by Liz Fielding
She couldn’t tell him that, of course, but she was going to have to tell him something and the longer she delayed, the less likely it was that he would believe her. From being in a position of power, Annie now felt at a distinct disadvantage in the low chair and, putting down her cup, she stood up so that she could look him in the eye.
‘You needn’t worry that I won’t pay you. I have money.’ And, determined to establish her financial probity at least, she tugged at the neck of the V-neck sweater she was wearing, reached down inside her shirt and fished a wad of fifty-pound notes from one cup of her bra and placed it on the table.
‘Whoa!’ Xandra said.
‘Will a thousand pounds cover it?’ she asked, repeating the performance on the other side before looking up to discover that George was staring at her.
‘Go and check the stores to see what spares we have in stock, Xandra,’ he said, not taking his eyes off her.
His daughter opened her mouth to protest, then, clearly thinking better of it, stomped out, banging the back door as she went.
For a moment the silence rang in her ears. Then, with a gesture at the pile of banknotes, George said, ‘Where did that come from?’
Realising she’d just made things ten times worse, that she was going to have to tell him at least some version of the truth, Annie said, ‘It’s mine.’ He didn’t move a muscle. ‘Truly. I don’t want to use credit cards for the same reason I can’t call my insurance company.’
‘And why is that?’ he asked, stony-faced as a statue.
‘It’s difficult…’
‘No licence, no insurance and a pile of hard cash? I’ll say it’s difficult. What exactly is your problem, Annie?’ he asked. ‘Who are you running away from? The police?’
‘No! It’s nothing like that. It’s…’ Oh, help…‘It’s personal.’
He frowned. ‘Are you telling me that it’s a domestic?’
Was he asking her if she was running from an abusive husband?
‘You’re not wearing a ring,’ he pointed out, forestalling the temptation to grab such a perfect cover story.
‘No. I’m not married.’
‘A partner, then. So why all the subterfuge?’ he said, picking up one of the wads of banknotes, flicking the edge with his thumb. ‘And where did this come from?’
‘My parents left me some money. I daren’t use credit cards-’
‘Or claim on your motor insurance.’
She nodded.
‘Is he violent?’
‘No!’
‘But unwilling to let you go.’
She swallowed and he accepted that as an affirmative. This was going better than she’d hoped.
‘How will he trace you? You understand that I have to think about Xandra. And my mother.’
‘There’s a security firm he uses, but they think I’ve left the country. As long as I don’t do anything to attract attention, they won’t find me.’
‘I hope you didn’t leave your passport behind.’
‘No. The clothes I’m wearing, the car, belong to the friend who helped me get away,’ she said before he asked her why her ‘partner’ was in the habit of hiring a security firm to keep tabs on her. ‘You can understand why I feel so bad about what’s happened to the car. Will you be able to fix it?’
He looked at her for a long time before shaking his head. ‘I knew you were trouble from the first moment I set eyes on you,’ he said, ‘and I know I’m going to regret this, but I’ll see if your car is salvageable so I can get you on your way. I just hope I don’t live to see the name Annie Rowland linked with mine in the headlines.’
‘That won’t happen,’ she promised.
‘Of course it won’t. The only thing I am sure of where you’re concerned is that your name isn’t Rowland.’
‘It is Annie,’ she said, glad for some reason that she couldn’t begin to fathom that she had chosen to use her own best name.
‘Then let’s leave it at that,’ he said, putting down the mug as he pushed himself away from the table. ‘But whatever you plan on cooking for dinner, Annie, had better be worth all the trouble you’re causing.’
‘I can guarantee that it’ll be better than beans on toast,’ she promised. ‘Thank you for trusting me, George.’
‘Who said I trusted you?’ He looked at her as if he was going to say more, but let it go. ‘Save your thanks and put that out of sight,’ he said, pointing at the pile of notes lying on the kitchen table. Then, as she made a move to stuff it back in her bra, ‘No! I didn’t mean…’ He took a deep breath. ‘Just wait until I’ve gone.’
She blushed furiously. ‘Sorry.’
‘So am I,’ he muttered as he left the kitchen. ‘So am I.’
CHAPTER FOUR
A NNIE hadn’t been aware of holding her breath, but the minute the back door closed she covered her hot cheeks with her hands and let out something very close to a, ‘Whew.’
That had been intense.
She appeared to have got away with it, though. For now, at any rate. And she hadn’t told any outright lies, just left George to answer his own questions. A bit of a grey area, no doubt, but she was sure he’d rather not know the truth and twenty-four hours from now she’d be miles away from Maybridge with no harm done.
The cat leapt from the chair as she crossed to the fridge, chirruping hopefully as it nuzzled its head against her ankle.
‘Hello, puss. Are you hungry too?’
She poured a little milk into a bowl, then sat back on her heels, watching the cat lap it up.
‘Trouble,’ she said, grinning in spite of everything that had happened. ‘He said I was trouble. Do you know, puss, that’s the very first time anyone has ever looked at me and thought “trouble”.’ The cat looked up, milk clinging to its muzzle, and responded with a purr. ‘I know,’ Annie said. ‘It is immensely cheering. Almost worth wrecking Lydia’s car for.’ Then, since the cat made a very good listener, ‘Tell me, would you describe George Saxon as a likely beach bum?’
