Читать книгу Snowbound With His Innocent Temptation - Кэтти Уильямс, CATHY WILLIAMS, Cathy Williams - Страница 9
ОглавлениеTHE HOUSE SEEMED to shrink in size the minute he walked in. He’d fetched his computer from his car but that was all and Becky looked at him with a frown.
‘Is that all you brought with you?’
‘You still haven’t told me your name.’ The house was clearly on its last legs. Theo was no surveyor but that much was obvious. He now looked directly at her as he slowly removed his coat.
‘Rebecca. Becky.’ She watched as he carelessly slung his coat over one of the hooks by the front door. She could really appreciate his lean muscularity, now he was down to the jumper and trousers, and her mouth went dry.
This was as far out of her comfort zone as it was possible to get. Ever since Freddy, she had retreated into herself, content to go out as part of a group, to mingle with old friends—some of whom, like her, had returned to the beautiful Cotswolds, but to raise families. She hadn’t actively chosen to discourage men but, as it happened, they had been few and far between. Twice she had been asked out on dates and twice she had decided that friendship was more valuable than the possibility of romance.
Truthfully, when she tried to think about relationships, she drew a blank. She wanted someone thoughtful and caring and those sorts of guys were already snapped up. The guys who had asked her out had known her since for ever, and she knew for a fact that one of them was still recovering from a broken heart and had only asked her out on the rebound.
The other, the son of one of the farmers whom she had visited on call-out on several occasions, was nice enough, but nice enough just wasn’t sufficient.
Or maybe she was being too fussy. That thought had occurred to her. When you were on your own for long enough, you grew careful, wary of letting anyone into your world, protective of your space. Was that what was happening to her?
At any rate, her comfort zone was on the verge of disappearing permanently unless she chose to stay where she was and travel long distances to another job.
She decided that inviting Theo in was good practice for what lay in store for her. She had opened her door to a complete stranger and she knew, with some weird gut instinct, that he was no physical threat to her.
In fact, seeing him in the unforgiving light in the hall did nothing to lessen the impact of his intense, sexual vitality. It was laughable to think that he would have any interest in her as anything other than someone offering refuge from the gathering snow storm.
‘I can show you to one of the spare rooms.’ Becky flushed because she could feel herself staring again. ‘I don’t keep them heated, but I’ll turn the radiator on, and it shouldn’t take too long to warm up. You might want to...freshen up.’
‘I would love nothing more,’ Theo drawled. ‘Unfortunately, no change of clothing. Would you happen to have anything I could borrow? Husband’s old gardening clothes? Boyfriend’s...?’ He wondered whether she intended to spend the rest of the evening in the shapeless anorak and mud-stained boots. She had to be the least fashion-conscious woman he had ever met in his entire life, yet for the life of him he was still captivated by something about her.
The eyes, the unruly hair still stuffed under the woolly hat, the lack of war paint...what was it?
He had no idea but he hadn’t felt this alive in a woman’s presence for a while.
Then again, it had been a while since he had been in the presence of any woman who wasn’t desperate to attract his attention. There was a lot to be said for novelty.
‘I can let you borrow something.’ Becky shifted from foot to foot. She was boiling in the coat but somehow she didn’t like the thought of stripping down to her jeans and top in front of him. Those sharp, lazy eyes of his made her feel all hot and bothered. ‘My dad left some of his stuff in the wardrobe in the room you’ll be in. You can have a look and see what might be able to work for you. And if you leave your stuff outside the bedroom door, then I guess I can stick it in the washing machine.’
‘You needn’t do that.’
‘You’re soaked,’ Becky said flatly. ‘Your clothes will smell if you leave them to dry without washing them first.’
‘In that case, I won’t refuse your charming offer,’ Theo said drily and Becky flushed.
Very conscious of his eyes on her, she preceded him up the stairs, pointedly ignoring the bucket gathering water on the ground from the leaking roof, and flung open the door to one of the spare bedrooms. Had she actually thought things through when she had fled back to the family home, she would have realised that the ‘cottage’ was a cottage in name only. In reality, it was reasonably large, with five bedrooms and outbuildings in the acres outside. It was far too big for her and she wondered, suddenly, whether her parents had felt sorry for her and offered to allow her to stay there through pity. They hadn’t known about Freddy and her broken heart but what must they have felt when she had dug her heels in and insisted on returning to the family home while Alice, already far flown from the nest, was busily making marriage plans so that the next phase of her life could begin?
