by Lucy Gillen
Not even for you—Melodie added silently, but she nodded her thanks for the guidance all the same. ‘Thank you, Mrs McKay.’
She stood watching the stocky and faintly disapproving figure of the housekeeper walk to the door, waiting to see it close, but she blinked hastily when Jessie McKay turned in the doorway and her shrewd brown eyes looked at her once more. ‘You’ll be chilled from the rain,’ she stated in her flat voice. ‘I’ll have you something hot to drink that will take the chill from you.’
Dazedly Melodie nodded and smiled. ‘Oh, that would be lovely, thank you ! ‘
This time the door closed behind her, and Melodie watched it with dazed eyes. Such an offer of hospitality was the last thing she expected from that dour and uncompromising woman, and she felt a momentary twinge of guilt at the thought of possibly misjudging her. When she unrolled the dressing-gown too, she found a large bath towel in the middle of the bundle, and she once again wondered at the unexpected thoughtfulness of Jessie McKay.
Her skin glowed after a vigorous rubbing with the towel, and Melodie felt much more comfortable as she shrugged herself into the thick towelling robe and tied the sash at her waist. As she expected, it covered her completely from head to foot, but at least it allowed no glimpse of her nakedness, and she rolled the sleeves back as she surveyed herself in a long cheval mirror.
The red colour suited her and added to the rather wild gypsy look that was suggested by her black hair roughly towelled dry and left to riot around her face because she had no means of combing it into any kind of order. There was laughter in her blue eyes that appreciated the sight, and she could not restrain a rather nervous giggle as she faced the prospect of appearing in such a state.
There was no one about on the landing when she looked out, and she padded out on her bare feet, then turned to carefully close the door behind her. It was as she straightened up that she found herself looking directly along at Neil McDowell, and for a moment she hesitated.
Evidently he had come from the stairs while she was dosing the door, and his hand was on the handle of a
door immediately at the top of the stairs, presumably his bedroom. For some reason she expected him to simply acknowledge her being there and then carry on into his room, and with that in mind, she waved a hand. But although he acknowledged the wave he made no other move and she was more or less obliged to walk along the landing towards him, feeling more self-conscious than she had ever done in her life.
Seeing him again she was reminded of the way he had held her in his arms, such a very short time ago, and the sight of his bare brown arms, still glowingly damp, brought a swift and disturbing reaction from her senses. Giving herself a mental shake, she smiled and walked over with as much confidence as her attire allowed.
Neil had kissed her, that was all, and it was hardly such an unusual event in her life that it should mean so much—she had been kissed before. Not with such intensity, it was true, but she had been kissed by men before, and it made no sense at all that Neil McDowell should have left a so much deeper impression on her emotions than anyone else ever had.
Grey eyes swept over her modestly covered length and registered the tumbled mass of her hair, then he smiled, and she was once again startled by the difference it could make to that rather stern face. ‘I’d no idea I was so much bigger than you,’ he said. ‘That dressing-gown is mebbe a wee bit big for you!’
Melodie laughed because, despite her efforts at self-control, she felt curiously excited suddenly; the way she had down by the river, though she did her best to quell the feeling as she pulled the red robe about her more tightly. ‘It drowns me!’
‘That colour suits you.’
‘A red rebel! That’s what my brothers sometimes call me! ‘
`You’ve brothers?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, two of them, for my sins!’
He nodded, but he was remembering those few moments beside the river; she knew it, even though he said nothing. She could sense it in his manner and she felt herself shiver at the possibility of the scene being repeated. She looked down at the thick red dressing-gown, anything rather than meet his eyes, then once more that small and slightly unsteady laugh betrayed her nervousness.
‘Well, I’d better let Mrs McKay have..’ She stopped, looking down at her empty hands for a second until the truth dawned, then she shook her head. ‘Oh, what an idiot I am—I’ve forgotten my clothes!’
