Читать книгу A Time To Dream - Пенни Джордан, Penny Jordan - Страница 6

WHEN the telephone started to ring, Melanie was poised precariously on the narrow platform of a pair of heavy wooden stepladders. The tip of her tongue was curled determinedly between her lips as she concentrated on trying to successfully hang the all important, first piece of wallpaper on walls which fell woefully short of being anything remotely like flat and straight.

Firmly ignoring the insistent clamour of the phone, she carefully pressed the pasted paper to the wall, but already her concentration was wavering.

The trouble was that—much as she had looked forward to the isolation of these next few months, telling herself that a spring and summer spent in the peaceful depths of the country, gently and leisurely bringing into reasonable decorative order the cottage she had been so unexpectedly left; much as she knew she needed this period of valuable recuperation to recover not just from a very nasty bout of flu, but also from the anguish of discovering that Paul had not loved her after all, and had simply been amusing himself with her while all the time intending to marry Sarah Jefferies and thus amalgamate the two businesses owned and run by their respective fathers—she was still beginning to feel rather alone.

She had been warned about Paul, of course. The older, wiser eyes of Louise Jenkins, her boss and the head of Carmichael’s PR department, had seen what was happening and had gently warned her not to place too much reliance on Paul and the attention he was paying her.

Fortunately her pride had probably been more hurt than her heart, especially when she had discovered that the very weekend she had firmly refused to go away with Paul he had then spent with Sarah.

When Louise had gently and sorrowfully broken this news to her, warning her of the impending engagement, she had hidden the pain she felt and had tossed her head defiantly, stating that she did not care, and that Paul Carmichael meant nothing to her.

She was very wise, Louise had remarked calmly, because she suspected that Paul was too shallow, too vain and self-obsessed to make any woman truly happy, and that, once she was married to him and her father’s business empire was secured for Carmichael’s, Sarah would find that Paul’s present pseudo-adoration of her would very quickly turn to indifference.

Melanie had listened and mechanically agreed with Louise’s pronouncement, but inside the shock of what she had learned was making her feel sick and desperately unhappy.

Now Melanie was only glad that the flu which had then struck her down had not manifested itself until after the engagement party, which all the staff had been commanded to attend, and that, even though she had felt as though she were being wrenched apart inside, she had managed to put in an appearance at the table reserved for her colleagues, a bright false smile pinned to her face as she joined in the celebrations.

It didn’t matter how much she told herself that she had had a lucky escape; that it was plain that Paul had never intended her to be anything other than a brief diversion in his life: the pain of discovering how poor her judgement had been, how foolish her heart, was not easy to dismiss.

And then had come the extraordinary letter from a hitherto unknown firm of solicitors, informing her that she was the sole beneficiary under the will of a certain John William Burrows, who had left her not only the entire contents of his bank account, which amounted to some fifty thousand pounds, but also a comfortably sized but very dilapidated cottage, together with its large overgrown garden and several acres of land on the outskirts of a tiny Cheshire village.

She should, the solicitors informed her when she presented herself at their offices, have no difficulty in selling the property; a course which they had recommended since Mr Burrows had been rather eccentric in the latter years of his life and the property had become extremely run-down.

‘Were there no blood relatives, no family to whom Mr Burrows could have left his estate?’ Melanie had asked anxiously, totally unable to understand why her unknown benefactor had chosen to leave everything to her.

‘Only one,’ she had been informed. ‘A second cousin with whom Mr Burrows had not apparently seen eye to eye.’

When she had asked with further anxiety if the estate ought not more properly have gone to this man, the solicitor had patiently advised her that Mr Burrows had been free to dispose of his assets to whomever he chose and that he had chosen her. His cousin, moreover, was a successful and wealthy businessman to whom, or so the solicitor seemed to imply, the inheritance of such a paltry sum as fifty thousand pounds and a very run-down property, would be more of a nuisance than an advantage.

If it had not been for the fact that she had been feeling so run down herself, so depressed with life in general and her own circumstances in particular, if the bright spring sunshine had not so deplorably highlighted the deficiencies of her small Manchester bedsit…if she had not been overwhelmed by a sharp surge of curiosity about not merely the cottage but John Burrows himself, she suspected that she would have accepted the solicitor’s advice and instructed them to sell the house and land immediately.

