Читать книгу Breaking Away - Пенни Джордан, PENNY JORDAN - Страница 5

HARRIET grimaced to herself as she realised she was not going to make it to the village before dark.

It was her own fault; she had been later leaving London than she had planned, and then she had made that motorway stop midafternoon. Already it was dusk, and it would be a good half-hour yet before she reached the village and her new home.

Louise had told her she thought she was mad when she had announced her plans.

‘Leave London for a small remote village lost in the Scottish Borders?’ She had shuddered, even at the end of the telephone, but then she and her sister had never had similar tastes.

Thinking of her sister made Harriet feel uncomfortable and anxious, a legacy from those early years after their parents’ deaths when she had first started to shoulder the burden of her sister’s irresponsibility.

There were four years between them, and it had surely only been natural that when their parents died she should have immediately abandoned her own plans for teaching abroad, and instead taken a job in London, so that she could take care of her younger sister and provide a home base for her.

She had been twenty-two then and Louise eighteen. Louise had always been rebellious and self-willed, and when, after a few months, Harriet used her own half of their shared inheritance from their parents’ estate to buy a small house, albeit in a then unfashionable area of London, so that she could provide a home for her sister, Louise had announced that she was going to use part of her own inheritance to pay for an expensive modelling course.

Louise was a beautiful girl—Harriet had not been able to deny that—but she had still tried to dissuade her sister, knowing full well that Louise was attracted to modelling because she thought it a glamorous life. Privately Harriet had believed Louise lacked the application and dedication necessary for success in such a very competitive world.

Louise had refused to listen to her. She had flown into a temper and run out of the house, and despite all her attempts to find her Harriet had neither seen nor heard from her for six months. Six months of incredible anxiety and concern, coloured by guilt that she had not handled matters better.

And then, just as she was beginning to pick up the pieces of her own life—just beginning to settle down and find her way in the very large and busy comprehensive where she was teaching English, just beginning to make one or two friends, and to accept dates from a fellow teacher, Paul Thorby—totally out of the blue Louise had returned to announce that she had been living in Italy, modelling there.

There was not a word of contrition for the concern she had caused, or for the anxiety and anguish she had put her sister through; all she could talk about was herself and her own plans, but Harriet was too relieved to chastise her.

She was getting married, she told Harriet, to a wealthy Italian she had met in Turin, adding airily and thoughtlessly that the only real reason she was back in London was to buy her wedding dress.

When Harriet learned that Louise had only known Guido for six weeks, she pleaded with her to wait a little longer, but Louise, as always, refused to listen.

They were married in Turin, two months after they had met, and, while Harriet quite liked her new brother-in-law, she was very uneasy about her sister’s ability to adapt to living with her in-laws and the rest of Guido’s large family.

Paul Thorby reminded her that Louise was an adult and perfectly capable of making her own decisions. He was a nice man, but pedantic, and inclined to be petulant if he didn’t have her full attention. He was an only child, and when he took Harriet home to meet his mother her heart sank as she recognised that she and Sarah Thorby were never likely to get on well.

She was then just twenty-four years old and aware of a vague feeling of dissatisfaction with her life: what had happened to all her bright dreams of travelling or exploring a little of the world, before settling down to her career?

Her parents’ deaths had brought a halt to those plans but there was no reason why she shouldn’t fulfil them now. Louise was married. She had no one to account to but herself. Perhaps at the end of the school year…

Six months later she was just nerving herself to tell Paul that their relationship was by no means as permanent as he seemed to think, and to explain to him her dreams of being able to travel, when without warning Louise suddenly returned home, announcing that her marriage was over and that she was divorcing Guido.

Dismayed, Harriet tried to persuade her to return to her husband, but Louise was adamant. She found herself a lawyer and instituted divorce proceedings, telling Harriet that she would have to live with her, and when Guido came over to London to see her she shut herself in her bedroom and refused to come out, leaving Harriet to deal with the irate Italian.

From his complaints against his wife, Harriet suspected that Guido had fallen out of love with her sister with the same alacrity with which she had fallen out of love with him. Neither seemed too concerned about the breakdown of their marriage.

Guido returned to Turin, and Louise continued to inhabit the larger of Harriet’s two spare rooms.

