Читать книгу Weddings Collection - Кэрол Мортимер, Кэрол Мортимер - Страница 10

MIKE dropped the sleeping bag, reached out and rubbed the pad of his thumb over her cheek. It came away sky blue. ‘Nice colour, it suits you. But isn’t the paint supposed to go on the walls?’ His eyes did a quick head-to-toes inspection of her and then he grinned. ‘Tell me, sweetheart, have you ever done this before?’

Willow firmly squashed her heart back into place. It had no business to be leaping about in that giddy, unrestrained way. He would have left her at the altar if she hadn’t got cold feet on the way to the wedding, she reminded herself. Jilted her. If she hadn’t jilted him first. She concentrated on what that would have felt like and resolutely forbade her arms to get their own way and fling themselves about him.

‘This is unfair, Mike. What the hell do you think you’re doing here?’

‘Much the same as you, I guess. At a loose end and feeling the need to do a little good.’

‘And you just happened to pick the same place as me?’

‘Is that a problem for you?’ he asked with a bland expression that she didn’t trust. He was up to something. ‘Volunteers have been called for. I’m volunteering. I’ve even brought my own sleeping bag—’

‘You can stuff your sleeping bag and your good intentions and find somewhere else to hide out!’

‘And a bottle of chilled white wine. I can’t guarantee the quality, but the guy in the pub down the road said it was drinkable—’

‘I haven’t got a corkscrew.’

‘And some Chinese food which could probably do with heating up,’ he continued as if she hadn’t interrupted. ‘I thought you might be hungry.’

‘Well, I’m not,’ she declared roundly. But as the scent of the food reached her from the bag he was carrying, her stomach rebelled, noisily betraying her.

Taking that as a change of heart, he looked around. ‘Is the cooker connected?’

‘Mike, we made a mistake!’ With him there in front of her she knew they’d made a mistake. They’d made a mistake in running away from their problems instead of facing them, but it was too late to change things. And this wasn’t helping. ‘We both agreed. We said goodbye. Please don’t make this any harder…’ She stopped. It wasn’t meant to be hard. She’d chosen this.

He appeared not to notice how close she’d been to admitting regret. How close she’d been to giving him her heart on plate. It wasn’t her heart he wanted. Not when push came to shove.

‘You think I want to be here? This is tough for me, too, sweetheart. But you’re going to need some help if this place is going to be ready in time. Volunteers would appear to be a bit thin on the ground.’ He headed for the cooker, switched it on and loaded the cartons onto the shelves. When he straightened, he turned and looked at her. ‘Just because we decided not to get married, Willow, doesn’t mean we can’t behave like civilised adults. We can still be friends.’

‘Friends!’ Outraged, her feelings finally caught up with reality. She didn’t want to be friends.

‘Why not? I like you. I like you a lot.’ She looked doubtful. ‘What? You surely don’t think I kept asking you out just because you’re great in bed?’ That was a loaded question. She was a loser whatever her answer, so she kept quiet. ‘Come on, Willow. We both need to stay out of sight. Let’s help one another out, here. For old times sake.’

‘We haven’t had any old times. We’ve only known one another for a few months.’

‘Five months, two weeks, four days. Just because we made the mistake of nearly getting married…’ she wished he wouldn’t keep saying that! ‘…doesn’t mean we have to cross the street to avoid one another. Does it?’ He offered her his hand. ‘Pax?’

‘Pax?’ she repeated, keeping her hands to herself, not convinced that it could be that easy. He looked far too innocent to trust. Except she would trust him with her life. ‘Friends?’

‘Good friends, I hope.’

This was the mistake. She was sure of it. The magnetic attraction that had been so fierce, so inescapable from the first moment they met, had not dimmed one jot during those five months, two weeks, four days. But he was right about one thing. What she knew about painting and decorating could be written on a postage stamp. A very small postage stamp.

And the cottages were isolated. It would be good to know there was someone within shouting distance if the floorboards started to creak in the middle of the night.

Her hand slid into his. Warm, strong. For a brief moment, all she’d wanted in the world.

‘Just good friends?’ That shouldn’t have been a question. Her voice ought to have been firmer.

For a brief moment his hand tightened about hers and she was sure his assurance that they would keep things on a platonic basis was just a ruse. Before she could reiterate her determination to keep it that way, though, he released her fingers, turned away to look around at their temporary home and she couldn’t be sure whether she was relieved or infuriated that he found it so easy to keep his word.

