by Penny Jordan
We… Was there any sweeter or more emotive word in the English language, especially when it encapsulated the two of them in a small private circle of intimacy, when it seemed to bond him to her almost, when it seemed to suggest that he—?
With a tiny gasp of shock, Melanie shook herself free of the insidious pull of her own weakness, and said breathlessly, ‘I don’t think I could tackle that kind of thing…and…’
‘No need. I wasn’t suggesting you should,’ he told her drily. When she made no response, he told her casually, ‘Look, this case I’m working on down here has gone off the boil a bit, so to speak, and I’m likely to have some time on my hands. How would it be if I took over as your decorator?’
‘Oh, but I couldn’t let you do that,’ Melanie objected, but her heart was racing with frantic excitement as she acknowledged how much she already wanted the dangerous intimacy he was promising her.
‘At least not without…not without paying you.’
‘Paying me?’ Suddenly he was frowning at her, his eyes curiously cold where they had been warm. The way he was looking at her made her shiver as she reacted automatically to the sharpness of his voice by stepping back from him.
It seemed he had read the meaning of her body language because immediately his expression changed, his eyes softening back to their original warmth. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that…well, the kind of relationship I had in mind for us wasn’t exactly one of business. However, if you really feel you have to offer me some form of repayment, how about payment in kind?’
She couldn’t help it. She looked immediately and betrayingly at his mouth, blushing vividly as she remembered how it had felt against her own. It was a very masculine mouth. Looking at it made her tremble inside and dig her teeth quite sharply into her own bottom lip, as she fought to banish the dangerous images tormenting her senses.
‘If you would agree to allow me to use your phone until my own is installed, that would be more than payment enough,’ she heard Luke saying, and instantly her fair skin flamed with guilty heat as she prayed that he hadn’t realised what she had been thinking.
Desperate to distract his attention, as if she were a vulnerable creature of the wild seeking sanctuary, she said quickly, ‘That’s…that’s fine by me. But this dado rail; do you really think—?’
‘I’m sure of it,’ he interrupted her. ‘Come over here and look at these marks on the wall.’
In order to do as he suggested she would have to stand so close to him that their bodies would be touching. A small shudder of sensation burned through her and she knew that if she did as he suggested, if she felt the heat and strength of his flesh against her own, she would be helpless to control the foolish response of her own flesh.
‘Yes, I can see them from here,’ she fibbed, adding nervously, ‘What do you suppose happened to it—the rails?’
‘Who knows? The old boy who used to live here probably ripped them out and used them as firewood,’ he told her wryly.
Melanie frowned. How had he known about John Burrows? Almost instantly she chided herself. Why shouldn’t he know? But did that mean that he knew about her, about how she had inherited the cottage? But no, he couldn’t do so, otherwise he would not have asked her about her family.
‘Right, then, let’s get started, shall we?’
* * *
AT ONE O’CLOCK, with three strips of immaculately aligned paper adorning the ceiling, Melanie suggested hesitantly, ‘Would you care for some lunch? It’s only salad and cold meat.’
‘Sounds like a great idea, but I’ve got a better one. Why don’t you let me drive you into Chester? There’s a good DIY place there where we can get the rail, and we could stop somewhere on the way for something to eat to save you doing anything.’
Melanie opened her mouth to ask him how he knew about the DIY centre and then closed it again, telling herself that she of all people ought to know better than to pry into someone else’s life, and, taking her silence as acceptance of his suggestion, Luke said warmly, ‘Good, that’s all settled, then. If I could just use your bathroom to clean up a bit?’
‘Er—yes, of course.’
The bathroom was shabby and uncomfortable like the rest of the house. It was also cluttered with her personal toiletries, her make-up and her hairbrush, since it was the only room in the house with a decent mirror in it.
Perhaps she was being foolish and naïve to be embarrassed as she thought of him seeing such intimate possessions, and she had no doubt at all that he would be openly amused if he could read her mind; but the idea of any man—but especially this man—using the room which she considered to be her most personal domain brought a tingle of dangerous sensation racing down her spine.
As he washed his hands free of the sticky wallpaper paste, would he visualise her in the small confines of the bathroom, stepping out of the large old-fashioned bath, her body slick and wet?
The shock of her own thoughts was mirrored in her eyes as she turned quickly away from him.
What on earth was happening to her? She had never had these kinds of thoughts before. Never. They both shocked and excited her, opening secret doors within herself which she had never even known existed.
‘The bathroom,’ Luke reminded her quietly.
‘Oh, yes.’ She told him where it was, and then hurried into her own bedroom. It had a narrow single bed, a small chest of drawers and a wardrobe that wobbled because it was missing one foot. It also had a tarnished mirror into which she peered rather desperately after she had changed her jeans and top for a more formal pleated skirt and a toning jumper.
She didn’t have a lot of clothes, and most of those she did own had been chosen with her job in mind rather than for attracting admiring males’ glances.
