Читать книгу Outback Husband - Jessica Hart - Страница 8

‘THERE’S beer in the fridge if you’d like one,’ Juliet said rather hesitantly as Cal came in from unloading the car. She knew that the offer sounded rather ungracious, but Cal hadn’t been particularly gracious about staying in the homestead. It didn’t seem to have occurred to him that she might not be that thrilled at the thought of sharing her home with him either.

If Cal resented her lukewarm tone, he gave no sign of it. Nodding his thanks, he took a bottle from the fridge and pulled off the top. Juliet, preparing vegetables in the sink for the children’s supper, tried not to watch him, but her eyes kept sliding sideways to where he stood, leaning casually against the worktop, his head tipped back as he drank thirstily.

She hadn’t thought to ask him how old he was, but she guessed that he was in his thirties. He had the toughness and solidity of maturity, but his face wore a guarded expression that made it hard to be sure of anything about him. He could hardly have been more different from Hugo, Juliet reflected. Hugo had been volatile, swinging from breezy charm to sullen rage with bewildering speed. Cal was, by contrast, coolly self-contained. It was impossible to imagine him shouting or waving his arms around wildly. Even the way he stood there and drank his beer suggested an economy of movement, a sort of controlled competence that was at once reassuring and faintly intimidating.

His presence seemed to fill the kitchen, and Juliet was suddenly, overwhelmingly aware of him as a man: of the muscles working in his throat, of the brown fingers gripped around the bottle, of the dust on his boots and the creases round his eyes and the coiled, quiet strength of his lean body. She couldn’t tear her eyes off him. It was as if she had never seen a man before, had never been struck by the sheer physicality of a male body before that moment.

Cal was unaware of her gaze at first. The beer was very cold. To Cal, hot, frustrated and tired after a long day, it tasted like the best beer he had ever had. He lowered the bottle to thank Juliet properly, only to find that she was watching him with a dark, disturbingly blue gaze, and as their eyes met he was conscious of a strange tightening of the air between them, of an unexpected tingling at the base of his spine.

Juliet felt it too. He saw her eyes widen, and a faint flush rose in her cheeks before she turned away and concentrated almost fiercely on peeling a potato.

Oddly shaken by that tiny exchange of glances, Cal levered himself away from the units and, a faint frown between his brows, took his beer over to the table where Natalie was entertaining the twins. She was normally a shy, quiet child, more comfortable with animals than people, but she had obviously taken to the twins immediately, and her face was lit up in a way that he hadn’t seen for years now.

Not since they had left Wilparilla, in fact. Cal shook off the unsettling effect Juliet’s eyes had had on him and sat down next to his daughter, remembering how she had wept into her pillow and begged to be taken home. He had done the right thing bringing her back, even if things weren’t working out quite as he had planned.

‘Dad!’ Natalie tugged at his sleeve. ‘Show Kit and Andrew that trick you do.’

At the sink, Juliet could hear the noise behind her, and she turned, potato in one hand, peeler in the other, to see the twins convulsed with laughter, Natalie giggling and Cal, straight-faced, turning his hand back and forth as if looking for something. ‘Again!’ shouted Kit, clambering excitedly over Cal as if he had known him all his life.

Juliet’s smile was rather twisted as she watched them. At times like these it hurt to realise how much the boys missed in not having a father. Did Cal ache this way when he saw his daughter without a mother?

Natalie seemed a nice little girl. She obviously adored her father, but from what Juliet had seen of him so far she thought he must be a formidable figure for her. He had been dour, if not downright hostile, ever since he had arrived. Not that the children seemed to find him nearly as intimidating as she did, Juliet had to admit. They were still squealing with laughter as he confounded them each time with whatever he was concealing in his hands.

It was then that Cal, unable to keep a straight face any longer, gave in and smiled at the twins’ delight, and Juliet nearly dropped her potato. Who would have thought that he could smile like that? Who could have guessed that cool mouth could crease his face with such charm, that the steely look could dissolve into warmth and humour, that the cold grey eyes could crinkle so fascinatingly?