Turning quickly, she started to run back to the bedroom she had used, vaguely aware as she did so that Neil was calling something after her, then suddenly she went sprawling, tripped by a corner of the too-long dressing-gown that had caught under her foot.
Too breathless for a moment to get up, she lay full length until two large hands reached down for her and raised her from the floor. He said nothing, but held her for a moment while she recovered, and her cheeks were flushed, her eyes downcast because she felt she had made a fool of herself. Then the strong hands on her arms and the masculine scent of his warm, damp body seemed suddenly much too affecting, and she glanced up suddenly and shook her head, laughing unsteadily to cover the way she felt.
`It’s just not my day, is it?’
`No harm done.’ The hard fingers on her arms pressed into her soft skin for a second before he released
her. ‘But Jessie will fetch your things—you’d best have two hands to cope with that long dressing-gown while you go downstairs.’
‘Won’t she mind?’
The question was instinctive, but she did not really know why she asked it, except that Jessie McKay’s stony manner was still too easily recalled. But she saw Neil’s brows rise as if it surprised him. ‘I should hope not,’ he said quietly, and glanced down at his own wet clothes. His shirt clung to his broad chest and showed the tanned skin through its thin texture, and his fair hair was still darker than normal, though already starting to dry. ‘I’ve to change my own things first, then I’ll be down too.’
Something else occurred to her suddenly, and she looked up at him. ‘I haven’t thanked you for taking care of both horses—I should have remembered.’
That too appeared to surprise him, for he was looking at her between thick fair lashes, and his head was angled in query. ‘Would you not expect me to take care of them both?’ he asked, and Melodie shrugged, vaguely uneasy without quite knowing why.
‘Yes. Yes, I suppose so, but I’m still grateful.’
The grey eyes studied her for a second or two, and she found the scrutiny oddly disturbing; then he shook his head slowly. ‘You’d best away downstairs,’ he said, ‘and mind and lift that robe when you go.’
The warning reminded her so much of the way her brothers sometimes spoke to her that she responded in much the same way she would have done to one of them, letting him know that she was not baby enough to need to be told.
‘Yes, Mr McDowell ! ‘
It was a pert answer, but meant only to tease him
for the way he was instructing her and she wondered if she had been too rash when she saw him raise a brow as he regarded her steadily for a moment. ‘You don’t have to be sassy,’ he told her, and the slang expression spoken in that soft quiet voice brought a swift flush of colour to her cheeks.
‘I’m not being sassy ! ‘
She looked up at him, her blue eyes unconsciously provocative between their thick black lashes, and she was at the same time tinglingly aware of her own body and of the man facing her. The air was electric, just as it had been down there beside the river, with the storm venting its fury all around them. A vivid flash barely preceded the snarling roar of thunder that shook the house, and she saw a glimpse for a moment of the same kind of fierceness in the eyes of the man beside her, before it was hidden from her.
‘Jessie has some hot toddy ready that will take off the chill,’ he said in that cool voice. ‘I’ll be down for my share as soon as I’ve changed my clothes.’
Her mind could not immediately cope with the matter-of-factness of what he was sayi
ng, and she shook her head slowly and vaguely. ‘Mr McDowell—Neil—’
‘Have you not heard that silence can be golden?’ he inquired softly. ‘I suggest that this is one of those occasions, Melodie.’
He turned and went striding back to his room and Melodie watched the tall figure in clinging wet clothes with dazed eyes. Pride and even arrogance showed in the way he walked, and she watched him go with a strange feeling of regret that she was not altogether sure she could explain.
CHAPTER FOUR
MELODIE had said nothing to John as yet about riding with Neil, or that they had been caught in a storm and she had been obliged to take shelter in Ben Ross. It struck her as odd that she was so diffident about mentioning it, and once or twice during the ensuing week she had questioned her own reasons.
