At least, that would do for a start.' whispered a fervent inner voice. Even man's first progress on the moon was measured in slow, tentative steps!
When unexpectedly, he strode to close the gap between them, the vibrant animal magnetism projected by the play of muscles beneath a supple black skin snatched all the breath from her body.
'There comes a time in every man's life, Kate,' he told her unemotionally, 'when he's forced by circumstances to reject the dangerous drug of illusion and to come to terms with reality. Reality, so far as you and I are concerned, is conflict, mistrust, dislike and determined resistance. Reality is the preference you show for Geoff's company, the way your eyes light up in his presence, the fact that whenever I've caught you both unawares you've either been kissing or holding hands. In time I shall probably be able to overcome the reality of being jilted—but if you should decide to cause a rift between Geoff and his loving and very lovable wife, I doubt whether I should ever be able to persuade myself that you deserved to be forgiven!'
Leon had gone, lowered over the side of the vessel inside a small metal bell that sank, heavy as her heartbeats, below the waves. As she stood next to Geoff at the ship's rail, her stricken eyes fastened upon an upsurge of bubbles marking the spot where the diving bell had disappeared, she was swamped by a feeling of desolation almost too great to endure. As usual, they had parted in anger, left floundering in a morass of misunderstanding she had been too astonished to even attempt to deny—if she had been given time to do so.
She shivered, staring at a sea made sluggish by breath-held calm, glowing blood red where it reflected a flame streaked, slowly encroaching stretch of copper sky. She was not conscious of Geoff's close scrutiny, was barely aware of his existence until he heaved a sigh.
'There's much I find puzzling about your love affair, Catriona,' he confessed, sweeping a sympathetic look over a quivering mouth, noting the depth of agony in her green eyes. 'To the majority of people Leon will always remain an enigma, a cussed, intolerant, impossible-to-manipulate guy, but you love him, don't you?'
She jolted round to face him, feeling momentarily shocked, ready to blurt out a denial, but somehow the words would not come, and after a dazed silence during which her tangled emotions became magically unravelled she gasped a shaken acknowledgment that wrung his heart.
'Yes, Geoff, I do love Leon—he'll never know how much!'
When he realised now near she was to tears he flung his arm around her shoulders and urged gruffly,
'Let's go below to the control room where they'll be monitoring the diving bell's progress, there's no sense lingering up here.'
But when he tried to urge her forward she resisted by clutching the rail and peering downward as if desperate to plumb the depths of murky water.
'Geoff, please tell me what's happening down there!'
Sharing her sense of helplessness, her painful feeling of isolation, he tried to ease her anxiety by drawing a brief, simple outline of the divers' predicament.
'The damaged bell is lying on the seabed at a depth of approximately six hundred feet. At such depths it's necessary for divers to change over from breathing air— nitrogen and oxygen— to a mixture of helium and oxygen, because nitrogen under pressure has a narcotic effect and produces a sensation of reckless abandon divers call "rapture of the deep". The use of helium averts this hazard, but unfortunately it has the unpleasant drawback of conducting heat from the body, leaving the divers freezing cold. That's why the umbilical cord is used not only to supply air to the bell but also heat in the form of hot water pumped through pipes, to prevent the divers from becoming hypothermic—in other words, chilling to death.'
He hesitated when he saw her wince, but when her questioning eyes urged him to continue he reluctantly carried on.
'Once the umbilical cord has been severed the divers have to fall back upon the emergency support system inside the bell which is designed to allow a rescue time of twenty-four hours.' When she looked stricken he hastened to console her, 'Don't worry, my dear, Leon will get the divers transferred to the rescue bell in no time at all!'
'Why couldn't you have winched the bell to the surface?' she puzzled. 'That way, the rescue could have been concluded much more quickly.'
