by Liz Fielding
‘Not at all!’ she replied, far too quickly, afraid that he was about to say something truly outrageous. ‘The world already has enough people, don’t you think?’ she continued, in an effort to recover herself, but from Harry’s shocked expression she realised she had not succeeded. ‘But that’s not the reason for the sale,’ she rushed on, before he could say anything. ‘It’s really impossible to justify such a reckless waste of fuel for one person’s convenience in this day and age. It doesn’t even have a catalytic convertor like the American version and I promised Julian...’
The frown creasing the space between dark brows deepened. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ he demanded.
She bridled at his tone. ‘In Julian’s opinion we should all be using public transport.’
‘Is that so?’ He shook his head. ‘I didn’t think they had buses in Antarctica.’ She didn’t bother to reply and he sat back, regarding her thoughtfully. ‘But you’re not going to live at the South Pole are you, Faith? You’ve just been having a little joke at my expense.’
‘When you thought you were the one doing all the teasing?’ she said, grateful to be off the subject of babies.
‘How wrong can you get?’
He wasn’t amused and she gave an awkward little shrug. ‘Julian’s been offered a post at Cambridge.’
‘So, that’s why you’ve left your job at the bank.’
‘No, I could have transferred to another branch, but it would have meant giving up what I’m doing now. I’m going to start my own consultancy.’
‘Financial advice for environmentally concerned scientists? I’m sure Cambridge is overrun with them. But have they got any money to invest?’
‘Don’t mock it, Harry. We can’t all be born with a silver spoon in our mouth or inherit a vast estate to keep us in luxury, but we’re all looking for financial security. It’s just that some of us are fussy about how the profits are made.’
‘Well,’ he said, as he held the door for her, ‘fortunately Cambridge is flat. You’ll be able to manage with a bike. You can always put a basket on the front for the shopping.’
She swung her legs out of the car and rose to her feet, refusing to be tormented for another moment. ‘No basket,’ she said. He hadn’t stepped back as she unfolded herself from the car and now she was standing so close that she was assaulted by his own special scent overlaid with the cloth of his jacket, leather and something heady and intoxicating, a scent that seemed to catch in her throat. Yet she mustn’t step away, retreat, betray the power he possessed to weaken every resolve. Instead she lifted her chin, met his eyes head on. ‘If I’m going to ride a bicycle,’ she declared, ‘it’ll be something sleek and fast with dropped handle-bars and dozens of gears—’ She stuttered to a halt under his provoking gaze.
‘In green, no doubt.’
‘Green?’ Stung, she retaliated. ‘Not green, Harry. Red. Bright pillar box red.’
Harry’s mouth twisted into a smile that was pure mockery. ‘East Anglian winters can be cold, you know. Nothing like the Antarctic of course, but you’ll freeze on a bike in that flimsy underwear. If you take my advice you’ll swop your frills for something more substantial.’
‘When I want your advice, Harry, I’ll ask for it.’ She turned away from the speculative look he was giving her. ‘What is this place? It doesn’t look like a pub.’
‘It’s not. This is my toy factory.’
She almost felt her jaw drop open. ‘Toy factory?’
‘I thought you might be interested.’
The door, painted black, looked conventional enough, except that there was no obvious way of opening it. ‘The lock is voice operated,’ Harry explained. He took a small card from his pocket and handed it to her. ‘This is the code. Why don’t you try it?’ Faith looked at him uncertainly. ‘Just read it.’
She glanced at it. ‘Is this your idea of a joke?’
‘It’s only a line of poetry, Faith. Chosen completely at random.’
She doubted that, but she gave a tiny shrug and began to quote, stiffly from the card. ‘“Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove...”’
‘There now, that wasn’t so hard was it?’
‘The door didn’t open,’ she pointed out.
‘Perhaps if you invested your voice with a little warmth?’ She glared at him. ‘No? Of course, you’re right. You could recite until Christmas and it wouldn’t open for you.’ Harry put the card in his pocket and, as he took her hands in his, repeated the lines from Marlowe’s poem with an intensity of feeling that made her blush, the door swung open.