‘It’s a bit spartan,’ he said, and Willow dragged her thoughts back to reality and thought guiltily of the beautiful kitchen cabinets in their would-be marital home that she’d made such a performance about. ‘That wall could do with some shelves.’

‘Yes, it could. Do you know a good carpenter?’

‘Yes,’ he said. Then turned and looked down at her. ‘I don’t suppose there are any glasses, are there?’

‘Disposable cups, that’s all.’

‘Then, we’ll make do with those.’ He produced a multi-purpose penknife from his back pocket, opened out the corkscrew and set to work on the bottle of wine. ‘Plates?’

‘Paper ones.’

‘Chopsticks?’

‘We’ll have to make do with plastic forks.’

He grinned. ‘No fighting over the washing up, then.’

‘Good friends don’t fight, do they?’

‘No?’ He pulled the cork. ‘Maybe not. But then, we never did fight.’ He filled two of the plastic cups she produced from a cupboard. ‘We always had better things to do.’ Willow turned swiftly away, checked the food. ‘How is it?’

Painful. She’d been such an idiot. They could have been in Mike’s flat right now. Or hers. Curled up together with nothing better to do than be together. If she’d just stayed put that Sunday night, for once indulged the man she loved. But no, that would have been breaking her own rules.

She’d thought she was so damned smart. But she wasn’t smart. She was arrogant and stupid and now she was paying the price. Now and for ever.

Mike had obviously never really wanted marriage or he wouldn’t have beaten a hasty retreat from the church. He’d just been carried away by the heat of his libido.

But what was her excuse? Hot grey eyes that promised her the earth? And delivered…

‘Another few minutes to be on the safe side, I think.’ She fixed a smile to her lips, then turned and took the cup of wine he offered, spilling a few drops as his fingers brushed against hers. ‘So, what’s the toast, Mike?’ she asked brightly. ‘The great escape?’

For a moment the muscles in his jaw tightened, then he too managed a smile. ‘Sure, why not?’ But he took little more than a sip of the wine before putting the cup down on the draining-board. ‘Why don’t you show me round while we’re waiting.’

‘There’s not much to see.’ The holiday centre had been converted from a row of artisans’ cottages and the rooms all opened from a single corridor, with a staircase at each end.

‘Downstairs there’s the kitchen, dining room, day room, quiet room.’ She led the way, opening doors without stopping, taking the stairs swiftly to keep a pace ahead of him, so she wouldn’t feel his breath on her neck. ‘And upstairs, two big rooms that’ll have bunk beds for the kids,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Showers and wash basins. Girls here. Boys there. Toilet facilities. Two small bedrooms for the carers.’

He pushed open doors and looked in as she whisked past. Noted her sleeping bag laid out in one of the small rooms. The bag she’d packed before taking to the hills. It looked lonely all by itself. The second small room looked even lonelier.

‘It’s a heck of a lot for one woman to paint.’

‘It’s not just me. There’ll be other people. I’ll bet Emily’s phone has been ringing off the hook all day,’ she said defiantly. ‘Please don’t think you have to stay.’

‘I don’t. I don’t have to do anything. I’ll stay because I want to.’

Mike looked down into the face of the one woman he’d ever wanted to keep so close to him that it hurt. To win her, keep her, he’d compromised his life, pretended that he was someone he could never be. And somehow she’d known. Not in her head, maybe, but in her heart where it mattered, she’d known that something was wrong.

This time he would do it right. If she was going to walk away from him, she’d walk away from the man he was, not the man he’d tried to be.

‘I promise you, Willow, from this day on I will live my life on my own terms.’ And just for a moment he thought that a quiver of desperation blurred the fierce determination of her face, giving him heart. ‘No more fudging, no more compromise.’

Willow’s grip tightened on the door handle. ‘Was that how our relationship was for you?’ she asked, her face betraying a world of hurt. ‘A fudge? A compromise?’ He reached out, wanting to reassure her that he hadn’t meant it that way. ‘The truth, Mike.’

The truth. He wanted to tell her that the relationship was the one thing that had been true. But that wasn’t what she was asking. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘I was compromising, doing stuff I didn’t want to do. You?’

