by Penny Jordan
‘They began their married lives together in the Dower House,’ she found herself admitting reluctantly.
As he surveyed her averted profile Finn felt a dangerous thread of unwanted tenderness for her curl itself sinuously around his heart. He itched to take hold of her and shake her for her stubbornness, and at the same time he ached to hold her, to banish from her eyes and her voice the pain he could see and hear in them. ‘You were very close to both your grandparents?’ he guessed.
Maggie couldn’t deny it. ‘Very,’ she agreed shortly, and then to her own consternation she heard herself telling him unsteadily, ‘They gave me a home, security, love, when my own parents—’ She stopped and shook her head, her mouth compressing, her expression betraying how much she regretted saying as much as she had.
But Finn ignored the invisible ‘keep out’ signs she was posting and pressed on ruthlessly. She intrigued him, baffled him, infuriated him, and made him ache with the intensity of those emotions. He was determined to find out just what it was that made her tick, what it was that made her so antagonistic towards him. ‘When your own parents what?’ he asked her.
Maggie closed her eyes. This was a conversation she wished she had never begun. She never talked about her parents to anyone. Not even her girlfriends knew how frightened, how insecure, how unwanted the careless, casual attitude of her mother and her father had made her feel.
She could still see the look of irritation on her mother’s face when she had begged her to attend her school play.
‘Oh, darling, no. James is taking me out to dinner tonight, and anyway you wouldn’t really want me to be there, would you? You know how bored I would be…’
Oh, yes, Maggie had known how bored she would be, how bored she so often was with Maggie herself.
‘Nothing,’ Maggie denied fiercely in answer to Finn’s question.
As she turned away from him, because she didn’t want Finn to see her expression, she wasn’t prepared for the sudden movement he made as he levered his body away from the wall and strode towards her, grasping her shoulders with his hands before she could escape.
‘They hurt you didn’t they, Maggie?’ he guessed. ‘They—’
‘No.’ Maggie hurled the denial at him like a thunderbolt, but she could hear in her voice, as clearly as she knew he must be able to himself, the fear and anguish that made a mockery of her lie.
‘Maggie…’
‘I don’t want to talk about it. It isn’t any of your business anyway. My parents were no different from countless other people of their generation, believing that they had a right to put themselves and their own happiness first. Their mistake was in having a child like me, who wanted…’
To her own horror Maggie could feel her eyes filling with tears. Frantically she tried to wrench herself out of Finn’s grasp, lifting her gaze furiously to his and then stiffening as she saw the compassion in his eyes.
Every ounce of her tensed body shrieked a silent scream of outrage that Finn could almost hear as he recognised how furiously she was rejecting his pity for the child she must have been.
‘No, Maggie,’ he corrected her gently. ‘Their mistake was in not valuing the gift they had been given.’
Something about the dark warmth of his voice was compelling her to look at him, to relax into him, to lift her face towards his and…
As he looked down into the cloudy emotion of her brown eyes Finn knew that he was lost. His gaze skimmed her face, her mouth. Her mouth…
Maggie could feel the soft groan he gave vibrating through his body. Feel it? What on earth was she doing standing so close to him? Frantically she pulled away from him, her eyes brilliant with tiny shards of anger.
‘I’ve had enough of this,’ she told him furiously. ‘I’m leaving—now.’
Quickly she spun round on her heel, heading for the front door.
‘Admirable exit line though that was, I’m afraid that you aren’t going to be able to go anywhere,’ Finn told her dryly.
Not leave? He wasn’t going to let her leave? Anger battled against fiercely sensual pleasure and excitement—and lost.
‘What do you mean?’ Maggie made herself challenge him. What was she going to do if he absolutely refused to let her go, if he insisted on keeping her here with him? A shocking thrill ripped through her, heating her face—and her body—with dangerously inflammatory secret thoughts and memories.
‘Take a look outside,’ Finn invited her, going to open the front door.
