by Penny Jordan
‘I’m sorry, Mr Hewitson,’ she began purposefully, ‘but I don’t really see the point in your call. I’m not prepared to sell the cottage to you. I’ve been in touch with my solicitor and he has confirmed that he has no record of any agreement made by Mr Burrows to sell the cottage or the land to you.’
There was a brief pause, and then David Hewitson said angrily, ‘I’ve already told you. It was a verbal agreement—’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Hewitson,’ Melanie cut in. She still couldn’t forget the horrid accusations he had made the last time he had telephoned her. Accusations which, like a wasp’s sting, had left their poison behind to fester and infect. She knew of course that there was no truth in his allegations, but how many other people shared that knowledge? How many others would prefer to think as David Hewitson plainly did?
‘I’m warning you,’ he told her, overriding her. ‘I want that land and I mean to have it. I’m a realistic man, Miss Foden. I’m prepared to pay a fair price for what I want, but, as I’ve already said, I’m not a sick old man, easily fooled by a greedy bitch with a pretty face.’
Weak with shock, Melanie replaced the receiver before he could say any more. She felt so ill that she had to lean against the wall while she re-gathered her physical strength. She was still leaning there when Luke walked out of the sitting-room. He must have heard her replace the receiver, she realised as he came towards her, his forehead creased with concern.
‘Something’s wrong. What is it…? What?’
‘It’s nothing…nothing at all,’ Melanie fibbed, ‘I had flu a short time ago, and it’s left me feeling stupidly weak, that’s all.’
She didn’t know why she was lying to him, why she didn’t want to tell him the truth. Or did she? Was it because she was afraid that he, like David Hewitson, would judge her unfairly? But why should she have that fear? There was no reason.
‘Is that why you bought this place? Somewhere to rest and recuperate?’
‘I—I didn’t buy the cottage. I—I inherited it.’ She forced herself to make the admission.
She couldn’t look at him; her stomach was all screwed up in tight apprehensive knots.
‘You inherited it? But I thought you said you had no family…’
She bit down hard on her bottom lip. ‘Yes. Yes, I did.’
‘I see. The previous owner was an old friend, then, someone you were close to?’ The voice was suddenly cold, chilling her.
It was a natural enough assumption, and certainly far easier to accept than the truth, which was that she had had absolutely no idea of John Burrows’s existence until his solicitors had tracked her down.
She still felt oddly uneasy about her inheritance; still felt as though she was in some way a fraud…as though there had been a mistake and the inheritance had not been meant for her at all. As though somehow she had become tainted by David Hewitson’s accusation. That was why she couldn’t bring herself to tell Luke the truth, and lied huskily instead, ‘Yes. Yes, that’s right.’
She still couldn’t bring herself to look at him. The small hallway seemed to be filled with tension. Probably as a result of her telephone call from David Hewitson, she reflected shakily.
‘There’s still enough daylight left for me to make a start on the bedroom.’ His voice was neutral, soothing her taut nerves.
The bedroom. The swift change of subject bemused her for a moment. She had still barely recovered from the intensity of the passionate kiss they had just shared, and was really in no mood to consider such mundane things as decorating a bedroom, but Luke, it seemed, was, and, that being the case, good manners necessitated that she went upstairs with him to do what she could to assist. At least he was no longer questioning her about her inheritance.
As she watched him work Melanie realised that he was far more experienced at this sort of thing than she had at first imagined, his movements deft and, to her eyes at least, dispiritingly professional compared with her amateurish attempts to take on the challenge of the bedroom’s sloping, uneven walls.
He worked hard as well, his manner towards her almost remote, without any hint of the passion he had shown her earlier.
She told herself that she was a fool to feel that there was a change in his manner, a coolness, but the years and her upbringing had honed her sensitivity to such an extent that she could almost feel his altered attitude as though it had caused an actual physical drop in temperature in the air between them.
What had caused it? Her reaction to his kiss? Had she been too passionately responsive to him? She remembered that when he had drawn away from her, their embrace interrupted by the ring of the telephone, he had looked at her rather oddly.
At the time she had put that look down to the fact that he had been as taken off guard by the passion which had flared between them as she had been herself. Now she wondered unhappily if she had perhaps completely misread the situation. After all, what did she know about men or their emotions?
It was almost dusk before Luke finally announced that it was time to stop work, by which stage most of the walls had been carefully measured and marked where the mouldings would eventually be applied.
‘Tomorrow we’ll start work on painting the mouldings,’ Luke told Melanie. ‘With any luck the whole thing should be finished by the end of the week.’
They were halfway downstairs when the telephone started to ring. Melanie felt her body tense with nervous dread. If it was David Hewitson again… But when she reluctantly picked up the receiver she heard a woman’s voice on the other end of the line, and the woman asked, or rather demanded, to speak with Luke.
Without asking her name, Melanie handed the receiver to him and then tactfully excused herself, hurrying into the kitchen and closing the door behind her.