Becky cringed.
Her parents would never, ever have denied her the cottage but they weren’t rich. They had bought somewhere tiny in France when her grandmother had died, and they had both continued working part-time, teaching in the local school.
Becky had always thought it a brilliant way of integrating into life in the French town, but what if they’d only done that because they needed the money?
While she stayed here, paying a peppercorn rent and watching the place gradually fall apart at the seams...
She was struck by her own selfishness and it was something that had never occurred to her until now.
She would phone, she decided. Feel out the ground. After all, whether she liked it or not, her lifestyle was going to change dramatically once she was out of a job.
Theo looked at her and wondered what was going through her mind. He hadn’t failed to notice the way she had neatly stepped past a bucket in the corridor which was quarter-full from the leaking roof.
It was startling enough that a woman of her age would choose to live out in the sticks, however rewarding her job might be, but it was even more startling that, having chosen to live out in the sticks, she continued to live in a house that was clearly on the verge of giving up the fight.
When he bought this cottage, he would be doing her a favour by forcing her out into the real world.
Where life happened.
Rather than her staying here...hiding away...which surely was what she was doing...?
Hiding from what? he wondered. He was a little amused at how involved he temporarily was in mentally providing an answer to that ridiculous question.
But if he had to get her onside, manoeuvre her into a position where she might see the sense of not standing in his way when it came to buying the cottage, then wouldn’t it help to get to know her a little?
Of course, there was no absolute necessity to get anyone onside. He could simply bypass her and head directly to the parents. Make them an offer they couldn’t refuse. But for once he wasn’t quite ruthless enough to go down that road. There was something strangely alluring underneath the guard-dog belligerence. And he was not forgetting that there were times when money didn’t open the door you wanted opening. If he bypassed her and leant on the parents, there was a real risk of them uniting with their daughter to shut him out permanently, whatever sums of money he chose to throw at them. Family loyalty could be a powerful wild card, and he should know... Wasn’t family loyalty the very thing that had brought him to this semi-derelict cottage?
She was switching on the ancient heating, opening the wardrobe so that she could show him where the clothes were kept, fetching a towel from the corridor, dumping it on the bed and then informing him that the bathroom was just down the corridor, but that he would have to make sure that the toilet wasn’t flushed before he turned on the shower or else he might end up with third-degree burns.
Theo walked slowly towards her and then stopped a few inches away.
When Becky breathed, she could breathe him in, masculinity mixed with the cold winter air, a heady, heady mix. Leaning against the doorframe, she blinked, suddenly unsteady on her feet.
He had amazing lashes, long, dark and thick. She wanted to ask him where he was from, because there was an exotic strain running through him that was quite...captivating.
He had shoved up the sleeves of his jumper and, even though she wasn’t actually looking, she was very much aware of his forearms, the fine, dark hair on them, the flex of muscle and sinew...
Her breathing was so sluggish that it crossed her mind...was it actually physically possible to forget how to breathe?
‘I don’t get why you live here.’ Theo was genuinely curious.
‘Wh-what do you mean?’ Becky stammered.
‘The house needs a lot of work doing to it. I could understand if your parents wanted you in situ while work was being done but...can I call you Becky?...there’s a bucket out in the corridor. And how long do you intend emptying it before you face the unpalatable fact that the roof probably needs replacing?’
Hard on the heels of the uncomfortable thoughts that had been preying on her mind, Theo’s remarks struck home with deadly accuracy.
‘I don’t see that the state of this house is any of your business!’ Bright patches of colour stained her cheeks. ‘You’re here for a night, one night, and only because I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I had sent you on your way in this weather. But that doesn’t give you the right to...to...’
‘Talk?’
‘You’re not talking, you’re—’
‘I’m probably saying things that have previously occurred to you, things you may have chosen to ignore.’ He shrugged, unwillingly intrigued by the way she was so patently uninterested in trying to impress him. ‘If you’d rather I didn’t, then that’s fine. I have some work to do when I get downstairs and then we can pretend to have an invigorating conversation about the weather.’