'Too risky,' Geoff shook his head. 'When a bell is leaking sudden drastic changes of pressure are apt to occur, which could be fatal. After just an hour spent diving at great depth the gas mixture saturates the divers' blood and body tissues to the point where he needs three days or more in a decompression chamber to bring him back to normal. So you must prepare yourself for a short separation,' he tried to sound jocular, 'for even if Leon should complete the rescue within the next hour, it will be at least three days from now before he's back in circulation.'
A clap of thunder drowned her reply. Startled, their eyes swivelled seaward just in time to see lightning rip a ragged tear across a sky active as a boiling cauldron, streaked with flame, seething with hidden turbulence.
'Quickly, get below!' Almost lifting her from her feet, he hauled her away from the rail when raindrops large as saucers began splaying on to the deck with a force that sounded from below deck like an opening burst of machine-gun fire warning of a full-pitched barrage to come.
'Hell!' The voice of an unseen man exploded just as they reached the threshold of the control room. 'That's all we need. Why couldn't the storm have held off for just another hour longer? Better warn Leon that we're preparing to hoist him back to the surface until the storm has passed over.'
'You'll be lucky!' Catriona just caught the words Geoff breathed under his breath. 'It's my guess that he'll refuse to come up until his mission has been completed.'
Proof that he could read Leon's mind better than anyone else present crackled through a radio receiver seconds after the men had informed Leon of their intention.
'I'll come up when I'm ready!' an almost incomprehensible voice commanded. 'We've reached the sea-bed, but our bell has developed a leaking valve that will have to be repaired before we begin transferring the trapped divers. I'm about to go outside the bell to attempt replacing it with a spare!'
Muttering a violent imprecation, Geoff strode across the room to shout into the microphone,
'Leon, don't be a fool! There's one helluva storm brewing up here, the Captain's doing his best to hold the ship steady, but there's every chance that your lifeline could also be severed. Come up, man! Far wiser to delay another hour than risk having a second bell adrift on the sea-bed!'
Silence was his only answer. Catriona turned away, digging fingernails deep into her palms as she fought to suppress an hysterical urge to snatch up the microphone and sob a heartbroken message through fathoms of murky water. 'Leon, come up! Please, darling, I love you so…!'
But instead she groped her way to a chair set in a corner at the far end of the control room and curled into a cold, tight ball of fear. For the following hour she was forgotten while, as a tempest raged above deck, while men stood by the winches, chilled and soaked to the skin, while the captain barked demented orders to his crew, while in the control room Geoff and Jock sweated and swore as they monitored Leon's movements, at the same time relaying a continuous flow of encouragement to the trapped divers.
As she waited, she felt cold and weary as if she were accompanying Leon on every step of his dangerously delayed mission to locate and replace a faulty valve in the darkness of freezing, zero-visibility sea with constantly changing currents, conscious all the while that if the support vessel should move his lifeline would snap, depriving him of air and essential heat.
After what seemed an aeon of suspense she heard Leon's calm, matter-of-fact voice reporting,
'The valve has been repaired and the trapped divers, both in fair conditions, have been transferred to the rescue bell. We're now ready to be winched back to the surface.'
She jumped to her feet, then swayed, aware, as if from a long way away, of the sound of cheering, shouted comme
nts, and tension-ridding laughter, then with a small sigh she slid down to the floor in a relieved faint.
CHAPTER TWELVE
'YOU'LL be getting back to work today, no doubt.' Aunt Hanna's statement sounded more in the nature of a command. 'There's nothing more to be done in here,' she glanced around the small living-room redolent with the smell of fresh paint, gleaming bright as a new pin with furniture polished to the sort of sheen only achieved with the aid of plenty of elbow grease; curtains and covers crisply laundered; rugs that had been violently attacked with carpet shampoo until they had yielded their original pattern of colours. 'If I didn't know you better, my girl, I'd say you were using housework as an excuse to delay your return to the office.'
'Not at all—' Catriona began a protest that was immediately interrupted.
'Yes, I know you've already explained the circumstances that have kept Leon out of circulation for a day or two, but surely after a week he must now be back behind his desk and missing the services of a secretary?'
