by Penny Jordan
'I didn't say I was press-ganged,' Sorrel said stiffly.
'You didn't have to,' came the dry response. 'It was written all over you.'
'Oh, I see. You only need to take one look at a person and you know immediately what they're thinking, is that it?' she snapped at him, and then was appalled with herself. How on earth had she allowed him to get so dangerously under her skin that he could provoke her this easily?
Dangerously under her skin? A tingle of apprehension shivered over her body.
'It seemed the most sensible solution. If we'd had the slightest idea that you—'
'Yeah, I know. Nothing would have persuaded you to come up here if you'd known you were going to have to spend three days alone with a man. Hell, I thought modern women were supposed to be fully emancipated. Let me tell you, lady, in Australia it's the male of the species who needs to protect himself from the female, not the other way around, especially if he's made himself a bit of money.'
'Really?' Sorrel looked down her nose at him. 'Am I to presume that you're speaking from personal experience or merely hearsay?'
There was a moment's silence, during which he gave her a lightning look of such chilling intensity that she almost shivered. She had struck a nerve there, no doubt about it, and privately she was astounded by her own recklessness. It was completely out of character for her to behave like this.
'Well, now,' he told her in a calm drawl, 'to use an American phrase, that's for me to know and you—'
'And you can keep the knowledge to yourself,' Sorrel interrupted him, hot flags of temper burning in her cheeks. She wasn't used to men who treated her like this: men who dominated their surroundings by their height and breadth, men who practically oozed sexuality in a way that was positively unnerving.
The kettle reached the boil and started to sing. Sorrel reached for it automatically, and then cried out as she forgot about the metal handle and scorched her skin.
Instantly Valentine was at her side, moving with surprising speed for such a large man, whipping up a cloth and removing the kettle from her burned hand, rushing her over to the sink to swish icy-cold water over her hot, blistered skin.
She tried to pull away, to regain control of the situation, but his body trapped her against the sink. She was a tall girl—taller, in fact, than Andrew and her father, but Valentine was at least a head taller. He made her feel fragile and vulnerable in a way that made her heart thump—or was that just the effect of the adrenalin released by her pain?
'Have you anything to put on this? ' he asked her tersely.
Sorrel nodded. 'There's a medicine chest upstairs in the bathroom. I'll get it. It will be quicker,' she added, when she saw he was going to object. 'It's only a small burn.'
Once upstairs, she refrained from giving in to the cowardly impulse to shut herself in the bedroom and stay there. Her mother had never dreamed of this outcome when she had cosily announced that Sorrel and her cousin could share the large double bed.
Valentine would simply have to sleep downstairs. But on what? There were only a couple of easy chairs in the kitchen, and no spare bedding at all.
When she got back downstairs, she found him pouring out two mugs of tea. He handed her one of the mugs, and although the tea was rather stronger than she liked she took it gratefully.
'So, how long are we likely to be cooped up here together?' he asked her once she had assured him that her hand, although painful, was not badly burned.
'Well, the twins go back to university at the end of the week, but I don't know how long the snow will last. Simon should be able to get through with the Land Rover.'
'But he won't arrive for another three days?'
Sorrel shook her head.
'Well, I guess unless the snow clears, we're stuck with one another.' He saw her face pale and raised his eyebrows.
'Burn bothering you?'
'No,' Sorrel told him shortly, in a voice that announced that she didn't like his questions.
'Well, something is,' he persisted, ignoring her coldness. 'Look, it's a long time since I last drove through snow, and since you've made it plain just how you feel about my company, if you could just show me where I'm supposed to sleep… ' He saw her face and frowned.
Wow what's wrong?'
There was no way she could avoid it. She looked at him and said hollowly, 'There's only one bedroom—furnished, I mean. You see, when Uncle Giles left, Mum and Dad moved the furniture out, just leaving the one bed for Simon when he comes here during the summer.'