John had become an even more frequent visitor to the cottage. He either came to see her in the mornings before she started work, or in the evening when she had finished for the day, and a couple of times he had taken her to visit his uncle and aunt in their cottage on the estate. The visits were not altogether a success, although it was pleasant enough chatting to his family, but the Stirlings had lived all their lives in the service of the family at Ben Ross and the idea of having a guest of their employer visiting as a friend of their nephew, made them uneasy, and did not fit in with their idea of how things should be.
She had seen Neil several times during the week, but had been given the opportunity to do no more than wave a hand as he passed, either from her cottage or from her chosen viewpoint at the top of the terrace steps. While he returned her greeting amiably enough he had not once stopped to say more than a couple of words to her, and deep-down she resented the fact more than she cared to admit.
From his manner at present it might be supposed that he saw her simply as someone he could do no more
than be civilly polite to, but in view of the way he had acted when they stood beside the river in the midst of a raging storm, it was not an attitude that was easy to either accept or understand. Neil McDowell continued to be as much an enigma as ever, and sometimes she lost patience with herself for being so intrigued.
On Saturday morning, John was a fairly early caller at the cottage, and when Melodie opened the door to him it was plain from the way he was dressed that he had it in mind for them to go riding. He wore dark denims and a blue open-necked shirt, and he looked irresistibly cheerful, grinning all over his pleasantly attractive face when she opened the door.
‘Hello, John, you’re an early bird! ‘
He gave her mock salute and leaned a hand on the lintel of the door while he grinned at her hopefully. ‘How do you feel about exercising one of McDowell’s horses this morning?’ His grin was perhaps just slightly less confident at the moment and she wondered if the surprise she felt showed on her face. ‘Can’t I tempt you, Melodie? I know you can ride because you’ve said so —so how about it?’
Her hesitation was purely and simply because she was remembering the events of the only other time she had borrowed a horse from the Ben Ross stables, but John did not know that and he was watching her with a curious anxiousness, as if he feared she might refuse. There was absolutely no reason why she should refuse to go with him, and she nodded after only a moment or two, glancing down at the summery dress she was wearing.
‘You’ll have to give me time to change,’ she told him, and stood back from the door to let him in. ‘Would you like to come in and wait for me—I shan’t be very long?’
John’s grin became broader than ever and, as he stepped inside the little cottage, he caught hold of her hand and gave her fingers a brief squeeze. ‘Take all the time you need,’ he said. ‘I’m in no rush now I know you’re not turning me down flat.’
Assigning him a chair with a careless hand, Melodie watched him curiously as he dropped into one of the cottage’s rather battered armchairs. ‘Did you expect me to turn you down flat?’ she asked, and he shrugged, as if he hated to admit that he had ever doubted his own powers of persuasion.
‘I don’t know,’ he confessed. ‘I guess I figured that as it’s such a long time since you were on a horse you might think twice about it when it came to the crunch.’
Of course, it was a long time as far as John knew, she thought, but rather than tell him that it was in fact little more than a week since she was last on a horse, she turned away towards her bedroom with a somewhat uneasy smile. ‘I’ll go and change,’ she said.
When she reappeared a few minutes later she was wearing the same denim trousers and white blouse she had worn when she rode with Neil, and John got to his feet hastily. The way he looked at her, a swift searching scrutiny from head to foot, was reminiscent of Neil’s reaction in similar circumstances, and the clarity with which she remembered the fact startled her for a moment.
Physically John was every bit as attractive as Neil McDowell, but there was something about the older man that left a deeper impression on her, although she could not have said why or what it was that made it so.
John’s grin was in evidence once more as she came across the room to him and she responded to it instinctively. There was something about his almost
schoolboy enthusiasm that appealed to her present mood. ‘Well,’ he drawled, ‘that must be something of a record for a quick change, and well worth the effort, believe me.’
His car was parked outside the cottage, but they walked along the steeply sloping drive towards the house, and once more Melodie was driven to speculate, as they approached the big red brick building, on how lonely it must be for Neil living alone there. She did not say as much to John, but simply remarked on the air of solitude about the old place, and he nodded agreement, unhesitatingly.