‘I’ll be downstairs.’ This for want of anything more coherent to say when she was so...angry...that he had had the nerve to shoot his mouth off! He was rude beyond words!
But he wasn’t wrong.
And this impertinent stranger had provided the impetus she needed to make that call to her parents. As soon as she was in the kitchen, with the door firmly shut, because the man was as stealthy as a panther and obviously didn’t wait for invitations to speak his mind. There was some beating around the bush but, yes, it would be rather lovely if the house was sold, not that they would ever dream of asking her to leave.
But...but...but...but.
Lots of buts, so that by the time Becky hung up fifteen minutes later she was in no doubt that not only was she heading for unemployment but the leaking roof over her head would not be hers for longer than it took for the local estate agent to come along and offer a valuation.
Mind still whirring busily away, she headed back up the stairs. She wished she could think more clearly and see a way forward but the path ahead was murky. What if she couldn’t get a job? It should be easy but, then again, she was in a highly specialised field. What if she did manage to find a posting but it was in an even more remote spot than this? Did she really want the years ahead to be spent in a practice in the wilds of Scotland? But weren’t the more desirable posts in London, Manchester or Birmingham going to be the first to be filled?
And underneath all those questions was the dissatisfaction that had swamped her after she had spoken to her sister.
Her life had been put into harsh perspective. The time she had spent here now seemed to have been wasted. Instead of moving forward, she had stayed in the same place, pedalling furiously and getting nowhere.
She surfaced from her disquieting thoughts to find that, annoyingly, the clothes she had asked to be placed outside the bedroom door were not there.
Did the man think that he was staying in a hotel?
Did he imagine that it was okay for her to hang around like a chambermaid until he decided that he could be bothered to hand over his dirty laundry for her to do? She didn’t even have to wash his clothes! She could have sent him on his way in musty, semi-damp trousers and a jumper that smelled of pond water.
He obviously thought that he was so important that he could do as he pleased. Speak to her as he pleased. Accept her hospitality whilst antagonising her because he found it entertaining.
She had no idea how important or unimportant he was but, quite aside from the snazzy little racing-red number and the designer clothing, there was something about him that screamed wealth.
Or maybe it was power.
Well, none of that impressed her. She’d never had time for anyone who thought that money was the be all and end all. It just wasn’t the way she had been brought up.
It was what was inside that counted. It was why, although Freddy had not been the one for her, there was a guy out there who was, a guy who had the sterling qualities of kindness, quiet intelligence and self-deprecating humour.
And, having ducked the dating scene for years, she would get back out there...because if she didn’t then this was the person she would be in the years to come, entrenched in her singledom, godmother to all and sundry and maid of honour to her friends as they tied the knot and moved on with their fulfilling lives.
Swamped by sudden self-pity, she absently shoved open the door to the spare room, which was ajar, and...stopped. Her legs stopped moving, her hand froze on the door knob and her brain went into instant shutdown.
She didn’t know where to look and somewhere inside she knew that it didn’t matter because wherever she looked she would still end up seeing him. Tall, broad-shouldered, his body an amazing burnished bronze. She would still see the hardness of his six pack and the length of his muscular legs, the legs of an athlete.
Aside from a pair of low-slung boxers, he was completely naked.
Becky cleared her throat and opened her mouth and nothing emerged but an inarticulate noise.
‘I was just about to stick the clothes outside...’
Without the woollen hat pulled down over her head, her hair was long, tumbling down her back in a cascade of unruly, dark curls, and without the layers upon layers of shriekingly unfashionable arctic gear...
She wasn’t the round little beach ball he had imagined. Even with the loose-fitting striped rugby shirt, he could see that she had the perfect hourglass figure. News obviously hadn’t reached this part of the world that the fashionable trend these days leaned towards long, thin and toned to athletic perfection, even if the exercise involved to get there never saw the outside of an expensive gym.
He could feel his whole body reacting to the sight of her lush curves and he hurriedly turned away, because a pair of boxers was no protection against an erection.
He was staring. Becky stood stock-still, conscious of herself and her body in ways she had never been before. Why was he staring at her like that? Was he even aware that he was doing it?
She couldn’t believe that he was staring at her because she was the most glamorous woman he had ever set eyes on. She wasn’t born yesterday and she knew that when it came to looks, well, a career could not be made out of hers. Alice had got the looks and she, Becky, had got the brains and it had always seemed like a fair enough deal to her.
