Читать книгу The City-Girl Bride - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 6

MAGGIE stared in disbelief at the downpour which had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, turning the road she had been driving along into a vast puddle and making her head ache with the tension of concentrating. From the moment she had seen the sale advertised she had been determined to buy the house. She was sure that it was exactly what her adored grandmother needed to lift her out of her current unhappiness.

Of course Maggie knew that nothing and no one could ever replace her grandfather in her grandmother’s life, but Maggie was convinced that returning to live in the house where her grandparents had started their married life, a house that was filled with memories of their shared love, would help to take her grandmother’s mind off the sadness of her loss. And Maggie was a woman who, once her mind was made up about anything or anyone, refused to change it. Which was why she was such a successful businesswoman—successful enough to be able to attend the auction being held to sell off the large Shropshire estate on which her grandparents had begun their married lives, in the rented house which was now being auctioned for sale.

Maggie had grown up hearing stores of Shropshire and its rich farmlands, but Maggie was a city girl; farms, rain, mud, animals, farmers—they were not for her. The company she owned and ran as a headhunter, her modern city apartment, her friends—single career woman like her—these were the things she enjoyed and valued. But her love for her grandparents was something else, something special. They had provided her with a secure and loving home when her own parents had split up, they had encouraged and praised her, supported her emotionally, loved her, and it both hurt and frightened her to see her once strong grandmother looking so frail and lost.

Until Maggie had seen the Shopcutte estate advertised for sale—its Georgian mansion, farmlands and estate properties, including the pretty Dower House where her grandparents had spent the first years of their marriage—she had been in despair, not knowing how to lift her grandmother’s spirits and terrified, if she was honest, that she might actually lose her. But now she knew she had found the perfect means of cheering her up. It was imperative that she was successful at the sale auction, that she acquired the house. And she was determined that she would.

But for this appalling and unforecasted torrential rain she would have reached her destination by now—the small country town adjacent to the estate, where the auction was to be held and where she had booked herself a room at the town’s only decent hotel.

When the rain had first started, appearing from nowhere out of a hitherto cloudless sky, she had had to slow her speed down to a crawl. The sky was far from blue now, in fact it was nearly black, and the road was empty of any other traffic as it narrowed and dipped at a perilously acute angle.

Was this really the A-class road she had been following? Impossible, surely, that she might have made a wrong turning. She simply did not do things like that. If there was one thing that Maggie prided herself on it was being in control.

From the top of her glossily groomed, perfectly cut blonde hair to the tips of her equally perfectly pedicured and painted toes Maggie epitomised feminine elegance and self-discipline. Her size eight figure was the envy of her friends—and that flawless skin, that equally flawless personal life, as devoid of the untidiness of emotional entanglements as Maggie’s home was devoid of clutter. Yes, Maggie was a woman to be reckoned with: a woman no man would dare not to respect or would risk tangling antagonistically with. After seeing the havoc and mess caused by her parents’ various sexual and emotional relationships, Maggie had decided that she intended to remain safely and tidily single. And so far none of the many men she had met had done anything to make her change that decision.

‘But you are far too gorgeous to be alone,’ one would-be suitor had told her, only to be given one of her most scathing and dismissive looks.

Perhaps somewhere deep down inside herself she did sometimes secretly wonder just why she should be so immune to the dangerous intensity of emotional and physical desire experienced by other women, but she refused to allow herself to dwell on such thoughts. Why should she? She was happy the way she was. Or at least she would be once she had got this auction out of the way and was the owner of the Dower House.

It was ridiculous that she should have had to come out here at all, she fumed as she began a steep descent. She had tried to buy the house prior to the auction, but the agent had refused to sell it. So here she was, and…

‘Oh, no. I don’t believe it,’ she protested out loud as the road turned sharply and she saw in front of her a sign marked ‘Ford’.

Ford…as in fording a river, as in some archaic means of crossing it surely more suitable to the Middle Ages rather than the current century. But that was what the sign said, and there in front of her was a shallow river, with the road running right through it and up the hill on its opposite side.

And this was an A road? Irritably Maggie started to drive through the water. That was the country for you, she fumed grittily.