‘I can’t think why it hasn’t been turned into a hotel or something by now,’ he declared, and shuddered melodramatically. ‘It’d give me the creeps, living alone in a mausoleum like that.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t call it a mausoleum!’ Her defence of the old house was quite instinctive, and she did not even notice John’s vaguely surprised look when she made the denial. ‘In fact it’s really quite homely inside, and—’ She stopped herself there, before she made a statement that could very well complicate things. Betraying an inside knowledge of the bedrooms in Ben Ross was bound to make John more curious than she was prepared for at the moment.
‘I can’t think why anybody would get so attached to it,’ he observed, glancing at the rather severe face that Ben Ross presented as they passed along its frontage. ‘Mind you, it must have something, I guess—the girl who inherited it from old man Ross hated leaving it, so Uncle Jamie says, though I’d have thought she would have been glad to see the back of it!’ Only then did he remember at whose invitation she was there, and Melodie saw his suddenly rueful face. ‘Oh, heck,’
he said dolefully, ‘I forgot you’re a friend of hers.’
‘You don’t have to worry,’ Melodie insisted, intrigued anew about Neil’s position at Ben Ross. ‘Catriona and Nick were more neighbours than close friends. We got along well socially, but I never knew a lot about them, only that Catriona inherited Ben Ross about eight years ago, but gave it up to marry Nick and settle in Australia.’ She looked up at the house again as they turned the corner and made for the stable yard. ‘Just the same, I can see how she’d hate leaving Ben Ross.’
‘And its manager, maybe?’ John suggested softly, and Melodie turned to him swiftly, her curiosity fighting a certain loyalty she felt she owed to her ex-neighbour in Australia.
‘Just what’s that supposed to imply, John?’
He shrugged, obviously regretting having made that rash and somewhat malicious comment, but there was little else he could do, having gone so far, but go on. And Melodie wanted to know the rest with a compulsion that surprised her. ‘It doesn’t mean anything very much really,’ he confessed uneasily. ‘It was just something that my uncle said once, about Neil McDowell having been keen on the girl who inherited this place.’
‘You mean he was
in love with her?’
It fitted in so well with the kind of situation she had visualised for Neil, and her blue eyes had a distant, hazy look for a second or two as she pictured him in love with the owner of Ben Ross, then losing her to Nick Holland. She had known somehow that he had been a loser in a love-affair, and her heart beat faster suddenly when she thought of him living alone in that great house with memories that were possibly more painful than anyone realised.
John took a more prosaic view, and he shrugged
lightly. ‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘Uncle Jamie said he was keen on her, he didn’t enlarge on it.’
‘I had a feeling there was something like that.’ She shook her head slowly. ‘He has that look about him somehow.’
‘Ah, come on now!’ John laughed off her romantic notions with a determined practicality, and taking her hand he smiled down at her, his brown eyes glistening. ‘He’s just a dour Scot, it has nothing to do with unrequited love ! Don’t get carried away with sentimental notions about him, Melodie—Neil McDowell isn’t the type to take kindly to anyone feeling sorry for him.’
‘I wasn’t feeling sorry for him!’ She denied it hastily and firmly, and yet she knew it wasn’t quite true, and the flush in her cheeks made John raise a brow.
‘O.K., O.K.,’ he soothed, and squeezed her fingers persuasively. ‘So let’s drop the subject of McDowell and get ourselves a couple of horses, shall we?’
Melodie said nothing for the moment, but walked with him across the cobbled yard and into the stable, instinctively pausing beside the stall that housed the chestnut gelding she had ridden the last time she went out. Black Knight’s stall next to it was empty, and she breathed an inward sigh of relief that Neil was unlikely to catch her unawares this time.
‘I’ll take Tarquin, the one I usually ride,’ John told her from further along, ‘and there’s a nice little grey here you’ll like. I’ll saddle him for you since you’re out of practice.’