Crossfeld House was now approaching, just an imposing blur through the densely falling snow.
‘Is there a great deal of work to do on the place?’ She broke the silence.
‘Enough to keep a building crew very busy for at least a year,’ he said, pulling up in front of the house as close as he could possibly get to the front door so as to avoid having to manoeuvre over the treacherous courtyard.
‘Good Lord. That’s going to cost a fortune!’ she exclaimed involuntarily. ‘And to think I shall probably have to dive into my paltry savings to get my bike repaired once it’s been fished out of the snow drifts.’
‘The repairs will be on me,’ Louis said drily, wondering whether that was what she had been aiming at with her remark, but the look of horror she shot him was sufficient to tell him that he couldn’t have been further from the truth.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I would never, ever accept a single penny from you.’ Lizzy opened the car door and slammed it behind her. ‘And I hope you didn’t think that I was fishing for hand-outs.’ She folded her arms and stopped to glare at him.
‘Accept the offer, Lizzy. If you felt that you had to come rushing over here for Rose, it was because of what I said, so in a peculiar way I’m partly to blame for the fact that your motorcycle is currently in the process of being buried under ten feet of snow. Besides—’ he reached past her to insert his key in the lock of the rather grand oak door ‘—it’s hardly as though it’ll break the bank.’
‘Thanks, but no thanks.’
‘Well, suit yourself. But pride comes before a fall.’
‘I’ve never believed in that old rubbish,’ she retorted, stepping back. ‘If I’m going to fall, I’m more than happy to fall with my pride keeping me company on the way down.’
Louis looked at her with sudden, vibrant appreciation and a flare of hot colour warmed her face. In the act of pushing open the door, he was so close to her that she could breathe in the woody, clean, masculine scent of him and it filled her head like an exotic, powerful incense.
She automatically stepped back, blinking like a mole suddenly exposed to bright light, then the door was opening and she was looking at the vast hall that she vaguely remembered from a thousand years ago.
Crossfeld House had been passed down the generations until its upkeep became too costly. Its glory had gradually faded, a grand old lady with no one rich enough or finally interested enough to give her the attention she deserved.
From what Lizzy could see, the place wasn’t in bad order. The five-strong golfing conglomerate had obviously had high hopes of bringing it up to standard, but the plummeting economy had taken care of that dream, and in the intervening years jobs begun had not been completed so that there was an unfinished air about the place. There were too few paintings on the walls, the tired, faded wallpaper needed to be stripped off; one immense, high ceilings were dingy. But nothing could take away from the scale and grandeur of the place.
‘Appreciate it while it’s here,’ Louis murmured drily as he followed her gaze. ‘It won’t be for long. The wiring’s chaotic, and the plumbing has an agenda of its own, and by the time those two things get sorted there’ll be nothing left of what you see.’
‘It’s a big task for, um, someone like you …’ Lizzy said faintly.
‘Someone like me?’
‘A year out restoring this property—isn’t that going to eat up lots of your valuable, high-powered time?’
‘Ever heard of delegation?’
‘You really do live in a different world from the rest of us, don’t you?’
‘Hence my natural caution about anyone aspiring to claw their way in through a back door.’
‘Right. The gold-diggers.’ She was comfortable being back on ground she understood. Just for a minute, when he had looked at her with that warm, amused appreciation, she had felt herself floundering, out of her depth and not knowing what to do about it. ‘Where’s Rose?’
‘Safe and well,’ Louis told her with infuriating amusement. ‘And in the sitting room with Nicholas and his sisters.’
Feeling a fool, she trailed behind Louis, feigning great interest in her surroundings whilst wondering why she had come. They weren’t about to feed Rose to the dogs. He had been right: she had been arrogant to assume that it was her sacred duty to watch over her sister like an unappointed guardian. When they finally reached the sitting room she could see from a glance that Rose wasn’t cowering in a corner but sipping from a glass of wine and looking radiant in a pair of casual leggings and a long-sleeved grey jersey-top that promoted her fantastic figure without revealing anything at all.
