‘A chest infection? Oh, you poor wee thing.’
Looking down, Sara wryly observed how he puffed himself out in the face of all the sympathetic tittering from the old ladies.
‘Is that one of the reasons that you came up here?’ one of the ladies asked. ‘They often say that clean air is good for respiratory conditions and we know you lived in London. Is that not a fact, Mary? Didn’t your Eleanor have to leave London because her asthma began to get worse?’
‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ Sara mumbled, keenly aware of the man standing behind her and not really sure why allowing him access to this little sliver of personal information was so off-putting, ‘it was one of the reasons.’
‘Well, of course we must let you get on. Sandra, dear! Another pot of tea. I can see Maria on her way. If she can manage to get away from that old fool Jenkins. Now, my dear, I hope we’ll be seeing a lot more of you!’
‘And I’m sure,’ James said, ‘that the feeling is entirely reciprocated, isn’t it? Sara?’ His voice was like dark chocolate curling around her name and something hot and alive deep inside her kicked, unbidden, into life. It was something she didn’t want to feel and she responded accordingly by pushing it away.
‘Of course.’ She managed a polite smile, eager to go now that she had established her excuse.
‘Oh, good, because there’s our little summer dance at the village hall…’
‘You’re more than welcome to help decorate…’
‘On Friday evening. Barbecue if the weather permits…’
‘And it will. If those weathermen are anything to go by, not that they usually are…’
‘Friday,’ Sara said lamely. ‘I’d love to, but Simon—’
‘I’m sure my mother would be more than happy to babysit,’ James interjected, knowing full well where her protest was leading. He hadn’t planned on staying quite as long as Friday, but the minute he had removed the objection from her mouth he was filled with an inexplicable urge to prolong his sojourn.
Get to know her, he argued to himself with every semblance of rationality. How else does one win ground unless one is fully aware of the layout?
And, irritating though the admission was, he still knew practically nothing about her and he wanted to find out more. It was a first for him. Hidden depths were not something that he particularly looked for, or for that matter had ever found, in any of the women he had dated. And he liked it that way. That way there was no room for nasty surprises.
‘I couldn’t possibly…’ There was a hunted look in her eyes which he blithely ignored.
‘You would be doing her a great favour. She adores children and would love nothing better than to spend the evening with Simon.’
‘Well, Simon is very shy with—’
‘You could even bring him up to our house. There’s a room occupied solely by the most elaborate train set a child could ever hope to find…’
‘Train set?’ Simon’s ears had pricked up, and with a sigh of frustrated resignation Sara conceded defeat.
‘So…’ he had followed her out of the café, out into the glare of the sun ‘…you came here because of Simon…why did you wait five years? Surely he would have been suffering from recurrent chest infections from birth?’
‘Have you nothing better to do than tag along behind me?’
‘Not at this point in time,’ he informed her, proving, she thought, that he was every bit as thick-skinned as she had deduced from their first meeting.
Indeed, at this point in time, the business he had intended to do while his mother spent a pleasant couple of hours with her cronies had faded into the background. Right now, he could think of nothing better than glancing over to catch sight of that vibrant red hair that was today caught up in a tortoiseshell clip that barely contained its luxuriant waywardness, that creamy white skin, tinged pink at her discomfort at having to endure his presence.
‘You never bought your ice cream,’ he pointed out suddenly. ‘I suppose our resident crew called you across before you could get to put in your order.’ Everyone was curious, he reasoned, and so she would not be able to resist letting her natural curiosity have a wander, even though the determined tilt of her head told him that she would have liked nothing better.
‘Who are they?’ Sara asked, glancing into the windows of some of the shops they were strolling past, catching the occasional look in her direction and uncertain whether this was due to her or to curiosity about why the man at her side was with her.
‘Supermarket?’ he asked, leaving aside her question for the moment.
She wouldn’t have immediately guessed. ‘With travel brochures in its window?’
‘That’s Bill MacKenzie next door. Pays for some of the window space and Trevor never could resist a buck.’
The quaintness of the arrangement brought a smile to her lips, a smile that he noticed, just as he noticed the reluctance behind it, as though it was dragged out of her.
‘Look, why don’t you go and get your shopping and I’ll take Simon for that ice cream? We can meet you in the square in half an hour.’
‘No!’
The vehemence of her response surprised him and he looked at her levelly, his eyebrows raised.
‘What’s the problem?’ he murmured.
‘There’s no problem. I just don’t want to accept your offer. Isn’t that enough for you? I have a lot of things to do before I head back home and Simon…needs to be with me.’
And I won’t allow my son to get close to a man who sees me as a little mystery he’d like to have fun trying to solve while he’s killing a few days here.
Every protective bone in her body had reared up into action at the thought of that. Simon had had enough disappointments in his short life what with having to deal with a father who was not particularly interested in him, who had routinely made arrangements to take him somewhere only to break them at the very last minute because something more important had come up.
In the space of a few still seconds, the past five years unreeled themselves in her head like a series of cinematic clips which had been edited and fast-forwarded to encapsulate her ex-partner and the misery he had brought to her life.