Keeping hot cheeks averted from her aunt's scrutiny, Catriona continued polishing the surface of a table that was already reflecting her features as clearly as any mirror.
'Perhaps so,' she mumbled, shamed by the knowledge that her aunt's suspicion was not far from the truth, 'but he knows where I am,' she continued in a tone with a definite edge, 'so if he wants me, all he needs do is send a message.' She blinked, then had to hastily use her duster to remove all evidence of an escaped tear that was marring the shine on the polished table. Her aunt had not yet been told that during their last encounter Leon had made it plain that he did not want her, nor that his proposal of marriage had been motivated by all the wrong reasons. On several occasions she had been on the verge of explaining, but because the trauma of being closely involved in a mission so dangerous its consequences could easily have been tragic was still fresh in her mind, because the love that had surfaced that day from beneath fathoms of naiveté and wilful blindness was so precious to her—secreted as a pearl inside the shell of an oyster—she had dodged the certainty of an inquisition by allowing her aunt to continue happily putting the finishing touches to her wedding dress, had made no demur when a date had been suggested for the wedding to take place that was less than two weeks away.
'Look here, child,' her aunt sounded as if she were fast losing patience, 'if you are not going into the office, why don't you go aboot da banks?—it's a lovely day and the walk will do you good.'
The snatch of ancient dialect brought a glimmer of a smile to Catriona's lips and made the suggestion that she should walk along the edges of the cliffs and down to the beach sound appealling.
'Yes, I think I will,' she decided, her bright head lifting towards sunwarmed windowpanes, 'it's ages since I last went beachcombing on the shore.'
As she was already wearing denims and a cream-coloured jumper with a Fair Isle patterned yolk, she needed only to exchange sandals for a pair of well worn brogues and to sling an anorak over her arm before she was ready. After placing a farewell peck on her aunt's cheek she set off, eager to explore the irregular coastline, the lochs, the hills and dales providing a constant change of scenery that could be fully appreciated only by hiking as far away as possible from the main road.
She had progressed only a couple of hundred yards along an incline leading away from the cottage when her attention was caught by a flashing signal being transmitted by sunshine bouncing off the roof of an approaching car. She stopped to stare towards a bend in the road behind which the car had become hidden, then when it suddenly reappeared speeding swiftly as a silver arrow towards the cottage she took off in panic-stricken flight, hoping to scramble over a nearby ridge before she was spotted by the driver.
But seconds later, the squeal of brakes followed by the sound of a car door slamming told her that the hope had been a vain one. Slowly she turned and waited, quivering with the anxiety of a small, cornered animal who expects to suffer less from the jaws of its trap than from the merciless hands of its trapper.
Purposefully, Leon strode until he was within a couple of feet of where she was standing, then with a gleam she had never before seen in his amber eyes he demanded,
'Why the prolonged absence from the office? Work has piled up to such an extent I've been forced to seek you out. I need help with an important report that must be completed before the end of the week.'
She had wanted so much to see him, to assure herself that he had escaped without injury from his ordeal, nevertheless, the reason that had prompted his appearance goaded her into a snap of temper.
'Robinson Crusoe is the only man I know whose work was all done by Friday!'
To her surprise, he did not bite back with his usual ferocity but responded in the tone of a man determined to remain reasonable, not to be riled.
'Apparently I've been too hard a taskmaster. You're looking pale and your nerves are obviously worn ragged. I'm sorry, Kate,' he astounded her with an apology. 'Your health is more important than any backlog of work, please take as much time off as you feel is necessary to recover from my criminal lack of consideration.' Ignoring her look of surprise, he then took her by the arm and confused her utterly by coaxing, 'As you seem prepared to take a walk, would you mind if I take you up on your offer to share with me the secret pleasures of your island?'
'Less than a minute ago you professed to be snowed under with work,' she reminded him with a show of reluctance that brought a twist of chagrin to his lips.