She gave a screech of delight and rushed over, only to stand back and hold Lizzy by the shoulders.
‘You’re soaking wet!’
‘That’s the trouble with being stuck in snow.’
‘Thank you so much, Louis, for rescuing her.’
‘He didn’t rescue me. He picked me up. I would have made it here just fine on my own, but it might have taken a little longer.’
Rose frowned and immediately Lizzy felt churlish and clamped her lips tightly together. ‘Not that I’m not grateful. I am.’
‘But what have you done with your motorbike?’ Jessica demanded, standing up and tossing her long, poker-straight blond hair over her shoulder. She smirked; it was a glaringly obvious smirk even though no one else appeared to notice it.
‘You look as though you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards,’ she continued, still smiling, still sounding sympathetic, but still looking at her narrowly, her bright blue eyes chips of ice. ‘You should go have a bath. Or something. But I’m not sure what you would change into … You’re a tiny little thing, aren’t you?’
‘Good things always come in small packages!’ Nicholas exclaimed, joining in the general fuss and trying to smooth over the jagged undertones. ‘Except in the case of Rose.’
‘Are you saying that I’m fat?’ She looked over her shoulder and laughed, and Lizzy was again struck by the idiocy of trekking her way to Crossfeld to help shore up the defences of the Sharp family. Rose was relaxed and more than capable of holding her own against Jessica and Eloise in her own quiet, unflappable way.
While Lizzy, the cynosure of all eyes, dripped onto the carpet and mentally tried to figure out how much this little excursion would set her back in repair bills to her motorbike.
‘I’ll take you up to … which room, Nicholas?’ Rose apologised, turning to Lizzy. ‘Some of them are horrid, plus un-heated. You could have my room. I’m … um … you know.’ She pinkened and shot Nicholas an anxious glance.
‘Wherever,’ Lizzy muttered, only to hear Louis commandeer the situation by offering to show her to one of the bedroom suites which were on the right side of the house. The wrong side, apparently, contained rooms that were sealed off, ready and waiting for the plumbers and electricians to wreak their havoc.
‘Don’t be silly, Lou!’ Jessica stepped forward quickly. This close, the comparison between them was even more dramatic: Lizzy still in her biker gear, wet and bedraggled, next to Jessica who was in a silky lounging outfit and a long cardigan that would have looked dreary on anyone fatter, shorter or less good-looking. ‘I’m sure the poor thing already feels like an imposition without having you put yourself out even more.’
‘The poor thing,’ Louis said coolly, ‘is more than capable of speaking for herself, Jessica. And the poor thing may have been a fool to contemplate taking a motorbike out in these sorts of conditions, but it’s a damn sight more admirable than hunkering down in front of a fire, moaning about the cold and refusing to step one dainty foot outside the house.’
A deathly silence greeted this flatly dismissive statement of fact. Eloise giggled, while Jessica went white before spinning round to deliver a withering look at her sister.
‘I thought,’ Jessica blustered, crossing her arms, ‘you liked women who looked like women.’
‘Oh, believe me, I do.’ The dark huskiness of his voice
combined with the speculative, brooding look he shot her made Lizzy’s toes curl and sent her thoughts whirling chaotically in her head. Suddenly the occupants of the room seemed to disappear, leaving just the two of them and the intense electric charge vibrating between them like a live current.
‘Rose will be fine showing me up to a room somewhere,’ she croaked. ‘No matter the size or condition. We bikers are a hardy lot.’
Out of the corner of her eye, Lizzy registered Nicholas’s curious eyes on them, while Eloise dived back behind the magazine she had been reading and Jessica pursed her lips together in rage.
Thankfully, Rose seemed oblivious. She was in her own little world with Nicholas, scared that it might not work out but deliriously happy. Upstairs Lizzy listened to her chatter away as she sat on the bed while Lizzy had a long, lazy, very hot bath with the door slightly ajar. She replayed that look Louis had given her, and the way he had shot Jessica down in flames without turning a hair. The more she saw of him, the less he corresponded with the one-dimensional image in her head—and, worse, he interested her. Just being in his company made her feel sickeningly alive, and not even submerging herself underneath the water could clear her head.
