by Penny Jordan
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 t
hat 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.
CHAPTER TWO
MAGGIE finished the call she had just made to her assistant explaining to her what had happened and asking her to organise the cancellation and reissue of her credit cards.
‘Do you want them sent direct to you where you are?’ Gayle had asked her.
‘Er, no…Get them to send them to the hotel for me instead, please Gayle. Oh, and when you report what’s happened to my insurance company and the garage make sure they know I’m going to need a courtesy car, will you?’
She had kept the details of what had happened brief, cutting through Gayle’s shocked exclamations after she had retreated to the room Finn Gordon had shown her to, clutching the mobile telephone he had loaned her. It galled her to have to ask him for anything, and she frowned now as she quickly dialled her grandmother’s number. She hadn’t told her what she was planning to do, had simply fibbed instead that she was going away on business for a few days.
The fraility in Arabella Russell’s voice when she answered Maggie’s call choked Maggie’s own voice with emotion.
Standing outside the partially open door, with the cup of tea he had made for his unexpected and unwanted guest, Finn heard the soft liquid note of love in her voice as she asked, ‘Are you all right, darling?’
Stepping back sharply from the door, he wondered why the knowledge that there was a man, a lover in Maggie’s life should be so unwelcome.
They had exchanged names earlier, with a reluctance and formality which in other circumstances he would have found ruefully amusing. Despite her bedraggled state, Maggie still managed to look far too desirable for his comfort. He had tried to reassure himself that his preference was and always had been for brunettes, and that he preferred blue eyes to brown, but he had still found himself staring at her for just that little bit too long.
Her call to her grandmother over, Maggie examined her surroundings. The room Finn had shown her to was large, and mercifully possessed its own bathroom. Its dormer windows looked out onto fields, beyond which lay some awesomely steep hills clothed in trees. The autumn light was already fading. What on earth was she going to do, stuck here until the river subsided? Maggie wondered bitterly.
Her request to her ‘host’ for access to his computer so that she could e-mail Gayle had met with a grim and uncompromising, ‘I don’t have one. I prefer to choose whom I allow to intrude into my life.’
Which had been a dig at her as well as
a reinforcement of his dislike of technology, Maggie suspected. The man was positively Neanderthal. Everyone had a computer. Everyone, that was, but this farmer she had managed to get herself trapped with. Crossly Maggie acknowledged that if fate had done it deliberately to annoy her it couldn’t have produced a man who would antagonise and irritate her more, or whose lifestyle was so much the opposite of hers. So far as she was concerned the river could not go down fast enough—and not just because of the impending auction.
In his kitchen, Finn was listening to the local weather forecast on the radio. As yet no one had been able to come up with any an explanation for the freak storm that had been so oddly localised and which, it seemed, had caused chaos which was only limited to within a few miles of the farm.
Finn hoped the river would be crossable in time for the auction. He preferred to bid in person rather than by phone; he liked to see the faces of his competitors so that he could gauge their strengths and weaknesses. Not that he was expecting to have much competition for the estate so far as the main house and the agricultural land went. However, when it came to the estate cottages it was a different matter. There was no way he wanted second home owners or holidaymakers living on his land. No, what he wanted was his privacy. What he wanted—
He turned round as the kitchen door opened and Maggie walked in. She had removed the jacket of her suit and the thin silk blouse she was wearing revealed the soft swell of her breasts, surprisingly well rounded in such an otherwise fragile fine-boned woman. The sight of her in silk shirt, plain gold earrings and straight tailored black skirt, but minus her shoes, caused Finn to smile slightly.
Immediately her chin came up, her eyes flashing warningly. ‘One word,’ she cautioned him. ‘Just one word and I’ll…’
Finn couldn’t resist. ‘You’ll what?’ he goaded her. ‘Throw something at me? A shoe, perhaps?’
‘I’m a mature woman,’ Maggie told him through gritted teeth. ‘I do not throw things…ever.’