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‘Or else what…?’
‘You don’t want to find out,’ he said silkily. ‘Now, stand up and try that foot of yours.’
When she remained on the bed, he leaned over her and said in a low, razor-sharp voice, ‘Shall I just remind you that you’re an unwanted and unwelcome intrusion into my house…’
‘Your house?’
‘While I’m looking after it, it’s my house. And if you think you’re going to play the grand princess and laze around for the next few days, or weeks if this weather doesn’t sort itself out, then you’re in for a shock. I’m not a man who puts up with the wiles and tantrums of a spoiled little rich girl!’
‘How dare you speak to me like that?’ Her imperious voice, which reflected more than anything else her bemusement at finding herself in the situation she was in and dealing with the man in front of her, failed to strike a chord. Or rather it did. Luke burst out laughing.
‘Oh, dear,’ he said, sobering up but not sufficiently to stop the occasional cynical chuckle from slipping through. ‘Oh, dear, dear, dear. And you wonder why I call you m’lady? Now, up!’
Miranda reluctantly swung her legs over the side of the bed, noting with relief that the tee shirt modestly reached down to just above her knees, and grasped his proffered hand.
‘Try and put a little weight on it.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Just try, and stop acting like a baby.’
Which did it. She tentatively touched the ground with her foot and discovered as she applied a bit more pressure that the immediate searing pain she had felt the previous day had become more of a persistent, dull discomfort.
‘I’ll remove the bandage before you get dressed and soak your foot in some cold water and then I’ll truss you up again.’
‘There’s no need. I can do that myself.’
‘Should I allow you to do that, I would live for ever in fear of Daddy’s avenging wrath.’
Miranda stopped her halting walk and stared up at him. ‘I hate that. Why are you so…horrible and scathing about me? You don’t even know who I am or what sort of person I am! Yet you feel it’s all right to make nasty, derogatory comments about me and my father. Daddy always said that the worst snobs are the inverted snobs. He always said that they’re the worst because they never give you a chance to prove yourself one way or another. They just assume that because someone has money, then they can’t be worthwhile.’ She found herself breathing shallowly as she stared up into his blue eyes.
‘Is that what you think I am?’ he finally asked curiously. ‘An inverted snob?’
‘Why else would you be so awful? Just because you don’t have any money doesn’t make it my fault!’
‘No, I guess you’re right,’ he said in an odd voice, ‘it doesn’t, does it?’
Instead of feeling pleased at this unexpected victory, Miranda felt suddenly nervous. Nervous because she had become quickly accustomed to his hostility and the lack of it was confusing.
‘My foot feels a lot better,’ she said, to change the subject, supporting herself on his arm as they headed slowly towards the bathroom, where a further unwanted reminder of his ministrations confronted her in the shape of the blue bath towel she had used the night before, neatly hanging over the towel rail.
She sat on the closed toilet seat and watched as he filled a plastic basin with cold water.
‘It’s freezing,’ she gasped as he soaked her foot.
He said, without looking up, ‘It’ll reduce most of the rest of the swelling. Don’t worry. You’ll get used to the temperature. There.’ He held up her foot and examined it like a butcher sizing up a joint of meat. ‘Not very pretty, but it’ll do.’ Then he carefully rebandaged it, taking his time. ‘Now, there’s a change of clothes behind you on the ledge and you might want to do something with that hair of yours. Tie it up, perhaps. Not very practical having that mane swinging around, I shouldn’t think.’
‘Actually,’ Miranda informed him coolly, ‘a woman’s mane is her crowning glory.’
‘Oh, is that so? And I always thought of her crowning glory was her mind. How much I’m learning from you.’ He shot her a brief, patronising grin and then left.