The woman, whoever she was, had sounded both aggressive and unpleasant. She had called Luke by his Christian name and had seemed to have no doubts that she would be able to get in touch with him. But that was no reason for Melanie to leap to the conclusion that she was romantically involved with Luke. After all, he had told her himself that he was free of any emotional commitments, giving her that information without her having to seek it.
The phone call didn’t last very long. When Luke came into the kitchen, though, he seemed preoccupied and distant. He made no mention of the phone call—and did not proffer an explanation of the identity of the caller—other than to apologise for the fact that he was making use of her telephone.
That was the arrangement they had made, Melanie reminded him stiffly. She was trying to keep her face averted from him. She didn’t want him to read in her eyes how upset she was by the way his manner towards her had changed.
As he walked to the door, Luke announced, ‘I have to go now, but I’ll get here as early as I can in the morning—say, about ten?’
So he still intended to help her with the bedroom. Until that moment she hadn’t realised how much she had feared that he might have changed his mind. And that frightened her, knowing how much he had already come to mean to her. Her fear made her protest huskily and protectively, ‘It really isn’t necessary, you know. You must have far more important things you want to do.’
Her voice didn’t sound quite as firm as she would have liked. Indeed, her sensitive ears suspected that there was even a trace of pathos in it.
Luke had been about to open the back door, but now he stopped and turned to look at her. ‘More important than spending time with you? Impossible.’
Once again his voice was soft with warmth, his eyes dark with emotion. Once again she was bewildered and caught off guard by the change in him.
‘I’m sorry if I upset you earlier today when I asked about your past…your family.’
‘I—I wasn’t upset.’
It was a lie and they both knew it.
Luke took a step towards her and she took one back. She felt the edge of the kitchen table against her spine. If he came any closer to her he would be close enough to kiss her. For some reason that knowledge made
her panic.
‘I haven’t been entirely alone anyway. I’ve been lucky enough to have good friends.’ She was gabbling, making conversation simply to fill the tense silence, and she was hardly telling the truth. The closest friends she had were Louise and her husband, and then only because Louise had persisted and broken her way through Melanie’s barriers of shyness and self-defence which put off others; but for some reason her stammered comment made Luke stiffen and stare almost angrily at her.
‘Yes, you have, haven’t you?’ he agreed quietly, but it wasn’t a pleasant quietness, and it was only when he had actually gone and the door had closed behind him that Melanie realised that there had almost been something faintly cynical about it.
He confused her totally with abrupt and, to her eyes, illogical changes of mood; one moment he could be tender, caring, making her feel that he felt drawn to her with the same deep compulsion she felt for him, and yet almost in the same breath he could distance himself from her so completely that she felt almost as though he actually disliked her. She couldn’t understand it at all.
As she made herself a cup of coffee she acknowledged, as she had done the previous evening, that the safest thing for her might be to call a halt to what was happening between them right now, to tell him when he arrived tomorrow morning that she had changed her mind about allowing him to use her phone, and that she no longer required or wanted his assistance with her decorating.
Yes, that was what she ought to do, but would she have the strength to actually do it?
* * *
DURING the evening the telephone rang. Melanie hesitated for a long time before lifting the receiver, licking her dry lips with a nervous tongue tip, her tension evaporating when she heard Louise’s familiar voice. ‘You took your time! I was just beginning to think
you had gone out. How’s the decorating going?’
Uncertainly Melanie explained what had happened to her.
‘And this man…this Luke has offered to help out with your decorating in return for being allowed to use your phone? That’s great! I wonder what sort of case he’s working on…’ Louise mused. ‘Probably a divorce. Horrid, really. I’d hate the thought of being involved in such unhappiness. But tell me a bit more about him. What’s he like? Is he good-looking?’
She laughed when Melanie was very hesitant in her reply.
‘Mm…like that, is it?’ she teased knowingly. ‘Well, I hope you haven’t told him about your lovely windfall. Oh, heavens, Mel, I didn’t mean that the way it sounds,’ she added hurriedly. ‘I wasn’t meaning to suggest that he might be some kind of fortune-hunter. I suppose that it’s just that you’re such a trusting innocent that I feel I have to keep reminding you that there are far too many big bad wolves prowling around, looking for tender little morsels like you to gobble up.’
‘We haven’t really talked about it,’ Melanie told her truthfully. ‘He knows that I’ve recently inherited the cottage, but in its present run-down state I suspect he probably thinks it’s more of a burden than an asset.’
‘Mm. Well, big bad wolves go out on the prowl for more than just money,’ Louise warned her, ‘and you are a remarkably pretty and desirable young woman.’ Melanie felt her heart start to pound, but luckily, before Louise asked her any more questions, she had changed the subject completely, saying, ‘Oh, by the way, the reason I’m ringing, apart from checking to make sure you’re OK, is to ask if you’d like to have a couple of old wardrobes and a dressing-table we’re getting rid of. They belonged to ma-in-law but we’ve finally decided that we can have new fitted furniture in that room, and I remembered your saying that you were desperately short of furniture for the cottage. Of course, when you sell it you’ll probably find the stuff is a bit of a liability, but until then it will at least make the place look a bit more lived in. Anyway, if you want it, Simon says he can bring it over in the van.’