She could hear above the noise of her car engine a loud rushing sound that for some reason made the hair at the back of her neck prickle, and then she saw why. Coming towards her at an unbelievable speed along the course of the river was a wall of water almost as high as the car itself.

For the first time in her life, Maggie panicked. The car’s wheels spun as she depressed the accelerator, but the car itself didn’t move, and the wall of water…

Finn was not in a good mood. His meeting had taken much longer than he had planned and now he was going to be late getting back. His mind was preoccupied with his own thoughts, so it gave him a shock to see the unfamiliar car motionless in the middle of the ford, but it gave him even more of a shock to see the swollen race of river threatening to overwhelm it.

He was in no mood to rescue unwanted and uninvited visitors with no more sense than to try to attempt to cross the river during what had to be the worst cloudburst the area had known in living memory, and in such an unsuitable vehicle. He frowned ominously as he dropped the Land Rover into its lowest gear.

He might have made the fortune which had enabled him to retire from the world of commerce by using what his mentor had once told him was the keenest and shrewdest financial brain he had ever come across, but that world and everything it encompassed was not one he ever wanted to return to. This was his métiere—what he wanted. But he wanted it permanently. And the lease on Ryle Farm could not be renewed when it ran out in three months’ time, which was why he had decided to bid for the Shopcutte estate. He knew that the house, the land and the other properties were being auctioned off in separate lots, but Finn wanted them all. He wanted and he intended to keep the estate intact, and with it his own privacy.

Protecting his privacy; guarding his solitude was vitally important to Finn, and fortunately, thanks to those hectic years he had spent working as one of the City’s most successful money market dealers, he had the financial means to buy that privacy and solitude—in the shape of the Shopcutte estate.

Those people who had known him in his early twenties wouldn’t be able to reconcile the man he had been then with the man he was now. He was a decade older now, of course, and in those days…In those days his high earning power had gained him an entrée into a fast-living world of trust fund socialites, models, money and drugs. But, as he had quickly come to discover, it was a world driven by greed and filled with insincerity. He had been too hardheaded to succumb to the easy availability of sex and drugs, but others he had known had not been so wise, or so lucky.

Already disenchanted with what had been going on around him, Finn had been filled with a sense of revulsion for the life he was living after the death of one of his colleagues from an accidental drug overdose. Finn had been openly and brazenly propositioned by girls crazed with need by their addiction, had attended parties thrown by clients where those same girls and the drugs that had ruined their lives had been handed round like sweets. It was a world that valued material wealth and held human beings cheap, and one day Finn had woken up and known that it could no longer be his world.

Perhaps unfairly, he had come to blame big city culture for sins that should have more appropriately been apportioned to his fellow human beings. But his own needs had forced him to question what he really wanted out of life, filling him with a craving for peace and a simpler, cleaner, more natural way of life, as well as a loathing for city life and, if he was honest, a wary hostility towards those who lauded it.

His mother had come from farming stock and he had obviously inherited those genes. He had made his plans, taken a calculated gamble on his own judgement which had netted him a profit that had run into millions. His employers had pleaded with him to stay, telling him he could name his own terms, but he had made his decision. Owning his own land would give him the opportunity to grow organic crops as well as breed cattle and increase his small herd of alpaca.

Unlike Maggie, the moment Finn heard the sound of the water thundering towards the ford he knew what it was, and immediately stopped his Land Rover, cursing under his breath as he realised that the huge flood of water filling the riverbed would mean that the ford would be impassable, even for his sturdy four-wheel drive, and that he would end up being marooned on the wrong side of the river. Angrily he looked at Maggie’s car. A trendy, top-of-the-range convertible that only a fool would possibly have attempted to take across a flooded ford.

The dangerously fast-flowing water was halfway up the side of the car—and rising. In another few minutes the car would be in danger of being swept completely away, and its blonde-haired driver with it.

Grimly Finn restarted his own vehicle and drove slowly and carefully through the swilling water towards Maggie, gritting his teeth as he felt the powerful surge of the water buffeting the side of the Land Rover and trying to force it downstream.