‘Yes, of course I was.’ Then, because if they stayed where they were another second she’d probably burst into tears, she said, ‘The food will be thoroughly reheated by now.’ And she turned and half stumbled down the stairs in her haste to put some space between them.

‘This is excellent.’ Willow, sitting cross-legged on the cottage’s floor, speared a prawn. ‘Where did it come from?’

‘Maybridge. There’s a little place down by the lock where the food is quite special.’

She glanced up. Maybridge? What had he been doing in Maybridge? Going back? Picking up the threads of the life he’d had before his father’s ill health had brought him home?

‘It’s pretty there, along by the river,’ she said.

‘I always meant to take you…’ He shrugged. ‘Still, you’ll have the whole of London to choose from when you’re working on the Globe.’

She didn’t care about London. She wanted to know about Maybridge. ‘You worked there…’ she couldn’t stop herself ‘…before your father was taken ill?’ He looked at her as if assessing where her question was leading. Then he nodded. ‘You’ve never talked about it.’ It wasn’t that she hadn’t been interested in his life before she’d known him. It was just that her curiosity had encountered an invisible barrier. He’d turned the conversation away from the past, distracted her. He was good at that. ‘You quarrelled with your father, didn’t you?’

‘Was that what the office gossips told you?’

It was her turn to nod. ‘Yes.’

‘I didn’t quarrel with him, Willow. It’s just that I’m not excited by balance sheets, cash flow, advertising revenue. I needed something else. My father couldn’t understand that, so it was easier if I stayed away.’

‘Did you find what you were looking for, Mike? In Maybridge.’

‘Some of it.’ He looked up then. ‘Then I came home and found the rest.’

His eyes assured her that she was everything he’d been missing. But it hadn’t been enough. It scared her that she could have been so inattentive, so self-absorbed in her own problems these past few weeks that she’d been oblivious to whatever had been eating away at him, bringing him to the point of flight.

Mike, sitting with his back against the wall, one knee drawn up to balance his plate, returned his attention to his food. ‘You never talk about yourself, do you?’ she persisted.

‘It’s a most unattractive habit.’

She was on a fishing expedition, he realised; dangling supposition in the hope that he would give her the reality. He’d not been very forthcoming about what he’d been doing for the past few years but, then, she hadn’t been very pressing.

No, that wasn’t fair. She been interested, he’d been the one who’d always changed the subject, uncertain of her reaction. Self-preservation had kept his mouth shut, even when he’d wanted to pour out his heart and soul.

He lifted one brow, to let her know that he was on to her. ‘Is that it? End of interrogation?’

‘Yes,’ she said. And her acceptance, reluctant though it was, left him oddly disappointed. He wanted her to demand answers, insist on them. But why would she? She had another life all planned out. One that didn’t include him.

No, Willow thought, chasing a prawn about the plate. He’d told her nothing. But maybe it was too late to fill in the gaps. They should have been doing that weeks ago, except that when they were together he hadn’t wanted to tell her.

Now they were apart she was damned if she was going to betray her regrets by asking questions he had no intention of answering.

‘I am sorry, Mike…’ she made one of those helpless little gestures that she so loathed in other people ‘…about messing up your takeover of the company. Will your father still be prepared to go ahead and transfer the paper to you?’

‘I’m afraid so. Armstrong Publications is more important than a little public embarrassment. He’ll need a week or two to convince himself that you were to blame for what happened today before he’ll admit it, but it shouldn’t take longer than that. He’s good at deluding himself.’

‘Don’t be cruel! He loves you.’ Then she said, ‘A week or two? That’s all it’ll take?’

‘He has an infinite capacity for self-deception.’ Maybe it was hereditary. He’d followed Willow in the belief that it was possible to win her back. He wasn’t doing much of a job, probably because he understood so well what was driving her. All his life people had wanted him to do what they wanted. He wouldn’t, couldn’t do that to her. If she really wanted London, the Globe, then she must have it. He wanted his life in Maybridge. Somehow he had to find a way to fit them into a life they could share. ‘Do you want some more of this, or shall I finish it?’

About to apologise again, try and make him see why she hadn’t been able to go through with the wedding, Willow stopped herself. He was as much to blame as she was for his fall from grace. He’d asked her to marry him. She hadn’t twisted his arm. Her only mistake had been to say yes. Everyone knew you shouldn’t say yes straight away—not that it would have made any difference. If she’d thought about it for a second or a year, her answer would still have been the same.

