Читать книгу The Girl He'd Overlooked - Кэтти Уильямс, CATHY WILLIAMS, Cathy Williams - Страница 6

EXCEPT one year became two, which became three, which became four. And in all those four years, Jennifer had not once set eyes on James. Each Christmas, she had contrived to bring her father over to Paris for the holidays, which he had loved. What had begun as a one-year placement, during which she could consolidate her French, had seen her rise through the company, and as she had risen so too had her pay cheque. She found that she could afford to holiday with her father abroad, and on those occasions when she had returned to England she had been careful with her visits, always making sure that they were brief and that James was nowhere in the vicinity.

He had walked out of the cottage four years previously and she had fled to Paris, her wounds still raw. She couldn’t imagine ever facing him again, and not facing him had developed into a habit. He had emailed her, and she had been happy enough to email back, but on the occasions when he had been in Paris she had excused herself from meeting him on grounds of being too busy, prior engagements, not well, anything because the memory of him gently letting her down remained, that open wound quietly hurting somewhere in the background of her shiny new life.

Except now…

She had nodded off on the train and woke with a start as it pulled into the station.

When she looked through the window it was to see that the flurries of snow that she had left behind in London were a steady fall here in Kent. The weather was always so much harsher out here. She had forgotten.

At six-thirty in the evening the train was packed with commuters and fetching her bags was chaotic, with people jostling her on all sides, but eventually she was out of the train and braving the freezing temperatures and snow on the platform.

She wasn’t planning on staying long. Just long enough to sort out the problems in the cottage, problems she had learnt about via an email from James who had been checking his house in his mother’s absence and had happened to walk down to the cottage to take a look only to find water seeping out from under the front door. Her father was away on his annual post-Christmas three-week holiday to visit his brother in Scotland. The email had read:

You can pass this on to your father, but I gather you’re in the country so you might want to check it out yourself instead of ruining your father’s fishing trip. This, of course, presupposes that you can interrupt your busy schedule.

The tone of the email was the final nail in the coffin of their enduring friendship. She had run away and, never looked back, and over time, the chasm between them had become so vast that it was now unbreachable terrain. His emails, which had been warm and concerned at the beginning of her stint in Paris, had gradually become cooler and more formal, in direct proportion to her avoidance tactics. It occurred to her that she actually hadn’t heard from him at all for at least six months.

In Paris, she could tell herself that she didn’t mind, that this was just the way things had turned out in the end, that their friendship had always been destined to run its course because it had been an unrealistic union of the inaccessible boy in the manor house and the childishly doting girl next door.

But now here, back in Kent, his email was a vaguely sexy reminder of how things used to be.

She wheeled her suitcase out to where a bank of taxis was only just managing to keep the snow on their cars from settling by virtue of having their engines running. Everywhere, the snow was forming a layer of white.

The water had been cleared, James had informed her, but there was a lot of collateral damage, which she would have to assess for the insurance company. He had managed to get the heating started. So at least when she arrived at the cottage, she wouldn’t freeze to death. She hoped he might have left her some fresh provisions before he cleared off, on his way to Singapore for a series of meetings, he had politely informed her in his email, but she wasn’t banking on it.

That was how far their friendship had devolved. When Jennifer thought about it for too long, she could feel a lump of sadness in her throat and she had to remind herself of that terrible night when she had made such a fool of herself. Someone better and stronger might have been able to survive that and laughingly put it behind them so that a friendship could be maintained, but she couldn’t.

For her, it had been a devastating learning curve and she had learnt from it.

She gazed out of the window of the taxi but could barely see anything because of the snow. Deep in the heart of the Kent countryside, the trip, in conditions like this, would take over an hour. She settled in for the long haul and let her thoughts drift without restraint.

It had been a while since she had returned to the cottage for any length of time. She and her father had spent summer in Majorca, two weeks of sun and sea, and every six weeks she brought him over for a weekend. She loved the fact that she could afford to do that now. She knew that there was a part of her that was reluctant to return to the place that held so many memories of James, but that was fine because her father was more than happy to travel out to see her and she always, always made sure that she met Daisy, James’s mother, for lunch in London when she was over on business. She had politely asked about James and given evasive non-answers whenever Daisy showed any curiosity as to why they no longer seemed to meet. Eventually his name had been quietly dropped from conversations.