Luckily she had washed her hair that morning and it hung in a clean, sweet-swelling, shiny fall on to her shoulders. She frowned as she stared at herself, wishing despairingly that she was taller and prettier, that her hair was curly and her nose straight.
Then she heard the bathroom door open and she grabbed the jacket she had put on the bed and hurried out to meet Luke on the landing.
Was it her imagination, or did his glance linger for just a split second longer than necessary on the soft swell of her breasts? Was that why they seemed so oddly tender as though they had actually been caressed and aroused by the firmness of a man’s hands?
‘If you’re ready,’ Luke was saying politely beside her as she battled against the shocking wantonness of her thoughts.
‘Er—yes…yes…I am.’
CHAPTER THREE
‘TELL me something about yourself.’
She was sitting in the passenger seat of Luke’s car while he drove them towards Chester. His question unnerved her, tightening her defences. She remembered how, over the years, she had been subject to a great many unkind comments because of her orphaned state, especially when she was at school. They had hurt, those comments, leaving tender scars.
‘There isn’t very much to tell.’ She hesitated, her mouth dry as she fought with her reluctance to reveal her own vulnerabilities to him.
There was a small silence during which he gave her a discomfitingly sharp look before saying, ‘Or not much you want to tell.’
He was shrewd, she had to give him that, but then his job would of course incline him to look beneath the surface, to probe and go on probing, to query and question.
She was starting to feel uncomfortably conscious of how little she would want to be the subject of his enquiries. Not that she had ever done anything in her life that would make her of any interest to a private detective.
‘I hope that one of those things you don’t want to tell me isn’t that you’ve got a husband and half a dozen offspring hidden away somewhere.’
His voice sounded lighter, teasing, but even so the shock of his charge caused her to turn automatically towards him, denying, ‘No, of course it isn’t.’
‘So you’re not married then, or otherwise involved?’
‘That’s something else we share in common, then,’ he told her, but before she could question him, could ask exactly what else it was they shared, he was adding more briskly, ‘This looks like the turn-off coming up for the DIY place.’
It was, and the next ten minutes were mundanely occupied with following the steady stream of traffic, all of which apparently was heading for the same destination, and then turning into the huge flat wasteland of tarmac dotted with the multi-coloured metal shapes of the many already parked cars.
How unpleasant it looked; how harsh on eyes which had all too quickly become accustomed to the softer, gentle shades in which nature clothed her landscape.
Melanie had always thought of herself as a city person, or at least a suburbanite, and yet already, as Luke parked the car and she got out, she felt exposed, vulnerable, missing the security of her new background into which she seemed to blend so comfortably and easily.
‘Not exactly a thing of beauty, is it?’ Luke commented wryly, quite obviously reading her thoughts. ‘Never mind; it shouldn’t take us long to get what we need, and then on to Chester. Have you visited the city at all?’
‘No,’ Melanie told him. He was walking very close to her, far closer than she would have normally liked, and yet she found that she was actually enjoying the sensation of having him at her side, that she actually almost wanted to close the very small distance which existed between them and walk even nearer to him.
Almost as though in denial of what she was feeling, her brain urged her to move away from him, to remember Paul and the pain he had caused her.
She was not good at judging men and their sincerity or otherwise. Luke’s whole manner towards her from the moment they had met suggested that he was an accomplished flirt. And yet…and yet there had been that moment in the car when he had looked at her, so seriously, so steadily, so much as though he wanted to convey to her that, given time, there could be far more than a flirtation between them, that her heart had turned over.
‘Something wrong?’
She stopped in mid-step and focused on Luke’s face. Her heart jumped into a panicky defensive rhythm. How long had he been watching her? What had he seen in her unguarded expression? She must not forget that he was an expert in reading people’s expressions; that it was his job to question what lay beneath the surface.
‘No,’ she assured him quickly, her gaze dropping from his as she started walking again.
‘So you weren’t perhaps wondering if I had a wife and half a dozen children tucked away somewhere, then?’ he quizzed her.
This time she managed to not stop walking, but her face burned with heat and she longed for the savoir-faire to shrug her shoulders and demand lightly, ‘Why should I care?’ even while she knew that she did care and that in that caring lay a far greater danger than any she had experienced in her relationship with Paul.
The panic inside her grew. This was too much; too soon; she didn’t want to feel like this, didn’t want the placid calm of her life disrupted by this man and the emotions he aroused within her. Part of her wanted to run and hide from him, to shut him out of her life and to keep him shut out before it was too late. But too late for what?
‘As I’ve already said,’ Luke was telling her gently, ‘I’m not committed to anyone else, either legally or morally.’
‘Just to your work and your client,’ Melanie suggested, trying to inject a lighter note into the conversation, and yet it seemed she had said the wrong thing because Luke stopped walking, and when she turned to look at him there was such a different expression on his face, such a stern darkness in his eyes that it was almost like looking at a different man; a far more austere and intimidating man than the one she had previously been allowed to see… Her stomach muscles tensed: allowed to see.