‘And they’re not too bad,’ Rose confessed as Lizzy decked herself out in borrowed clothes, rolling the waistband of the trousers to shorten them, just as she had done with her school skirt when she had been a teenager, and feeling a little awkward in the skin-tight jersey-top. Her shoes were drying out by the radiator and, having refused to be seen dead in the fluffy bedroom slippers Rose had brought with her, she opted for a pair of socks.
‘I mean, Jessica’s a bit sarcastic now and again, but I just ignore her—and Eloise is a dream.’
So all was joy in paradise, Lizzy thought to herself. Even if she was more than aware of the snide digs from Jessica for the remainder of the evening, underneath the polite conversation. Malicious asides were camouflaged behind wide, innocent eyes; the little attempts to make sure that the conversation was dragged round to the subject of background so that she could chat about her privileged upbringing with the riding lessons and skiing holidays. Then she would ask, leaning forward with an earnest, kind, curious expression, what they had done for fun when they were kids.
From the sidelines Louis, sprawled after dinner with a cup of coffee, watched and said very little until Lizzy asked, twisting to look at him, ‘And aren’t you going to tell us all about your fabulous background and marvellous holidays? I mean, you’ve heard all about our trips to the seaside and camping excursions—’
‘Which were wonderful,’ Rose interposed quickly, snuggling into the crook of Nicholas’s arm.
Lizzy wondered whether either of them was actually paying a scrap of attention to the conversation. Had Rose even noticed the catty way Jessica had managed her put-downs? The airy wave of the hand when she had dropped names and spoke of ‘Daddy buying this’ and ‘Daddy buying that’? The sly, sideways glance at Louis and the quiet insertion of ‘you poor things’ when Lizzy had admitted that, no, they had never been on safari or gone snorkelling in the Bahamas? Nor had any of them had the privilege of going to private schools, never mind the boarding schools both Eloise and Jessica had attended and which—Lizzy had learned in too much detail—had been an absolute hoot.
No, Rose was in a world of her own, smiling and murmuring to Nicholas while he played with her vanilla-blond hair and twirled curly strands between his fingers. Rose most definitely did not need her assistance. Rose didn’t need anyone’s assistance. She was perfectly capable of looking out for herself by dint of a personality with a highly developed talent for denial.
‘Oh, Louis was always the envy of our group.’ Jessica had kicked off her flats and her long legs were draped over the arm of the chair.
‘You mean you had even more fabulous and mind-boggling holidays than Jessica’s safaris and yachting down the Grenadines?’
Dark eyes rested on Lizzy’s face and his mouth curved into a slow smile. ‘It’s not the quality of the holiday,’ he murmured, ignoring Jessica completely. ‘It’s the quality of the people you go with—and believe me when I tell you that I have never been more bored than when I was in Mustique, despite the turquoise water and white sand.’
Lizzy didn’t believe him and, judging from the look on her face, neither did Jessica. Her head was beginning to hurt.
Did she really want to continue listening to never-ending descriptions of a life to which membership started with a price tag of a million pounds? No. Did she now want to have it rammed home to her just how much she and her family did not belong with these birds of paradise who lived their marvellous lives in this gilded cage? Definitely not. She yawned widely and stood up; Louis drawled lazily, ‘Surely you’re not heading up already?’
‘The poor thing’s probably exhausted from her escapades in the snow.’ Jessica sprang to her feet. ‘No, don’t you move a muscle, Rose! I’ll show Lizzy up. She’s in the Blue Room, right? I need to get something from upstairs anyway.’
Did Lizzy believe that for a second? No. And, as soon as Jessica had shut the door behind them, she was proved right.
‘How long are you planning on staying?’
Now that they were no longer in the sitting room, the act was comprehensively dropped.