To think of him moving around in the cottage made something in her shiver. Sometimes, a memory of the scent of him, clean and masculine and woody, would surface from nowhere, leaving her shaken. She hoped that scent wouldn’t be lingering in the cottage when she got there. She was tired and it was too cold to run around opening windows to let out an elusive smell.

By the time they reached the cottage, driving was becoming impossible.

‘And they predict at least a week of this,’ the driver said bitterly. ‘Business is bad enough as it is without Mother Nature getting involved.’

‘Oh, this won’t last,’ Jennifer said airily. ‘I’ve got to be back in London by day after tomorrow.’

‘Lots of clothes for an overnight stay.’ The driver struggled up to the door with the case, unable to wheel it in the snow.

‘I’ll be leaving one or two things behind. Clearing out old stuff.’

She paid him, thinking of the task that lay ahead. Aside from sorting out the cottage, she would be bagging up all those frumpy clothes that had once been the mainstay of her wardrobe. None of them would fit any more. In the space of four years, she had been seduced by Parisian chic. She had lost weight, or maybe, thanks to her daily run, the weight had just been reassigned. At any rate, the body she had once avoided looking at in the mirror now attracted wolf whistles and stares from strangers and she was not ashamed to wear clothes that accentuated it. Nothing revealing, that would never be her style, but fashionable and figure hugging. Her untamed hair had been tamed over the years, thanks to the expert scissors of her hairdresser. It was still long, longer even than it used to be, but it was cleverly layered so that the frizz had been replaced with curls.

The cottage was in complete darkness although the door was surprisingly unlocked. She lugged the suitcase through and slammed the door shut behind her, luxuriating for a few seconds in the blissful warmth, eyes closed, lights still off because she just wanted to enjoy the cottage before she could see all the damage that had been caused by the flood.

And then she opened her eyes and there he was. Lounging against the door that led into the kitchen.

The cottage hadn’t been in complete darkness, as she had first thought. No, one of the kitchen lights had been switched on, but the kitchen was at the back of the house and the door leading to it had been shut when she had entered.

She literally froze on the spot.

God, he hadn’t changed. He was still as beautiful as he always had been, still the man who towered over other men. His hair was shorter than it had been four years ago and she could tell from the shadow on his jawline that he hadn’t shaved. In the space of a few seconds, during which time Jennifer felt her breath catch in her throat, she took in everything. The lean, long body in a pair of jeans and an old striped rugby jumper, the sleeves of which were shoved up to the elbows, those amazing deep blue eyes, now focused on her in a way that made her head swim.

Disastrously, she felt herself catapulted back to the young, naive girl she had once been.

‘James. What on earth are you doing here?’ She knew that her hand was trembling when she hit the light switch. ‘You told me that you would be leaving the country!’

‘I should be in the air right now but the weather got in the way of those plans. It’s been a long time, Jennifer…’

The silence stretched and stretched and stretched and she had to fight to maintain her self-control. Four years of independence, of cutting herself free from those infantile ties that had bound her to this man, and she could feel them melting and slipping away. She could have wept. Instead, she let the little ball of remembered bitterness and anger form into a knot inside her stomach and she began to get rid of her coat, which was heavy and damp from the snow.

‘Yes. Yes, it has. How are you?’ She forced a stiff smile but her heart was thumping like a sledgehammer.

‘I thought I’d stay in the cottage until you got here, make sure you arrived safely. I wasn’t sure whether you were going to drive or take the train.’

‘I… I took the train.’ Her car was parked outside her friend’s house in London where she stayed every time she came back to the city. ‘But there was no need for you to hang around here. You know I can take care of myself.’

‘You’ve certainly been doing a very good job of that while you’ve been in Paris. My mother frequently regales me with news of yet more promotions.’

She still hadn’t taken a single step towards him because her feet appeared to be nailed to that one spot in the hallway.

He was the first to break the spell, turning away and heading into the kitchen, leaving her to follow him.

He hadn’t said a word about how much she had changed. How could he have failed to notice? But then, why was it so surprising when he had never really noticed her? The ease she had once felt in his company was nowhere to be found and it was a struggle thinking of polite conversation to make.

‘It’s been a very successful posting for me,’ Jennifer said politely. ‘I never thought that I’d end up staying over there for four years but as I accepted more and more responsibility, the work became more and more challenging and I found myself accepting their offers to stay on.’

‘You look like a visitor, standing there. Sit down. You might as well forget about getting anything done tonight. We can work on detailing what will need to be done to the cottage tomorrow.’