She was impressed, but she wasn’t about to show it. ‘Very funny. Can we go now?’
‘Don’t you want to see the rest of my toys?’
‘Toys?’ Of course she did, but she wasn’t about to admit it. ‘I would have thought a grown man had something better to do with his time.’
‘It’s a very profitable pastime. Surely as a banker that’s of some interest to you?’
Her interest was aroused but she gave a little shrug. ‘What kind of toys do you make? Not the kind of thing you’d give an infant for her birthday, I imagine.’
‘You imagine right. I design security systems.’
‘Hence the fancy door?’
‘It’s just a bit of fun. I change the code to suit the client.’
She knew it. He’d programmed it especially to embarrass her. ‘Is that all it is for you? A bit of fun?’
Suddenly he wasn’t joking. ‘No, Faith. I employ a team of highly skilled people to make and install my systems and I have a waiting list of clients happy to pay for the privilege. Wickham Hall may be a luxury, but it is an expensive one.’
‘Why did you bring me here, Harry?’ she demanded.
‘Maybe I need a business loan.’ She waited. ‘Or maybe I just don’t like being thought a layabout.’
‘I don’t believe you. You don’t care tuppence what anyone thinks of you.’
‘And you don’t care tuppence for me.’
He’d been flirting with her, tormenting a weakness that he had perceived in the carefully erected armour. It was all a game to him and he was clearly an expert. She flinched as he took her arm. He saw, but he had done with teasing.
‘Come on, Faith,’ he said, abruptly. ‘Let’s go and have dinner.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE restaurant was cool and inviting, the river reflecting off the low, heavily-beamed ceiling giving the impression almost of being on board a ship.
‘This is lovely,’ Faith said, looking around her once they had been settled at a quiet table by the window and determined to get the evening back to a less personal track. She sipped her drink. ‘Do you come here a lot? The staff seem to know you very well.’ Polite, but formal. She was pleased with herself.
He gave her the benefit of a long thoughtful look, but didn’t confirm or deny it. ‘The food’s very good,’ he said, finally, as if that was explanation enough.
Faith studied the menu, satisfied that he had got the message. ‘I wonder if the smoked trout will be as good as Mac’s?’
‘There’s every chance. Why don’t you ask him?’
She raised her eyes above the menu. ‘Is he here?’ Harry too had lifted his head, but he was looking at someone behind her. She turned to find Mac standing at her shoulder.
‘You decided to stay at the Hall after all?’ he said, surprising her with the warmth of his smile, apparently genuinely pleased to see her.
‘I had my arm twisted—’
‘Not by me,’ Harry cut in and she favoured him with the briefest glare.
‘—but I’ll be leaving tomorrow. Dinner is Harry’s way of saying thank you. And goodbye.’ She said the word with a finality that was unmistakable. ‘Would you like to join us, Mac, or are you with someone?’
‘Mac’s presence is required in the kitchen,’ Harry intervened, smoothly. ‘Faith wanted to know if the trout was as good as the one you brought up to the house
the other night, Mac.’
‘Oh, yes, I would say so. Why don’t you try a little creamed horseradish with it?’
Faith glanced from one man to the other and the penny dropped. ‘Oh, I see. This is Mac’s place down by the river, right?’
‘Right,’ Harry confirmed.
‘Thanks to the Major—’
‘We’re not in the army now, Mac. If you can’t call me Harry I’ll start eating somewhere else.’ He closed the menu. ‘We’ll both have the trout. And you can surprise us after that. You don’t mind being surprised do you, Faith?’ His voice hinted at a challenge. She was more than up to it.
‘If it’s Mac doing the surprising, Harry, I look forward to it.’
‘You’ll not be disappointed.’ The Scot grinned at Faith and she wondered why she had ever thought him dour. Maybe he’d just had enough of nappies and screaming babies on the first occasion they met. ‘I’m glad you were able to stay for a while.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Faith demanded the moment he had gone. ‘You let me make an idiot of myself with all that talk about small business loans.’