Why did she have this odd perception that there was far more to Luke than he was letting her see, and why should it unnerve her so much? As though he sensed her disquiet and wanted to dismiss it, he told her easily, ‘My work is important to me; after all, it is what pays the bills and keeps a roof over my head.’
‘Have you always been a private detective?’
Something warned her that he didn’t want her asking him that kind of question, but to do so was safer, surely, than allowing him to probe into her history, even if in doing so she was creating a barrier between them.
Normally so sensitive about her own dislike of talking about her past that she never brazenly asked questions of others, now she discovered that she was holding her breath, wondering what Luke would tell her, whether indeed he would tell her anything at all, or simply change the subject.
There was a rather long pause, and she had just decided that he was going to refuse to answer her question when he said slowly, ‘No, not always. I was in the army for a time—a family tradition.’
‘You didn’t like it?’ she invited softly when she saw the shadows darkening his eyes.
‘What I didn’t like was seeing people—friends—die,’ he told her curtly. ‘I stuck it out long enough to appease my pride and the family honour, and then when I came out I joined forces with a friend and we set up in business together.’
So he wasn’t merely working for a detective agency; he was one of the partners in it.
‘Any more questions?’
She started to shake her head and then said quickly, ‘Have you…have you any family?’
‘Sort of. I was an only child. My father was in the army. He was killed in action when I was very young—’
‘Your—your mother?’ Melanie queried eagerly, interrupting him. What if, after all, she could confide in him? What if, like her, he knew what it meant not to have a home to call his own? Not to have a past…a history? But then she realised that, even if his mother was no longer alive, his past was not really like hers. The way he had talked of joining the army hinted at family traditions, an awareness of belonging, of being part of an established family unit, whereas she…
She knew nothing other than that her young parents had been killed together in a car crash; that she had been saved and that the authorities had not been able to trace any kind of family connections on either her mother’s or her father’s side.
‘My mother is very much alive. She remarried a few years ago.’
Again his eyes darkened, and Melanie wondered sympathetically if he had resented that remarriage, although she guessed that he was somewhere in his early thirties, and that surely meant that he must have been old enough at the time of her remarriage to accept taking second place in her life.
‘She lives in Canada now. Neil, her husband, was a widower with three daughters and a son, and, as my mother keeps pointing out to me, I’m the eldest and as yet I’m the only one who has failed to present them with a grandchild.’
‘What excuse do you give her?’ Melanie asked him teasingly.
They had just reached the large purpose-built superstore. People were coming and going busily through the glass doors, and yet she was totally oblivious to them; to everything other than the man standing so close to her, as Luke responded devastatingly, ‘I used to tell her, quite truthfully, that I’m waiting for the right woman to come along.’
Her heart was pounding frantically. He couldn’t really mean what he appeared to be saying to her. She must be imagining things. He couldn’t really be looking at her like that…as though…
Almost running in her haste to escape from her own dangerous thoughts, she bolted for one of the doors, but somehow Luke got there before her, holding it open for her, taking hold of her arm as he guided her through it, making her feel somehow precious and cherished…making her feel… To her dismay she could feel the prickle of emotional tears stinging her eyes.
After Paul’s cruelty, Luke’s tenderness
made her feel frighteningly vulnerable. Paul had opened her eyes to the fact that men could lie so convincingly that you didn’t know they had lied until it was almost too late.
But why should Luke lie to her? Why should he pretend to want her company? To pretend to want her? He could of course simply be aiming to idle away time he would otherwise have spent simply waiting for his telephone to be installed, but he must surely have realised by now that she was no sophisticate; that she was not a suitable candidate to play opposite him in a practised game of flirtation and seduction.
The trouble was that he was a man totally outside her limited experience. No, she corrected herself; the trouble was that she was already dangerously vulnerable to him and had been from the moment he had kissed her.
She tensed as she felt his hand on her arm, wondering if he had somehow read her mind, if he was actually going to kiss her again right here in this crowded building; but as she turned towards him she realised that he was simply trying to bring her attention to the directions hanging above their heads.
‘I suspect we need to go this way,’ he informed her.
The DIY centre was a whole new world to Melanie. She stared around, bemused and confused, while Luke assembled everything he thought they would need.
Only when they had come to the check-out and he reached for his cheque-book did Melanie gather her wits sufficiently to refuse to allow him to pay. She half expected him to get annoyed, but to her relief he immediately accepted her protest and allowed her to pay for the things herself.
He was, she saw as she wrote out the cheque, almost as surprised by her determination to pay as she had been by his acceptance of it.
Was he only used, then, to women who expected a man always to do the paying? Her own life had been far too hard for her to know anything other than the necessity of supporting herself, and, while she sometimes wondered wistfully what it would be like to have some indulgent male picking up the bills for her, in her heart of hearts she acknowledged that she prized her independence far too much to ever really enjoy that kind of role. She believed in men and women being equal, being partners, each one supporting the other—or, rather, each one prepared to support the other if necessary, but also prepared to allow the other their individual independence. That was the only way to maintain respect within a relationship, to keep it wholesome and healthy.