‘We? Like I said, there’s absolutely no need for you to help me with this. I plan on having it all finished by tomorrow afternoon and I’ll be leaving first thing the following morning.’ This was not how two old friends, meeting after years of separation, would act. Jennifer knew that. She could hear the sharp edge to her voice and, while she was dismayed by it, she was also keenly aware that it was necessary as a protective tool, because just looking at him rooting around in the fridge with his back to her threatened to take her down memory lane and that was a journey she wasn’t willing to make.

‘Good luck arguing with the weather on that score.’

‘What are you doing in the fridge?’

‘Cheese, eggs. There’s some bread over there, bought yesterday. When the snow started, I realised I might find myself stuck here and if I was stuck here, then you would be as well, so I managed to make it down to the shops and got a few things together.’

‘Well, that was very kind of you, James. Thank you.’

‘Well, isn’t this fun?’ He fetched a bottle of wine from the fridge, something he had bought along with the food, she was sure, and poured them both a glass. ‘Four years and we’re struggling to pass the time of day. Tell me what you’ve been up to in France.’

‘I thought I just had. My job is very invigorating. The apartment is wonderful.’

‘So everything lived up to expectation.’ He sat back in the kitchen chair and took a deep mouthful of wine, looking at her over the rim of the glass. God, she’d changed. Did she realise just how much? He couldn’t believe that the last time he’d seen her had been four years ago, but then she had made sure to be unavailable whenever he’d happened to be in Paris, and somehow, whenever she’d happened to be in the UK, he’d happened to be out of it.

She had cut all ties with him and he knew that it had all happened on that one fateful night. Of course, he didn’t regret the outcome of that evening. He had had no choice but to turn her down. She had been young and vulnerable and too sexy for her own good. She had come to him looking for something and he had known, instinctively, that whatever that something was he would have been incapable of providing it. She had been trusting and naive, not like the hard-edged beauties he was accustomed to who would have been happy to take whatever was on offer for limited duration.

But he had never suspected that she would have walked out of his life permanently.

And changed. And had not looked back.

‘Yes.’ Jennifer played with the stem of her wine glass but there was no way that she was going to drink any of it. ‘Everything lived up to expectation and beyond. Life has never been so good or so rewarding. And what about you, James? What have you been up to? I’ve seen your mother over the years but I really haven’t heard much about you.’

‘Shrinking world but fortunately new markets in the Far East. If you like, I can go into the details but doubt you would find it that fascinating. Aside from the challenging job, what is Paris like for you? Completely different from this neck of the woods, I imagine.’

‘Yes. Yes, it is.’

‘Are you going to expand on that or shall we drink our respective glasses of wine in silence while we try and formulate new topics of conversation?’

‘I’m sorry, James. It’s been a long trip with the train and the taxi and I’m exhausted. I think it’s probably best if you went up to your house and we can always play the catch-up game another time.’

‘You haven’t forgotten, have you?’

‘Forgotten what?’

‘Forgotten the last time we met.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Yes. Yes, I think you do, Jen.’

‘I don’t think there’s anything to be gained by dragging up the past, James.’ She stood up abruptly and positioned herself by the kitchen door with her arms folded. Not only were they strangers, but now they were combatants, squaring up to each other in the boxing ring. Jennifer didn’t dare allow regret to enter the equation because just looking at him like this was making her realise that on some deep, instinctive level she still responded to him. She didn’t know whether that was the pull of familiarity or the pull of an attraction that refused to remain buried and she was not willing to find out.

‘Why don’t you go and change and I’ll fix you something to eat, and if you tell me that you’re too exhausted to eat, then I’m going to suspect that you’re finding excuses to avoid my company. Which wouldn’t be the case, would it, Jen?’

‘Of course not.’ But she could feel a delicate flush creep into her cheeks.

‘Nothing fancy. You know my culinary talents are limited.’

The grin he delivered was an aching reminder of the good times they had shared and the companionable ease they had lost.

‘And don’t,’ he continued, holding up one hand as though to halt an interruption, ‘tell me that there’s no need. I know there’s no need. Like I said, I’m fully aware of how independent you’ve become over the past four years.’

Jennifer shrugged, but her thoughts were all over the place as she rummaged in the suitcase for a change of clothes. A hurried shower and she was back downstairs within half an hour, this time in a pair of loose grey yoga pants and a tight, long-sleeved grey top, her hair pulled back into a ponytail.

