by Maggie Cox
‘I’m fine, thank you.’
Laying down the screwdriver, she rubbed her hands briskly together to get the circulation flowing back into her cramped fingers, deliberately keeping her expression carefully blank.
‘That damn gate of yours kept me awake all night with its creaking.’ Folding his arms across a chest that was disconcertingly wide, with muscles like steel beneath his black sweater if the strongly corded sinews in his forearms were anything to go by, Rowan’s hostile neighbour presented her with yet another forbidding scowl.
‘Why do you think I’m trying to fix it? It kept me awake too.’ That and another awful nightmare about Greg walking out in front of that car…
‘So you know what you’re doing, then?’
She thought she saw just a hint of a smile touch those austere-looking lips of his, but then told herself she must be mistaken. Something told her that smiles from this man would be as unlikely as honeysuckle growing in the Arctic. Anyhow, she was too busy being incensed by that superior, condescending tone of his to care one way or the other.
‘Frankly, Mr Whatever-Your-Name-Is, it’s none of your business. Now, I’d really appreciate it if you’d just leave me alone and let me get on with it.’
‘Evan Cameron.’
‘What?’ Rowan blinked up at him.
‘My name. It’s Evan Cameron.’ But don’t get your hopes up. Just because I’ve told you my name it doesn’t mean we’re going to be friends. She heard the words echo through her head even though he hadn’t actually voiced them.
‘Fine. Good. I’ll know who you are if anyone knocks on my door by mistake, then.’ Her fingers curled around the screwdriver again and determinedly she trained all her concentration on trying to undo the obstinate screw.
‘Give it to me.’
‘What?’
The screwdriver was deftly removed from between her freezing-cold fingers before she even knew what was happening. Shocked by the contact of his larger, rougher hand brushing against hers, Rowan stood up to her full five feet five inches and glared at the black-haired whipcord-lean specimen of forbidding male towering over her.
‘Why don’t you get inside in the warm and I’ll see to this?’
If he’d meant to sound solicitous of her welfare all of a sudden, Rowan itched to tell him that he’d failed. Her creaking gate had annoyed him, that was all, and he was anxious to get it fixed so he wouldn’t have to endure another sleepless night because of it. Another woman might be grateful he was going to fix it at all and save her a job, but not Rowan. As far as she was concerned, if someone couldn’t offer help with a good heart then it wasn’t really help at all. She’d rather blunder on under her own steam and make a pig’s ear of the job than allow some hostile male with an overstated sense of his own machismo to take charge.
‘I didn’t ask for your help and neither do I require it, Mr Cameron. I’m sure you have better things to do than stand out here in the cold and fix my annoying gate on a Sunday morning.’
Holding out her hand, Rowan tried to ignore the thundering of her heart as her own soft brown eyes duelled with frosty green. ‘I’d like my screwdriver back, please.’
‘You got a man about the house, Ms Hawkins?’
‘That’s none of your business. And before you say anything else, don’t you dare stand there and condescend to treat me like some vacuous little female who doesn’t know one end of a power tool from another, because I—’
‘Do you?’ Evan’s lips twitched into a smile before he could help it.
Her shoulders stiffening in resentment, Rowan glared in disbelief. ‘Do I what?’
‘Know one end of a power tool from another?’
‘This is ridiculous! Give me my screwdriver and just go. Please go!’
‘Please yourself.’ Shrugging those broad shoulders of his as if he really didn’t give a damn, Evan returned the tool to her outstretched hand. He turned to walk away, then stopped and glanced back for a few disturbing seconds, his cool gaze sizing Rowan up as if he definitely found her wanting in the physical department. ‘Funny how the phrase “cutting off your nose to spite your face” springs to mind. Fix that gate, Ms Hawkins, or I’ll be knocking on your door in the middle of the night so that you can share my night-time torment.’
And with that he walked away, as if he were some arrogant lord of the manor and she a mere peasant trespassing on his land. Giving vent to her fury, Rowan jammed the screwdriver back into the screw and nearly howled in pain when it slipped and almost took the skin off her thumb.
Two hours later, her belly grumbling for lunch and her body stiff with cold, Rowan got up off her knees and had to admit defeat. Two hours…two hours, for God’s sake! And that damn hinge still wouldn’t budge. As she hurried back up the path towards the house, she glanced surreptitiously at her neighbour’s windows. Satisfied that she wasn’t being observed, she rushed inside and carefully shut the door behind her. Ten minutes later, phone directory in one hand and a steaming mug of hot chocolate in the other to warm her, Rowan sat herself down at the circular pine kitchen table with the telephone to see if she could locate a nearby odd-job man. She was still seething from Evan Cameron’s parting remark—‘night-time torment’ indeed! She was just about to pick up the phone to punch out a number when the melodic sound of the doorbell trilled ominously through the house.