Whilst they had been arguing the afternoon had darkened into dusk, but it wasn’t the darkness that made Maggie gasp in disbelief as she stared out of the open door, her chagrin that he hadn’t, after all, been speaking out of a desire to keep her with him obliterated by the sight that greeted her disbelieving gaze. Whilst they had been arguing dusk wasn’t the only thing that had fallen. Everything was covered in a thick blanket of snow—snow that was still falling, driven by a strong and very cold wind, so that in the corners of the building it was already forming peaked drifts. The side of her car was a mask of white, only the double row of trees marking where the drive lay.
Maggie gulped and looked at Finn.
‘It probably looks worse than it is. Once I get to the main road…’
‘No way,’ Finn told her, shaking his head. ‘They were giving out blizzard warnings earlier, urging people not to travel. These country roads—even the A roads,’ he added dryly, ‘are subject to heavy drifting. I’d have second thoughts about driving in this in the Land Rover, and there’s no way I’m going to let you take the risk of going out in it.’
‘There were blizzard warnings?’ Maggie demanded, glowering at him. ‘Why on earth didn’t you say something…tell me?’
That was a question Finn had been asking himself from the moment he had seen her arrive. And one he had still found no satisfactory answer to—at least not one which would satisfy any logical criteria! ‘You didn’t give me much chance,’ he pointed out. ‘You were determined to say your piece, and…’
Maggie shook her head in disbelief. ‘Now what am I going to do?’
‘There’s only one thing you can do,’ Finn told her. ‘You’ll have to spend the night here.’
Maggie gritted her teeth against her ire and exasperation.
‘What kind of county is this?’ she demanded irritably. Its extraordinarily changeable weather conditions had to be peculiar to the area; there had certainly been nothing on her car radio as she had driven west to warn her of impending blizzard conditions! Impassable fords, snow in November. ‘That’s twice now we’ve been marooned together. You’d never get anything like this happening in London,’ she told Finn irritably as she surveyed the inhospitable not to say downright dangerous arctic scene in front of her.
As the wind twisted blowing an icy sheet of snow over her she stepped back into the warmth of the house. Already her face and hands were stinging from the cold.
‘What about the alpaca?’ she asked Finn anxiously. ‘Will they be all right?’
Finn busied himself closing the door before answering her. He didn’t want her to guess that he was smiling. ‘The alpaca will be fine,’ he assured her, keeping his face as straight as he could. ‘They’re used to the cold.’
‘But the little ones? The babies?’ Maggie protested, remembering the young animals she had seen with their mothers.
‘They’ll be fine,’ Finn repeated.
She was looking at the closed door almost as though she was going to rush through it and check on the animals herself, which might prove rather embarrassing, seeing as they were all tucked up safely in a specially enclosed field complete with protective bales of hay and an open barn to go into for shelter. He and Shane had moved them there only this morning, after hearing the weather forecast. The same forecast he had omitted to mention to Maggie!
‘In your grandmother’s time there would have been deer in the park,’ he told Maggie, intending to distract her. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting her. She must know qu
ite a lot about the recent history of the house if she lived here. The two sons of the family who would have owned it at that time were both killed during the War, and the estate then passed to a second cousin who already owned a much larger estate in Scotland.’
‘What do you mean, you’re looking forward to meeting my grandmother?’ Maggie interrupted him ominously. ‘I’ve already told you, she won’t be coming here.’
There was a long pause before Finn asked her with deliberate emphasis, ‘Are you really prepared to do that, Maggie? Let me ask you something. If it were anyone else but me offering you a lease on the Dower House would you refuse it?’
Maggie bit her lip.
‘I don’t want to discuss the subject any longer,’ she told him sharply, adding in a very formal and grand voice, ‘If you would just direct me to my room?’ Pointedly she lifted her eyebrows and looked at Finn.
‘Your room. Mmm…Unfortunately, there’s a slight problem. As yet there is only one functional bedroom…’
‘One bedroom?’ Maggie repeated warily.
