One Night with Gael

by Maya Blake

  And then there was the roof, which had decided that it was no longer going to play ball and she was sure that right now, if she listened hard enough, she would be able to hear the unnerving sound of the steady leak drip-dripping its way into the bucket she had strategically placed in the corridor upstairs.

  ‘I keep telling you that you’re too young to be buried out there in the middle of nowhere! Why don’t you come out to France? Visit us for a couple of weeks? Surely the practice can spare you for a fortnight...’

  In three months’ time, Becky thought glumly, the practice would be able to spare her for approximately the rest of her life.

  Though there was no way that she was going to tell her sister this. Nor did she have any intention of going out to the south of France to see Alice and her husband, Freddy. Her heart squeezed tightly as it did every time she thought of Freddy and she forced herself to answer her sister lightly, voice betraying nothing.

  ‘I’m hardly buried out here, Alice.’

  ‘I’ve seen the weather reports, Becks. I always check what the weather’s doing on my phone and the Cotswolds is due heavy snow by the weekend. You’re going to be trapped there in the middle of March, when the rest of the country is looking forward to spring, for goodness’ sake! I worry about you.’

  ‘You mustn’t.’ She glanced out of the window and wondered how it was that she was still here, still in the family home, when this was supposed to have been a temporary retreat, somewhere to lick her wounds before carrying on with her life. That had been three years ago. Since then, in a fit of lethargy, she had accepted the job offer at the local vet’s and persuaded her parents to put all plans to sell the cottage on hold. Just for a little while. Just until she got her act together. She would pay them a monthly rent and, once she’d got herself on a career ladder, she would leave the Cotswolds and head down to London.

  And now here she was, with unemployment staring her in the face and a house that would have to be sold sooner rather than later because, with each day that passed, it became just a little more run down. How long before the small leak in the roof expanded into a full scale, no-holds-barred deluge? Did she really want to wake up in the middle of the night with her bed floating?

  So far, she hadn’t mentioned the problems with the house to her parents, who had left for France five years previously, shortly having been joined by Alice and her husband. She knew that if she did the entire family would up sticks and arrive on her doorstep with tea, sympathy and rescue plans afoot.

  She didn’t need rescuing.

  She was an excellent vet. She would have a brilliant recommendation from Norman, the elderly family man who owned the practice and was now selling to emigrate to the other side of the world. She would be able to find work somewhere else without any problem at all.

  And besides, twenty-seven-year-old women did not need rescuing. Least of all by their younger sibling and two frantically worried parents.

  ‘Shouldn’t I be the one worrying about you?’

  ‘Because you’re three years older?’

  Becky heard that wonderful, tinkling laugh and pictured her beautiful, charming sister sitting in their glamorous French gîte with her legs tucked under her and her long, blonde hair tumbling over one shoulder.

  Freddy would be doing something useful in the kitchen. Despite the fact that he, like her, was a hard-working vet, he enjoyed nothing more than getting back from the practice in which he was a partner, kicking off his shoes and relaxing with Alice in the kitchen, where he would usually be the one concocting the meals, because he was an excellent cook.

  And he adored Alice. He had been swept off his feet from the very first second he had been introduced to her. At the time, she had been a high-flying model on the way to greatness and, whilst Becky would never have believed that Freddy—earnest and usually knee-deep in text books—could ever be attracted to her sister—who was cheerfully proud of her lack of academic success and hadn’t read a book cover to cover in years—she had been proved wrong.

  They were the most happily married couple anyone could have hoped to find.

  ‘I’ll be fine.’ Becky decided to put off all awkward conversations about job losses and collapsing roofs for another day. ‘I won’t venture out in the middle of a snowstorm in my pyjamas, and if anyone out there is stupid enough to brave this weather on the lookout for what they can nick then they won’t be heading for Lavender Cottage.’ She eyed the tired décor in the kitchen and couldn’t help grinning. ‘Everyone in the village knows that I keep all my valuables in a bank vault.’

  Old clothes, mud-stained wellies, tool kit for the hundreds of things that kept going wrong in the house, enviable selection of winter-woolly hats...just the sort of stuff any robber worth his salt would want to steal.

  ‘I just thought, Becks, that you might venture out here and have a little fun for a while before summer comes and all those ghastly crowds. I know you came over for Christmas, but it was all so busy out here, what with Mum and Dad inviting every single friend over for drinks every single evening. I... I feel like I haven’t seen you for absolutely ages! I mean, just the two of us, the way it used to be when we were younger and...well... Freddy and I...’

  ‘I’m incredibly busy just at the moment, Ali. You know how it is around this time of year with the lambing season nearly on us, pregnant sheep in distress everywhere you look... But I’ll come out as soon as I can. I promise.’

  She didn’t want to talk about Freddy, the guy she had met at university, the guy she had fallen head over heels in love with, had he only known, the guy who had turned her into a good friend, who had met Alice, been smitten in the space of seconds and proposed in record time.

  The guy who had broken her heart.

  ‘Darling, Freddy and I have something to tell you and we would much rather tell you face to face...’