Paul, who didn’t like her, announced to Harriet that she ought to tell her sister to find alternative accommodation, but Harriet was far too soft-hearted and besides Louise wasn’t well. She had been sick several times, and she was beginning to look almost haggard…Louise, who had never looked anything less than glowingly beautiful from the moment she was born.

Once, briefly as a teenager, Harriet had envied her younger sister her beauty. Louise took after their paternal grandmother, having thick, pale gold hair, and dark blue eyes, with the kind of complexion that never broke out in spots.

Harriet, on the other hand, took after her mother’s side of the family. She wasn’t quite as tall as Louise, barely medium height and finely boned. Her hair was dark, almost but not quite black, with odd red lights in it, so that Paul had once disapprovingly asked her if she dyed it. Her eyes were the only feature she shared with Louise, their density of colour startling against the framework of her pale translucent skin and dark hair.

Harriet had no illusions about herself, aware that she was nowhere near as attractive to men as her sister but with no real wish to be. A natural reticence and shyness had kept her from accepting the overtures made to her during her teenage and university years.

And now there was Paul in her life. If their relationship lacked excitement and passion—and if, deep down in a secret part of her, she deliberately kept it on a non-sexual basis because of some silly, romantic daydreams about being swept off her feet by a man who would arouse within her all the feelings that Paul never did—then she suppressed those feelings, and told herself that such an idealistic emotional commitment was not for her.

She was just wondering how soon she could break the news to Louise that she intended to sell the house and go and travel abroad for an indefinite period of time, when Louise dropped a bombshell of her own. She was pregnant, she told Harriet, and no, she had no intention of cancelling the divorce or even of letting Guido know about her condition.

When Harriet tried to counsel her to think about it, she became so hysterical that her sister gave in. Louise was still living with Harriet and after the birth of the twins made it plain that she intended to go on doing so.

How could she turn her out? Her own sister and two small babies besides! Harriet protested when Paul suggested that she ought to tell Louise to leave.

Paul had been furious with her and hadn’t spoken to her for almost a fortnight.

When he eventually did, she told him that their relationship, such as it was, was over. Then, in the years that followed, somehow or other there was no time in her life for any relationship other than to her role as the main breadwinner and financial support of her sister and her children.

Louise was as irresponsible a mother as she was a sister; one moment spoiling the twins to death, the next ignoring them.After their birth she never went back to work, although she always seemed to have enough money to buy clothes to go out with the various men who dated her.

Harriet loved the twins, but she had to admit they weren’t the easiest of children to deal with. Louise never disciplined them herself and refused to allow others to do so.

Life wasn’t easy for Harriet although she never complained. Unlike Louise, who seemed for some obscure reason to blame Harriet for her early marriage and the twins’ arrival… Then, just after the twins’ ninth birthday, something totally unexpected happened, or rather two totally unexpected things happened.

The first, and the more astonishing as far as Harriet was concerned, was that a publisher accepted the children’s book she had submitted to the firm.

For as long as she could remember she had scribbled down her ‘stories’, but it was an article she had read in a magazine that had encouraged her to spend the long winter evenings working on perfecting the short adventure story she had originally written for the twins.

Now, unbelievably, it was going to be published and she was commissioned to write four more.

The other surprise was an announcement from Louise that she was remarrying, to an American who was taking her and the twins back to California with him.

Harriet had known that Louise was involved in another of her brief affairs, but there had been so many that she had not thought this one any more serious than those which had preceded it. Her sister craved admiration in the way that an addict craved drugs or alcohol, and once the current man in her life failed to provide that admiration in full measure she usually lost interest in him.

This time, though, it seemed that she had at last found a man strong enough to cope.

Harriet attended their quickly arranged marriage in a daze of surprise. She hadn’t had time to announce her own good news; Louise had as always been too wrapped up in her own affairs to spare the time to listen.

For nearly ten years Harriet had supported her sister and her children, and now totally unexpectedly she was free of that burden. A burden she had willingly shouldered, partly out of love and partly out of guilt—a guilt that sprang from the belief that she was to blame for Louise’s flight from their home and her subsequent too early marriage, and that, had their parents not died, Louise would never have left home. Now that burden was removed from Harriet’s shoulders, and she was free!

