her flawless complexion. Healthy living, he thought absently, staring down at her. ‘And you still haven’t told me who you are.’
‘I don’t think this is the time to start making chit chat.’ Becky blinked and made a concerted effort to gather her wits because he was just another hapless tourist in need of her services. It was getting colder and colder in the little hallway and the snow was becoming thicker and thicker. ‘I’ll come with you but you’ll have to drive me back.’ She swerved past him, out into the little gravelled circular courtyard, and gaped at the racing-red Ferrari parked at a jaunty angle, as though he had swung recklessly into her drive and screeched to a racing driver’s halt. ‘Don’t tell me that you came here in that!’
Theo swung round. She had zipped past him like a pocket rocket and now she was glaring, hands on her hips, woolly hat almost covering her eyes.
And he had no idea what the hell was going on. He felt like he needed to rewind the conversation and start again in a more normal fashion, because he’d obviously missed a few crucial links in the chain.
‘Come again?’ was all he could find to say, the man who was never lost for words, the man who could speak volumes with a single glance, a man who could close impossible deals with the right vocabulary.
‘Are you completely mad?’ Becky breathed an inward sigh of relief because she felt safer being the angry, disapproving vet, concerned for her safety in nasty weather conditions, and impatient with some expensive, arrogant guy who was clueless about the Cotswolds. ‘There’s no way I’m getting into that thing with you! And I can’t believe you actually thought that driving all the way out here to get me was a good idea! Don’t you people know anything at all? Not that you have to be a genius to work out that these un-gritted roads are lethal for silly little cars like that!’
‘Silly little car?’
‘I’d find the roads difficult and I drive a sensible car!’
‘That silly little car happens to be a top-end Ferrari that cost more than you probably earn in a year!’ Theo raked fingers frustratedly through his hair. ‘And I have no bloody idea why we’re standing out here in a blizzard having a chat about cars!’
‘Well, how the heck are we supposed to get to your animal if we don’t drive there? Unless you’ve got a helicopter stashed away somewhere? Have you?’
‘Animal? What animal?’
‘Your cat!’
‘I don’t have a cat! Why would I have a cat? Why would I have any sort of animal, and what would lead you to think that I had?’
‘You mean you haven’t come to get me out to tend to an animal?’
‘You’re a vet.’ The weathered bag, the layers of warm, outdoor clothing, the wellies for tramping through mud. All made sense now.
Theo had come to the cottage to have a look, to stake his claim and to ascertain how much he would pay for the place. As little as possible, had been his way of thinking. It had been bought at a bargain-basement price from his mother, who had been so desperate to flee that she had taken the first offer on the place. He had intended to do the same, to assess the state of disrepair and put in the lowest possible offer, at least to start with.
‘That’s right—and if you don’t have an animal, and don’t need my services, then why the heck are you here?’
‘This is ridiculous. It’s freezing out here. I refuse to have a conversation in sub-zero temperatures.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t feel comfortable letting you into my house.’ Becky squinted up at him. She was a mere five-foot-four and he absolutely towered over her. He was a tall, powerfully built stranger who had arrived in a frivolous boy-racer car out of the blue and she was on her own out here. No one would hear her scream for help. Should she need help.
Theo was outraged. No one, but no one, had ever had the temerity to say anything like that to him in his life before, least of all a woman. ‘Exactly what are you suggesting?’ he asked with withering cool, and Becky reddened but stoutly stood her ground.
‘I don’t know you.’ She tilted her chin at a mutinous angle, challenging him to disagree with her. Every pore and fibre of her being was alert to him. It was as though, for the first time in her life, she was aware of her body, aware of her femininity, aware of her breasts—heavy and pushing against her bra—aware of her stiff and sensitive nipples, aware of her nakedness beneath her thick layer of clothes. Her discomfort was intense and bewildering.
‘You could be anyone. I thought you were here because you needed my help with an animal, but you don’t, so who the heck are you and why do you think I would let you into my house?’
‘Your house?’ Cool grey eyes skirted the rambling building and its surrounding fields. ‘You’re a little young to be the proud owner of a house this size, aren’t you?’
‘I’m older than you think.’ Becky rushed into self-defence mode. ‘And, not that it’s any of your business, but yes, this house is mine. Or at least, I’m in charge while my parents are abroad and, that being the case, I won’t be letting you inside. I don’t even know your name.’