Soft brown eyes clashed with winter-blue.
‘One bedroom,’ Finn agreed softly.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ONE bedroom!
And they had spent what was left of the fast-fading daylight arguing about which of them was going to occupy it—or rather which of them was going to make the noble gesture of sleeping in the drawing room on one of its two sofas.
In the end Finn had won, but only because she had allowed him to, Maggie defended her own capitulation mentally. Only because he had thrown down a trump card by declaring, ‘Since this is my home, I rather think that the decision of who sleeps where lies rather more in my hands than yours, Maggie. And, as your host, I fully intend to claim the right of giving up my bed for my guest.’
Maggie had clenched her teeth together at those words ‘host’ and ‘guest’, but in the end she had had to give in. And now here she was, standing in Finn’s bedroom, staring out of the window into the starlit snow-covered landscape. Turning her back on it, she faced the bed. Something she had deliberately been avoiding doing since Finn had shown her up here half an hour ago, suggesting that she ‘make herself at home’ whilst he cooked them a meal.
It was, as she might have expected given the size of the room—and Finn himself—very large. Very large. Large enough not just for two adults but potentially large enough for a handful of children as well. Children! Now, where had that thought come from? And, far more disconcertingly, why?
Concentrate on the room as it is, Maggie warned herself. Instead of fantasising about…about things there is totally no point whatsoever in even thinking about—or even wanting to think about!
Its high ceiling and decorative plasterwork were typical of the period of the house, and someone—Finn—had washed the walls in a fresh covering of subtly tinted bluey-green paint, picking out the plasterwork in white and a denser colour of the tint. But, whilst Maggie would normally have thoroughly approved of the plain white bedding and bare stripped floorboards, somehow the room cried out for something softer and warmer.
That floor would be so cold on those little bare feet as their owners came rushing into their parents’ room to join them in bed, and one would have little inclination to linger for long intimate embraces en route from bathroom to bed, surely, without the softness of a thick carpet to curl one’s toes into. No, what this room needed was the sensually rich fabrics that its original builder must have favoured, and furniture, too: the kind of furniture owned by her grandmother, furniture one polished with traditional beeswax and lavender polish.
Maggie gave a faint sigh and then blinked. Just for one suffocating second, whilst she had been looking absently at the bed, she had somehow or other seen Finn lying there, propped up against the pillows, his body bare, lean, muscular and oh, so inviting, his hair ruffled from sleep, his jaw malely rough, his mouth curling invitingly as he looked at her…
Quickly Maggie blinked again, banishing the wickedly tantalising image. In the room’s en suite bathroom she tidied herself up, and placed the clean warm towels Finn had taken from the airing cupboard and given to her on a stool. The huge towelling robe he had given her, which was patently one of his, she determinedly placed at the bottom of the pile.
It was time she went back downstairs. If she didn’t Finn might actually start thinking that she wanted him to come looking for her. As she hurried to the bedroom door she glanced towards the window, her forehead furrowing in a darkly accusing frown. It had started to snow again. It was almost as though the weather was determined to cause her problems, to keep her here with Finn.
‘We’ll have to eat in here,’ Finn announced as Maggie walked into the kitchen. ‘I suppose ultimately I’m going to have to get designers in to revamp the place, but at the moment—’
‘Why didn’t you tell me that you used to work in the City?’
The abruptness of her unplanned question made Maggie wish she hadn’t asked. The high standards and professionalism she normally demanded of herself made her blush with embarrassment at her own unfamiliar gaucheness, but to her relief, instead of reacting with a cool put-down, Finn looked at her searchingly for a few seconds before replying quietly, ‘It’s a part of my life I’ve put behind me and which has no real relevance to the way I live now other than that the money I made then has made it possible for me to choose my own future.’
‘You can’t say that,’ Maggie objected immediately. ‘Everything that happens in a person’s life has relevance.’