It had always been a standing joke that James never cooked. He would tease her father, who adored cooking, that the kitchen was a woman’s domain, that cooking wasn’t a man’s job. He would then lay down the gauntlet—an arm-wrestling match to prove that cooking depleted a man of strength. Jennifer used to love these little interludes; she used to love the way he would wink at her, pulling her into his game.

However, he was just finishing a remarkably proficient omelette when she walked into the kitchen. A salad was in a bowl. Hot bread was on a wooden board.

‘I guess I’m not the only one who’s changed,’ Jennifer said from the doorway, and he glanced across to her, his eyes lazily appraising.

‘Would you believe me if I told you that I took a cookery course?’

Jennifer shrugged. ‘Did you?’ She sat at the table and looked around her. ‘There’s less damage than I thought there would be. I had a look around before I went to have a shower. Thankfully, upstairs is intact and I can just see that there are some water stains on the sofa in the sitting room and I guess the rugs will have to be replaced.’

‘Have we finished playing our catch-up game already?’ He handed her a plate, encouraged her to help herself to bread and salad, before taking up position opposite her at the kitchen table.

Jennifer thought that this was the reason she had avoided him for four years. There was just too much of him. He overwhelmed her and she was no longer on the market for being overwhelmed.

‘There’s nothing more to catch up on, James. I can’t think of anything else I could tell you about my job in Paris. If you like I could give you a description of what my apartment looks like, but I shouldn’t think you’d find that very interesting.’

‘You’ve changed.’

‘What is that supposed to mean?’

‘I barely recognise you as the girl who left here four years ago. Somewhere in my memory banks, I have an image of someone who actually used to laugh and enjoy conversing with me.’

Jennifer felt the slow burn of anger because he hadn’t changed. He was still the same arrogantly self-assured James, supremely confident of their roles in life. She laughed and blushed and he basked in her open admiration.

‘How can you expect me to laugh when you haven’t said anything funny as yet, James?’

‘That’s exactly what I’m talking about!’ He threw his hands up in a gesture of frustration and pushed himself back from the table. ‘You’ve either had a personality change or else your job in Paris is so stressful that it’s wiped out your sense of fun. Which is it, Jen? You can be honest with me. You’ve always been open and honest with me, so tell me: have you bitten off more than you can chew with that job?’

‘I know that’s what you’d like me to say, James. That I’m hopelessly lost and can’t handle the work in Paris.’

‘That’s a ridiculous statement.’

‘Is it? If I told you that I was having a hard time and just couldn’t cope, then you could be the caring, concerned guy. You could put your arm round my shoulder and whip out a handkerchief for me to sob into! But my job is absolutely brilliant and if I wasn’t any good at it, then I would never have been promoted. I would never have risen up the ranks.’

‘Is that what you think? That I’m the sort of narrow-minded, mean-spirited guy who would be happy if you failed?’

Jennifer sighed and pushed her plate away.

‘I know you’re not mean-spirited, James, and I don’t want to argue with you.’ She stood up, began clearing the dishes, tried to think of something harmless to say that would defuse the high-voltage atmosphere that had sprung up.

‘Leave those things!’ James growled.

‘I don’t want to. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day and the less I have to do in the kitchen, tidying up stuff that could be done now, the better. And by the way, thank you very much for cooking for me. It was very nice.’

James muttered something under his breath but began helping her, drying dishes as she began washing. Jennifer felt his presence as acutely as a live charge. If she stepped too close, she would be electrocuted. Being in his presence had stripped her of her immunity to him and it frightened her, but she wasn’t going to give in to that queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach. She launched into a neutral conversation about their parents. She told him how much her father enjoyed Paris.

‘Because, as you know, he stopped going abroad after Mum died. He once told me that it had been their dream to travel the world and when she died, the dream died with her.’

‘Yes, the last time I came here for the weekend, he was waiting for the taxi and reading a guide book on the Louvre. He said it was top on the agenda. He’s been ticking off the sights.’

‘Really?’ Jennifer laughed and for an instant James went still. He realised that the memory of that laugh lingered at the back of his brain like the refrain from a song that never quite went away. Suddenly he wanted to know a lot more than just whether she enjoyed her job or what her apartment was like. She had always, he was ashamed to admit to himself, been a known quantity, but now he felt curiosity rip through him, leaving him bemused.