He’d turned away now, thankfully putting on some ancient track pants her father had left behind and an even more ancient jumper, and by the time he turned back around to face her she wondered whether she had imagined those cool, grey eyes on her, skirting over her body.
Yes, she thought a little shakily. Of course she had. She had stared at him because he looked like a Greek god. She on the other hand was as average as they came.
Should she feel threatened? She was alone in this house...
She didn’t feel threatened. She felt...excited. Something wicked and daring stirred inside her and she promptly knocked it back.
‘The clothes.’ She found her voice, one hand outstretched, watching as he gathered items of clothing and strolled towards her. ‘I’ll make sure they’re washed and ready for you tomorrow morning.’
‘First thing...before I’m sent on my way,’ Theo murmured, still startled at the fierce grip of his libido that had struck from nowhere.
She couldn’t wait to escape, he thought with a certain amount of disbelief.
Something had passed between them just then. Had she even been aware of it? A charge of electricity had shaken him and she hadn’t been unaffected. He’d seen the reaction in the widening of her eyes as she had looked at him, and the stillness of her body language, as though one false move might have led her to do something...rash.
Did rash happen out here? he wondered. Or was she out here because she was escaping from something rash? Was the awkward, blushing, argumentative vet plagued by guilt over a misspent past? Had she thrown herself into a one-way relationship to nowhere with a con man? A married man? A rampant womaniser who had used her and tossed her aside? The possibilities were endless.
She certainly wasn’t out here for the money. That bucket on the landing said it all. She might be living rent free at the place but she certainly wasn’t earning enough to keep it maintained. Old houses consumed money with the greed of a gold-digger on the make.
‘What if it’s still snowing in the morning?’
She was clutching the bundle of clothes like a talisman and staring up at him with those amazing bright blue eyes. Her lips were parted. When she circled a nervous tongue over them, Theo had to fight down an urge to reach out and pull her against him.
‘It won’t be.’
‘If you weren’t prepared to risk my life by sending me on my way, then will you be prepared to risk someone else’s life by asking them to come and collect me and take me away?’
‘I could drive you myself. I have a four-wheel drive. It’s okay in conditions like this.’
‘When I knocked on your door...’ Theo leant against the door frame ‘... I never expected someone like you to open it’
‘What do you mean someone like me?’ Becky stiffened, primed for some kind of thinly veiled insult.
Theo didn’t say anything for a couple of seconds. Instead, he watched her, head tilted to one side, until she looked away, blushing. Very gently, he tilted her face back to his.
‘You’re on the defensive. Why?’
‘Why do you think? I... I don’t know you.’ The feel of his cool finger resting lightly on her chin was as scorching-hot as the imprint from a branding iron.
‘What do you think I’m going to do? When I said someone like you, I meant someone young. I expected someone much older to be living this far out in the countryside.’
‘I told you, the house belongs to my parents. I’m just here... Look, I’m going to head downstairs, wash these things...’ Her feet and brain were not communicating because, instead of spinning around and backing out of the room, she remained where she was, glued to the spot.
She wanted him to remove his hand...she wanted him to do more with it, wanted him to curve it over her face and then slide it across her shoulders, wanted him to find the bare flesh of her stomach and then the swell of her breasts... She didn’t want to hear anything he had to say, yet he was making her think, and how could that be a bad thing?
She barely recognised her voice and she certainly didn’t know what was going on with her body.
‘Okay.’ He stepped back, hand dropping to his side.
For a few seconds, Becky hovered, then she cleared her throat and stepped out of the room backwards.
By the time he joined her in the kitchen, the clothes were in the washing machine and she had regained her composure.
Theo looked at her for a few seconds from the doorway. She had her back to him and was busy chopping vegetables, while as background noise the television was giving an in-depth report of the various areas besieged by snow when spring should have sprung. He felt that her house would shortly be featured because there was no sign of the snow letting up.
Before he had come down, he had done his homework, nosed into a few of the rooms and seen for himself what he had suspected from the bucket on the landing catching water from the leaking roof.
The house was on its last legs. Did he think that he was doing anything underhand in checking out the property before he made an offer? No. He’d come here to conduct a business deal and, if things had been slightly thrown off course, nothing had fundamentally changed. The key thing remained the business deal.