The cat, stretching out its tongue to lick the last drop from its whiskers, appeared to shake its head.
‘No, I didn’t think so, either.’
Surely ‘laid-back’ was the very definition of beach-bum-hood, while George Saxon was, without doubt, the most intense man she’d ever met.
With Xandra on his case, she suspected, he had quite a lot to be intense about, although if he really was an absentee father he undoubtedly deserved it. And what was all that about closing down the garage? How could he do that while his own father was in hospital? It was utterly appalling-and a private family matter that was absolutely none of her business, she reminded herself.
She just wanted to get the car fixed and get back on the road. Take in the sights, go shopping unrecognised. But, despite Xandra’s build-up and her assurance that she wouldn’t miss it, she’d be giving the Maybridge Christmas market a wide berth.
Less ho, ho, ho…More no, no, no…
The thought made her feel oddly guilty. As if she’d somehow let the girl down. Which was stupid. If it hadn’t been for Xandra, she would have been picked up by some other mechanic who wouldn’t have given her nearly as much grief.
A man without the careless arrogance that was guaranteed to rouse any woman with an ounce of spirit to a reckless response. One who wouldn’t have held her in a way that made her feel like a woman instead of a piece of porcelain.
Someone polite, who would not have made uncomplimentary comments about her driving, but would have promised to deliver her car in full working order the next day because that was on the customer relations script he’d learned on his first day on the job.
In other words, all the things that she wanted to get away from.
Whatever else George was, he certainly didn’t follow a script. And locking horns with a man who didn’t know he was supposed to show due deference to the nation’s sweetheart was a lot more interesting than being holed up in a budget hotel room with only the television remote for co
mpany.
For all his faults, George Saxon did have one thing in his favour-he was the complete opposite of Rupert Devenish, a man who had never rated a single ‘whew’. Not from her, anyway.
There was nothing textbook about George.
Okay, so he was tall, with shoulders wide enough to fill a doorway-no doubt like the lines carved into his cheeks, around those penetrating grey eyes, they came from hard use.
And he was dark.
But he wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, classically handsome. On the contrary, his face had a lived-in quality and there was enough stubble on his chin to suggest a certain laissez-faire attitude to his appearance. He certainly wasn’t a man to wait for some woman to pluck him off the ‘ideal husband’ shelf, she thought. More the kind who, when he saw what he wanted, would act like a caveman.
The thought, which was supposed to make her smile, instead prompted the proverbial ripple down her spine. Something which, until today, she’d foolishly imagined to be no more than a figure of speech.
He was, by any standard, anything but ideal and she had the strongest feeling that her wisest course of action would be to make his day and get out of there, fast.
But, then again, why would she when, for the purposes of this adventure, he could almost have been made to order.
Exciting, annoying, disturbing.
She’d wanted to be disturbed, jolted out of her rut. Wanted to be excited and, maybe, just a little bit reckless.
She swallowed as she considered what being reckless with George Saxon would entail.
He was right. She should definitely leave. As soon as possible. Not because the idea appalled her. On the contrary, it was much too excitingly disturbing, recklessly appealing and she’d call a taxi to take her to the motel.
Just as soon as she’d cooked the hot meal she’d promised them.
Her stomach rumbled at the thought. Lunch had been a very long time ago and she’d been too nervous to eat more than a mouthful of that. Not that she’d eaten much of anything lately, a fact that had been picked up by one of the gossip magazines looking for a new angle. An eating disorder was always good copy.
Now, for the first time in months, she felt genuinely hungry and, leaving the cat to its ablutions, she stood up and returned her attention to the fridge.
It was well stocked with the basics, but it wasn’t just the bacon, eggs, cheese and vegetables that were making her hungry. She’d already seen the large homemade meat pie sitting on the middle shelf, gravy oozing gently from the slit in the centre, just waiting to be slipped into the oven.
Presumably it had been made by George’s mother before she’d left to visit her husband in the hospital. That Xandra knew it was there was obvious from her earlier performance but, anxious to keep her grandfather’s garage functioning, desperate, maybe, to prove herself to her father, she was prepared to take any chance that came her way and she’d grabbed her offer to make dinner for them all with both hands.
Good for her, she thought. If you had a dream you shouldn’t let anyone talk you out of it, or stand in your way. You should go for it with all your heart.
Annie put the pie in the oven, then set about the task of peeling potatoes and carrots. It took her a minute or two to get the hang of the peeler, then, as she bent to her task, the annoying glasses slid down her nose and fell into the sink.
She picked them out of the peelings and left them on the draining board while she finished.
Her only problem then was the vexed question of how long it took potatoes to boil. She’d left her handbag in the car, but she’d put her cellphone in her coat pocket after calling for help. She wiped her hands and dug it out to see what she could find on the Web.
The minute she switched it on she got the ‘message waiting’ icon.