‘Willow?’

‘What? Oh, no, go ahead. Finish it all. I wasn’t as hungry as I thought. In fact, I think I’ll take a shower and then try and get some sleep.’

‘Will you be all right up there on your own?’

Mistrusting the concerned note in his voice, still sure that he was would try and move the ‘just good friends’ goal posts a little—this was the jilting man, after all, who’d suggested they could still go on honeymoon—she rounded on him, determined to put him right about that. But he looked so serious that she stopped pushing the food trays back into the carrier bag.

‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘No reason.’ Then he added, ‘Just give a shout if you need me to evict that spider from the shower room.’

She swallowed. ‘Spider?’

‘A big black one with hairy legs. I noticed it in the girls’ showers when we did that whistle-stop tour.’

‘Then I’ll use the boys’.’

‘Willow—’

‘And your room is the one at the far end.’ Just in case he had any lingering hope that she might be prepared to share hers.

‘Willow—’

‘What?’

‘Nothing, sweetheart.’ His slow smile was an essay in the art of teasing. ‘I’ll lock up.’

She swept up the stairs—or she would have if she hadn’t been wearing jeans and a T-shirt stiff with paint—convinced she could hear him laughing. Let him laugh, she was damned if she would yell for help. She could cope with a spider. If she had to.

But she bypassed the girls’ shower room and when cautious inspection revealed that the boys’ was a spider-free zone, she turned on the water in the first stall, adjusting the temperature. She’d stripped down to her underwear when she realised she had a bigger problem than spiders.

No soap. And no towel.

She’d thrown a change of clothes into her bag thinking… No, that was an exaggeration. She hadn’t been thinking. She hadn’t been thinking for weeks.

She fetched a clean T-shirt from her bag and pulled it over her bra, then went to the top of the stairs. ‘Mike!’ His face appeared below her. ‘Could you throw up that bar of soap on the kitchen sink.’

He didn’t throw it, he brought it up. ‘It’s a bit basic,’ he said, sniffing at it.

‘Basic is fine. I need something capable of shifting paint.’ Then she asked, ‘I don’t suppose you thought to bring a towel with you, did you?’

‘Sorry, I’m a man on the run. I didn’t get beyond a razor and a change of clothes. To be honest, I envisaged staying in an hotel tonight.’

‘You could try the pub. They do rooms.’

‘Sounds inviting. What about you?’

‘I’m happy where I am…’

‘In that case I’ll dry myself with a spare T-shirt.’ He grinned. ‘You can share if you like.’

‘Thanks, but I’ve got my own.’

‘Mine’s bigger.’

‘Don’t brag, Mike.’ She took the soap from him. Then she demanded, ‘What are you doing?’ as he peeled off his T-shirt, unhooked his belt. He dropped his trousers, kicked them off and stepped into the end stall, so that only his head and shoulders were visible. ‘Mike, you can’t do this!’

His boxers joined the rest of his clothes on the floor. ‘When you use the boys’ room, honey, you have to be prepared to share.’ And he turned on the water. ‘Take your pick. Spiders or me.’

She knew she was being silly. What difference did a day make? A hell of a lot. ‘Mike, this is impossible. You jilted me.’

‘The words “pot” and “kettle” spring to mind, but I’m not whining. Nobody says you have to look.’

‘I’m not looking!’ She stamped but, shoeless, she might as well not have bothered.

‘Pass the soap, will you?’ He extended his hand and she passed it to him. ‘And next time you stamp your foot, watch that beetle. He hasn’t done anything to you.’

‘Beetle? You expect me to fall for that?’ Then something with scratchy legs ran over her foot and she screamed and leapt in the shower stall with him. ‘Where did that come from?’

‘In here,’ he said, grinning broadly as she stepped back. Except with his body blocking the exit, there wasn’t anywhere to go.

‘You rat!’

‘Nobody’s perfect.’ He reached up to soap his hair, his arm brushing against her, doing nothing for her determination to keep this platonic.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, attempting to extricate herself without touching any more of him than was absolutely necessary. ‘These aren’t exactly made for two.’

His arm was around her waist in a heartbeat. ‘That beetle is lying in wait for you.’