And was the woman peeling the vegetables an unexpected part of acquiring what he wanted? Was she now part of the business deal that had to be secured?
In a way, yes.
And he was not in the slightest ashamed of taking this pragmatic view. Why should he be? This was the man he was and it was how he had succeeded beyond even his own wildest expectations.
If you allowed your emotions to guide you, you ended up a victim of whatever circumstances came along to blow you off course.
He had no intention of ever being one of life’s victims. His mother had so much to give, but she had allowed her damaged heart to take control of her entire future, so that, in the end, whatever she’d had to give to anyone else had dried up. Wasn’t that one reason why she was so consumed with the thought of having grandchildren? Of seeing him married off?
Because her ability to give had to go somewhere and he was the only recipient.
That was what emotions did to a person. They stripped you of your ability to think. That was why he had never done commitment and never would. Commitment led to relationships and relationships were almost always train wrecks waiting to happen. Lawyers were kept permanently busy sorting out those train wrecks and making lots of money in the process.
He had his life utterly in control and that was the way he liked it.
He had no doubt that whatever had brought Becky to this place was a story that might tug on someone else’s heartstrings. His heartstrings would be blessedly immune to any tugging. He would be able to find out about her and persuade her to accept that this was no place for her to be. When, inevitably, the house was sold from under her feet, she would not try and put up a fight, wouldn’t try and coax her parents into letting her stay on.
He would have long disappeared from her life. He would have been nothing more than a stranger who had landed for a night and then moved on. But she would remember what he had said and she would end up thanking him.
Because, frankly, this was no place for her to be. It wasn’t healthy. She was far too young.
He looked at the rounded swell of her derrière...
Far too young and far too sexy.
‘What are you cooking?’
Becky swung round to see him lounging against the door frame. Her father was a little shorter and reedier than Theo. Theo looked as though he had been squashed into clothes a couple of sizes too small. And he was barefoot. Her eyes shot back to his face to find that he was staring right back at her with a little smile.
‘Pasta. Nothing special. And you can help.’ She turned her back on him and felt him close the distance between them until he was standing next to her, at which point she pointed to some onions and slid a small, sharp knife towards him. ‘You’ve asked me a lot of questions,’ she said, eyes sliding across to his hands and then hurriedly sliding back to focus on what she was doing. ‘But I don’t know anything about you.’
‘Ask away.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘London.’ Theo couldn’t remember the last time he’d chopped an onion. Were they always this fiddly?
‘And what were you doing in this part of the world? Aside from getting lost?’
Theo felt a passing twinge of guilt. ‘Taking my car for some exercise,’ he said smoothly. ‘And visiting one or two...familiar spots en route.’
‘Seems an odd thing to do at this time of year,’ Becky mused. ‘On your own.’
‘Does it?’ Theo dumped the half-peeled onion. ‘Is there anything to drink in this house or do vets not indulge just in case they get a midnight call and need to be in their car within minutes, tackling the dangerous country lanes in search of a sick animal somewhere?’
Becky stopped what she was doing and looked at him, and at the poor job he had made of peeling an onion.
‘I’m not really into domestic chores.’ Theo shrugged.
‘There’s wine in the fridge. I’m not on call this evening and, as it happens, I don’t get hundreds of emergency calls at night. I’m not a doctor. Most of my patients can wait a few hours and, if they can’t, everyone around here knows where the nearest animal hospital is. And you haven’t answered my question. Isn’t it a bit strange for you to be here on your own...just driving around?’
Theo took his time pouring the wine, then he handed her a glass and settled into a chair at the kitchen table.
His own penthouse was vast and ultra-modern. He didn’t care for cosy, although he had to admit that there was something to be said for it in the middle of a blizzard with the snow turning everything white outside. This was a cosy kitchen. Big cream Aga...worn pine table with mismatched chairs...flagstone floor that had obviously had underfloor heating installed at some point, possibly before the house had begun buckling under the effect of old age, because it wasn’t bloody freezing underfoot...
‘Just driving around,’ he said slowly, truthfully, ‘is a luxury I can rarely afford.’ He thought about his life—high-voltage, adrenaline-charged, pressurised, the life of someone who made millions. There was no time for standing still. ‘I seldom stop, and even when I do, I am permanently on call.’ He smiled crookedly, at odds with himself for giving in to the unheard of temptation to confide.
