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‘Country life obviously suits you. You’re looking really well.’
‘I’m happy here.’
She had learned how to be happy but it hadn’t come easily to her. At first she had felt as if half of her soul had been cut away and it had only been the need to care for the baby growing in her womb that had kept her going.
‘So why don’t you make that coffee while I unload the car and then you can tell me all about it?’
Ellie’s breath hissed in through her teeth in a sound of exasperation.
‘Morgan, what part of what I said did you not understand? I don’t have time for this…’
But she was speaking to empty air. Morgan had already opened the door and gone out to the car. When she hurried after him it was to find that he’d opened the boot and was pulling a case from it.
‘Why won’t you listen to me? I can’t stay! Nan’s expecting me—she’ll be wondering where I am.’
‘I never thought of Marion as a slave-driver.’
He was coming back to the door again now, a suitcase in either hand so that Ellie had to flatten herself against the wall to let him past.
‘And I’m sure she’ll understand that you and I will need to spend a little time getting reacquainted.’
‘We’re not going to get reacquainted or re anything.’
Her words would have more emphasis if she didn’t have to keep trotting after him, forcing her shorter legs to keep up with the long, swift strides that took him through the cottage and into the ground-floor bedroom in the space of a few seconds.
‘I told you—the only reason I’m here is because you’re a guest and it’s part of my duties to make sure you’re settled in.’
‘And to arrange the other services you’ll provide,’ Morgan returned sharply, dumping the cases on the floor and heading back to the car again.
‘Services?’
It was a squawk of panic, both at the thought of just what he might have in mind and because he had come to an abrupt halt, whirling round to face her so that she had to screech to a stop herself, narrowly avoiding slamming straight into his chest.
‘I was given to understand by Mr Knightley that you provided a cleaning service.’
‘Well, yes…yes, we do. But surely—’
‘And some meals?’
‘Yes—for long-stay guests we can provide an evening meal…’
Too late she saw just where his thoughts were heading.
‘Oh, no! No way! I’m not—’
‘But it’s in the contract.’
Anyone else might only have heard the gentle reminder in his comment but, knowing Morgan as she did, Ellie was hypersensitive to the ominous undertone that threaded darkly through the words.
‘I know it’s in the contract, but surely now you can’t expect us to keep to it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well—isn’t it obvious? I mean, you won’t want me round the house every day.’
‘Won’t I?’ Morgan’s expression gave nothing away. ‘As a matter of fact I think it could work very well. You know my ways—know not to move papers, the crazy hours I work, the food I like. You’d be less likely to disturb me than a stranger.’
‘But Dee—the housekeeper—she usually…’
Her voice failed her as she saw the adamant shake of his dark head.
‘Not Dee,’ he stated in a voice that brooked no further argument. ‘I want you, angel. You and no one else.’
‘I won’t do it.’
For one thing she couldn’t be away from Rosie that long—and she certainly didn’t plan on bringing her little daughter along to the cottage with her. And for another, she already felt emotionally mangled after barely half an hour in Morgan’s presence. There was no way she could cope with the prospect of seeing him for long periods of time, day after day.
‘You’ll have to find someone else.’
‘I don’t want anyone else.’
The blue eyes were like shards of ice, hard and implacable. Past experience told her that arguing with Morgan at times like this was like banging her head hard against a brick wall; that she was only hurting herself by continuing, but she couldn’t give in.
‘What is this? Some sort of power game? A way of getting back at me for leaving you? Do you get some sort of perverse pleasure out of the prospect of seeing me skivvying for you?’
‘Is the idea of doing a few hours’ simple housework so humiliating?’ Morgan shot back at her.
Not for anyone else. But working for Morgan—working with Morgan was quite a different prospect. Where he was concerned nothing was ‘simple’ at all.
‘I don’t find it in the least humiliating—normally! Actually, I quite enjoy it. And as a matter of fact, the additional services were my idea. I suggested we put them…’
‘In the contract,’ Morgan finished for her with grim satisfaction when, seeing how her foolish outburst had trapped her, she let the sentence trail off weakly. ‘Believe me, Ellie, I intend to keep you to every letter of every word of that agreement. There’s no way I’m going to let you run out on this.’
He didn’t add the words ‘as you did before’, but they were there at the back of what he was saying, implied by his scathing tone and the black, burning look that seared over her skin.
‘I didn’t “run out”!’ she protested. ‘I explained.’
‘Oh, yeah.’
The harshness of his tone slashed into her heart like a savage sword.
‘You said that things had changed. You “didn’t feel the same way any more”.’
Hearing the words flung at her so brutally, Ellie could only wince inwardly at the realisation of how inadequate they sounded.
But she couldn’t possibly have told the truth. And even to protect her unborn child she couldn’t have told Morgan that she no longer loved him.
‘Well, my feelings had changed—I’d changed!’
Changed in the most fundamental way it was possible for a woman to do so. She had become pregnant and, knowing how he would react to that one basic fact, she had seen leaving him as the only course open to her.
‘You certainly had.’
Morgan leaned back against the wall, arms folded across the width of his chest, eyeing her with bleak cynicism.
‘If I’d been a betting man, angel, I’d have put money on the fact that we had something special…’
‘Well, you’d have been wrong.’