It had been Louise who had persuaded her that the cottage was almost heaven sent and that six months or so spent living in the country was just what she needed right now.

‘But I don’t know anything about living in the country,’ she had protested, and Louise had laughed at her, pointing out that Cheshire was hardly the deepest South American jungle.

‘If you like, Simon and I will drive you out there this weekend and you can take a look at the place.’

Since Simon, Louise’s husband, was a qualified surveyor and would be able to tell her just how dilapidated the property actually was, Melanie had gratefully accepted this suggestion.

Which was how she now came to be perched so precariously on top of this ladder, trying desperately to follow Louise’s and Simon’s advice that, since the cottage was basically sound, it would pay her to spend some time and money on redecorating it before putting it up for sale.

‘Although if you do decide to sell you must hold on to the land,’ Simon had warned her. ‘There’s some talk of a new motorway extension in the area, which could send the price of any local land soaring.’

The phone had thankfully now stopped ringing, and very gingerly she climbed back down the ladder to survey the results of her handiwork.

When she had explained to the man in the wallpaper shop the condition of the cottage walls, explaining that she wanted to do something to brighten up the dull dinginess, she had been thrilled when he had suggested this pretty floral paper with its soft pinks and blues on a gentle cream background. Since there was no formal pattern to the paper it would not matter so much that the walls were not completely straight, he had explained to her; and the fact that the paper was ready-pasted and needed only to be moistened in the specially provided water-tray would greatly assist her in this her first venture as a wallpaper-hanger.

And then if all else failed he did just happen to have the name and address of an excellent local decorator, he had added with a kind smile, correctly interpreting her uncertain look at what seemed to be a vast amount of rolls of paper.

The trouble was that she had lived so long in rented accommodation in the confines of one tiny cluttered room that she was completely inexperienced in this sort of thing.

Before that her home had been the shabby institutionalised atmosphere of the children’s home where she had grown up.

When Melanie was orphaned when just three years old, there had been no one to take her into their charge. As she had grown up and realised how alone in the world she was, she had learned to cover the loneliness and aching sense of loss this brought her with a bright smile and an insouciant air of cheerfulness, while inwardly giving in to the compulsion to daydream on what her life might have been if her parents had not been killed in that car crash.

Perhaps it had been that inner loneliness, that need she had always tried to keep so firmly under control which had made her so susceptible to Paul’s false declaration of love.

Louise had been right about one thing. Living here in this cottage was giving her a new perspective on life.

Always fiercely independent, fiercely determined not to rely on anyone for anything, she was beginning to discover that needing the companionship, the friendship of others was not perhaps a weakness after all, but simply an acceptable fact of being human.

She had been surprised to discover how curious people were about her, and how ready they were to express that curiosity. The cottage was situated almost two miles outside the village, but already Melanie had had several callers, no doubt curious to see the young woman to whom old Mr Burrows had left his property.

Melanie still had no idea why on earth John Burrows had left his estate to her, and the solicitors had been as baffled as she was herself.

She frowned, worried as she studied her wallpaper, wondering if it was straight enough.

She wasn’t a very tall girl, barely five feet three with fine delicate bones that made her look far more fragile than she actually was. Her debilitating attack of flu had left her looking more finely drawn than ever, leaving shadows beneath her dark blue eyes and a listlessness to her normally energetic way of moving.

Today her long dark hair was tied back off her face and plaited, making her look much younger than her twenty-four years.

Twenty-four. Paul had laughed at her when she had turned down his suggestion that they spend the weekend together. She couldn’t possibly still be a virgin, he had mocked her. Not at her age and with her background.

That had hurt her; as though somehow the fact that she had no family to support and protect her meant that she must somehow be promiscuous. She had immediately denied such a suggestion, ignoring the unkind way he was laughing at her.

As a child she had loved reading; had found in her books an escape from the loneliness of her life, and perhaps it was because she had absorbed so many fairy-tales that she had clung so tenaciously during her late teens to the fantasy that one day she would meet someone; that they would fall in love and that not until that happened would she have any desire for the kind of sexual intimacy that seemed so casually taken for granted by others.