‘I didn’t think you were an idiot and neither did Mac. You were very perceptive in fact. When I discovered how rocky the estate was after my father died he did suggest turning the place into an upmarket hotel and restaurant.’
‘But you couldn’t do that.’
‘I had to do something or put the place on the market. But I value my privacy, hence the “toy” factory. It was touch and go for a while but the threat of losing something precious concentrates the mind wonderfully. And it was all I had left.’ He gave an awkward shrug, as if he had said too much. ‘But I owed Mac something and this place was vacant.’
‘So you offered it to him instead?’
‘Little enough for saving my life.’ Faith wanted to ask the obvious question. It hung in the silence between them. ‘It was a bomb.’
‘A bomb?’ She almost gagged on the word.
‘That’s what I did before I retired from the army. Bomb disposal. In this case something uncovered by construction workers.’ He continued, his voice quite without expression.
‘Bomb disposal?’ The very idea made her feel sick.
‘Just the job for a reckless little boy prone to climbing out of bedroom windows, don’t you think?’
‘It... It doesn’t appear to have been a long term career move. What happened?’
‘It was a heap of rust. No one was sure what it was. We all assumed it was a false alarm and, stupidly, I walked over to take a look just as it went off. Mac dragged me clear, did something magic with a tourniquet and kept me alive until the medics arrived.’ His smile was crooked. ‘You’re looking a little pale, Faith. Shall we skip the gory details?’
She didn’t need the gory details. She’d seen the result. ‘I’m fine,’ she lied. ‘As I told you, I’ve seen far worse injuries at the swimming club.’
‘In other words I really shouldn’t feel sorry for myself?’ There was an ironic challenge behind the words that made her bristle.
‘No, Harry. After all, you’ve got more than most people could ever dream of. Even your business is a hobby.’
‘A hobby that pays the wages of a dozen people and keeps the roof over my head. But you’re right about the bomb. I was careless; I’m just glad that someone else was using his head that day and no one else was hurt. However I lost the two things that meant most to me at the time. My job and the girl I was going to marry.’
Clementine? Clementine had dumped him? Confused she said, ‘You could have lost your life.’
‘And one must be grateful?’
‘There are other job, other girls. You only have one life.’
‘You are a pragmatist, Miss Bridges.’
‘And it takes a romantic to be a hero?’
‘A hero?’ A small sound signalled his disgust with the word. ‘An idiot. My only excuse is that I was getting married that weekend and I had my mind on other things.’ His mouth tightened in a self-deprecating little smile.
His bride-to-be. What man in his right mind wouldn’t have been thinking about her? But conscious that she had forced something into the open that he would rather not discuss, she said, ‘I knew you were in the army. Aunt Janet has a photograph of you in your uniform.’
‘In a silver frame. I know. My mother gave it to her. It was cheaper than a pension,’ he said, bitterly.
‘But she has a pension— Oh, I see. That was you.’ He neither confirmed nor denied it and Faith was aware of a dark mood settling over him. Guilt poked hard at her conscience. She had accused him openly of idleness and she had been wrong. Far worse, deep inside she had tried him and found him guilty of walking out on a woman who loved him but she had been wrong about that too. She didn’t know what had happened, but it was obviously nothing so simple.
They said that confession was good for the soul. She would try it. Maybe it would help. ‘I thought you’d jilted Clementine,’ she said.
‘I noticed. Why does it bother you so much?’
‘Because it happened to me.’ He looked up sharply. ‘At the same time. Aunt Janet was planning to wear the same grand outfit to both our weddings.’
‘Oh, I see.’ He let out a long breath, as if he had been holding it forever. ‘You must have been very young. What happened?’
‘Oh, nothing dramatic.’ She braved a smile. ‘No row, there’s wasn’t another girl, he just got cold feet. He went to Canada two days before the wedding.’
‘Canada?’