‘You mean like your own relationship with your parents?’ Finn countered.
Brown eyes met blue, the pride and pain in the brown an immediate barrier to the challenging masked compassion in blue.
‘Whatever unhappiness I experienced through my parents’ lack of love for me was more than outweighed by the love of my grandparents,’ Maggie defended herself sharply. ‘You, on the other hand, are obviously hanging on to your bad feelings about city life and city people.’
She had a very quick and incisive mind, Finn acknowledged with reluctant admiration, If there was one thing he did miss about city living in his current solitary life, it was the buzz that the exchange of conversation, opinions, news and views with other like-minded people had given him.
‘Not really,’ he denied, giving a small shrug as he told her, ‘It’s simply that I’ve moved on inwardly, as well as physically, and the man I am now wants a hell of a lot more out of life than material success. And besides…’ He paused, opening the oven door to study its contents before adding sombrely, with just enough contempt in his voice to make Maggie’s face sting with angry resentment, ‘I’ve seen too many people damaged or destroyed by the pursuit of wealth and success—driven to abuse themselves and others by their fear of what they consider to be failure—to have any illusions left.’
‘It isn’t city living that causes that,’ Maggie protested.
‘Maybe not, but it doesn’t help. The lasagne is just about ready,’ he informed Maggie. ‘And, since they say that arguing is not conducive to good digestion, I suggest that we find something else to talk about.’
‘I’ve got an even better idea,’ Maggie told him acerbically, adding without waiting for his response, ‘Why don’t we just eat in silence?’
‘A silent woman! Is there such a thing?’ Finn mocked her as he removed the lasagne from the oven.
Maggie threw him a murderous look, but somehow managed to restrain herself from making any verbal response.
Half an hour later, her stomach deliciously full, her earlier antagonism and with it her mental vow to herself momentarily forgotten, Maggie announced, ‘That was good. I hadn’t realised how hungry I was.’ She stopped abruptly as she realised what she had done, but instead of taunting her for breaking her self-imposed silence, Finn simply looked at her.
When she forgot to be on her guard against him there was an endearing sweetness about her which gripped him by the throat and the heart. And wasn’t his body wel
l and truly reacting to that knowledge, and to her? He could feel his glance sliding dangerously towards her mouth, the appetite he wanted to satisfy having nothing whatsoever to do with food, and he hastily dragged it back before Maggie could see.
If he had thought the buzz he had once got from the City traders’ always-on-the-edge lifestyle possessed too much dangerous and addictive excitement, it was nothing to the charge this reckless game of advance and retreat he and Maggie were now putting one another through. But, despite what common sense and caution were telling him, he still couldn’t resist the opportunity presenting itself to him.
‘A city woman who likes to eat. Now you have surprised me. Although I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, after all…’ There was a gleam in his eyes when he paused that made Maggie’s muscles tense as she waited for the blow she knew was about to fall. But when it came it was not what she had been expecting, and its effect was so devastating that she suspected her reaction must have given her away completely. ‘After all,’ Finn continued in a softly sensual voice that felt like male fingers stroking her skin, ‘They do say that a woman with a healthy appetite for sex has a healthy appetite for all the pleasures of life. Another glass of wine?’ he offered, indicating the bottle of red wine he had opened when they had begun their meal.
‘No! No, thank you,’ Maggie amended in a calmer voice as she battled against her reaction to his soft words.
A healthy appetite for sex. Did he have to remind her…to torment her…?
‘Perhaps it’s stopped snowing. Perhaps I can leave after all.’ Maggie knew that she was gabbling, giving away her panic, and her movements were flustered as she started to stand up and then sat down again very quickly as Finn moved towards her and reached out for her empty dinner plate. If she stood up now she would be standing right next to him. Just the thought of that happening was enough to make her whole body quiver as tiny rushes of nervous excitement darted through her. Agitatedly she picked up her wine glass and drank from it. She knew that Finn was watching her, and that was making her feel even more nervous.