Perhaps Paul was right and she was being naı¨ve and idiotic; perhaps it was true that the majority of men would deplore and mock her inexperience; perhaps it was also true that at her age she ought to finally be abandoning her ridiculous notions of falling in love and living happily ever after.

Certainly, now that her eyes had been opened to Paul’s true character, she would not want to change places with Sarah.

Very carefully she cut the next strip of wallpaper, equally carefully rolling it up and placing it in the water-filled tray.

It had been Louise who had suggested that she tried her hand at doing some of her own decorating, taking Melanie home with her to show her what she and Simon had achieved in their own elegant detached house.

Some ten years her senior, Louise was proving to be a good friend, the first real friend she had ever had. She and Simon had been very kind to her and they were the only people she had ever admitted into her life and her trust.

Quite why, when she was eighteen years old, she had decided to take a course of driving lessons and ultimately her driving test she had never really known, but now she was thoroughly glad she had done so. Although Melanie was reluctant at first to touch any of her savings, Louise and Simon had firmly told her that when living in such an isolated area a car was an absolute necessity, and then when she had seen the fire-engine red VW Beetle she had fallen so immediately in love with it that Louise had chided her teasingly about being a salesman’s dream.

She did not intend to touch a penny of her inheritance—she had other plans for that!

Wealth, luxuries, life in what was popularly termed ‘the fast lane’—these had no appeal whatsoever for Melanie, but what she had always secretly hankered for was a home of her own, preferably in a country setting.

Of course in her daydreams this home was peopled with the family she had never had, but perhaps that was why she had given in so easily to Louise’s urgings that she move into the cottage if only for a little while.

Perhaps there had also been another reason; perhaps she had hoped that in living in the cottage she might somehow discover more about her unknown benefactor.

Melanie didn’t know very much about men, as the lamentable way in which she had almost fallen for Paul’s deceit had shown. She had no idea why a man, a total stranger, should choose to make her the beneficiary of his will. The solicitors had suggested that perhaps there was a blood connection, but she had shaken her head, knowing already that she had no blood relatives whatsoever.

Perhaps, then, he had known her parents. Again she had shaken her head, forced to admit that she had no idea whether or not this might have been the case, but privately she doubted it. If he had, surely he would have come forward to make himself known to her while he was still alive.

Apart from his cousin, it seemed that John Burrows had had no other family. He had lived in the area all his life and so had his family before him, although in the latter years of his life he had apparently become something of a recluse.

Carefully Melanie mounted the ladder again, gingerly carrying the second piece of wallpaper.

This proved harder to stick on to the wall than the first piece. Even harder was trying to align the edges of the two pieces so that the random pattern matched. The damp paper tore, causing her to make a small verbal protest at her own lack of skill as she hastily tried to stop the paper ripping even further.

Perhaps if she hadn’t been concentrating so hard on what she was doing it would not have been such a shock when the bedroom door opened abruptly and a totally unfamiliar male voice called out cheerfully, ‘Sorry to barge in like this. I tried ringing the bell but couldn’t get any response and, since your back door was open…’

Automatically Melanie let go of the sticky paper and turned round, forgetting her precarious position on top of the ladder.

The man’s reactions were fast. As the ladder started to topple and she with it, he seemed to virtually leap forward across the room, grabbing her around the waist and swinging her free of the heavy ladders just as they crashed down on to the floor.

It must be the shock of both his totally unexpected appearance and nearly having a painful fall that was making her feel so weak, she decided shakily, unable to do a thing other than simply cling to the hard muscles of his arms while he held her firmly suspended quite some distance from the floor, his black-lashed grey eyes subjecting her to a very thorough and slow appraisal.

As the colour rose up under her skin, her body language betraying immediately that she was both unused to and not entirely comfortable with such intimacy, his expression changed, a tiny frown appearing between his dark eyebrows as he studied her again.

What was it about her that was bringing that almost irritated frown to those otherwise rather carefully blank grey eyes? Melanie wondered when she found the courage to shyly look into them.

He was still holding on to her, as effortlessly as though she were a small child, she realised rather indignantly as she struggled uncomfortably within his grasp, trying to remind him that he was still holding her some dozen or more inches off the floor.

When this gave no response, she demanded rather breathlessly, ‘Could you please put me down?’