‘You’ve opened up a door for John,’ he drawled, drying the last dish and then leaning against the counter with the tea towel slung over his shoulder. ‘I think he’s realised what he’s been missing all these years. He was in a rut and your moving to Paris forced him out of it. I have a feeling that he’s going to get bored with weekends to Paris pretty soon.’

‘We don’t just stay in Paris,’ Jennifer protested. ‘We’ve been doing quite a bit of Europe.’ But she was thrilled with what James had told her. It was a brief window during which, with her defences down, they were back to that place they had left behind, that place of easy familiarity, two people with years and years of shared history.

She glanced surreptitiously at him and edged away before that easy familiarity could get a little too easy, before her hard-won independence began draining away and she found herself back to the girl in the past who used to hang onto his every word.

‘In fact, I’ve already planned the next couple of weekends. When the weather improves, we’re going to go to Prague. It’s a beautiful city. I think he’d love it.’

‘You’ve been before, have you?’

‘Once.’

‘And this from the girl who grew up in one place and never went abroad, aside from that school trip when you were fifteen. Skiing, wasn’t it?’

Yes, it certainly was. Jennifer remembered it distinctly. James’s father had just died and he had been busy trying to grapple with the demands of the company he had inherited. He hadn’t been around much and when, after the skiing trip, she had seen him for the first time after several weeks, she had regaled him with a thousand stories of all the little things the class had done. The cliques that had subdivided the groups. The quiet girl, usually in the background, who had come out of her shell because she was one of only a handful who had been any good at skiing.

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘And who did you go to Prague with?’ James enquired casually. ‘I’ve actually been twice. Romantic city.’ He turned to fill the kettle and found that he was keenly awaiting her response.

Jennifer frowned. She was relieved that he had his back to her. Her first instinct was to tell him that her private life was none of his business. She quickly decided that it was one thing being scrupulously polite, but if she began to actively push him away he would start asking himself why and they would be back to the subject she was most desperate to avoid: her mistimed, unfortunate pass at him. He would really be in his element then, she concluded bitterly, holding her hand and trying to assure her that she shouldn’t let the memory of it interfere with her life, that their friendship was so much more important than a silly non-escapade. She would be mortified.

‘Yes. It’s a very romantic city. I love everything about it. I love the architecture and that terrific feeling of a place almost suspended in time. Don’t you agree?’

‘So who did you go with? Or is it a deep, dark secret?’ He chuckled and turned round to face her, moving to hand her a mug of coffee and then sitting down and pulling one of the chairs in front of him so that he could fully relax, using the spare chair as a footrest.

‘Oh, just a guy I met over there.’

‘A guy!’

‘Patric. Patric Alexander. Just someone I met at a party a while back…’

‘Well.’ He didn’t know why he was so shocked at this. She had always been sexy, although it was fair to say that she had never realised it. She was still sexy and the only difference was that Paris had made her realise just how much.

‘French guy, is he?’ James heard the inanity of his question and his lips thinned although he was still smiling.

‘Half French. His mother’s English.’ She gulped down her coffee and stood up with a brisk smile. ‘Now, I really think it’s time for you to head back to your house, James. I have unpacking to do and I want to be up fairly early to make a list of what needs doing. Hopefully not that much. I noticed that the rug in the sitting room’s already been rolled. Thank you for that.’

‘Thank God there’s no carpet downstairs. The joys of flagstones when there’s a flood! Why didn’t this Patric guy come to help you?’

‘Because he’s in Paris.’ She moved to the door and frowned when he remained comfortably seated at the table.

‘The name doesn’t ring a bell. I’m sure your father would have mentioned him to me in passing—’

‘Why would he?’ Jennifer snapped.

‘Because I’m his friend…? How long have you been going out with this Patric guy?’

‘I really don’t want to be having this conversation with you.’

‘Because you feel uncomfortable?’

‘Because I’m tired and I want to go to sleep!’

‘Fair enough.’ James took his time getting to his feet. ‘I wouldn’t want to be accused of prying and I certainly wouldn’t want to make you feel uncomfortable in any way…’ He walked towards her and, the closer he got, the tenser she could feel herself becoming.

‘I’m perfectly comfortable.’