In her own car, Maggie could not believe what was happening to her. Things like this simply did not happen…especially not to her. How could she possibly be here, in the middle of a flooding river with water creeping higher and higher? She gave a shocked gasp as the car started to move, slewing sideways. She was going to be swept away completely. She might even drown. But she had seen the Land Rover coming up behind her and told herself that she was panicking unnecessarily. If its driver could cross the ford then so could she. Determinedly she tried to restart her car.

Finn simply could not believe his eyes. As he saw Maggie’s shiny blonde hair swing across her face when she leaned forward to restart her car he thought he must be hallucinating. What on earth was she doing? Surely she must realise that her car was not going to start? And even if by some remote chance it did…

Drawing alongside her, he carefully brought the Land Rover to a halt and wound down his window.

Maggie saw what he was doing and gave him a supercilious look, which Finn ignored. He could see now that she was a city woman, and his irritation and exasperation with her grew. Gesturing to her to wind down her own window, he returned her look with darkly bitter dislike.

Initially Maggie had intended to ignore his arrogant command—in the City a woman never responded to overtures from unknown men—but then she felt her car move again.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Finn demanded irascibly once Maggie had lowered her window. ‘You’re driving a car, not a submarine.’

His obvious irritation and contempt infuriated Maggie, who was not used to being verbally mauled by the male sex. Normally her looks alone were enough to guarantee that they treated her gently.

‘What I am doing,’ she responded acidly, ‘is trying to ford the river.’

‘In this—a flood?’ Finn couldn’t keep the ire out of his voice.

‘There was no flood when I started to cross,’ Maggie retaliated hotly, and then gasped as her car started to move again.

‘You’re going to have to get out of the car,’ Finn told her. Any moment now, he suspected, the car would be completely swept away with her in it, if she didn’t move quickly, but he was worried that she would start to panic and make the situation even worse than it already was.

‘And how do you suggest I do that?’ Maggie asked him with a sharp frostiness icing her voice and her eyes. ‘Open the door and swim for it?’

‘Too dangerous—the current’s too strong,’ Finn informed her brusquely, ignoring her attempt at sarcasm. Giving her slender body a brisk inspection, he told her crisply, ‘You’ll have to climb out through the window; there should be enough room. I’m parked close enough for you to be able to crawl into the back of the Land Rover through the rear passenger window.’

‘What? You expect me—?’ Maggie was almost lost for words. ‘I am wearing a designer suit and a pair of very expensive shoes, and there is no way I am going to ruin them by crawling anywhere—least of all into an extremely muddy Land Rover.’

Finn could feel his blood pressure rising, and along with it his temper. He had never met anyone who had irritated him as much as this impossible woman was doing. ‘Well, if you stay where you are it won’t just be your shoes you’ll be in danger of losing. It could be your life as well—and not just your own. Have you any idea of the—?’ Finn broke off as her car rocked with the force of the water buffeting it. He had had enough.

‘Move. Now,’ he ordered her, and to her own shock Maggie found that even before he had finished speaking she was scrambling through her car window.

The feel of two strong male hands supporting her, almost heaving her towards the Land Rover’s open window as though she were a…a sack of potatoes, only increased her sense of outrage. As she wriggled and slipped head-first into the rear of the Land Rover the breath whooshed out of her lungs at precisely the same time as her shoes slid off her feet.

Without even having the courtesy to check that she was all right her rescuer was continuing to cross the river, his vehicle somehow pushing its way through the flood which had threatened her own car. As she struggled to sit up Maggie saw her car start to move downstream as the flooding river finally overwhelmed it. She was shivering with shock and reaction, but the driver of the Land Rover seemed totally unconcerned about her as they finally emerged onto dry land and he started to drive up the hill.

Another few seconds and that idiotic woman would have been swept away with her car, Finn fumed once he had safely negotiated their passage back onto dry land. Now, until the river went down, the farm was effectively marooned. There was no other road off the property, which was enclosed on both sides by steep hills.

‘You can drop me in the centre of the town,’ Maggie informed him in a dismissive clipped voice. ‘Preferably opposite a shoe shop, since I now have no shoes.’ And not anything else, she recognised. No luggage, no handbag, no credit cards…

‘The centre of what?’ Finn demanded incredulously. ‘Where the hell do you think you are?’