He would never know how much it cost her to say those words. Because she too had thought they had had ‘something special’ and she had dreamed of it staying that way. Of it growing and flowering into the sort of relationship you could build a lifetime upon. She had even let herself dream of marriage, maybe, one day.
But there had been one small flaw in the perfection of her love. Morgan didn’t want children. He had been absolutely emphatic on that matter right from the start. Had warned her that if she hadn’t been able to cope with the idea then he’d been prepared to break it off now, before either of them had got in too deep.
But Ellie had already been in too deep. She had told herself she could manage—that Morgan himself was enough for her. And he had been enough—until the day she had realised that an accident had happened and that in spite of her precautions she was going to have a baby.
Ellie came back into the present with a jolt, and, looking deep into those inimical blue eyes, she shivered involuntarily, fearful of the cold antipathy she could see in their depths.
‘Nothing stays the same for ever,’ she managed, ruthlessly suppressing her voice’s tendency to wobble revealingly.
‘Nothing stays the same…’ Morgan echoed viciously. ‘How true. Nothing—not even the protestations of undying love, the vows of eternal faithfulness, the declarations that you had never felt this way before, would never feel it again. How long did it last, my angel? Ten months? A year?’
‘Oh, stop it!’
Ellie longed to lift her hands and clap them over her ears, anything to drown out the brutal litany of scorn he was subjecting her to.
‘I never thought—I… I’m sorry…’ she finished miserably, knowing she had to say it, even though it was hopelessly inadequate and far, far too late. ‘I’m really sorry. If I could say anything—’
‘No!’ Morgan cut in harshly. ‘Don’t! Don’t say anything—and don’t say that you’re sorry—because I’m not! I was angry when you left—true. I was even a little hurt at the thought that you could discard me so easily, move on to someone else. But when I calmed down and started thinking rationally again, I realised that in fact you’d done me one hell of a favour.’
‘A favour?’
‘Yeah, a favour. I was close to making the biggest mistake of my life with you.’
He shook his head as if in despair at his own foolishness.
‘Something I would have regretted for as long as I lived. But by leaving when you did, you saved me from that. Really, instead of reproaching you, I reckon I should thank you.’
‘Don’t bother!’ Ellie snapped, unable to take any more.
For the first time she admitted to herself that she had come here with a tiny thread of a weak, foolish hope in her heart. Hopes of a reconciliation, of finding that Morgan, too, had suffered from their time apart, and so might be prepared to rethink his feeling about children. But his comments had not only taken that pathetic hope away from her, they had crushed it into tiny, irreparable pieces, impossible ever to put together again.
‘Well, at least you won’t expect me to stay after—’
‘Oh, but I do,’ Morgan cut in sharply. ‘In fact, now I want that coffee more than ever.’
‘Well, you can just go on wanting! I’m finished here, I—’
‘But I haven’t finished with you,’ Morgan came back at her with deadly quietness. ‘There are things we still have to talk about.’
He pushed himself away from the wall, straightening up lazily.
‘Make the coffee, Ellie,’ he said and it was a command, not a request.
CHAPTER THREE
FOR a moment Morgan thought he’d lost her.
He knew that look of old. The set jaw, the compressed mouth, the mutinous glare that declared only too clearly that Ellie was having none of whatever she thought he was suggesting.
This was Ellie at her most stubborn, and, strangely enough, it was seeing her in this mood that reached out and stabbed him in the heart, when he least expected it to.
This was the Ellie who had most infuriated him when they’d been together. The woman who could set against something, however small, and turn it into a battle, one she had no intention of letting him win. There had never been any chance of wearing her down when she’d been like this. In fact there had only ever been one approach that had a chance of winning her round.
So he used it.
‘Please…’ he added softly, pitching his voice at a very different level.
She wasn’t going to give in that easily, it was clear. Just one swift, stunned blink of those amazing eyes showed any sort of response, making Morgan wonder exactly why he was so set on having her stay when quite clearly she would rather be anywhere but here.
But perhaps that was the whole point. Whatever was bugging her, it was pretty damn important to her. And the more she seemed determined not to let any hint of it drop, the more he wanted to know what it was.
‘Ellie…’
He pushed one long-fingered hand through his ebony hair, raking it back from his face with a sigh.
‘I’ve been driving for hours and I really could murder for a coffee.’
He did look tired, Ellie admitted to herself reluctantly. Typical Morgan. When he was working, or concentrating on anything, he forgot about minor practicalities like food or drink.
‘What are you afraid of if you stay?’ Morgan questioned softly.
‘Nothing.’ It didn’t sound at all convincing. ‘What on earth makes you think that I’m afraid?’
That was better. She might even believe herself now. But she knew only too well what she was afraid of—and with good reason. She just couldn’t bring herself to admit it.
‘Just one cup of coffee,’ she growled reluctantly, risking a swift glance at his face and immediately wishing she hadn’t as she was rewarded with the sort of wide, flashing smile that would have melted rock, never mind her weak, foolish heart.
‘You’re an angel.’
‘It will only be instant…’
Desperately she tried to claw back some of the ground she had surrendered.
‘Fine!’
He punctured her sense of triumph quickly and easily, tossing the response over his shoulder as he headed back out to the car.
Struggling to keep her mind blank, Ellie moved to fill and switch on the kettle. One cup of coffee wouldn’t take very long. She’d be on her way in no time.