He had stopped looking at her, thankfully, and seemed to be studying the wall behind her with a rather arrested and bemused look on his face. The wall she had just been papering, she realised defensively; but now he looked at her again, and her whole body seemed to receive a shocking jolt of sensation that made her feel literally as though her bones had turned to fluid and that if he put her down now she would simply dissolve into a small heap at his feet.

The trouble was that she wasn’t used to being so physically close to a man; and certainly not a man like this one. He might not be handsome in the way that Paul had been. Paul, with his blond good looks, his carefully groomed hair, his hard, compelling bone-structure and his equally hard muscles; but this man had something about him, something which she dimly recognised was far more potent and dangerously male than Paul’s rather effeminate and weak good looks.

‘Not yet, I think,’ the stranger told her easily. ‘First I demand my forfeit…’

‘Your forfeit…’ Melanie was unaware of saying the words aloud in a stupefied almost drugged voice until he smiled at her. She had often read of smiles being described as wolfish, but this was the first time she had ever seen one. It made her skin go cold and then hot, and a tiny, forbidden pulse of excitement beat into life deep within her body; a sensation so unfamiliar and shocking that she could only stare at him with her bewilderment openly betrayed in her eyes.

His own narrowed fractionally, their blankness suddenly sharpening into an expression that made her heart jump frantically, but thankfully he seemed to mistake the cause of her shock because he explained patiently as though speaking to a child, ‘Yes, the forfeit you owe me for so speedily saving you from misfortune. That’s the way it goes in all the best fairy-tales, isn’t it?’

Her heart jumped again. She averted her head, but couldn’t resist giving him a nervous sideways look. She licked her lips anxiously. He had said that almost as though he knew her; as though he knew of her childhood absorption and belief in such things.

But she wasn’t a child any more. She was a twenty-four-year-old woman, and he was a strange man who had no right to walk into her home even if she had misguidedly left the back door open.

However, before she could say as much he was speaking again, his voice soft, mesmeric almost. ‘You have such a warm, irresistible mouth that there’s really only one forfeit I can ask you for, isn’t there? A mouth like yours was surely fashioned deliberately to entice a man’s kisses.’

Her head was whirling. What on earth was happening to her? Things like this simply did not take place. Men such as this one simply did not walk into her life and demand forfeits from her…kisses…And as for what he had said about her mouth…

Unconsciously she traced its shape with her tongue tip, her eyes unwittingly darkening in reaction to the potency of what he had whispered to her, her naı¨vety and lack of experience so openly obvious that for a moment he hesitated.

What if his assumptions should be wrong? She looked so fragile…so lost…so vulnerable somehow; and then he reminded himself that he could not afford to make mistakes or allowances; that he had come here for one express purpose; that he…He tensed as she focused on him, her eyes so dark that they looked almost purple, so dilated that…

He felt his own heartbeat quicken, his body tensing in reaction to the scent and the warmth of her…the womanliness…Because she was a woman, despite the fragility of her body and the innocence in her eyes.

He lowered his head, sternly reminding himself why he was doing this.

Held fast in his arms, Melanie quivered nervously. He was going to kiss her; she knew it. She also knew she ought to stop him, but how could she? What was her puny strength against the hard bulk of his body?

The grey glance still held her own, inducing an almost trance-like state of stillness within her body.

She felt the warmth of his breath caress her cheek, and a rush of goose-pimples raced down her body.

She quivered once as his mouth touched hers, her body stiffening as her mind summoned all its feminine defences, desperately sensing an enemy more dangerous than any it had yet known, but her body was deaf to all the warnings of her brain.

He kissed her slowly and lingeringly, bemusing her so thoroughly that she wasn’t even aware of him gradually lowering her so that her feet could once more touch the floor, thus freeing his hands to cup her face and her arms to instinctively and betrayingly creep round his neck, her heart pounding suffocatingly, as his tongue tip stroked her trembling lips. The hand cupping her jaw held her still beneath his sensual assault, while its partner slid down her back, firmly moulding her against body.

Paul had kissed her. Several times and very passionately, or so she had thought, and there had been other kisses before that, but none like this; and for all the fact that there was none of the urgency, the greed of Paul’s kisses in this man’s almost detached possession of her mouth, she was still aware of a reaction within herself that was far, far more intense and dangerous that any emotion Paul had ever made her feel.