‘I’d love it,’ Melanie told her gratefully. It was true that the cottage was lamentably short of furniture. The larger of the three bedrooms was very basically furnished with a bed and an old chest of drawers. The second bedroom, which she had adopted as her own, had possessed a very old and unappealing single bed which she had disposed of, buying herself a brand new divan, but making do with the rickety wardrobe and small chest of drawers, and the third room, the one she was presently engaged in decorating, had been filled with an assortment of broken chairs and other pieces of furniture, none of which had appeared to have any charm or value and all of which she had, on Louise’s advice, paid a couple of men to come and take away.
She knew the furniture Louise was talking about and, while it was undoubtedly rather old-fashioned and perhaps too heavy for a modern house such as Louise’s, she had no doubts whatsoever that it would be completely at home in the cottage.
As she thanked Louise for her generosity she felt a rush of gratitude and affection for her friend, who, she was quite sure, could have sold the bedroom furniture for quite a respectable price had she chosen to do so. However, when she said as much Louise laughed at her. ‘Who on earth wants that heavy old stuff these days? It isn’t old enough to be antique. It weighs a ton. It needs polishing in the old traditional way, and, besides, I’ve never been that keen on oak.
‘How is the decorating going, by the way?’ she added, returning to her original question. ‘Or are you and this Luke too busy getting to know one another to be making much progress with the wallpapering?’
Not even to Louise did Melanie feel able to admit how very deeply she felt drawn to Luke, especially in view of Louise’s earlier warnings; she was able, however, to tell her what Luke had suggested in relation to improving the decorative state of the bedroom, and when she had finished Louise commented approvingly, ‘Well, it’s a marvellous suggestion, and if he’s prepared to help you carry it out… One word of warning though, my love: don’t put too much of yourself into all this redecorative work, otherwise when the time comes to sell up you aren’t going to want to do so. Mind you, there’s nothing to stop you staying on in the cottage. It is a little remote, but with this Luke for a neighbour…’
Melanie could see the way her friend’s mind was working and told her quickly, ‘Oh, Luke won’t be staying long. He’s only renting his cottage, and as for me keeping this place…’
She gave a tiny sigh. Even if she should want to stay, even if she had not already decided that the cottage and the land must be sold and the proceeds given to some worthy charity, to go on living here would be impossible. For a start she would need to find herself a job, and that would prove virtually impossible; there was no industry of any sort…no one who might wish to employ a secretary. Unless… There was of course Chester. An hour…just less than an hour’s drive away.
‘So I’ll arrange for Simon to bring this stuff out to you, and then I’ll give you a ring to let you know when he’s coming,’ Louise was saying, and Melanie dismissed her errant thoughts to concentrate on her friend’s words.
Later that evening, when the fire had died down and she had eaten her supper, she found herself reliving the events of the day…remembering.
But no, she must not give in to this temptation, this compulsion almost to daydream about Luke, to recall, sensation by sensation, second by second, the time she had spent with him, and how he had made her feel.
She would be far better employed in worrying about David Hewitson’s obnoxious call.
She was sure she had not imagined the threat he had made against her. The solicitor had originally suggested when she had told him of her intention to sell the property that she wait until the outcome of the enquiry into the motorway extension was known, and for her to then put both the cottage and the land up for auction, because that way she would probably achieve a higher price; and this was what she had decided to do.
It wasn’t that she wanted the money for herself—far from it—but she suspected intuitively that David Hewitson had hoped to browbeat her into letting him have the property and the land at far below its re
al market value, and that, thwarted of this goal, he would probably continue to harass her and to make his vile insinuations in the hope that she would eventually give in.
Had she herself been the only person who would benefit financially from the sale of her inheritance she might well have done so, but that was not the case.
Since she had come to live in the cottage she had realised how very alone and unloved her benefactor had been, and she had come to feel that her inheritance from him was in some way an almost sacred trust; that the loneliness, the aloneness they had both known was an invisible thread that linked them to one another, just as it linked them to the many, many other people throughout the country, throughout the world—people who also knew the intense emotional deprivation of that deep inner loneliness which could be worse than the very hardest kind of financial poverty.
And, that being the case, she owed it both to John Burrows and to those who would eventually benefit through her from the sale of his land and home to get the maximum amount of money she could from the sale.
Restlessly she wished there was someone she could confide in; someone she could turn to for help and support; someone…
No, not just someone, she admitted honestly. The person who came most quickly to mind when she acknowledged this need within herself to reach out for protection and help was Luke Chalmers.
It was ridiculous, allowing herself to harbour these dangerous feelings for him. No matter how much he might intimate that he found her physically desirable, no matter how attractive she herself might find him, there was really no excuse for her to feel this aching, yearning need to get closer to him emotionally. Had she really no sense? Had she learned nothing from the past?
CHAPTER FIVE
TODAY, if Luke did put in an appearance she would treat him with cheerful friendliness, but if he made any kind of physical overtures to her whatsoever she would very quickly and firmly repel them, Melanie told herself determinedly as she finished her breakfast and cleared away the things.