‘On the A road, five or so miles from Lampton,’ Maggie told him promptly.

‘On an A road…Does this look like an A road?’ Finn’s voice was loaded with male disbelief.

Now that she looked at it—properly—Maggie could see that it didn’t. For one thing it was barely more than single track, which meant…which meant that somehow or other she must have taken a wrong turning. But she never took wrong turnings—in any area of her life.

‘Things are different in the country,’ she informed Finn contentiously. ‘Any old road can be an A road.’

Her arrogance infuriated him.

‘For your information this is a private road, leading only to a farm…my farm.’

Maggie’s soft brown eyes widened. She studied the back of Finn’s head whilst she tried to assimilate what he had told her. He had a strong bone structure, and thick, very dark brown hair. His hair needed cutting. It covered the collar of his shirt. She wrinkled her nose fastidiously as she took in the shabbiness of his worn coat. She could almost see the forcefield of male anger and hostility that surrounded him, and she felt equally antagonistic towards him.

‘So I must have made a wrong turning somewhere.’ She gave a small shrug. Only she knew just how much it cost her to admit that she might have got something wrong.

‘If you hadn’t virtually hijacked me I would have been able to turn round and—’

‘Turn round?’ Finn interrupted her with a derisive snort. ‘If I hadn’t turned up you’d have been damned lucky to be alive right now.’

The brutality of his harsh words sent a shiver running through her, but Maggie refused to let him see it. Instead she did what she had trained herself to do, which was to focus on her ultimate goal and ignore everything else.

‘How long will it be before the river goes down?’ she asked him. ‘If we wait here?’

‘Wait…?’ Finn couldn’t keep the disbelief out of his voice. ‘Lady, a river like this could take days to subside,’ he told her, impatient of her naivety. People like her shouldn’t be let loose in the country. They had as much idea of how dangerous nature could be as a child had of crossing a motorway.

‘Days…?’

In his driving mirror Finn saw the panic flaring briefly in Maggie’s eyes, and against his will he wondered what had caused it. What the hell was he doing, getting curious about her?

‘How…how many days?’ Maggie asked, fighting not to betray her concern.

Finn shrugged. ‘That depends. The last time we had a flood like this it was well over a week.’

‘A week…’ Now there was no hiding the despair in Maggie’s voice. And, if the road really did lead only to the man’s farm, it looked as if she had no choice but to spend that week with him.

They were almost at the top of the hill now, and automatically she turned round in her seat to look back the way they had come. The Tarmac glistened wetly, a narrow black ribbon against the autumn landscape, and as for her car—she could just about see its roof above the floodwater as it lay at an angle, wedged against a tree.

With the initial shock of what had happened over, Maggie was filled with unfamiliar panic and anxiety. Her clothes, her mobile phone, her bag—with her money and credit cards and all those taken-for-granted things that reaffirmed who and what she was—had gone, swept away from her by the flood with her car. She was, she recognized with stomach-dropping resentment, totally dependent on her rescuer.

In his rearview mirror Finn carefully monitored the emotions shadowing Maggie’s eyes. He knew how to read people, and how to second-guess their thoughts; city life had taught him that. City life, like this city woman. What was a woman like this one doing in such an out-of-the-way country area? Everything about her screamed that she was not a country-lover. And every instinct he had was telling him that she was trouble.

Finn knew danger when he saw it, right enough, but for some reason he couldn’t understand he had an overwhelming urge to go ahead and walk right into it, he recognised, with a grim disbelief at his own totally uncharacteristic behaviour as he heard himself saying, ‘If you’ve got friends in the area you can ring them from the farm to tell them what’s happened.’

What the hell was he doing, practically inviting her to involve him in her life? Finn asked himself angrily. There was no way he wanted to be there. She irritated and antagonised him to the point where…To the point where he just knew he had to take her in his arms and see if that deliciously full soft mouth felt as good as it looked.

Finn clenched his jaw. What the hell was happening to him? To think…to imagine…to want…He shook his head, appalled by the sheer inappropriateness of his unwelcome thoughts.