In fact, when he eventually started to release her mouth, her lips actually seemed to cling to his. And she knew that he was aware of it too because he made a sound beneath his breath which might have been irritation or which might have been amusement.

Thankfully whatever it was it brought her sharply back to reality in time to remove her arms from around his neck before he had to forcibly do it for her. However, when he stepped back from her, to her consternation she discovered that her body seemed to actively miss the hard pressure of his.

While she was still trying to come to terms with what had happened he stepped past her to examine her wallpapering, commenting almost brusquely, ‘You know, these ladders aren’t really safe. Some lightweight aluminium ones would be far better. Think what could have happened if you had fallen and I hadn’t been here to catch you.’

If he hadn’t been there she wouldn’t have fallen off the ladders in the first place, Melanie told herself sturdily. Now that he wasn’t touching her any more she was rapidly returning to sanity, to the awareness that he was a stranger who had invaded the privacy of her home, uninvited, and that, for all that her feminine awareness of him urged her to think differently, he could be dangerous.

‘Umm…’ he added, moving closer to the wall on which she was working. ‘It looks to me as though you could do with a plumb-line!’

‘A plumb-line?’ She stared at him.

‘Mm. If you’ve got a piece of string and some chalk I’ll show you what I mean.’

He turned round then and smiled at her, a warm gentle smile that made her heart turn over.

‘I am sorry,’ he apologised. ‘You must be wondering who on earth I am and what I’m doing barging in on you like this. I’ve just moved into the cottage at the bottom of the lane, only to discover that none of the services seem to have been switched on. I was hoping I could use your phone to make a couple of calls. My name’s Luke, by the way.’

‘Luke,’ Melanie repeated, automatically reaching out to shake the hand he had extended to her.

His grip was firm without being painful, the palm of his hand slightly callused as though he worked outside, and yet, for all the casualness of his jeans and shirt, there was an air about him which suggested that he was a man used more to giving orders than following them. But then, what did she know about men? Melanie derided herself a little forlornly.

‘Luke?’ she queried a little more firmly, determined to let him know that she wasn’t a complete fool.

‘Luke Chalmers,’ he told her easily, adding softly, ‘I hope you aren’t too angry with me for taking advantage of the opportunity that fate so generously gave me.’

Angry! Her heart skipped a beat. Anger wasn’t exactly how she would describe her confused and chaotic emotions, but from somewhere she found the presence of mind to respond drily, ‘Do you make a habit of going round demanding forfeits from women you don’t know?’

‘Only when they’re as beautiful and tempting as you,’ he told her gravely. ‘And that, fortunately, is very rare. So rare in fact that I’ve never known it to happen before.’

Her heart was thumping frantically again. She felt as though she was suddenly caught up in a new game—a game that was both wildly exciting and frighteningly dangerous.

‘You wanted to use the phone,’ she reminded him breathlessly. ‘It’s downstairs. I’ll show you.’

As she walked past him he caught hold of her arm, his fingers sliding almost caressingly over the softness of its inner flesh so that she quivered. His fingers encircled her wrist, holding her in bondage while his free hand moved up to her face.

He wasn’t going to kiss her again was he? He wasn’t going to repeat that mind-blowing, devastating caress? No, he wasn’t, it seemed. He reached out and removed something from her face, causing her to gasp a little as she felt a sharp sting of pain. She looked at him in surprise as he held a small snippet of her wallpaper between his fingers.

‘I believe that in the eighteenth century ladies used to stick false beauty-spots to their faces in order to draw attention to their eyes and mouth, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen wallpaper being used for the same purpose.

‘What a pity it was so close to your cheekbone and not your mouth,’ he added sultrily, ‘otherwise I might have been tempted to demand another forfeit.’

Melanie thought of all the sensible and authoritative things she ought to have said in response to this outrageous piece of male flirtation, but oddly all she could do was to gaze mutely at him, while inside she prayed desperately that he wouldn’t read into her silence the compliant eagerness of her body that he should adopt just such a course.