‘The foreign legion wouldn’t have occurred to him. He didn’t have that much imagination.’ That was supposed to make him laugh, but he didn’t laugh, didn’t say anything. ‘He has a software business now.’ As well as a Canadian wife and two Canadian children. It wasn’t marriage he had run from, just her.
‘Is that why you’re marrying Julian Fellowes even though you don’t love him?’
Was it? Did it matter? She refused to think about it. Laughed the idea away. ‘Oh, Harry, I’ve been in love dozens of times since then. Hundreds of times.’
He didn’t respond to her brittle attempt at gaiety, but regarded her intently. ‘I haven’t known you long, Faith, but I find that difficult to believe.’
She dropped her eyes to the tablecloth. ‘Well, perhaps I was exaggerating. Just a little.’
‘Just a little? I’ve only managed the falling in love thing once.’ He stretched across the table, lifted her chin so that she had no choice but meet his eyes. ‘I’d consider it a kindness if you could show me how it’s done.’
The touch of his fingers was sending tremors through her. She wanted to show him. Take him in her arms and tell him that love wasn’t something you could learn. It was something rare and wonderful that just happened. Out of the blue.
‘You broke off the engagement for her, didn’t you?’ She felt her voice tremble. ‘Let her go?’
He dropped his hand. ‘Well I couldn’t saddle the poor girl with the wreckage of the man she thought she was getting.’
‘But you’re not—’
‘No?’ He was holding onto his feelings, but his eyes were shadowed. ‘Well, perhaps not as much as everyone was convinced I was going to be. But Clemmie was built for fun. She took one look at me lying in my hospital bed and had hysterics.’
‘I don’t think she would now.’
‘No?’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe not. But I’m not the Harry March in Janet’s photograph am I? Not the life and soul of the party, Harry March. Not the Harry March that made other girls envious of her. Not the same man at all.’
No. He was older, wiser and infinitely more desirable. ‘You make her sound very shallow. She might have been attracted by the way you looked, but it takes more than that to fall in love.’
‘Maybe. But the thing I kept asking myself was how I would have felt if the situation had been reversed? If she had been lying in a hospital bed with her face in ruins and the very real possibility that she might lose a leg?’
Harry wasn’t looking at her, but into the glass he was holding, staring into the bottom of it as if it might be able to offer him the answers he sought.
‘Did you come up with an answer?’
He refused to meet her eyes. ‘Only that I wasn’t going to inflict that on her.’
‘You didn’t give her a chance, Harry.’
‘To prove how noble she was?’ His mouth tightened. ‘Would you want someone to marry you because it was the noble thing to do? How long do you think it would last before one of us ended up hating the other?’ He lifted his shoulders, not quite a shrug. ‘The wedding had to be cancelled anyway, so I suggested she take one of her friends to Bermuda and have some fun.’
‘Bermuda? Why Bermuda? Oh—’ That’s where they were going for their honeymoon.
He looked up. ‘A friend had loaned us the villa. It seemed a shame to waste the tickets.’
He hadn’t heard of travel insurance? Or was she being too practical, too level-headed? ‘Surely she didn’t go?’ No girl could bear to walk away from the man she was supposed to love and use the honeymoon they had planned as an escape from reality? Could she? She saw from his face that Clemmie Norwood could. And had.
‘It was only when she’d gone that I realised how much I wanted her to tell me not to be so stupid, that we’d get married in the hospital chapel right away and nothing would matter except being together. The fact that she went at all told me everything I needed to know, I didn’t wait for her to give me back my ring. Pride’ll get you through all kinds of pain, Faith.’
‘That’s what Janet meant?’
‘That and more. In the end it was pride that made me cling to a shattered leg when consultants and common sense suggested otherwise. I had this idea in my head you see that one day, at a party, I would walk up to her and quite casually ask her to dance. And afterwards, simply walk away. Just to let her know that she’d been wrong.’
‘And did you?’
‘Well, the walking bit took longer than I thought.’ He managed a wry smile. ‘By the time I was sufficiently mobile to dance she was married to someone else and too advanced in pregnancy to tango.’