She had never liked living and working in London, and indeed disliked city life, preferring the country. The Border country between England and Scotland had always drawn her, and the weekend after Louise had left for California with her new husband and the twins, Harriet found herself heading north, to spend a glorious week meandering along the peaceful Border roads, enjoying the first real personal freedom of her life, enjoying time to think about her future—to plan!

The decision to sell her London house and move north was made quickly, too quickly perhaps, but Harriet wasn’t going to allow herself to regret it.

She had found the house by accident one golden afternoon when she was driving through the tiny village of Ryedale. A mile or so outside the village she had seen the battered ‘For Sale’ sign posted beside the road, and had gone to investigate, following the lane that was little more than an overgrown and disused cart track, to find the cottage tucked secretly and securely away behind an enormous overgrown hedge.

She had driven straight back to her hotel and telephoned the agents, and by the end of the week she had committed herself to the purchase of the cottage.

The agent had warned her of its many defects: its loneliness, its lack of mains drainage, its unkempt, overgrown garden, and its need for a complete overhaul of the electrical and plumbing installations, but nothing could put her off. She was in love, and like anyone else in that dangerous state, she refused to admit to any flaws in the appearance of her beloved.

Nevertheless she had a full survey done on the house. Built of stone, small and squat with tiny windows and low-beamed rooms, it was surprisingly free of any structural problems.

The buoyancy of the London property market enabled her to sell her own house immediately for what seemed an enormous sum of money, most of which she intended to invest to bring herself in a small ‘security net’ income. This would keep her going while she discovered if she could actually earn her living as a writer, or if her first success had been merely a fluke.

Her headmaster, when she had told him her plans, had pursed his lips and frowned, pointing out to her the risks she was taking. Teaching jobs were not easily come by where she was going. She was in line for promotion…

Harriet refused to listen. All her life she had been cautious and careful; all her adult life she had been burdened with the necessity of putting others first.

She was almost thirty-five years old and she had had no real freedom, no real opportunity to express herself as an individual. Now fate had handed her this golden chance; if she refused to take it…but she wasn’t going to refuse.

She felt happier than she could ever remember feeling in her life; and yet nervous at the same time.

Via the agent, contractors were employed to put right the defects in the plumbing and wiring; a new kitchen was installed in the cottage; and a new bathroom, plus central heating; and now, as autumn set in, Harriet was driving north to begin her new life.

As a final gesture of defiance, she had bundled up all the neat plain skirts and blouses she had worn for school and given them away; and in a final splurge of madness had gone out and re-equipped herself with jeans and thick woollen sweaters bearing funny motifs and in brilliantly bright colours.

She had discarded the serviceable green Hunter wellingtons suggested by the saleswoman when she explained her new lifestyle, and instead had opted for a pair of bright, shiny red moon boots that matched almost exactly the bright red of her hooded duffel coat. Not for her the sombre and correct green of the county fraternity. From now on she was going to be her own person and not conform to anyone else’s ideas.

She smiled a little grimly to herself as she drove north. Surely almost thirty-five was rather old to start rebelling against society? Even if that rebellion was only a very small one…Anyway, remote in her small cottage, she doubted if she would see many people to disapprove of her vivid choice of colours.

Of course, it would be nice to make friends, she admitted wistfully. In London there had never seemed to be the opportunity. The other teachers were either younger than she and intent on having a good time when they weren’t at work, or older and involved with their families. Louise had sulked every time she had tried to point out that she had a right to her own free time, and in the end it had proved so difficult to have a life of her own, independent of those of the twins and her sister, that she had given up.

She felt guilty at how little she missed them. Louise had left without making any attempt to suggest that her sister visit them. She only hoped that this time Louise stayed married, Harriet reflected. The cottage only had one large bedroom now, the two smaller rooms having been knocked into one and the third bedroom having been converted into a bathroom.

Yes, she was free for the first time since her parents’ death. Free to write…to daydream…to enjoy the countryside…to do all those things she had wanted to do for so long…to…

Her thoughts sheered off abruptly, and she braked instinctively, feeling her small VW protest as it squealed to a halt, only just missing the man who had so unexpectedly emerged from the trees shadowing the road and who was even now bearing down on her.