'And now I've decided to play hookey. I believe in concentrating my mind upon one problem at a time, Kate,' he insisted with a gentleness that scared her more than his usual quick impatience, 'when I'm working I think only about work; when I'm in a mood for play my sole requirement is an agreeable playmate.'
Sensing his determination not to be thwarted, she bowed to the inevitable.
'Very well,' she conceded stiffly, 'what would you like to see first?'
'The wild Shetland ponies I've heard so much about.' Cheerfully, he fell into step beside her. 'I believe they're unique to the islands?'
Immediately, she shied from his close proximity, vitally aware of his rangy, relaxed stride, of limbs supple as a stalking predator's beneath casual slacks and a fine woollen sweater. Having been taught by past experience to treat his rare periods of amiability as presentiments of danger, she broke into a nervous babble.
'Ponies that roam the hills and moors all during the summer are descendants of a breed that's been native to the islands for thousands of years, but to say that they're wild is as misleading as the popular theory that in winter they're forced to eat seaweed in order to survive. They all belong to somebody, and though owners' methods of looking after their stock vary, mares in foal are usually made comfortable in enclosures and the few that are left grazing during winter months are supplied with plenty of extra feed to supplement their sparse diet.'
Somehow, without apparent effort, Leon closed the gap between them. 'Cattle left to shift for themselves where feeding is sparse tend to be undersized and underdeveloped,' he mused. 'Perhaps if one were to try breeding Shetland ponies in a climate where the grazing is richer they would increase in height.'
Unwittingly duped into defending part of her islands' heritage, Catriona vigorously shook her head. 'No,' she corrected proudly, 'it's been proved conclusively that that's not the case—no matter where they live, no matter what they are fed, pure bred Shetland ponies retain their miniature proportions! How and when these uniquely small animals reached our islands is not known for certain, but during excavations of a Bronze Age settlement unearthed animal bones were examined and measured and found to compare very favourably with those of the existing Shetland pony. Viking invaders, who were known to have taken their stallions with them into battle, probably introduced another strain when they settled here, but during the years that have passed since their occupation the pony has gradually reverted to its original small size. Aunt Hanna kept a couple in the stables when I was
a child,' she mused with a faintly nostalgic smile, 'it was always a blissfully happy day for me whenever, Citrine, my particular favourite, was not needed to cart fuel from the peat hill and I was allowed to use her as transport to take me to school.'
They had left the road far behind them, and as they sauntered over heather-covered moorland towards a coastline littered with reefs, stacks and skerries the smell of seaweed began mingling with the perfume of wild flowers being crushed beneath their feet, forming nature's own fragrant incense, a balm to soothe the senses and assuage the pain of savaged emotions.
Halting at the edge of cliffs dropping dramatically towards a stretch of sandy beach, Leon peered below, his attention riveted by a herd of chestnut, brown, black, grey, piebald and skewbald ponies with long, shaggy manes browsing among seaweed left stranded by an ebbing tide. When he leant forward to peer closer the air became suddenly animated by hundreds of pairs of beating wings as gannets, puffins, razorbills, guillemots and kittiwakes lifted from rocky perches to shriek raucous resentment of his presence. Hastily, he took a step backward when a piratical great skua rose into the air, then made a swooping dive in his direction.
'Look out!' she cautioned sharply, making a lunging grab for his arm when he seemed in danger of losing his balance. 'You must keep away from the edges of cliffs, they're often dangerously loose, especially after a spell of wet weather,' she scolded, shaken by his second close brush with danger.
When his glance quickened, his bright amber eyes questioning her shocked loss of colour, she snatched her hand from his arm, annoyed by the certainty that, to a man grown used to plumbing dangerous depths, her reaction must have appeared over-protective.
'I'm sorry, Kate, I seem fated to upset your serenity.' He did not sound mocking, nor even amused, just cautious as a hunter aware of a need to tread warily.
'You do…?' Though inwardly shaking, she strove to sound surprised, apparently unconcerned. 'I'm afraid I hadn't noticed.'
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