‘I just wonder,’ he mused, pausing to invade her personal space by standing only inches in front of her, a towering six-feet-three inches of pure alpha male clearly hell-bent on satisfying his curiosity, ‘whether you avoided me over the years because you were reluctant to let me meet this man of yours…’

‘I was not avoiding you over the years,’ Jennifer muttered uncomfortably. ‘I thought we corresponded very frequently by email…’

‘And yet every time I happened to be in Paris, you were otherwise occupied, and every time you happened to be in this country, I was out of it…’

‘The timings were always wrong.’ Jennifer shrugged, although she could feel hot colour rising to her face and she stared down at the ground with a little frown. ‘Patric and I are no longer involved,’ she finally admitted, when the silence became unbearable. ‘We’re still very good friends. In fact, I would say that he’s my closest confidant…’

This time she did look at him and James knew instantly, from the genuine warmth of her smile, that she was being completely truthful.

The girl who had always turned to him, the girl who had matured into a woman he hadn’t seen for nearly four years, now had someone else to turn to.

‘And what about you?’ she asked, because if he could ask intrusive questions then why shouldn’t she? ‘Is there anyone significant in your life at the moment, James?’

James was still trying to get over a weird feeling of disorientation. He tilted his head to one side, considering her question.

‘No. No one at the moment. Until recently, I was involved with an actress…’

‘Blonde?’ Jennifer couldn’t resist asking and he frowned at her and nodded.

‘Petite? Fond of very high heels and very tight dresses?’

‘Did my mother mention her to you? I got the impression she wasn’t bowled over by Amy…’

‘No, your mother didn’t mention anyone to me. In fact,’ she added with a hint of smugness, ‘your mother and I haven’t really discussed you at all. I’m just guessing because those are the sort of girls you’ve always been interested in. Blonde, big hair, small, very high heels and very tight dresses.’ Jennifer couldn’t help herself, even though dipping into this subject would be to open a door to all the insecurities she had felt as a young woman, pining for him and comparing herself incessantly to the girls he would occasionally bring back to the house. Amy clones. She took a deep breath and fought her way through that brief reminder of a time she would rather have forgotten.

James flushed darkly.

‘Nothing changes,’ she said scornfully.

‘Really? I wouldn’t say that’s true at all.’

‘You still go out with the blonde airheads. Daisy still despairs. You still only have relationships that last five seconds.’

‘But you don’t still have a crush on me…’

That softly spoken remark, a lazy, tantalising question wrapped up in a statement, was like a bucket of freezing water thrown over her and she stepped back as though she had been slapped.

What had she been thinking? Had she been so shocked to find him in the cottage that she had forgotten how efficiently he could get under her skin? She had managed to keep her distance so how was it that they had somehow drifted into a conversation that was so personal?

‘That was all a long time ago, James, and, like I said, there’s nothing to be gained from rehashing the past.’

‘Well…’ He finally began strolling to where his coat was hanging over the banister. She wondered how she had managed to miss that when she had walked in but, of course, she hadn’t been expecting him. ‘I’ll be heading off but I’ll be back tomorrow and please don’t tell me that there’s no need. I’ll roll the other carpets. Get them into one of the outbuildings and keep them dry so that they can be assessed for damage when this snow decides to stop and someone from the insurance company can come out.’

‘I’m sure that can wait,’ Jennifer said helplessly. ‘I won’t be here long. I plan on leaving… well… if not tomorrow evening, then first thing the following morning…’

James didn’t say anything. He took his time wrapping his scarf round his neck, then he pulled open the front door so that she was treated to the spectacular sight of snow swirling madly outside, so thick that she could barely make out the fields stretching away into the distance.

‘Good luck with that.’ He turned to her. ‘I think you’ll find that we might both end up being stuck here…’

With each other. Jennifer tried not to be completely overwhelmed at the prospect of that. He wasn’t going to stay cooped up in his house when he thought that she needed help in the cottage. He would be around and she had no idea how long for. Certainly, the snow looked as though it was here for the long haul and the house and cottage were not positioned for easy access to handy, cleared roads. They were in the middle of nowhere and it would not be the first time that heavy snow would leave them stranded.

But maybe it was for the best. She couldn’t hide away from him for ever. Sooner rather than later she would be returning to the UK to live. Her father wasn’t getting any younger and she had enough on her CV to guarantee a job, or at least a good prospect of one. When that happened, she would be seeing him once again on weekends.

She decided that this was fate.

‘You could be right,’ she said with more bravado than she felt. ‘In which case, thank heavens you’re here! I mean, I adore Patric, but I have to be honest and tell you that an artist probably wouldn’t be a huge amount of practical help at a time like this…’