  ‘What? What is it?’ Filled with sudden consternation, Becky sat up, mind crash-banging into worst case scenarios.

  ‘We’re going to have a baby! Isn’t it exciting?’

  * * *

  Yes, it was. Exciting, thrilling and something her sister had been talking about from the moment she had said I do and glided up the aisle with a band of gold on her finger.

  Becky was thrilled for her. She really was. But, as she settled down for one of the rare Saturday nights when she wasn’t going to be on call, she suddenly felt the weight of the choices she had made over the years bearing down on her.

  Where were the clubs she should be enjoying? Where was the breathless falling in and out of love? The men in pursuit? The thrilling text messages? When Freddy had hitched his wagon to her sister, Becky had turned her back on love. Unlike Alice, she had spent her teens with her head in books. She’d always known what she’d wanted to be and her parents had encouraged her in her studies. Both were teachers, her father a lecturer, her mother a maths teacher at the local secondary school. She had always been the good girl who worked hard. Beautiful, leggy Alice had decided from an early age that academics were not for her and of course her parents—liberal, left wing and proud of their political correctness—had not batted an eyelid.

  And so, while Becky had studied, Alice had partied.

  ‘Everyone should be free to express themselves without being boxed into trying to live up or live down to other people’s expectations!’ had been her mother’s motto.

  At the age of eighteen, Becky had surfaced, startled and blinking, to university life with all its glorious freedom and had realised that a life of study had not prepared her for late-night drinking, skipping lectures and sleeping around.

  She had not been conditioned to enjoy the freedom at her disposal, and had almost immediately developed a crush on Freddy, who had been in her year, studying veterinary science like her.

  He, too, had spent his adolescence working hard. He, too, had had his he
ad buried in text books between the ages of twelve and eighteen. He had been her soul mate and she had enjoyed his company, but had been far too shy to take it to another level, and had been prepared to bide her time until the inevitable happened.

  Only ever having watched her sister from the sidelines, laughing and amused at the way Alice fell in and out of love, she had lacked the confidence to make the first move.

  And in the end, thank goodness, because, had she done so, then she would have been roundly rejected. The boy she had considered her soul mate, the boy she had fancied herself spending her life with, had not been interested in her as anything but a pal. She had thought him perfect for her. Steady, hard-working, considerate, feet planted firmly on the ground...

  He, on the other hand, had not been looking for a woman who shared those qualities.

  He had wanted frothy and vivacious. He had wanted someone who shoved his books aside and sat on his lap. He had wanted tall and blonde and beautiful, not small, dark-haired and plump. He hadn’t wanted earnest.

  As the dark night began to shed its first flurries of snow, Becky wondered whether retreating to the Cotswolds had been a good idea. She could see herself in the same place, doing the same thing, in ten years’ time. Her kid sister felt sorry for her. Without even realising it, she was becoming a charity case, the sort of person the world pitied.

  The house was falling down.

  She was going to be jobless in a matter of months.

  She would be forced to do something about her life, leave the security of the countryside, join the busy tide of bright young things in a city somewhere.

  She would have to climb back on the horse and start dating again.

  She felt giddy when she thought about it.

  But think about it she did, and she only stopped when she heard the sharp buzz of the doorbell, and for once didn’t mind having her precious downtime invaded by someone needing her help with a sick animal. In fact, she would have welcomed just about anything that promised to divert her thoughts from the grim road they were hell-bent on travelling.

  She headed for the door, grabbing her vet’s bag on the way, as well as her thick, warm, waterproof jacket, which was essential in this part of the world.

  She pulled open the door with one foot in a boot, woolly hat yanked down over her ears and her car keys shoved in her coat pocket.

  Eyes down as she reached for her bag, the first things she noticed were the shoes. They didn’t belong to a farmer. They were made of soft, tan leather, which was already beginning to show the discolouration from the snow collecting outside.

  Then she took in the trousers.

  Expensive. Pale grey, wool. Utterly impractical. She was barely aware of her eyes travelling upwards, doing an unconscious inventory of her unexpected caller, registering the expensive black cashmere coat, the way it fell open, unbuttoned, revealing a fine woollen jumper that encased a body that was...so unashamedly masculine that for a few seconds her breath hitched in her throat.

  ‘Plan on finishing the visual inspection any time soon? Because I’m getting soaked out here.’

  Becky’s eyes flicked up and all at once she was gripped by the most unusual sensation, a mixture of dry-mouthed speechlessness and heated embarrassment.

  For a few seconds, she literally couldn’t speak as she stared, wide-eyed, at the most staggeringly good-looking guy she had ever seen in her life.

  Black hair, slightly long, had been blown back from a face that was pure, chiselled perfection. Silver-grey eyes, fringed with dramatically long, thick, dark lashes, were staring right back at her.

  Mortified, Becky leapt into action. ‘Give me two seconds,’ she said breathlessly. She crammed her foot into wellie number two and wondered whether she would need her handbag. Probably not. She didn’t recognise the man and, from the way he was dressed, he wasn’t into livestock so there would be no sheep having trouble giving birth.