‘I’ll be gone in the morning,’ Lizzy said with equal bluntness.
‘I mean from here. Back to London. Don’t you have a bunch of kiddies back at some school or other? Rose said that you could only get a few days off and that you won’t be back for Christmas.’
‘I don’t think that my movements are your concern.’
‘True.’ They were halfway up the grand, winding staircase and Jessica skipped up a couple of steps and then turned to look down on Lizzy. ‘But you’d be doing yourself a favour by clearing off. All that business of Louis coming to rescue you; I wasn’t born yesterday. I know every trick in the trade when it comes to getting a man, especially a man like Louis.’
‘Sorry?’
‘The unnecessary trip to Crossfeld? The stranded motorbike? The SOS call to your sister? You can flutter your eyelashes all you want at Louis, but you’d be wasting your time, and you can think of that as a friendly piece of advice. He would never look at you in a million years. He’s choosy when it comes to the women he dates, and a little bit of bored flirting doesn’t mean that he’s actually interested.’
‘I have no idea why you’re telling me all of this,’ Lizzy said coldly. ‘Louis Jumeau is the last man on earth I’d ever be interested in. He’s not my type and I’m not turned on by the size of someone’s bank balance. In fact, it’s a disadvantage.’ Her throbbing head was making her feel giddy and nauseous. She clutched the banister and tried to focus. ‘You’re welcome to him,’ she added for good measure, and the tinkle of Jessica’s delighted laugh sent a spasm of pain shooting through her head.
‘Oh, goody—I’m thrilled we understand each other! Now, you go up to bed. You’re really beginning to look a little green around the gills. All that wind and snow can’t be good for a girl; does terrible things to the complexion, you know …’
The following morning, Lizzy knew that she was somewhat more than just green around the gills. She was burning up, could barely get out of bed and her legs felt like jelly.
Rose came in and was a hovering, worried presence that she was fleetingly aware of before she fell back asleep.
When she next opened her eyes it was to find thin winter sunlight trying to penetrate the thick curtains; a glance at her watch told her that it was after eleven. The banging in her head had eased but had been replaced by a general, shaky weakness that made a nonsense of her urgent desire to get out of bed.
In the middle of trying to manoeuvre her legs into obedience, she was hardly aware of the bedroom door being pushed open, and the sound of Louis’s voice sent a shock wave of panic through her.
‘What are you doing here?’ Instead of being sharply authoritative, her voice was a feeble croak. She cl
eared her throat and fell back onto the pillow, pulling the quilt up to her neck and closing her eyes to block out the alarming sight of him striding across the room to look down at her.
‘I’m doing my medical rounds. If you’d woken up half an hour earlier you would have found your sister doing hers. You’ve been out of it for nearly twelve hours.’
Lizzy cautiously opened her eyes and squinted up at him. He wasn’t even a permanent resident of Crossfeld House and he already looked like a lord of the manor in a thick, checked shirt which he had cuffed to the elbow and a pair of faded black jeans that rode low on his hips. He was a man accustomed to giving orders, and he looked every inch the part.
‘I was tired.’
‘You’re ill.’
‘I’m not ill! I’m never ill. Rose has always been the fragile one in the family. Ask anyone. I’m as strong as an ox.’
‘There’s no way a doctor can come out here. You could say that we’re snowed in, so you’re going to have to rely on medication and plenty of fluids to get you through this bug you’ve picked up.’
Lizzy groaned. The word ‘imposition’, which Jessica had used the night before, reared its ugly head.
‘We can’t be snowed in.’
‘You can’t be ill. We can’t be snowed in. Wrong on both counts, unfortunately.’ Louis walked across to the curtains and yanked them open to reveal a continuing and dramatic fall of snow. ‘It should ease by nightfall, if the weather forecast is anything to go by, but before you start thinking about leaving you might as well forget it. You’re going nowhere until you’re back on your feet. The last thing I need is for you to end up in hospital because I’ve dispatched you before time.’
In Want of a Wife? Page 5