There was a text from Lydia with just a single code word to reassure her that everything had gone exactly according to plan, that she’d reached the airport without problem-or, as she’d put it, being twigged as a ‘ringer’.
Even if they hadn’t agreed that contact between them should be on an emergency-only basis-you never knew who was tuned into a cellphone frequency-she’d still be in the air so she couldn’t call her and tell her everything that had happened, confess to having cut her hair, wrecking her car. Instead, she keyed in the agreed response, confirmation that she, too, was okay, and hit ‘send’.
There was, inevitably, a voicemail from her grandfather asking her to call and let him know when she’d touched down safely. Using any excuse to override her insistence that she wanted to be left completely alone while she was away.
‘You’ll have to call me at King’s Lacey,’ he said. ‘I’m going there tomorrow to start preparations for Christmas.’ Piling on yet more guilt. ‘And the Boxing Day shoot.’
As if he didn’t have a housekeeper, a gamekeeper, a houseful of staff who were perfectly capable of doing all that without him.
‘And of course there’s the Memorial Service. It will be twenty years this year and I want it to be special. You will be home for that?’
It was the unexpected touch of uncertainty in his voice that finally got to her.
‘I’ll be there,’ she murmured to herself, holding the phone to her chest long after the voicemail had ended.
It was twenty years since her parents had died in a hail of gunfire in the week before Christmas and every year she’d relived that terrible intermingling of grief and celebration that made the season an annual misery.
And worse, much worse, the centuries-old Boxing Day shoot that nothing was allowed to interfere with. Not even that first year. Cancelling it would have been letting her parents’ killers win, her grandfather had said when he’d found her hiding beneath the stairs, hands over her ears in terror as the guns had blasted away.
‘God help me,’ she said again, ‘I’ll be there.’
Then she straightened, refusing to waste another minute dwelling on it. Having come so close to losing this little bit of freedom, she was absolutely determined to make the most of every moment. Even something as simple, as unusual for her, as cooking dinner. But as she clicked to the Net to surf for cooking times, the sound of something hitting the floor made her jump practically out of her skin.
She spun round and saw George Saxon in the doorway, her bag at his feet.
How long had he been there? How much had he heard?
George hadn’t intended to eavesdrop, but when he’d opened the door Annie had been half turned from him, so tense, the cellphone so tight to her ear that she hadn’t noticed him and he’d frozen, unable to advance or retreat.
He’d heard her promise to ‘be there’, but the ‘God help me…’ that had followed as she’d clutched the phone to her chest had been so deeply felt that any doubts about the kind of trouble she was in vanished as, for a moment, all control had slipped away and she’d looked simply desolate.
At that moment he’d wanted only to reach out to her, hold her. Which was when he’d dropped her bag at his feet.
And she’d visibly jumped.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’ Just shatter the spell that she seemed to be weaving around him.
‘You didn’t,’ she said, a little too fiercely. Then blushed at the lie. ‘Well, maybe just a bit.’
She looked down at the cellphone, then crammed it quickly into the back pocket of her jeans. Unlike her clothes or the holdall he’d just brought in from the car, which was definitely from the cheap-and-cheerful, market-stall end of the spectrum, it was the latest in expensive, top-end technology. He had one exactly like it himself and knew how much it had cost. And he wondered what kind of wardrobe she’d left behind in London, along with her driving licence, when she’d made her bid for freedom.
A woman whose partner could afford to employ a security company to keep an eye on her would be dressed from her skin up in designer labels. Silk, linen, cashmere. Would wear fine jewels.
What had he done to her to make her
run? If not physical, then mental cruelty because she was running away from him, not to someone. His hands bunched into fists at the thought.
‘I was just catching up on my messages,’ she said.
‘Nothing you wanted to hear, by the look of you.’ For a moment she stared at him as if she wanted to say something, then shook her head. ‘You do know that you can be tracked by your phone signal?’ he asked.
Not that it was any of his business, he reminded himself, forcing his hands to relax.
‘It was only for a minute. I need to know what’s happening.’
Long enough. Who was important enough to her that she’d take the risk? Make that kind of promise?
A child?
No. She’d never have left a child behind.
‘Use some of that money you’ve got stashed away to buy the anonymity of a pay-as-you-go,’ he advised abruptly.
‘I will,’ she said, clearly as anxious as he was to change the subject. Then, lifting her chin, managing a smile, ‘I found a pie in the fridge so I’ve put that in the oven. I hope that’s all right?’
‘A pie?’
‘A meat pie.’
‘Ah…’
A tiny crease puckered the space between her beautifully arched brows.
‘Is that a good “ah” or a bad “ah”?’ she asked. Then, raising her hand to her mouth to display a set of perfectly manicured nails, she said, ‘Please don’t tell me you’re a vegetarian.’
‘Why?’ he demanded. ‘Have you got something against vegetarians?’
‘No, but…’
‘Relax. You’re safe. What you’ve found is the equivalent of the fatted calf…’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘For the prodigal son.’
‘I’m familiar with the metaphor.’ She regarded him intently. ‘Just how long is it since you’ve been home?’ she asked.