Juliet was disturbed to discover how attractive Cal was when he smiled. She didn’t want him to be attractive. Somehow it was easier to think that he was always cold and hostile than to know that he was nice to children, and to wonder why it was that he would never smile at her the way he smiled at them.

As if to prove her point, Cal looked up, and his smile faded as he saw the peculiar look on Juliet’s face. Probably waiting to point out that she had employed him as a manager, not a children’s entertainer, he thought with an edge of bitterness.

He drained his beer and pushed back his chair. ‘When do the men finish for the day?’ he asked Juliet, ignoring the children’s disappointment. If she wanted an efficient manager, that was what he would be.

‘About now.’ As if suddenly realising that she was still clutching a potato and peeler, Juliet turned back to the sink. Why should she care if he wouldn’t smile at her? she asked herself, refusing to admit that she was hurt by the way his attitude changed so completely whenever he looked at her.

‘I think I heard the ute go by a few minutes ago,’ she added, glad to hear that her own voice sounded just as cool as his. ‘They should be back in their quarters by now.’

‘How many men are down there?’

‘Four at the last count.’ Juliet dropped the last potato in the saucepan and filled it with water. ‘I haven’t had much to do with them. The last manager brought them in when he’d succeeded in getting rid of all the experienced stockmen who were here when we arrived. His wife used to cook for them. I offered to give them meals up here when she left, but they obviously didn’t want to sit down with me every evening, so they take it in turns to do their own cooking.’

Juliet tried hard to keep the loneliness and rejection out of her voice. It had been so long since she had had anyone to talk to that she would have welcomed the company of even the dour and taciturn men who so clearly disliked her. ‘I only ever see them when one of them comes up to ask for more flour or sugar or whatever. They don’t seem to require much in the way of fresh vegetables,’ she added with a would-be careless shrug.

Cal frowned as he set the empty bottle on the side. ‘Then who tells them what to do every day?’

‘No one,’ said Juliet bitterly. ‘I didn’t have much choice but to tell them to carry on with whatever they would normally be doing until the new manager arrived, but I know they thought I was stupid to have sacked the last man in the first place. For all I know they’ve just been lying around for the last couple of weeks.’

She set the pan on the cooker and turned on the element, then wiped her hands on her apron, trying to make Cal understand. ‘I’m pretty much tied to the house with the twins,’ she said. ‘I can’t leave them here on their own, and it’s too far to take them with me if I wanted to go and check up on the men—even if I knew where they were and what they were supposed to be doing in the first place.’

‘You’ve been here over three years,’ Cal pointed out. What he had seen of Wilparilla so far hadn’t left him in any mood for sympathy. He had sold a thriving property and had come back to find that all his hard work had been thrown away and the station left to crumble into disrepair. ‘You must have had some idea.’

‘My husband never involved me in the station side of things.’ Hugo had never involved her in anything, thought Juliet dully. She looked down at her hands, unable to meet Cal’s eyes directly. ‘When we first came here, he was taken up with the idea of turning Wilparilla into a place that would attract the kind of tourists who want to see the outback but who want a bit of luxury too. There was a nice little homestead here before, but Hugo said it wouldn’t be big enough or smart enough, so he knocked it down and built this one.’

Juliet looked around her at the state-of-the-art kitchen, with its view out onto the wide, shady verandah that ran completely round the house. Everything had been done with a designer’s style, but it still made her angry to think of how much money Hugo had poured into the house when the station around it was neglected and falling inexorably apart. She had tried to remonstrate with Hugo, but he had brushed her objections aside. It was his money, he had said, and he knew what he was doing.

‘I went to Darwin to have the twins in hospital, and I ended up staying there nearly a year while the homestead was being rebuilt. I wanted to come back earlier, but Hugo said I would find it impossible with two babies.’