The pregnancy, Simon, Phillip’s lack of support because, as he had ruefully informed her, he wasn’t the marrying kind, still less the paternal sort. He had seen Simon occasionally but his life had been moving onwards and upwards. There was no time to fit in a sickly son who was too thin, too small and got ill all the time.
The only thing that had ever mattered to Phillip, if only she had been able to see that from the word go, was his career and the ambition to get even further with it. And here was James Dalgleish, who seemed to be as ambitious and career-oriented as Phillip, pretending to take an interest in her son, an interest that was never going to get anywhere, but try telling that to a vulnerable five-year-old child without a father.
She could easily cope with the likes of James Dalgleish. She was immune to men like him. But ice cream in the village square with her son? Oh, no, she thought, I don’t think so.
‘What’s the matter?’ James’s voice seemed to come from a long way away and the sharpness of it snapped her out of her memories. She blinked and focused on him. ‘For a minute there you looked as though you were about to pass out.’
‘Did I?’ Sara asked coldly.
Her tight, closed expression mirrored the iciness of her voice. Whatever she wanted most right at this very moment, and he would bet on this, was for him to disappear. But he wasn’t going to do her that favour.
‘Now, why would that be, I wonder?’
Sara licked her lips nervously. Her body seemed to have broken out in a fine film of clammy perspiration and she didn’t like the way he was looking at her, with that sort of curious interest that made her feel a bit like a specimen being observed by a very clever, very dangerous scientist.
She also didn’t care for what he was doing to her body, because even though her brain was furiously seeing with
perfect clarity all the danger signs that were going off like alarm bells in her head, her body was behaving with a life of its own. Her breasts felt as though they were pulsing and there was a treacherous warmth spreading through her that illogically made her even angrier with the man standing unperturbed in front of her, looking at her as though he could read every little strand of thought in her mind. And if he couldn’t, then he intended to probe until he could.
‘What’s Simon’s relationship with his father?’
Colour drained from her face. How dared he?
‘That’s no business of yours!’
‘Is it a secret?’ He had asked the wrong question, he could see that now. Somehow he had managed to dig into a wound that was still raw, but hell, he would go for broke now. ‘What’s your relationship with him?’ he asked.
Sara reacted on impulse. There was no longer any Simon by her side, no shops around her, no pavements teeming with people all out doing their shopping in the fine weather. There was just him.
Her open palm stung as it made fierce contact with his face and the sound of flesh hitting flesh shocked her almost as much as it shocked him, but before she could turn and flee the unpleasant scene she felt his fingers circle her wrist and he was bending over her, his mouth thinned into a flat, angry line.
‘Don’t,’ he said with silky menace, ‘ever do that again.’
‘Or else what?’ Sara demanded through gritted teeth. ‘What will you do to me? Throw me in prison? Chain me to a post in the village square?’
‘Such antiquated ideas,’ James said with soft intent. ‘Punishment comes in many different packages.’ He lowered his head and his mouth made contact with hers, driving her back slightly, and in that moment of unsteady surprise his tongue found a way to plunder her mouth. It was a hard, savage kiss that ended almost before it began and he couldn’t have thought of a more brutally effective punishment because Sara could only stare at him in silent shock.
Her lips felt bruised but it was inside that was really doing a wild, terrifying roller-coaster ride. She couldn’t have been more affected if an electric current had been driven into her. Her whole body ached and throbbed and wanted in a way that filled her with fright and dismay.
‘And don’t forget,’ he reminded her in a perfectly level voice, ‘that my mother will be babysitting for you on Friday.’ His deeply sensual mouth parted into a humourless smile. ‘And don’t, likewise, imagine that you can wriggle out of it. It’s a small town and tongues wag. If you want to be happy here with your son, then I am sure you see the necessity of kicking off to the right start.’
His accuracy of the size of the town and the wagging of tongues struck home later that evening when, over dinner, his mother carefully closed her knife and fork and gave him one of those shrewd looks that he knew from experience promised a serious conversation.
‘I knew that you had met our new neighbour,’ Maria Dalgleish said ruminatively, ‘but I had no idea that you had become quite so intimate with her.’
‘Now, how did I know that that was coming?’ James tossed his white linen napkin next to his plate and sat back in the chair, pushing it away from the exquisitely polished table so that he could cross his legs.
‘A passionate kiss in the middle of town, James?’ Her eyes flashed with sudden amusement and she looked down at the tips of her fingers. ‘Surely you must have known that such a thing would have had…’ she searched to find the appropriate phrase in English ‘…fall-out.’
James’s eyes were brooding and uncooperative. He had known full well what the so-called fall-out of his actions would be, had known it even as he had lowered his head towards her. The possibility of him, the most prominent man in the area, probably in the whole of Scotland for that matter, going unnoticed was zilch.
But he had been compelled to. He had looked into those fiery green eyes, looked lower to the angrily parted lips, perfectly defined petal-pink lips, and he had been unable to resist tasting them. Only the knowledge that they were in public and her son was staring up at them wide-eyed and curiously accepting, had made him pull back from her. Or he would have carried on kissing her and he had wanted more. Much more. Just thinking about it now made his body react in a pleasurable but utterly inappropriate way.