She reacted instinctively to his totally unexpected appearance as any driver would, braking to avoid him, but now as he came towards her she realised two disturbing things simultaneously.

The first was that she had been very foolish to stop the car in the first place, and the second and even more frightening was that the man appeared to be totally naked, apart from a pair of extremely brief briefs.

As far as she could see in the gathering dusk he was also extremely wet, and extremely angry.

Too late she reached out to lock the car door, but he was already wrenching it open, his voice hard and furious as he said bitingly, ‘Trixie, what the hell do you think you’re doing? You’ve had your little joke, and now if you wouldn’t mind giving me my clothes—’

Two strong hands reached for her, grasping her arms unceremoniously. She gasped and tensed, fear flicking through her, and then almost immediately the hands were withdrawn and an icy male voice was apologising curtly.

‘I’m sorry. I mistook you for someone else. She drives the same model and colour car. Trixie, I could murder you!’

He stopped abruptly, almost visibly forcing back his anger, his forehead creasing into a frown.

He was a tall man, over six feet and powerfully built, as Harriet had every opportunity to see, and probably very good-looking when he wasn’t so angry.

He had dark hair, at present almost plastered to his skull as though he had just been swimming, which would explain the moisture dripping from his skin and his almost nude state—but what man in his senses would be swimming out here alone in the dark?

Lost in her own thoughts, Harriet suddenly realised that he was apologising to her, though rather brusquely, explaining that he had mistaken her for someone else. Someone else who drove the same make and colour of car.

She focused on him, uncomfortably aware of her own heightened colour as her brain made the automatic connections between his unclothed body, and his reference to believing her to be someone else. Someone else who was surely his lover, and had obviously been with him and then driven off leaving him.

Suddenly feeling hot and flustered, she was aware of an odd bleakness inside her, an uncomfortable and unwanted realisation that for her there never had been, and now probably never would be, the kind of interlude that might lead to a passionate quarrel such as had obviously provoked her companion’s present ire.

She judged him to be three or four years her senior, despite the hard leanness of his body, and wondered idly what his lover was like…attractive most certainly, sophisticated. How old? Mid-twenties? And then realised that he was asking her if she would give him a lift.

A lifetime of caution screeched loud warning bells in her brain urging her to refuse. He seemed safe enough, but…

‘I’m sorry,’ she began uncomfortably, wishing she had not allowed him to open the car door, and then trying to soften her refusal by adding, ‘I’m sure that your…your girlfriend will soon be back.’

Only she spoiled her attempt at assured sophistication by stammering a little over the words, and, far from having a palliative effect on him, to her trepidation they brought the anger back to his mouth as it tightened into a hard line.

He stared down at her, and demanded brusquely, ‘My what?’His mouth tightened even more and he told her acidly, ‘Trixie isn’t my girlfriend. She’s my niece. This isn’t some idiotic lovers’ tryst gone wrong, if that’s what you’re thinking, but a piece of deliberate manipulation.’

His mouth twisted suddenly and the look in his eyes was one of disgust.

‘I realise that the circumstances here don’t exactly encourage you to believe that I’m a perfectly respectable member of our local community, but do I look like the sort of idiot who’d go swimming with his girlfriend on a freezing cold autumn evening, and then let her walk off with his clothes? That kind of thing’s for teenagers, not adults…’

To Harriet’s surprise, he seemed more infuriated by her surely perfectly natural mistake about the nature of his predicament than by her refusal to give him a lift. Now that she looked at him a little more closely she saw that his face was that of a man who was more than likely rather autocratic, and used to controlling situations rather than to being controlled by them. Unlike her…but this was one occasion on which she intended to stand firm.

No matter how plausible and respectable he might seem, she would be a fool to give him a lift…She gave a tiny shiver, contemplating the kind of fate that could be hers, if he were not everything that he seemed.

Luckily she had kept the car engine running and now, as she looked nervously over her shoulder, wishing another car would appear on the quiet road, he seemed to read her mind.

‘For God’s sake, woman,’ he said irately, ‘do I look like a rapist?’