Miranda gingerly stood up and for the first time took a long look at her reflection in the mirror. Her waist-length blonde hair had been damp when she had fallen asleep, but even so it had dried and now fell in its usual silky curtain around her face. Her wide blue eyes absorbed the stunning prettiness of her features then, as she stripped off the oversized tee shirt, idly scanned the exquisite, slender proportions of her body. These looks, she thought dispassionately, had turned heads and had opened countless doors to the world of beautiful people in which she moved. If she had been dowdy and unattractive, would she have been as popular? Would men have beaten a path to her door, however much money her father had? Probably not. For the first time, she realised that her looks carried a downside. The had attracted men like Freddie, but looks were disposable. None of the men in her brittle world ever seemed to take time out to search for what lay beneath the sparkling veneer.
She very quickly washed her face and changed into yet another tee shirt and a pair of jogging bottoms that had to be tied with the tan leather belt thoughtfully left along with the bundle of clothes. Then she made her way down the stairs, refusing to yell for assistance.
Luke was in the kitchen clearing up and, for a few minutes, Miranda hovered uncertainly by the door, wondering what to do next.
‘Make yourself at home,’ he said drily. ‘I don’t bite.’
She edged to the pine kitchen table and sat down.
‘How long does this caretaker job last?’ she asked, for the sake of asking something, and he turned to look at her with a momentary expression of bewilderment. Then his face cleared.
‘Oh, this caretaker job?’ he said carelessly. ‘Oh, not very long.’
‘And then you…’
‘Move on.’
‘Move on to what?’ He made a good caretaker, she thought. The kitchen was tidy, with a stack of logs neatly chopped and piled in the corner.
‘Other things,’ he said vaguely. ‘Now, normally I tend to spend the days outside, but this blizzard has put paid to that, so we might as well work out some kind of routine here so that you don’t get in my way.’
Miranda immediately began to bristle. ‘I won’t get in your way. I’m more than happy to spend my time reading.’
‘Good.’ He paused to sit down, spinning the chair back so that he sat on it with his hands loosely hanging over the back. ‘Because I have some business to attend to on my laptop and I don’t want to feel that you’re lurking around waiting to be entertained.’
‘I don’t expect to be entertained.’
‘Don’t you?’
‘I’m quite happy in my own company.’ Miranda paused to digest this and realised that she was very seldom in her own company. Even at night, when she flopped into bed, sometimes in the early hours of the morning, she was always too tried to really spend any time on her own. ‘What work do you have to do?’ she asked curiously. ‘On a computer? I wouldn’t have thought…’
‘That I was clever enough to use a computer? Or maybe you thought that I’d never even heard of one?’ He grinned wickedly at her blushing discomfort. ‘News of technological breakthroughs do sometimes drift even to we yokels, you know. In fact, I’ll take a small bet with you that you’re the one who doesn’t have a clue how to operate a computer.’
Miranda’s face went a shade deeper in colour.
‘Mmm,’ Luke said pensively. ‘Not much point having a computer on the ski slopes, is there? Or at the races? Or in Mustique for a few weeks over summer?’
‘I—I—’
‘You—you—what?’
‘I learned everything about computers when I was doing my design course,’ she said, holding her chin up to counteract the level of defensiveness in her voice.
‘Oh, yes, that interior design course of yours.’ He was virtually smirking, and Miranda glowered impotently at him. ‘Well, wait right here.’ He stood up and she watched suspiciously while he disappeared out of the kitchen, only to return minutes later with a sleek black laptop in his hand.
‘There, now.’ He flicked it open, pressed a few buttons and the screen unfolded into life. ‘Why don’t you amuse yourself with this for a little while just while I fetch some more logs from the outside shed and do a bit of chopping.’ He moved swiftly around the table so that he was bending over her, one hand resting on the table top, the other pressing various icons until an architectural drawing of a house appeared on the screen.
‘What’s this?’
‘This, my dear interior designer, is a house.’
‘Whose house?’
‘Oh, just a little dwelling my boss has in mind to renovate. He knows I like playing on the computer now and again, so he lent me this file to have a look at.’
Miranda looked at him narrowly. ‘Now, why would your boss do something like that?’