Juliet stopped as she realised that the bitterness in her voice was telling Cal a little too much about the state of her marriage. ‘The point is that I haven’t been able to spend the last three years learning about Wilparilla,’ she told him. ‘Even after I came back, I had my hands full with the twins. They were only just two when Hugo was killed last year. Looking after two toddlers doesn’t leave you much time to learn how to run a cattle station.

‘Everything’s so far away out here,’ she sighed. ‘It takes so long to get anywhere. There’s no toddler group when it takes two hours to get to the nearest town, and no handy babysitter when your neighbours live eighty miles away. I haven’t even had the time to make the most basic of social contacts.’ The blue eyes were defensive as she looked back at Cal. ‘I had no choice but to rely on the manager Hugo had appointed.’

Cal’s mouth turned disapprovingly down at the corners. ‘Judging by what I’ve seen so far, he wasn’t much of a manager,’ he said.

‘I know,’ snapped Juliet. ‘I’ve got eyes. I only see a tiny fraction of the property, but even that looks run down. But I couldn’t do anything about it when Hugo was alive, and when he died…’ She trailed off. How could she explain what a terrible financial and emotional mess Hugo had left behind him? ‘Well, it wasn’t a very good year,’ she went on after a moment. ‘It was all I could do just to keep things as they were.’

It was the first time Cal had thought what it might have been like for Juliet since her husband’s death, and he was conscious of a stirring of shame that he had never considered the matter from her point of view. It couldn’t have been easy for her, isolated, and far from home, bringing up two small children alone.

She could have sold, though, he reminded himself. He had offered a good price for the station. She could have gone back to England a rich woman and made things easy on herself, but she hadn’t. She had chosen the hard way.

‘I’ll go and have a word with the men now,’ he said, exasperated by the momentary sympathy he had felt for Juliet. ‘They’re going to start work tomorrow, and they’d better be ready for it.’

‘Should I come and introduce you?’ Juliet asked doubtfully

‘There’s no need for that,’ said Cal, a grim look about his mouth as he thought about the men who had let his property fall into disrepair. ‘I’ll introduce myself.’

He didn’t say anything about Natalie, so when he had gone Juliet gave her something to eat with the boys. She could hardly leave the child just sitting there, and judging by the way Natalie gobbled it all up she was starving. Afterwards, Natalie helped her wash up, drying each plate with painstaking care.

‘You’re very well trained, Natalie!’ said Juliet, keeping a wary eye on a glass.

‘Dad always makes me do chores,’ Natalie admitted with something of a sigh. ‘I have to dry up and sweep the floor and tidy my bedroom every day.’

‘Oh? Is he very strict?’

‘Sometimes,’ said Natalie. ‘And sometimes he’s funny. We do good things together.’

Hugo had never wanted to do anything with his sons. ‘Does he look after you all by himself?’ asked Juliet, uneasily aware that she shouldn’t be pumping the child, but, given Cal’s uncooperative attitude, it seemed to be the only way she would ever find out anything about him.

‘Most of the time,’ said Natalie, untroubled by any fine sense of ethics. ‘We used to have housekeepers, but they all fell in love with Dad so we don’t have them any more. Dad doesn’t like it when they do that.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Juliet dryly. All those housekeepers must have been brave women to fall in love with a man like Cal Jamieson. He wasn’t exactly encouraging. But perhaps he had smiled at them…

She pulled herself up short. Was that why Cal was so hostile? she wondered. Was he afraid she was going to be tiresome and fall in love with him as well? Juliet felt quite ruffled at the very idea. She had no intention of falling in love again, least of all with a man who patently disliked her and was one of her employees to boot! Love had hurt too much the first time round. Juliet had learnt the hard way how fragile her heart was, and she wasn’t going to let it be broken again.

Natalie helped her bathe the twins and put them to bed, and then, when there was still no sign of Cal, Juliet let her choose where she would like to sleep. Puzzled, she watched as Natalie looked in every room, as if expecting to find something. ‘Why not have this room next to the twins?’ she suggested, when Natalie only looked disappointed. She pointed at the door opposite. ‘Dad can sleep across the hall there.’