His eyes narrowed disconcertingly, suddenly boring into her with an intentness nothing in his previous demeanour had led her to expect. She had the odd notion that she was suddenly seeing the real man, and that the cloak of bonhomie and laid-back insouciance he had shown her before was just exactly that. It gave her an uncomfortable jolt to be subjected to that hard grey stare.
'What do you mean, one bed?'
'Exactly what I said, 'Sorrel mumbled uncomfortably. 'The old bed that belonged to Gran and Gramps was so heavy that Mum and Dad left it. I brought clean bedding with me, of course, but only enough for that bed.'
There was a long pause, and then he said softly, 'I see… You mean that because your mother assumed that Val was short for Valerie and that I was therefore female, she saw no harm in the two of us sharing a bed.'
'She was panic-stricken,' Sorrel told him. 'She had no idea what to do. It was too late to get in touch with you to let you know the situation.'
'And that's why you've been behaving like a cat walking on hot desert sand, is it? The thought of having to sleep with me…'
'I am not going to sleep with you,' Sorrel told him indignantly, her face flaming. 'And yes, of course I was a little… embarrassed.'
'No need to be on my behalf,' he told her drily. 'You won't be the first woman I've shared a bed with.'
Sorrel stared at him, almost struck dumb with anger at his casual mockery of her. When she got her voice back, she said tightly, 'No, I'm sure I'm not. But unlike you, I haven't—' She broke off abruptly, but it was too late.
'You wouldn't by any chance be trying to tell me that you're still a virgin, would you?'
The way he said it made it sound as though she was some kind of freak, Sorrel thought wretchedly. Oh, what on earth had possessed her to be so stupid? Why hadn't she just kept quiet? She ached to be able to make some light-hearted comment that would cover her mistake and deceive him, but one look into those steel-grey eyes warned her that it was impossible. It was like looking into the heart of a steel trap.
'A virgin,' he mused, watching her. 'And you must be what…twenty-five—twenty-six?'
'Twenty-four, actually,' Sorrel snapped at him.
'You're not bad looking. Nice body… good legs,' he added appreciatively, skimming her body with thoughtful scrutiny. It's hard to guess what your breasts are like under that sweater, but my guess—'
He broke off as Sorrel gasped in indignation.
'Something wrong,' he asked her, lifting dark eyebrows.
'When I want your opinion on my body, I'll ask for it,' Sorrel told him grimly.
'No need to get so uptight. I was just curious to know why a woman like you hasn't had a lover. When I was your age…'
He was somewhere in his mid-thirties, Sorrel guessed, although, with the deep tanning of his skin and the tiny lines that fanned out from his eyes, it was hard to be accurate. There was certainly no grey in his hair. No discernible excess of flesh on his hard-muscled frame.
'I have no wish to know about your sexual experiences,' Sorrel told him frigidly.
'No man in your life, eh? Now…'
Sorrel had had enough. 'As a matter of fact, there is a man in my life. I'm engaged to be married, and if Andrew has too much respect for me to… to rush me into bed, then… '
She broke off as she heard his laughter. Hot spots of colour burned in her face as she glared at him.
'Too much respect? More like not enough guts,' Val told her forthrightly. 'Wha
t kind of man is he?'
'A decent, respectable, hardworking kind,' Sorrel told him grittily. 'Not that it's any business of yours.'
He was looking at her rather oddly, an almost devilish glint of amusement in his eyes.
'I see. And I suppose the sober, respectable… worthy fiancé would not approve of you spending the next three days and nights alone here with me?'
Sorrel opened her mouth to protest that Andrew would understand, and then she remembered how very narrow-minded he could be on occasions, how much importance he placed on respectability, and she swallowed back the words. He would understand, of course he would. And no one outside the family need know. The kind of speculation and gossip that Andrew would abhor wasn't going to arise because no one outside the family would ever know, would they?
She looked up and found that Val was watching her with cool amusement.