‘Theo Rushing.’ Some of the jigsaw immediately fell into place. He had expected to descend on the owners of the property. He hadn’t known what, precisely, he would find but he had not been predisposed to be charitable to anyone who could have taken advantage of a distraught young woman, as his mother had been at the time.
At any rate, he had come with his cheque book, but without the actual owners at hand his cheque book was as useful as a three-pound note, because the belligerent little ball in front of him would not be able to make any decisions about anything.
Furthermore, she struck him as just the sort who would bite off the hand clutching the bank notes, or at least try and persuade her parents to...
He was accustomed to women wanting to please him. Faced with narrowed, suspicious eyes and the body language of a guard dog about to attack, he was forced to concede that announcing the purpose for his visit might not be such a good idea.
‘I’m here to buy this cottage so you’ll find yourself without a roof over your head in roughly a month and a half’ wasn’t going to win him brownie points.
He wanted the cottage and he was going to get it but he would have to be a little creative in how he handled the situation now.
He felt an unusual rush of adrenaline.
Theo had attained such meteoric heights over the years that the thrill of the challenge had been lost. When you could have anything you wanted, you increasingly lost interest in the things that should excite. Nothing was exciting if you didn’t have to work to get it and that, he thought suddenly, included women.
Getting this cottage would be a challenge and he liked the thought of that.
‘And I’m here...’ He looked around him at the thick black sky. He had planned to arrive early afternoon but the extraordinary delays had dumped him here as darkness was beginning to fall. It had fallen completely now and there were no street lights to alleviate the unlit sky or to illuminate the fast falling snow.
His eyes returned to the woman in front of him. She was so heavily bundled up that he reckoned they could spend the next five hours out here and she would be immune to the freezing cold. He, on the other hand, having not expected to leave London and end up in a tundra, could not have been less well-prepared for the silent but deadly onslaught of the weather. Cashmere coats were all well and good in London but out here...
Waiting for an answer before she dispatched him without further ado, Becky could not help but stare. He was so beautiful that it almost hurt to tear her eyes away. In those crazy, faraway days, when she had been consumed by Freddy, she had enjoyed looking at him, had liked his regular, kind features, the gentleness of his expression and the warmth of his brown, puppy-dog eyes.
But she had never felt like this. There was something fascinating, mesmerising, about the play of shadow and darkness on his angular, powerful face. He was the last word in everything that wasn’t gentle or kind and yet the pull she felt was overwhelming.
‘Yes?’ She clenched her gloved fists in the capacious pockets of her waterproof, knee-length, fleece-lined anorak. ‘You’re here because...?’
‘Lost.’ Theo spread his arm wide to encompass the lonely wilderness around him. ‘Lost, and you’re right—in a car that’s not very clever when it comes to ice and snow. I’m not...accustomed to country roads and my satnav has had a field day trying to navigate its way to where I was planning on ending up.’
Lost. It made sense. Once you left the main roads behind—and that was remarkably easy to do—you could easily find yourself in a honeycomb of winding, unlit country lanes that would puzzle the best cartographer.
But that didn’t change the fact that she was out here on her own in this house and he was still a stranger.
He read her mind. ‘Look, I understand that you might feel vulnerable out here if you’re on your own...’ And she was, because there was no rush to jump in and warn him of an avenging boyfriend or husband wending his weary way back. ‘But you will be perfectly safe if you let me in. The only reason I’m asking to be let in at all is because the weather’s getting worse, and if I get into that car and try and make my way back to the bright lights I have no idea where I’ll end up.’
Becky glanced at the racy, impractical sports car turning white as the snow gathered on it. In a ditch, was written all over its impractical bonnet.
Would her conscience allow her to send him off into the night, knowing that he would probably end up having an accident? What if the skittish car skidded off the road into one of the many trees and there was a fatality?
What if he ended up trapped in wreckage somewhere on an isolated country lane? If nothing else, he would perish from hypothermia, because his choice of clothing was as impractical for the weather as his choice of car.
‘One night,’ she said. ‘And then I get someone to come and fetch you, first thing in the morning. I don’t care if you have to leave the car here or not.’
‘One night,’ Theo murmured in agreement.
Becky felt the race of something dangerous slither through her.
She would give him shelter for one night and one night only...
What harm could come from that?