‘OK.’

Juliet made up the bed, and helped her unpack her suitcase. Natalie took out a framed photograph of Cal and a pretty blonde girl holding a toddler on her knee. ‘That’s Dad, and that’s me when I was a baby, and that’s Mum,’ she said, showing Juliet the picture.

‘She was very pretty, wasn’t she?’ said Juliet, and, when Natalie nodded, added gently, ‘Do you miss her?’

Natalie considered. ‘I don’t remember her very well,’ she said honestly. ‘But Dad says she was very nice so I think I do.’

She could only have been three when her mother had died—the same age as the twins. Poor Natalie, thought Juliet. Poor Cal.

She wondered again about him as she made up the bed. She didn’t know what to make of him. He had seemed so taciturn and hostile at first, but he was so different when he played with the children, and Natalie had made him sound like a different man again. It was odd, Juliet thought idly, how clearly she could picture him already, almost as if she had always known those cool, quiet eyes and that cool, cool mouth.

Smoothing down the bottom sheet, Juliet found herself imagining him lying there, lean and brown and tautly muscled. Her palm tingled, as if she were running her hand over his skin instead, and she swallowed. When Natalie cried ‘Dad!’ she spun round as if she had been caught in the act itself.

‘Dad, look, we’re making a bed for you!’

‘So I see,’ said Cal, but his grey eyes rested on Juliet’s flushed face, and he raised one eyebrow at her guilty expression. She was sure that he could see exactly what she had been thinking about.

‘We…I just thought…since you weren’t here…’ Juliet realised that she was floundering and forced herself to stop. This was her house and she had a perfect right to be here. She didn’t have to explain anything to anyone, least of all to Cal, who was (a) her employee, and (b) late.

‘It’s very kind of you,’ said Cal coldly, ‘but there was no need. I’ll finish it off.’

Juliet felt dismissed. ‘I’ve…er, I wasn’t sure what you wanted to do about eating, but I’ve made supper if you’d like to eat later,’ she said awkwardly.

‘Thank you.’

He didn’t say ‘you may go’, but that was what it felt like. He stepped out of the doorway and Juliet sidled past him and slunk back down to the kitchen. Behind her, she could hear Natalie excitedly telling him about Kit’s bedtime story, and how Andrew had splashed in the bath, and she felt a great wash of loneliness sweep through her. She had no one to tell about her day. How long was it since she had had anyone to talk to in the evenings?

A long time.

She had hoped that she would have been able to make some friends amongst her neighbours after Hugo had died, but everyone lived so far away, and she soon discovered that he had left her a legacy of distrust and disapproval. On the few occasions she had made the laborious journey to the nearest town, her attempts to be friendly had been met with politeness but no warmth, and she had been too tired and depressed to persevere. Rebuffed, she had retreated into herself, and relied on letters and phone calls to friends in England for support instead. She had told herself that she wasn’t lonely as long as she had the twins, but she had been.

In an effort to cheer herself up, Juliet showered and changed into a cool cotton dress. She had bought it in London years ago, and the deep turquoise colour always made her feel more positive. Kit and Andrew were happy and healthy, she reminded herself, and with Cal as manager she had taken the first step towards saving Wilparilla. That was what mattered.

Her equilibrium restored, she made her way back to the kitchen, where she found Cal looking out through the windows towards the creek. He swung round at the sound of her footsteps and stared at her. Juliet had the oddest feeling that he had forgotten her existence until that moment.

Cal was, in fact, thrown more than he wanted to admit by the sight of Juliet standing in the doorway. The kitchen had been very quiet when he had come in, and he had been standing there, remembering the simple room it been before all the polished wood and gleaming chrome. He had spent long, long evenings alone in here after Sara had died, while Natalie slept down the corridor, torn between his instinct to stay at Wilparilla and the promise he had made to his dead wife.