The look he gave her seemed to imply that, even if he were, he would scarcely choose the likes of her for a victim. Always sensitive to what she considered to be her own lack of sex appeal, a lack which she had always felt was underlined by Louise’s casual ability to attract men to her side like so many flies to honey, she flushed brilliantly and snapped at him, ‘How do I know? I’ve never met one.’And then the acid look he gave her made her add uncomfortably, ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t give you a lift. You must see that. I could give someone a message, though…the local police?’

The look he gave her was as corrosive as acid.

A cool wind had sprung up, and even within the comfort of her small car she could feel its chill. No wonder that he, standing outside it, should suddenly shiver, his skin lifting in a rash of goose-bumps.

She almost weakened then, the caring, vulnerable nature which had been her undoing so often with Louise urging her to help him, but even as the words were forming on her tongue he was straightening up, his eyes brilliant with anger.

He said curtly, ‘No, that won’t be necessary,’ and then, sketching her a swift and insulting half-bow that oddly enough did not make him look in the least ridiculous, he said sarcastically, ‘That’s what I like so much about the female sex—its compassion and understanding…’

And then, as she reached for the car door to close it, he lifted his hand and stopped her, the unexpected contact of his cool, damp fingers touching hers, almost like an electrical impulse passing through her body, freezing her into immobility as she stared at him, her heart pounding like that of a terrified rabbit.

‘Do you really think that if I were intending you some harm I couldn’t quite easily have overpowered you already? You know damn well I don’t intend you any harm,’ he added with soft bitterness, ‘but, like the rest of your sex, you obviously enjoy torment for torment’s sake. A small act of human charity, that’s all I asked for.’

Her guilt increasing with every word he spoke, Harriet was just about to say she had changed her mind when, without warning, he removed his hand from hers and slammed the car door shut, leaving her feeling oddly bereft and hurt.

He had already turned his back on her and was disappearing in the direction from which he had come. Her car’s headlights briefly picked out the lithe, powerfully male body, and then he was gone!

A shudder wrenched through her, and she realised that she was sitting there like someone in a trance.

Jerkily she put the car in gear and drove away.

Half an hour later, when her heartbeat had still not returned entirely to normal, she drove through the village, and slowed down carefully, looking for the lane which led to her cottage.

In the village she hesitated, wondering if she ought perhaps to report the incident to the police, anyway. Then, recognising that to do so would probably cause the man more embarrassment than relief, she did not stop.

Embarrassment…she had been the one to feel that, not him, she admitted wryly, remembering the shock of her first realisation that he was virtually nude. Strange how one accepted the sight of men on the beach wearing the briefest of attire without giving it a second thought, and yet when one was confronted by the same image in totally different surroundings—

She swallowed nervously, remembering how difficult she had found it to keep her eyes focused on the man’s face without betraying her idiotic discomfort with his unclothed state. He should have been the one to feel discomposed, not her!

And as for telling her that it was his niece who was responsible for his plight…She frowned as she turned into the lane, forced to admit that both his anger and his words had held an undeniable ring of truth.

She had gained the impression that he was a man who did not have a particularly high opinion of the female sex. Why? she wondered. Given his looks, she would have thought that almost all his adult life he would have been surrounded by admiring women.

At last her car headlights picked out the shape of the cottage. It was properly dark now, and she wished yet again that she had not left it so late to leave London. There was something depressing about arriving alone and unwelcomed at her new home to find it all in darkness.

Apparently the cottage had originally been part of a large local estate, but had been sold off as being of no further use when the estate had been split up and sold several years ago, which accounted for the isolated position of the little house.

Previously it had been inhabited by the estate’s gamekeeper, the agent had told her, and then, after the gamekeeper’s death and until the estate had been broken up eighteen months earlier, the cottage had remained uninhabited.

Two local farmers had apparently bought most of the land, with the main house and its grounds being sold to a local businessman.

As Harriet unlocked the cottage door and switched on the lights, she felt a sense of relief. The light that flooded the small hall helped to banish the sense of apprehension and guilt that had filled her as she drove away from that uncomfortable interlude by the roadside.

Guilt… Why should she feel guilt? She had offered to report his plight…

She stood still, remembering the bitter look he had given her, his curt denunciation of her sex, and found herself hoping that, whoever he was, he lived far away enough to ensure that she didn’t run into him again.