  Which probably meant that he was one of those rich townies who had second homes somewhere in one of the picturesque villages. He’d probably descended for a weekend with a party of similarly poorly equipped friends, domestic pets in tow, and one of the pets had got itself into a spot of bother.

  It happened. These people never seemed to realise that dogs and cats, accustomed to feather beds and grooming parlours, went crazy the second they were introduced to the big, bad world of the real countryside.

  Then when their precious little pets returned to base camp, limping and bleeding, their owners didn’t have a clue what to do. Becky couldn’t count the number of times she had been called out to deal with weeping and wailing owners of some poor cat or dog that had suffered nothing more tragic than a cut on its paw.

  In fairness, this man didn’t strike Becky as the sort to indulge in dramatics, not judging from the cool, impatient look in those silver-grey eyes that had swept dismissively over her, but who knew?

  ‘Right!’ She stepped back, putting some distance between herself and the disconcerting presence by the door. The flurries of snow were turning into a blizzard. ‘If we don’t leave in five seconds, then it’s going to be all hell getting back here! Where’s your car? I’ll follow you.’

  ‘Follow me? Why would you want to follow me?’

  His voice, Becky thought distractedly, matched his face. Deep, seductive, disturbing and very, very bad for one’s peace of mind.

  ‘Who are you?’ She looked at him narrowly and her heart picked up pace. He absolutely towered over her.

  ‘Ah. Introductions. Now we’re getting somewhere. You only have to invite me in and normality can be resumed without further delay.’

  Because this sure as hell wasn’t normal.

  Theo Rushing had just spent the past four-and-a-half hours in second gear, manoeuvring ridiculously narrow streets in increasingly inhospitable weather conditions, and cursing himself for actually thinking that it would be a good idea to get in his car and deal with this mission himself, instead of doing the sensible thing and handing it over to one of his employees to sort out.

  But this trip had been a personal matter and he hadn’t wanted to delegate.

  In fact, what he wanted was very simple. The cottage into which he had yet to be invited.

  He anticipated getting it without too much effort. After all, he had money and, from what his sources had told him, the cottage—deep in the heart of the Cotswolds and far from anything anyone could loosely describe as civilisation—was still owned by the couple who had originally bought it, which, as far as Theo was concerned, was a miracle in itself. How long could one family live somewhere where the only view was of uninterrupted countryside and the only possible downtime activity would be tramping over open fields? It worked for him, though, because said couple would surely be contemplating retirement to somewhere less remote...

  The only matter for debate would be the price.

  But he wanted the cottage, and he was going to get it, because it was the only thing he could think of that would put some of the vitality back into his mother’s life.

  Of course, on the list of priorities, the cottage was way down below her overriding ambition to see him married off, an ambition that had reached an all-time high ever since her stroke several months ago.

  But that was never going to happen. He had seen first-hand the way love could destroy. He had watched his mother retreat from life when her husband, his father, had been killed suddenly and without warning when they should have been enjoying the bliss of looking towards their future, the young, energetic couple with their only child. Theo had only been seven at the time but he’d been sharp enough to work out that, had his mother not invested her entire life, the whole essence of her being, in that fragile thing called love, then she wouldn’t have spent the following decades living half a life.

  So the magic and power of love was something he could q
uite happily do without, thanks very much. It was a slice of realism his mother stoutly refused to contemplate and Theo had given up trying to persuade her into seeing his point of view. If she wanted to cling to unrealistic fantasies about him bumping into the perfect woman, then so be it. His only concession was that he would no longer introduce her to any of his imperfect women who, he knew from experience, never managed to pull away from the starting block as far as his mother was concerned.

  Which just left the cottage.

  Lavender Cottage...his parents’ first home...the place where he had been conceived...and the house his mother had fled when his father had had his fatal accident. Fog...a lorry going over the speed limit... His father on his bicycle hadn’t stood a chance...

  Marita Rushing had been turned into a youthful widow and she had never recovered. No one had ever stood a chance against the perfect ghost of his father. She was still a beautiful woman but when you looked at her you didn’t see the huge dark eyes or the dramatic black hair... When you looked at her all you saw was the sadness of a life dedicated to memories.

  And recently she had wanted to return to the place where those memories resided.

  Nostalgia, in the wake of her premature stroke, had become her faithful companion and she wanted finally to come to terms with the past and embrace it. Returning to the cottage, he had gathered, was an essential part of that therapy.

  Right now, she was in Italy, and had been for the past six weeks, visiting her sister. Reminiscing about the cottage, about her desire to return there to live out her final days, had been replaced by disturbing insinuations that she might just return to Italy and call it quits with England.

  ‘You’re barely ever in the country,’ she had grumbled a couple of weeks earlier, which was something Theo had not been able to refute. ‘And when you are, well, what am I but the ageing mother you are duty-bound to visit? It’s not as though there will ever be a daughter-in-law for me, or grandchildren, or any of those things a woman of my age should be looking forward to. What is the point of my being in London, Theo? I would see the same amount of you if I lived in Timbuktu.’