Now, suddenly, he was no longer alone, and Juliet was there, warm and vibrant in a blue dress, but with that wary look on her face. Irrelevantly, he found himself wondering what she would look like if she relaxed and smiled for a change.

He lifted his hand to show the bottle. ‘I helped myself to a beer. I hope you don’t mind.’ He thought his voice sounded odd, but Juliet didn’t seem to notice anything wrong.

‘Of course not,’ she said, very formal.

There was a pause. ‘Is Natalie in bed?’ she asked at last, and Cal nodded.

‘She’s tired. It’s been a long journey for her.’ He hesitated. ‘Thank you for looking after her. She seems to have had a good time.’

’She was very helpful,’ said Juliet. ‘She’s a nice little girl.’ She would have liked to ask about Natalie’s schooling. Presumably she would do her lessons with the School of the Air. But Juliet suspected that Cal would interpret any questions as criticism, and, since they seemed to be being polite to each other for now, it was a shame to spoil it.

Instead, she went over to the oven and took out the supper. ‘How did you get on with the men?’ she asked as she set it on the table.

Cal pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘I think they know who’s boss now,’ he said, grimly remembering the scene in the stockmen’s quarters. He had been down to the stockyards before he went to see them, and had been so angry at the way everything had been neglected and allowed to fall into disrepair that he had been in no mood to make allowances.

‘And who is boss?’ enquired Juliet in a frosty voice as she took a seat opposite him.

‘As far as they’re concerned, I am. As far as I’m concerned, you are.’ Cal met her look evenly. ‘Is that a problem?’

‘Why is it so hard for them to accept that this is my property?’ she asked, disgruntled. ‘Is it because I’m a woman? Because I’m English?’

‘It’s because you don’t know anything about running a cattle station,’ said Cal flatly. ‘You admitted as much yourself. Yes, you’ve got a bit of paper that says you own Wilparilla, but these men aren’t interested in that.’

He nodded his head in the direction of the stockmen’s quarters. ‘They’re only going to work if they know that the person giving them orders understands what they’re doing, and in this case that’s me. Now, you can go down and give them a little lecture on property rights if you like, but you’re paying me to get them organised and get some work done on this station again, and I’ll only be able to do that if they think of me as boss for the time being. If you’re not happy with that, you’d better say so now.’

‘I don’t have very much choice but to be happy with it, do I?’ said Juliet a little bitterly.

Cal just shook his head in exasperation and applied himself to his meal. In a way, he was glad she was being unreasonable. It was much easier to find her irritating, to remember how perversely she was standing in way of all he wanted, than to notice how smooth and warm her skin looked, how her dark hair gleamed in light, how even when her lips were pressed together in a cross line, like now, her mouth hinted at a fiery, passionate nature beneath that brittle cool.

Why was she so obsessed about being boss anyway? She had no idea about Wilparilla. She didn’t know the land. She didn’t know the creeks and gullies the way he did. She had never ridden all day through the heat and the dust, or slept out under the stars while the cattle shifted their feet restlessly in the darkness.

She would never be the boss of Wilparilla, Cal vowed to himself. She didn’t belong on a cattle station. All she knew was this homestead. She probably wouldn’t even recognise a cow if she saw one, he thought contemptuously. Look at her! Sitting there like some exotic bird that had lost its way and found itself in the desert instead of the hot-house environment where it belonged. What was the point of wearing a dress that curved over her breast like that? A dress that let him glimpse the hollows at the base of her throat and made him wonder about the soft material whispering over her skin as she moved?

‘You don’t like me, do you?’ His face didn’t give much away, but Juliet could feel his dislike as clearly as if he had stood up and shouted it.

Cal took a pull of his beer and looked across the table at her. He might have known she would prove to be one of those women who wanted to be up front about their feelings. No, he didn’t like her, but he was damned if he was going to indulge her by admitting it. She would only start asking ‘why not?’ and before they knew what had happened they would be picking over emotions as if any of it mattered.