It was still relatively early, barely ten o’clock, and despite her long drive she was filled with a restless urgency that drove her not only to unpack her personal possessions from her car, but also to set up her typewriter on the table in the cottage’s comfortably-sized kitchen-cum-living-room. There she started drafting out the beginnings of an idea which had occurred to her as she’d brought her things in.

Her furniture had arrived earlier in the week, and the relocation agency she had hired had ensured that it was installed exactly where she had wanted it. These last few days in a London hotel had not been particularly comfortable ones, but she had had an interview with her publisher yesterday morning and it had seemed pointless to move to her new home and then have to travel all the way back to London for a two-hour meeting.

She was soon deep in the grip of her work, and it was two hours before she stopped typing and realised how much her back and wrists were aching and how chilled she had become. Stifling a yawn, she put her typed papers tidily to one side and got up.

Time for bed now. She would check what she had written in the morning.

Smothering a second, wider yawn, she ensured that the doors were bolted and then made her way upstairs to the comfortable room with its sloping eaves, and its wonderful views of the rolling Border hills.

Her modern bed was out of place in these traditional surroundings. As soon as she could spare the time, she would have to comb the local antique shops for something more suitable, she decided tiredly as she prepared for bed.

This room with its sloping floor and uneven walls called for something heavy and oldfashioned—the sort of bed you virtually had to climb on to, the sort of bed that was stuffed with soft pillows, covered in crisp, lavender-scented cotton and topped with an old-fashioned faded quilt.

Everything was so quiet. Unlike London where the traffic never seemed to stop. Louise had told her scornfully that the silence would drive her mad and that she’d be back in London within six months, but she knew she wouldn’t.Already she found something indescribably soothing and peaceful about the vague, muted noises the house made as it settled down around her…already she was looking forward to her new life.

She frowned, fighting off sleep. She just wished she hadn’t met that man. His anger, his almost personal contempt of her, had struck a sour note she couldn’t hush. She felt stupidly as though she were in some way responsible for causing that contempt, as though he had looked at her, had found her lacking as a woman, and for that reason had shown his contempt of her. Which was all quite ridiculous when he had made it quite plain that he disliked women in general.

She was still trying to puzzle out why she should go on thinking about him when she fell asleep.

She woke up abruptly, confused by unfamiliar sounds and by the vividness of her dreams, her face slightly pink as she tussled with the extraordinariness of her sleeping thoughts.

She had been walking alongside a river, engrossed in watching its flow, her ears and eyes attuned to its sounds and sights, and then suddenly without warning as she turned a corner she saw a man coming towards her. He was dressed casually in jeans and a cotton shirt, and as he came towards her and she saw the way he was looking at her, she realised in horrified shock that she was completely naked.

Every instinct clamoured to her to conceal herself from him, but it was already too late, and above the now urgent sound of the river she heard him saying mockingly, ‘Now it’s your turn…See how you like it…’

She shivered as she sat up in bed, trying to dismiss the symbolism of the dream. Outside it was raining, and heavily, raindrops spattering against her windows; the cause of the ‘river’ she had heard in her dream, perhaps?

Angry with herself for allowing an incident which she ought by now to have dismissed completely from her mind to occupy so much of her attention, she swung her legs out of bed, and decided that it was time she got up.

The relocation company had provided a certain amount of food, but there were things she would need, a certain amount of stocking up to do, which meant driving to the nearest market town.

Breakfast first and then she would make plans later, she decided, finding and filling the coffee filter and switching on the machine.

Two mugs of fragrant coffee and a piece of toast later, she decided that she might as well brave the wet weather and investigate a little of her immediate surroundings. From the field at the bottom of her wilderness of a garden, ran a footpath that went from the village right through up into the hills. Harriet didn’t want to walk quite that far, but she decided that a breath of fresh air would help to settle her breakfast and her thoughts.

Pulling on her red boots, and adding a bright yellow shiny oilcloth jacket with a hood, she stepped outside.

Underfoot the ground was squelchy and muddy, and she was glad she had had the forethought to buy the boots. Her garden gate swung creakily as she opened it.

She walked through, across the lane and on to the footpath in the field beyond it.