Luke’s answer was so swift that she almost wondered whether it had been prepared. ‘We go back a ways. If you move this little gadget here, called a mouse, hey presto, you can zoom all over the place.’
Miranda gritted her teeth and allowed him to have his fun. He would be laughing on the other side of his arrogant, handsome face when she presented him with her ideas, even if the whole lot was erased never to be seen again. The last job she had done of any magnitude had been years previously, but she could feel a stirring of interest in her veins as she glanced at the outlines of a house in front of her.
‘You mean you babysit his cabin every year?’
‘Oh, yes. It’s a long-standing arrangement.’ He hadn’t straightened, so when he spoke his breath brushed against her cheek and into her ear. ‘He must have thought that I might get lonesome, stuck out here as I am, hence this little file for me to play with. Little did he know that I would have unexpected company.’ He stood up and flexed his muscles. ‘You can mess around however you like. Design whatever you want. It can all be deleted. Why don’t you go into the sitting room and relax in front of that roaring fire and show me what you can do with this little toy.’
‘I guess you do get lonely here for weeks, maybe months, on end,’ Miranda said, half to herself, as she settled onto the big sofa, with the computer on her lap. ‘How on earth do you fill your time?’
‘Loneliness is a state of mind,’ he said over his shoulder, as he slung on his waterproof jacket and then pulled on some very thick wool socks and a pair of snow boots that were by the door. ‘And it can only be filled when you’re at peace with yourself.’
‘Well, if you want to spout philosophy, then I’ll just get on with a bit of this interior design, shall I?’ She felt herself smile and when she looked up at him it was to find the smile returned. It gave her the oddest feeling.
‘When I get back from my healthy outdoor fun, you can phone your father. Although…’ he opened the door and swirls of snow blew in ‘…I did call him half an hour ago. On your behalf.’
Miranda looked up, stunned by this piece of effrontery but, before she could demand an explanation, he had left the cabin, slamming the front door behind him.
Her poor dad probably assumed that the man was a genial, middle-aged caretaker with a family tucked away further down the slopes. He would have a fit if he knew what Luke Decroix was like, she fretted. Ten fits, in fact. He would round up the forces and gear up for a rescue mission, not that that would be possible, given the state of the weather. The windows in the cabin were small, but not so small that she couldn’t get a glimpse of the leaden skies, barely visible through the continuing blizzard. Lord alone knew where she was. The skiing resort, her friends, the faithless Freddie and all the bijou little cafés seemed like a dream.
She began experimenting on the computer and the wheels of her rusty memory slowly cranked into life as she played around with ideas. Every so often, she looked up and was treated occasionally to the sight of Luke outside, tramping through the snow with a shovel over his shoulder, making sure that the doorway was kept as clear of snow as possible. He was certainly dedicated to his job, if nothing else.
When he finally came back in, he was carrying a basket of neatly chopped logs slung over his shoulder which he dumped on the ground. He didn’t say anything, just looked at her. Then he divested himself of his wet waterproofs and his boots and socks. His black hair was slick from the snow and he went to squat in front of the fire, rubbing his hands together and raking them through his hair.
‘So you haven’t got bored yet with fooling around on the computer?’ he asked, with his back to her. He pulled his thick jumper over his head and stood up, pulling down the shirt underneath. Another tee shirt, this time with some faded design on the front of what was once a bulldog next to a glass of beer. ‘What have you done?’ He sat down next to her, depressing the sofa so much that she had a job not to slide straight into him, thigh against thigh.
‘Not much. Is the snow just as heavy outside?’
‘What do you think of the house? Like it?’
Miranda angled the screen away from him, suddenly shy at exposing her efforts to him. ‘You promised I could use your mobile to call Dad. Which reminds me…’ yes, a good healthy dose of irritation to bring her back on course ‘…whoever said you could call my father? And how did you get his number? And what did you have to say to him, anyway?’
‘Questions, questions, questions. Didn’t your mother ever tell you that when a man returns from some hard labour, the last thing he needs is a whinging woman?’