On the other hand, why should he make things easy for her by denying it? ‘I don’t think this is the right place for you,’ he temporised at last.

‘Why not?’

He had known that was coming! ‘I would have thought it was obvious,’ he said, irritated at having fallen into the same old trap. Why did women always have to know the reason? Why couldn’t they just accept things for what they were?

‘Not to me,’ said Juliet, who had hoped to put Cal out of countenance and was annoyed to find that he didn’t even have the grace to look embarrassed at being confronted with his hostility.

Cal sighed. Well, if she was so anxious to know what he thought, he would tell her. ‘This is a working cattle station. Life out here is rough and dirty. It’s not a place where you put on a pretty dress and pretend you’ll never have to get mud under your fingernails.’

‘You’ve had a shower and changed your clothes,’ Juliet pointed out, dangerously sweet.

‘Yes, but not into the kind of clothes I’d wear to a smart restaurant.’

‘So I’m not allowed to wear anything but torn jeans and a checked shirt, is that it?’

Cal looked impatient. ‘It’s not a question of allowing,’ he said irritably. ‘I’m just saying that you’re not wearing the right clothes if you want to belong.’

‘But I do belong,’ said Juliet, pushing her plate aside. ‘This is my house,’ she told him deliberately, ‘and I can wear whatever I like in it. I advise you not to forget that.’

The haughty note in her voice made Cal’s lips tighten. It was almost as if she knew how much he hated her reminding him that Wilparilla belonged to her, and was taunting him deliberately. Yes, it had been his choice to sell, but the Laings hadn’t cared for the land. He was the one who had built Wilparilla up into a successful station, and in Cal’s heart it was still his.

Across the table, his eyes met Juliet’s challenging gaze. ‘I don’t think there’s much chance of me forgetting that,’ he said, and his voice was very cold.

They finished the meal in silence, constrained on Juliet’s part, apparently unconcerned on his. Afterwards, she had half expected him to make his excuses and leave, but instead he found a tea-towel and without being asked began to dry the dishes as she washed up.

It was strange for Juliet to have someone to help. She wasn’t used to anyone else being with her in the kitchen. Few people came out to the station, and anyone with business on the station had eaten with the manager and stayed in the stockmen’s quarters. It was certainly quicker with Cal there, but Juliet half wished that he had left her to do it on her own. She was very aware of him standing beside her, not saying anything, looking through the window at the darkness, absorbed in his own thoughts, not caring if she was there or not. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see his hands moving, unhurried and competent, and she found herself watching them as if fascinated. They were brown and strong, and there were fine golden hairs at his wrist.

He wasn’t handsome, Juliet told herself. Not handsome in the way Hugo had been, anyway. Really, he was quite ordinary. Brown hair, grey eyes, nothing special.

There was something implacable about him, though. Something hard and strong and steady. A quiet coldness that mesmerised and unnerved her at the same time. Beneath her lashes, Juliet’s eyes rested on his mouth. That wasn’t the mouth of a cold man, she found herself thinking, and she remembered how he had smiled at the twins. The memory snaked down her spine, and something shifted deep inside her so that she jerked her gaze away.

She tried to concentrate on how obvious he had made his distaste, but all she could think about was him lying in the bed she had made, his long brown body bare against the cool sheet. She could imagine it so clearly that she sucked in her breath, and the tiny sound made Cal turn his head to find her eyes wide and dark and startled, as if she had just thought of something shocking.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘Nothing.’ Juliet’s fingers trembled as she pulled out the plug and made a big deal of rinsing out the sink. She had to get a grip of herself! ‘That is…’ She stopped. No, that wasn’t a good idea.

‘What?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

Cal frowned irritably. If she had something to say, why didn’t she get on with it? ‘What doesn’t?’

Driven into a corner, Juliet wiped her hands on a tea-towel and wished she had never opened her mouth. But Cal obviously wasn’t going to let it drop, and maybe it needed saying after all.