‘Please, Mike…’

His eyes darkened. ‘You should get out of those wet things, you know. You’ll catch cold.’

She swallowed, but found it impossible to look away, pull free, although his arm was loose about her waist, his hold anything but imprisoning. ‘This relationship is over.’ She made her mouth say the words, but she knew that her body, responding mindlessly to his touch, was giving him an entirely different message.

‘Is it?’ he asked softly. Then, not waiting for an answer, his mouth came down on hers, tender, undemanding, still offering her the choice to say no. Irresistible. For a moment she didn’t resist. Just for a moment, with the warm water pouring over her, soaking into her T-shirt, into her underwear, she let herself drown in the honey of his mouth, let herself be drawn into the sweet deception that this was a relationship still going somewhere. Then she caught his wet shoulders with her hands and pushed herself away from him. He made no attempt to stop her, there was nowhere for her to go. He just said, ‘Over?’

‘It has to be. I want a career. I don’t know what you want.’

‘You,’ he said.

She didn’t doubt it. She knew that look. She swallowed nervously. ‘So how come we were having pasta on the motorway when we should have been knee-deep in smoked salmon and champagne?’ She banged her elbow on the taps and seized the chance to say something very rude to cover the hurt she was feeling.

‘You’re right. These shower stalls were definitely built with single occupancy in mind,’ Mike said as he ran his fingers gently along her arm, checking for damage.

‘It’s basic,’ Willow agreed. ‘But at least it hasn’t got those disgusting gold taps.’ And for a moment they shared a vision of the huge shower stall in the house they should have been moving into.

‘That’s a bonus,’ he agreed after a moment. Then, glancing at her, he said, ‘I thought you liked them. You waxed positively lyrical when Dad gave us the grand tour of the house.’

‘He’d just given it to us as a wedding present. What did you expect me to say?’

He stilled. ‘You really didn’t like the taps?’

She shrugged. ‘They were rather…ornate, for my taste. You?’

‘I prefer things to be simple and functional,’ he agreed.

‘Then, this should suit you fine. But if you’ve finished, I’d be grateful if you’d get out and let me take a shower—alone—in peace.’

By the time she’d finished, he’d dried himself with his T-shirt and was respectably clad in trousers. She mopped herself dry as best she could and then felt positively naked in a pair of knickers and a damp T-shirt that clung to her breasts. She shivered. ‘It’s cold now, isn’t it?’

‘Not from where I’m standing.’

They parted at her bedroom door. ‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ Willow said awkwardly, as he turned to go. It seemed entirely wrong to sleep in separate rooms, to be apart. It would have been so comforting to have his arms around her tonight, some reassurance that she hadn’t stepped off the edge of the world without a parachute.

‘Not before nine-thirty on a Sunday,’ he warned. ‘And I take three spoonfuls of sugar in my tea.’ He almost smiled as he bent and lightly brushed her cheek with his lips. ‘But you already know that.’

She shut the door in his face. But only to stop herself from hooking her fingers into his waistband and dragging him inside with her.

Willow had always assumed that the country was quiet. There was no traffic hum to disturb her, it was true, but the house was full of noises as the air cooled and the old timbers creaked and settled. Above her in the attic space, small creatures shifted and rustled. Mice. Or bats.

But it wasn’t the thought of bats, zipping in under the eaves with the smug, sitting-tenant assurance of a protected species, that was keeping her awake.

Her body might ache from her efforts with a paintbrush, but her mind simply refused to shut down, instead constantly rerunning in slow motion the low points of her day.

What a mess.

She reached for her mobile, switched it on. The message-waiting icon still flashed urgently. Her mother, as she’d anticipated, every hour on the hour, demanding that she ring. Her father, just asking that she let them know she was safe. She should have done that hours ago. Crysse, almost incoherent in her inability to comprehend what she’d done.

Willow hadn’t thought it possible to feel any worse. Which showed how much she knew. She tried to return Crysse’s call, but the phone just rang and rang. Even the answering machine refused to listen to her excuses.

Her father, though, answered on the first ring, as if he’d been sitting by the phone, waiting to snatch it off the hook. He didn’t ask where she was, only how she was coping.

‘I’m fine, Dad. Really. I’m at Marlowe Court, helping put the finishing touches to the holiday cottages I was telling you about. I just need to be alone for a while.’ And to do something for somebody else after weeks of what, in retrospect, appeared to have been mindless selfishness.