‘My mother died when I was eight.’
‘Oh, yes. I’m sorry.’ He leaned back on the sofa, hooking one foot around the leg of the table in front and pulling it towards him so that he could rest both his feet on the surface. He had replaced his boots with the same worn, tasselled loafers that had greeted her when she had arrived the previous day. He rubbed his eyes, then folded his arms behind his head and looked at her.
His blue eyes were hypnotic. When she looked into them, she had the strangest sensation of giddiness and a feeling that, if she wasn’t careful, she could easily fall into their fathomless depths and drown.
‘You haven’t answered my questions,’ she reminded him tartly.
‘Oh, so I haven’t. Well, if you really want to know, I have a little method of obtaining the number of the last call on my phone, which I did last night after you had called him in his office. And I thought I might as well touch base, let him know that nothing untoward had happened to his baby during the night. Here, call him yourself now if you like.’ He felt in his pocket and retrieved the palm-sized phone which he handed to her. Except, he didn’t quite hand it over, more dangled it in front of her so that she had to reach for it.
Depressingly, her father seemed to have been reassured by Luke’s phone call.
‘Might do you a spot of good being stuck in the middle of nowhere for a few days,’ he joked, impervious to her horror at any such suggestion. Miranda clamped the phone tighter against her right ear and inclined her body slightly away from Luke’s undisguised interest in what she was saying and what was being said to her.
‘How can you say that, Dad?’ she muttered, but the question was bypassed in her father’s sudden need to get going to a meeting. His driver, apparently, was waiting. He had to dash but he would be in touch, probably later in the evening when he was back home.
‘I hope he’s not too worried about you,’ Luke said piously, reaching out for the mobile and resting it on the table next to his feet. ‘I did try and set his mind at rest. Told him how well you were being looked after. I even said that I had lent you my laptop so that you could amuse yourself on it for a couple of hours.’
‘I’m sure my father doesn’t want lengthy explanations from you on how I’m doing,’ Miranda informed him haughtily.
‘So, what have you managed to do? Anything at all?’
‘You never bothered to tell me what your boss meant by renovating. Does he intend to knock walls down? What specifications is he after?’
‘My, my. I take it you’re wearing your technical interior designer hat now?’
‘If you want to sit there and smirk, then why don’t we just forget this?’ Miranda said. ‘You can have your little toy back to do whatever it is you need to do and I can’t imagine what, and I’ll just content myself with one of those detective novels on the bookshelf.’
Luke pulled the computer towards him so that it was partially resting on his lap and looked at what she had done. ‘So, you are capable of using a computer. Accept my humble apologies for implying otherwise…’ When she looked at him, his face was patently lacking in remorse. He was flicking through the rooms she had designed, seemingly interested. ‘There’s no need for a dining room that big,’ he murmured.
‘How do you know? Don’t tell me: you’re so close to this boss of yours that you have insider knowledge into how often he plans to entertain and for how many people. Are you sure this boss is a man and not a woman?’
‘Oh,’ Luke murmured softly, scrolling through her work and using various icons to magnify certain aspects, ‘I’m most emphatically certain on that point.’
‘Well, what does this man want to do with the house?’
‘I gather he intends to move out of London and use it as a base for his work. So, and I’m presuming here, I expect he would want a fairly large working area.’
‘What does this man do?’
‘Something to do with finance, I believe.’
‘You mean he hasn’t bothered to bore you with the details?’ It was Miranda’s turn to smirk and she did so with relish. ‘Perhaps he thought that you weren’t up to understanding the technicalities of his job.’
‘What’s this?’
‘It’s an archway. I’ve bashed through those two rooms and linked them with an archway. On either side you can incorporate stained-glass windows as features to break the monotony of the brick wall.’
‘Very creative. He’ll like that touch, I’m sure. And what’s this?’
‘I haven’t finished with that bit yet.’
‘That’s not what I asked.’
‘Well, that bit, if you can picture it…’