‘What on earth do you do?’ Becky leant against the counter and stared at him with interest.
‘I...buy things, do them up and sell them on. Some of them I keep for myself because I’m greedy.’
‘What sorts of things?’
‘Companies.’
Becky stared at him thoughtfully. The sauce was simmering nicely on the Aga. She went to sit opposite him, nursing her glass of wine.
Looking at her, Theo wondered if she had any idea of just how wealthy he was. She would now be getting the picture that he wasn’t your average two-up, two-down, one holiday a year, nine-to-five kind of guy and he wondered whether, like every other single woman he had ever met, she was doing the maths and working out how profitable it might be to get to know him better.
‘Poor you,’ Becky said at last and he frowned.
‘Come again?’
‘It must be awful never having time to yourself. I don’t have much but what I do have I really appreciate. I’d hate it if I had to get in my car and drive out into the middle of nowhere just to have some uninterrupted peace.’
She laughed, relaxed for the first time since he had landed on her doorstep. ‘Our parents always made a big thing about money not being the most important thing in life.’ Her bright turquoise eyes glinted with sudden humour. ‘Alice and I used to roll our eyes but they were right. That’s why...’ she looked around her at the kitchen, where, as a family, they had spent countless hours together ‘... I can appreciate all this quiet, which I know you don’t understand.’
The prospect of saying goodbye to the family house made her eyes mist over. ‘There’s something wonderfully peaceful about being here. I don’t need the crowds of a city. I never have or I never would have returned here after... Well, this is where I belong.’ And the thought of finding somewhere else to call home felt like such a huge mountain to climb that she blinked back a bout of severe self-pity. Her parents had moved on as had Alice. So could she.
Theo, watching her, felt a stab of alarm. A pep talk wasn’t going to get her packing her belongings and moving on and a wad of cash, by all accounts, wasn’t going to cut it with her parents.
When was the last time he had met someone who wasn’t impressed by money and what it could buy?
His mother, of course, who had never subscribed to his single-minded approach to making money, even though, as he had explained on countless occasions, making money per se was a technicality. The only point to having money was the security it afforded and that was worth its weight in gold. Surely, he had argued, she could see that—especially considering her life had been one of making ends meet whilst trying to bring up a child on her own?
He moved in circles where money talked, where people were impressed by it. The women he met enjoyed what he could give them. His was the sort of vast, bottomless wealth that opened doors, that conferred absolute freedom.
And what, he wondered, was wrong with that?
‘Touching,’ he said coolly. ‘Clearly none of your family members are in agreement, considering they’re nowhere to be seen. The opposite, in fact. They’ve done a runner and cleared off to a different country.’
‘Do you know what?’ Becky said with heartfelt sincerity. ‘You may think you’re qualified to look down your nose at other people who don’t share your...your...materialism, but I feel sorry for anyone who thinks it’s worth spending every minute of every day working! I feel sorry for someone who never has time off to just do nothing. Do you ever relax? Put your feet up? Listen to music? Or just watch television?’ Becky’s voice rang with self-righteous sincerity but she was guiltily aware that she was far from being the perfectly content person she was making herself out to be.
She hadn’t rushed back to the cottage because she couldn’t be without the vast, open peaceful spaces a second longer. She’d rushed back because her heart had been broken. And she hadn’t stayed here because she’d been seduced by all the wonderful, tranquil downtime during which she listened to music or watched television with her feet up. She’d stayed because she’d fallen into a job and had then been too apathetic to do anything else about moving on with her life in a more dynamic way.
And it wasn’t fun listening out for leaks. It wasn’t fun waiting for the heating to pack up. And it certainly wasn’t fun to know that, in another country, the rest of her family was busy feeling sorry for her and waiting for her to up sticks so that the house could be sold and valuable capital released.
‘I relax,’ Theo said softly.
‘Huh?’ She focused on a sharply indrawn breath, blinking like a rabbit caught in the headlights at the lazy, sexy smile curving his mouth.
‘In between the work, I actually do manage to take time off to relax. It’s just that my form of relaxation doesn’t happen to include watching television or listening to music... But I can assure you that it’s every bit as satisfying, if somewhat more energetic...’