'Of course Andrew would understand,' she lied, tilting her chin and staring him down. 'He trusts me implicitly, and besides, there's no question of anything… well, illicit. It's just that there's been a mistake.'
'He trusts you, but he doesn't desire you. Sounds an odd basis for a lifetime commitment to me.'
'Just because sex isn't the most important part of our relationship, that's no reason to sneer at it,' Sorrel told him angrily.
'As far as I understand it, sex doesn't form any part of your relationship,' Val threw back at her. 'Lord, I thought your kind had gone out with the Victorians. What do the rest of the family think about this engagement?'
'They… they like Andrew,' Sorrel fibbed valiantly.
'You don't sound so certain. It seems to me that this engagement of yours has been a bad mistake.'
Sorrel couldn't believe her ears. She knew that Australians believed in frank speaking, but this was sheer rudeness. Thoroughly affronted, she opened her mouth to tell him that her private life was no concern of his when he forestalled her by changing the subject and saying, 'Any chance of anything to eat? We were late landing at Heathrow, and I never eat plane food.'
He made it sound as though he travelled a great deal, and Sorrel felt a faint unwanted stirring of curiosity about him.
His clothes, now that she looked at him properly, were expensive and well-tailored, despite their casual appearance. Looking at him, it would be impossible to judge just where he was from or what he did for a living.
'I've got a home-made shepherd's pie I could heat up. It will take about half an hour in the range.' She went to put it in. 'Your letter said that you had to come to England on business,' she went on abruptly. 'What kind of business?'
'I have a boat-building business in Perth, and I'm over here to check out a new British technique for making super-lightweight craft.'
'And you thought you'd look us up… just like that?'
Her aggression made him smile mockingly at her. Was there no way she could get under his skin the way he did hers? Sorrel thought crossly as she got the pie and put it in the oven, this time taking care to use protective oven gloves.
'Ancestry's very big back home at the moment. Something to do with the recent bicentennial fever, I guess. I knew that my family came originally from Wales, and I thought it might be interesting to have a go at seeing how far I could trace it back.'
'Llewellyn's a very common Welsh name,' Sorrel pointed out.
'I have a great-aunt who swears that she remembers hearing from her grandmother how her husband's father came originally from this part of Wales. He was a Daniel, too, like your father. And the family diaries—'
'Your family keep diaries, too?' Sorrel's face lit up, her animosity forgotten. 'Oh, I'd love to see them. Ma asked Simon to bring ours down. She thought you might be interested in reading them. It's a tradition that the women of the family always keep a diary.' She stopped, annoyed with herself for forgetting how much she disliked him.
'What's this?' he asked her suddenly, staring at her tapestry frame.
She told him reluctantly, but her love and enthusiasm for her craft refused to give way to her desire to be abrupt with him.
'I've done the first three seasons,' she heard herself telling him, in a voice that was suddenly, for no reason at all, slightly breathy. It couldn't be because he had bent his head over her work, just in the direction she was pointing, so that his dark hair brushed against her wrist, causing tiny tingling sensations to race along her veins, heating her entire body, could it? No, of course not. It was unthinkable… ridiculous… impossible that she should react to this abrasive Australian in a way that she had never reacted to Andrew, the man she had agreed to marry.
Various alien and disturbing thoughts filled her mind, making the colour come up under her clear Celtic skin.
'And the final season?' Val prompted.
'Winter,' she told him curtly.
'Yes… The last time I experienced snow like this was in the Canadian Rockies during my university days. I hadn't realised you could have this kind of weather so late in the year.'
'Half a dozen or more climbers who think the same thing lose their lives in these mountains almost every year,' Sorrel told him. 'You were lucky not to be trapped inside your car. Why did you go to university in Canada?'
He raised his eyebrows a little but, if he could ask her impertinent questions about her relationship with Andrew, then she was quite sure that she could reciprocate. It was odd how curious she was about him. Dangerous, too. She shivered a little, a tiny frisson of unfamiliar apprehension-laced excitement going through her.