‘I was just thinking that it might be a good idea if we established a few ground rules.’ She pushed her hair behind her ears, absurdly nervous for some reason.

He looked at her with that infuriatingly unreadable expression. ‘Ground rules?’

‘Yes. I mean, we’re going to be living together until we can get the manager’s house cleaned up, so perhaps we should agree a few things now.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I presume you don’t want to cook separately, so we need to decide about meals, that kind of thing and…well, you know…how we ensure that we both have some privacy,’ she finished lamely. It had seemed so sensible when she started, but under Cal’s dispassionate gaze she found herself faltering for some reason.

‘You’re very keen on rules, aren’t you?’ he said sardonically, and she flushed and lifted her chin.

‘Sometimes they save awkwardness.’

‘I don’t see what’s awkward about sharing a few meals.’

‘I didn’t just mean that,’ said Juliet. ‘I meant the situation generally.’

‘What situation?’ asked Cal, exasperated.

‘You know what I mean!’ she flared. He was being deliberately obtuse! ‘The fact is that the two of us will be alone together here for much of the time.’

‘Ah!’ he exclaimed, suddenly enlightened—as if he hadn’t known all along exactly what she was talking about, Juliet thought sourly. ‘You want some rules to make sure I don’t take advantage of you, is that it?’

‘Yes…no!’ she corrected herself frantically as Cal raised an eyebrow. ‘Of course not,’ she said more calmly. ‘All I’m trying to say is that we’re both adults, both single. If we don’t acknowledge that now, I can see a situation arising where we might…might…’ She could feel herself floundering again and wished she’d never opened her mouth. ‘Well, we might…might wonder…’

‘Might wonder what it would be like if I kissed you?’ Cal suggested in a hatefully calm voice, but she was too relieved to have the sentence completed for her to resent him.

‘That kind of thing, yes.’

She was standing by the cooker in her turquoise dress, hugging her arms together self-consciously and wearing a defensive expression that made her look very young. Cal looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, then laid his tea-towel over the back of a chair.

‘Let’s find out now,’ he said, coming over to Juliet.

She looked at him blankly. ‘Find what out?’

‘What it would be like if I kissed you.’ He took her hands and unfolded her arms so impersonally that he had taken hold of her waist before Juliet had quite realised what was happening. ‘Then we won’t need to wonder,’ he explained briskly, drawing her towards him, ‘and we won’t need any rules.’

And with that he bent his head and kissed her.

Juliet’s hands came up quite instinctively to clutch at the sleeves above his elbows for support as his mouth came down on hers and the floor seemed to drop away beneath her feet.

It was a hard, punishing kiss, a kiss meant to teach her a lesson. Juliet knew that, but she was unprepared for the searing response that shot through her at the feel of his lips and his hands hard against her. It seemed to leap into life, jolting between them like electricity, at once shocking and dangerously exciting, so that the kiss which Cal had intended to be so brief somehow took on a life of its own and he tightened his arms around Juliet, moulding her against him as her lips parted beneath his.

Cal slid one hand up to the nape of her neck, tangling his fingers in the silky hair. He had forgotten how she exasperated him, forgotten her stupid rules, forgotten everything but how warm and soft and pliant she felt in his arms. Caught off-guard by the piercing sweetness of her response, Cal was in the middle of gathering her closer and deepening his kiss when the realisation of just how close they both were to losing control stopped him in his tracks as effectively as a bucket of cold water.

Literally dropping Juliet back to earth, he stepped away from her and took a deep, steadying breath. Juliet was left to collapse back against the cooker, dazed and trembling. They stared at each other for a long, long moment.

‘Well, now we know,’ said Cal, when he could speak. ‘We won’t need to waste any more time wondering about it, will we?’ He could see Juliet’s mouth shaking, and the temptation to pull her back into his arms and forget everything else once more was so strong that he had to make himself turn away.

Juliet was still leaning against the cooker when he reached the door. ‘Thanks for the meal’, he said, and then he was gone.