‘I’m not visiting friends,’ Maggie denied tersely.

Finn waited, expecting her to elaborate, and then when she didn’t wondered why he should find her refusal to confide in him so intensely aggravating. By rights he should have been pleased that she was so determined to keep her distance from him.

Maggie could feel herself starting to bristle with irritation as she recognised that her rescuer was expecting her to tell him what she was doing in Shropshire. As though she was a child being called to account by an adult. Well, her business was none of his, and besides, the very nature of Maggie’s career meant that secrecy and discretion were of prime importance—so much so that they were now second nature to her. Anyway, why should she divulge her very private reasons for being in the area to this…this farmer?

They had crested the hill now, and the lane narrowed even more ahead of them, meandering through pastureland towards a pretty Tudor farmhouse. A small herd of animals grazing in one of the fields was disturbed by the Land Rover and raced away from the fence, capturing Maggie’s bemused attention.

‘What are those? Llamas?’ she asked, unable to check her curiosity.

‘No, llamas are much larger. These are alpaca. I keep them for their wool.’

‘Their wool?’ Maggie repeated, watching as the small herd stopped and one of its braver members craned its long neck to stare at them.

‘Yes, their wool,’ Finn repeated, adding sardonically, ‘It’s highly prized and very expensive—and I wouldn’t be surprised if your ‘designer’ hasn’t used it in his clothes.’

The way he’d said the word ‘designer’ was so challenging that Maggie itched to retaliate, but before she could do so he had put the Land Rover in a higher gear and switched on the radio, so that any attempt she might have made to talk would have been drowned out by the sound of the announcer.

‘Sounds like we’re not the only ones to be caught out by this freak storm,’ Finn commented.

‘Thank you,’ Maggie told him tartly. ‘But I don’t need a translation. I do speak English.’

The auction was in six days time—the river had to have gone back to normal by then. She wished now that she had not given herself this extra time, but she had hoped to be able to convince the agent, when she talked with him face to face, to accept her offer for the Dower House prior to the auction taking place. She was fully prepared to pay, and to pay generously to secure the house. Anything to see her grandmother smile again.

They were driving into the farmyard now—in the paddock beyond it Maggie could see hens scratching in the grass and ducks on the pond. An idyllic scene, no doubt, to some people. But not to her, no way, and especially not when it came inhabited by a man like the one who was now turning round in his seat towards her.

‘Let’s just get one thing straight,’ he was telling her grimly, ‘I don’t like this situation any more than you do, and, moreover, I was not the one who stupidly drove my car into a river which was plainly in full flood. Neither was I the one who made a wrong turning and ended up—’

‘There was no flood when I tried to cross the ford,’ Maggie interrupted him sharply. ‘It just seemed to come out of nowhere—as though…’ As though some malign fate had been waiting for her, she wanted to say, but of course she was far too sensible to make such a silly comment. ‘And, since you apparently own this wretched place, I should have thought you would have a legal obligation to warn motorists of just how dangerous it is to use the supposed ford.’

Ignoring her mistaken belief that he owned the farm—this was no time to become involved in minor details—Finn barred his teeth savagely in an unfriendly smile whilst he reminded Maggie unkindly, ‘Since this road is private, and on privately owned land, there isn’t any need.’

‘That’s all very well,’ Maggie countered immediately, ‘but perhaps you could explain to me just how a person is supposed to know that, if there isn’t a sign to tell them so?’

‘There doesn’t need to be a sign,’ Finn told her through gritted teeth. ‘It’s perfectly plain from any map that this is virtually a single-track road which leads to a dead end. Women,’ he exploded sardonically. ‘Why is it they seem pathologically incapable of reading maps?’

Maggie had had enough—all the more so because of the small inner logical voice that was trying to tell her unwantedly that her adversary had a point.

‘I can read a map perfectly well, thank you, and I can read human beings even better. You are the rudest, most arrogant, most…irritating man I have ever met,’ she told him forcefully.

‘And you are the most impossible woman I have ever met,’ Finn retaliated.

Silently they looked at one another in mutual hostility.