‘Because there are too many idle women in this place,’ he said irritably, ‘with nothing better to do than talk about other people.’
‘So,’ Maria said briskly, ‘is it tomorrow that you are off? Or Wednesday? I had planned a meeting with the girls for tomorrow to discuss this summer fête at the manor, but of course I can easily cancel that and we can maybe go somewhere for lunch.’
‘No need.’ He sat frowning and thinking, cursing himself for having given in to his ridiculous male impulse to kiss the damned woman and expose her unwittingly to gossip. ‘I’ve decided to stay until at least the weekend.’ He refocused on his mother and added drily, ‘I at least have some duty to escort Sara King to the local ball, having sullied her image in the first place.’ He imagined her standing hesitantly on her own by the door of the village hall, having been forced to attend an event she clearly had not wanted to, while everyone stopped what they had been doing to look covertly at her. ‘Which reminds me, I told her that you’ll babysit her son, Simon. I hope you don’t mind.’
‘Mind? I will enjoy every minute of it. You know how much I love children.’
‘And don’t even think it, Mama,’ James said wryly, toying with the slender stem of his wine glass, watching the remnants of his white wine swirl around. ‘I’m not about to get involved with her. She’s as elusive as a shadow and you know I have only ever been attracted to the straightforward type.’ But even as the words had been uttered, he had a compelling vision of a tall, slender creature, with creamy white skin, breasts pushing forward like ripe fruit to be tasted. He drained his wine and stood up, ready to take his leave.
And Maria Dalgleish was more than happy to let him. She couldn’t think while he hovered there, and thinking was what she felt like doing tonight.
‘I shall show him your father’s train set, shall I?’ she asked with a smile and he nodded with a little shrug.
‘Why not? He’s bound to love it. I did.’ Now that he had decided not to leave, just yet, he had business to see to. Thank God for computers, faxes, e-mails and all the technology that would enable him to run his empire away from his offices, if only for a while.
He would stay at home, he thought, and work. His visits to the estate were so short that no one would question the fact that he was no longer around in the town and he would not risk bumping into Sara again.
He had frightened her with his questions, appeared to have utterly panicked her with his ill-thought-out kiss. He would give her time to recover and build up her defences.
But the mere thought of those defences going up was enough to fire him up at the thought of breaking them down.
But go back up they would. Less than a mile away, Sara was feverishly thinking the same thing. She had spent the day in a state of charged confusion. Done her shopping and hurried back to the Rectory with Simon. Normally, being with him was always enough to take her mind off her problems, but today her mind was caught in a trap elsewhere, filled with images of James Dalgleish and the kiss he had forced upon her as fair retribution for her having slapped his face.
He would never have had his face slapped by a woman in his life before, she thought as she sat in the cosy snug with the television providing muted sound in the background. That arrogant, devastatingly attractive face would not have inspired anger in any woman he might have been out with. It would have inspired craving because everything about him, from the way he looked to the way he moved, was sexually mesmerising.
He had touched her and her body had shot up in flames, hot flames that licked every part of her. It would almost have been better if she could have put her response down to the needs of a woman who had been celibate for the past five years.
And they would be talking about her i
n the town. Their kiss hadn’t exactly been conducted in the privacy of four walls.
But there were still some things that needed doing. Someone to come and install an extra phone line for her so that she could use the internet on her computer. Someone to come and link up her computer for goodness’ sake, get it up and running. She had never had to bother with the nuts and bolts of the thing, but then in London she had had a secretary to do all that for her, to get the appropriate software technicians in when it was playing up. Even if she only intended to stay put for a limited period of time, she would still have to buy a book on computers, at least so that she could learn some of the rudiments herself.
After all the effort she had made to get here, though, the thought of running back down south now seemed exhausting. More change for Simon. And if she returned south, then how long before the headhunters began? Life was frantic down there.
She shook her head wearily and decided that she had better check out schools, get Simon registered, just in case.
That, too, would need a visit to the town. Balking at the prospect of meeting yet another set of people who knew her business was not going to do her any good.
But, as it turned out, her trip in on the Thursday was less of an ordeal than she had imagined. And she found out, really without asking, that James had left to return to London. This piece of information came from a girl in her twenties whose young boy ended up playing with Simon in a little park on the edge of the town where Sara had taken him to see some ducks. She herself had ended up sitting on the bench with the girl, to discover that her mother was one of the dreaded six and that she, Fiona, was the local vet’s assistant.
‘You won’t be over-popular with some of our girls who think that James Dalgleish is up for grabs,’ Sara was told with a laugh, ‘but you’ll be very popular with the rest of us who find that little lot extremely annoying. That kiss has been the most exciting thing to have happened here in months!’
That kiss was not going to happen again, at any rate, Sara thought on the Friday as she nervously contemplated going to the village hall, an invitation which had been thrust upon her and one which she was morally obliged to meet.
His Convenient Mistress Page 5