'I wanted to study geology, and I spent a postgraduate year in the Rockies doing fieldwork.'
'Geology? I thought you said you built boats.'
'I do—now. The pie smells as though it's ready.'
In other words, no more questions. He was adroit at concealing more of himself than he revealed, and even more adroit at getting her to reveal far too much, she acknowledged as she went over to the oven.
The pie was almost ready. There were fresh vegetables to go with it, and rhubarb fool for pudding.
'We ought to be toasting our new-found cousinship,' Val remarked as he asked Sorrel where he could find the cutlery. 'Is there anything to drink?'
Her mother had packed a couple of bottles of her home-made wine, and Sorrel produced one of them. She saw his eyebrows lift in a way that was becoming familiar as he studied the label, and she explained to him what elderberry wine was.
'A resourceful woman, your mother.'
'She's a home-maker,' Sorrel told him, 'and she thrives on hard work. She's spent her life doing all the things we're told turn the female sex into drudges, and yet I've never met a more fulfilled woman than my mother. She's interested in everything and everyone… and she knows so much about the history of the wife's role in the running of a farm like ours. She sometimes gives talks on it to local WI meetings. She loves it… standing up on the stage, talking to them… and they love her. I asked her a few years ago if she had ever thought what she might have done if she'd had a career. She laughed at me. She said that being married to my father gave her the best of everything: a man whom she loved, his children, the pleasure of running her own home, and the business aspects of keeping the farm accounts, of being free to order her own day, to enjoy the countryside. I know what she means… I don't think I could ever work for a large organisation with regimented rules and regulations after being my own boss.'
'I know what you mean,' Val told her, surprising her. 'When I started off in mineral exploration, it was very much a free and easy life. You got a job working for a newly formed company. They bought the mineral rights to a certain tract of land and sent you out to discover what, if any, value it might have. You lived in the outback… often for weeks at a time, turning in a report when you'd finished the job. But once the boom came, the pleasure went out of it.'
'Was that why you build boats instead?'
'Sort of. This wine smells good… Not quite up to our better Australian vineyards' products, of course.'
'It's very
potent,' Sorrel warned him, dishing up their meal and putting a plateful of food in front of him.
It had surprised her a little that he had so readily and naturally helped her with the preparation of the meal, but perhaps if he had lived alone in the outback he was used to fending for himself. She had always thought that Australian men were very chauvinistic, and considered women to be little more than chattels.
Fair-mindedly, she acknowledged that she did not really know enough about the continent or its inhabitants to separate truth from myth, and it was probable that Australian men, like any men, were a mixed and varied bunch of human beings who should not be typecast.
'This is good,' Val told her appreciatively, tucking into his food. 'Your mother's an excellent cook.'
Sorrel bent her head over her own plate, not telling him that she had made the pie. She enjoyed cooking, and firmly believed that any form of creative achievement could be satisfying when one was well-taught. Although her mother was what was normally referred to as a plain cook, she took a pride in the meals she placed before her family, and she had passed on that pride to Sorrel.
Val had poured them both a glass of wine, and now he put down his knife and fork and picked up his glass, motioning to Sorrel to do the same.
'To you, Sorrel Llewellyn,' he toasted her softly. 'I'm delighted to make your acquaintance… Drink it,' he urged her when she barely touched her lips to the glass. 'Otherwise I'm going to think it's poisoned. You certainly looked at me as though you'd have loved to slip me a glass of hemlock when I first arrived.'
'It was a shock to discover you were a man,' Sorrel protested, letting the warming wine slide down her throat. It tasted delicious but, as she well remembered from past occasions, she really did not have a strong enough head to cope with her mother's potent home-made brews.
Over their meal they talked, or rather Val talked and she listened, so that by the time they were ready for their pudding she was beginning to feel almost lazily content.