‘Is there anything you need? Anything I can bring you?’

A dozen things sprang immediately into her mind, but she’d manage without them. Not even her father would understand about Mike being here. She didn’t understand it herself. Especially the fact that she was glad he was curled up in his sleeping bag in the room at the other end of the corridor. Near enough if she called out… ‘No. I’ll manage. And I’d rather you didn’t tell Mum—’

‘I won’t.’ Then he said, ‘Willow, about Mike—’

‘Dad—’

‘Well, don’t worry about him, okay? He took it like a man.’

‘But Dad—’

‘Your mother’s coming. Unless you’re ready for a lecture, I suggest you hang up now.’

She bit her lip as tears welled up beneath her lids. The sweet man wasn’t going to tell her that Mike had run out on her. Despite the dreadful day that she had put him through, her father still wanted to save her feelings. But it didn’t make her feel better. She felt infinitely worse. Only one person could do anything to help but he was at the far end of the corridor. She looked around, hoping for a lurking spider to give her an excuse to go running down there and put her sleeping bag next to his.

That was the trouble with spiders. There was never one about when you needed one.

She took a deep breath. She didn’t need one. She was fine. She had a life to plan—one that didn’t include Mike. She sniffed, searched for a tissue and blew her nose. She didn’t have time to mope.

Mike heard the urgent shrill of Willow’s phone as she turned it on, alerting her to messages waiting. She’d be calling Crysse. Or her mother. Neither of them calls to look forward to. He should have thought of some way to get her in here with him. She shouldn’t be on her own in the dark in a strange place.

Well, maybe it wasn’t too late.

He found his mobile and sent her a text message.

Willow’s phone beeped again. A text message this time. Crysse?

‘Are you okay down there?’

Not Crysse. Mike.

‘Absolutely fine,’ she tapped in and despatched to him.

Another beep. ‘No spiders, beetles or earwigs?’

Earwigs? Eeugh! That was a low blow. He knew she hated creepy crawlies and he also knew she was lying on the floor in the dark, tucked into the sleeping bag, with only the light of her phone for company. It was too easy to believe that any loose strand of cotton brushing against her ankle was something far worse. She bit down on her lip, telling herself not to be a wimp.

‘Only bats. Any ideas?’

‘Close the window?’

‘I’d rather risk the bats. Goodnight.’

Mike grinned. ‘Did you hear something on the stairs? Is this place haunted?’ he asked.

Willow wished she hadn’t bothered to look at that one. After the heat of the day the building creaked and sighed like a restless ghost and it wouldn’t stretch her imagination to convince herself that those were footsteps on the stairs.

The phone beeped again. She tried to ignore it, but couldn’t. The message read, ‘Scream if you need me.’

Very funny. There was nothing here to bother her except the man at the end of the corridor.

On the other hand, why suffer alone?

She screamed.

He was in the open doorway in a heartbeat, moonlit temptation in soft grey boxers and a frown. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

For a moment she considered telling him that there was something crawling about at the bottom of her sleeping bag. That he’d have to get in there and have a good look around. Then reality kicked in.

‘Just testing,’ she said.

For a moment he remained where he was. Then he said, ‘The system worked.’

‘Terrific.’

‘Yeah. Goodnight.’

‘Night,’ she said with a smile that hurt and a little wiggle of her fingers that were all she was prepared to allow out of the sleeping bag. Until he shut the door. Then she dived for her bag, looking for the slab of chocolate she’d bought anticipating low moments. This was definitely a chocolate moment.

‘Tea, three sugars.’

Mike’s hand appeared from the humped-up sleeping bag followed by a groan as he blearily checked the time on his wrist-watch. ‘It’s six-thirty, woman. You’re inhuman.’

‘No one said you had to volunteer.’ Life, Willow thought, would be a whole lot simpler if he’d go away. Bleaker, but simpler. ‘But the sun’s shining and I’ve got a room to paint.’ She put the plastic cup on the floor beside him.

‘I don’t get breakfast?’

‘If you’d wanted room service you should have stayed at the pub,’ she said briskly.

‘I can’t work all day on a cup of tea.’ He sat up, raked his hand through his hair, pushing it out of his eyes, and reached for the cup. ‘A couple of eggs. Is that too much to ask?’