What on earth was happening to her? After Paul she had surely learned her lesson; had surely realised that it was idiotic to trust men so quickly, that it was dangerous to continue to believe in her childhood dreams and fantasies of finding love and living happily ever after.

‘The phone,’ she reminded him weakly. ‘It’s downstairs.’

‘Ah, yes, the phone,’ he agreed gravely. So gravely that she half suspected that he might be laughing at her. The thought made her face sting with embarrassed colour. Well, if he was she surely deserved it, allowing him to take advantage of her like that…allowing him to kiss her…to…to what?

Her bruised heart ached in panicky reaction to her susceptibility to him, reminding her of her vulnerability…reminding her of the close escape she had had from Paul’s deceit.

The telephone was in the sitting-room. She escorted him to it and then left him alone, retreating to the kitchen. When he rejoined her she would show him by her dignified silence, by her cool remoteness that whatever might have happened upstairs she was not the kind of woman to be easily influenced by his outrageous brand of flattery and flirtation.

He was a man who was obviously well versed in the ways of her sex, in its vanities and vulnerabilities, and it would be as well to ensure that he was aware right from the start that, close neighbours though they might be, she was simply not interested in the kind of flirtatious, meaningless affair in which he no doubt specialised and that he might just as well save his flattery and his kisses for someone more appreciative of them.

However, when he did eventually return he was looking so grave that she felt compelled to ask him anxiously, ‘Is something wrong?’

‘In a sense.’ There was no flirtatiousness in his manner now. ‘It seems that it’s going to be some weeks before the telephone people can put in a phone. Luckily the electricity supply should be on within the next couple of days. Unfortunately, however, my work does mean that I need a telephone.’

‘Your work?’

‘Yes,’ he told her. ‘I’m a private detective.’

Melanie stared at him. ‘A…a what?’

‘A private detective,’ he repeated casually. ‘I’m working on a case in this area. Naturally I can’t disclose any details. I rented the cottage, thinking it would give me a good base from which to work. It’s secluded enough to ensure that I don’t get too many people wanting to know what I’m doing here. That’s the trouble with country areas—people are curious about their neighbours in a way they aren’t in the city.’

‘Yes, they are, aren’t they?’ Melanie agreed. She too had discovered that, and it had thrown her a little at first, until she had sensibly realised that behind their curiosity was a very warm neighbourly concern for her well-being.

‘You’re not local, then?’ he asked her almost in surprise.

‘Well, no…actually I’m not.’

He paused as though inviting her to go on, and when she did not said softly, ‘Then it seems that we have something in common. Two strangers in a foreign land.’

For some reason his words conjured up a warmth within her, a sense of shared intimacy with him that made her react against it, to say primly, ‘I should hardly consider Cheshire a foreign land—’

‘You think not? The countryside is always a foreign land to a city dweller,’ he told her with a grin, adding, before she could respond, ‘Look, I’ve taken up enough of your time. I’d better go.’

To her horror, Melanie discovered that she was almost on the verge of protesting that she didn’t want him to leave; that she had to literally bite on the inside of her mouth to stop herself from uttering the betraying words.

Silently she accompanied him to the back door, only able to incline her head in assent when he told her smoothly, ‘You really should get that lock seen to, you know. I’m surprised a streetwise city girl like you hasn’t had that attended to already.’

The way he said the word ‘streetwise’ made her tense as though sustaining a blow, as though somehow the words had held an insult, a gibe; and yet when she looked at him the grey eyes were still smiling, the relaxed bulk of the male body carelessly at ease, so that she knew she must have imagined the toughness, the threat which she had momentarily felt lay beneath the words.

Melanie closed the door as soon as he had driven off, bolting it from the inside. He was right about one thing. She must get that lock seen to.

Although she went back upstairs, somehow wallpapering had lost its appeal and she discovered that she was wandering restlessly from room to room of her new domain, her thoughts not on the house and all that she had planned to do to it, but on the man who had just left.

She raised her hand to her lips, touching them questingly as though in search of the physical imprint of his. Even without closing her eyes she could recall every detail of those moments in his arms, every nuance of the sensuality of his unexpected kiss.

Stop it, she told herself shakily. Stop it at once. You know how stupid it is to daydream. It’s time you grew up…faced reality…accepted life for what it really is.