‘Not at all. You’ll find a box in the fridge. And Emily thoughtfully brought along a frying pan.’

‘What about you?’ Mike regarded her with a look that might, by someone inclined to self-deception, be interpreted as concern. ‘I’m in enough trouble without you passing out at the top of a stepladder. Breakfast is the most—’

‘—important meal of the day. I know.’ She tried to look irritated, but it was difficult. He had the kind of shoulders that, naked, bypassed her irritation and went straight for the midriff. Her decision not to marry the man had done absolutely nothing to lessen his physical attraction. ‘Tell the truth, Mike. My mother sent you, didn’t she?’

Invoking the spectre of her mother should have been sufficient to break the spell. Unfortunately, his grin had a way of making her go weak at the knees. ‘I can see there’s no point in talking to you. You paint, I’ll cook.’ He made a move and she beat a hasty retreat before he shucked off the sleeping bag. The grey boxers were on top of a pile of clothes and a man who hadn’t stopped to pack a towel wouldn’t have given pyjamas a second thought.

She frowned. And what kind of hotel asked you to bring your own sleeping bag?

Halfway down the stairs, she stopped, glanced back. He must have seen the paper at the service station, worked out where she was going. Not so difficult. But that sleeping bag was a long way from new. Where had it come from?

Maybridge. That’s where. Did he have stuff stored there? Did he still have a flat or house there? What was it about Maybridge that was so secret?

She picked up her tea, walked through to the day room. She’d abandoned her work when Mike had arrived, and expected to find her paintbrush stiff and in need of washing. Instead, it was sitting beside the paint tin, clean, soft and ready to use. She flipped the bristles across the palm of her hand and smiled.

‘You’ll have to do that yourself from now on.’ She looked back over her shoulder at Mike in just his jeans leaning against the doorway, cup in hand, watching her. He really should wear more clothes, she thought. But maybe his T-shirt was still damp from double duty as a towel the night before. She’d hung hers over the window catch to dry, along with the underwear she’d rinsed out in the middle of the night when the chocolate high had suddenly dropped to sea level.

‘Thanks for taking care of it. I won’t be such a paintbrush slob again.’ He didn’t seem in any hurry to move. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘Make myself a fried egg sandwich. Sure I can’t interest you?’

‘Absolutely certain. I meant where are you going to start painting?’

‘I’m not, I’m going to a D-I-Y store. Want to come?’

She just about managed to stop her jaw from dropping. ‘Be seen in public with you after yesterday?’ she asked, once she’d got her breath back. ‘Risk meeting someone I know? Wouldn’t that make a tasty morsel for the Evening Post’s gossip column.’

‘You have a point, but I’m not going to the one on the bypass, I’m going to one at the business park.’

‘Near Maybridge?’ The words were out before she could stop them.

He grinned. ‘That’s the one. Are you sure you don’t want to come?’ His voice teased, as if he knew that her curiosity was straining wildly at the leash. ‘We could take a walk by the river. Feed the ducks,’ he offered, temptingly. ‘Have lunch somewhere quiet.’

‘Quite sure,’ she snapped primly, carefully dipping the brush in the paint, wiping off the excess against the side of the tin and then applying it to the wall. Then curiosity got the better of her. ‘What are you going to a do-itself-yourself place for? We’ve got all the paint and brushes and stuff we need to finish this job.’

‘I’m going to get some timber. I thought I’d make a start on some shelves for the kitchen.’

‘You?’

‘Me.’

‘Don’t you think you should ask Emily before you do that?’

‘Emily?’

‘She’s the Trust’s co-ordinator. I’d assumed you’d read my article in the Chronicle. Isn’t that how you worked out where I was?’

‘I assumed you left it behind so that I would.’ She snorted, outraged. ‘You don’t have to worry, I wasn’t planning on charging her for them.’

‘That’s not what I meant. I meant—’

‘You meant, do I know a hammer from a chisel?’

‘Well, do you?’

‘Just because you’ve never seen me use anything more dangerous than a fountain pen, Willow, doesn’t mean I don’t know how.’

‘There’s an awful lot about you I don’t know—considering I was going to marry you.’ For instance: she knew why she’d jilted him, but why had he jilted her? ‘What were you thinking about while you were waiting, Mike? In church?’