‘You’ve got guts, I’ll give you that.’
‘Meaning?’
Bristling at the humour in Evan Cameron’s previously glacial green eyes as his awesome physique dominated her doorway, Rowan didn’t know how she resisted the urge to slap that smirk clean off his wretchedly handsome face.
‘For two hours now I’ve watched you struggle with that hinge in the cold and wind, and, whatever I think of your misguided stubbornness to prove a point, I’ve got to respect the fact that you didn’t give up trying. Let me put you out of your misery and mend the gate for you, then I promise I won’t bother you again.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘WHAT does it take to get through that thick skull of yours?’ Rowan heard herself demand. ‘I don’t want you to fix my gate. If I can’t fix it myself then I’d rather any other man in the world fixed it than you!’
The woman was even more stubborn than he’d thought. Evan knew he was mostly to blame for her current animosity towards him, but still he’d gone to her house with the best of intentions, and was it his fault if she refused to see that it made utter sense for him to fix her broken gate? She’d said she’d rather ‘any other man in the world’ fix it than him. Perhaps there wasn’t a husband or boyfriend around, then? There must be a good reason she was trying to repair the damn thing herself.
His green eyes narrowed with reluctant interest. In her floaty white dress of yesterday Rowan Hawkins had looked small and unbelievably slender. Today, in tight black jeans and a figure-hugging red sweater, Evan could see she had curves in plenty. His gaze was momentarily distracted by the angry rise and fall of her eye-catching breasts beneath her sweater and he cursed the inevitable reaction low in his groin. Despite his purely male response she really wasn’t his type at all. He liked his women taller and on the willowy side. He especially wasn’t attracted to women with that lost look in their pretty brown eyes, or women who thought it was an infringement of their human rights if a man so much as held a door open for them—never mind offered to mend broken gates.
‘Fine.’
Only it wasn’t fine. Not really. There was still the little matter of the creaking gate potentially keeping him awake for a second night in a row. The wind coming in off the sea was still fierce, and even now the damn thing was squeaking for all it was worth. If it carried on any longer he’d be fit to be tied. ‘Perhaps you could get your husband to fix it, then?’
Evan knew by the sudden shadows that crept into her eyes that he’d said the wrong thing. He’d deliberately baited her just for the hell of it. Oh, why hadn’t he just left well enough alone and walked away? He was the one who’d told her h
e wasn’t the neighbourly sort and now he was annoying himself with his dogged persistence in trying to win a response from her.
‘I don’t have a husband.’
‘Not the end of the world.’ Shrugging, Evan dug his hands into his jeans pockets, wondering how he could tactfully withdraw from the pain that was all too evident in her soft brown gaze. ‘You’re probably better off without one. I can’t say the married state is one I’d recommend.’
‘Really? Your cold cynicism can’t win you many friends, Mr Cameron. For your information, my husband was killed in a road accident. I loved him with all my heart and miss him like you can’t begin to imagine, so how do you figure that I’m better off without him?’
Her voice breaking on a sob, Rowan retreated, stricken, behind the solid wooden door with its peeling white paint and the sound of it slamming reverberated through Evan’s skull like cannon fire. For a long moment he simply didn’t move. Of all the crass, tactless, supremely stupid things that had ever come out of his mouth, his last comment to Rowan was probably the worst. Now not only did he loathe his own apparent inability to be even the smallest bit sensitive to a woman who was clearly in pain, but he also detested the unhappy knack he’d acquired in the past two years of distancing himself emotionally from the rest of the human race. Since Rebecca had done her worst it had been Evan’s safety valve, but now he despised himself for allowing it to become a habit.
He considered knocking on Rowan’s door again to apologise, but realised that under the circumstances she’d probably just tell him to go to hell. Too late, he was there already… He clicked his tongue and backtracked down the path to stare down at the offending gate with a rueful shake of his head.
An hour later he had it mended, new hinges and all. The curtain at one of Rowan’s front windows twitched slightly as Evan stood up, but he deliberately glanced away, stretching his arms high above his head to ease out the cramp in his muscles before gathering up his tools. He had no intention of waiting around for acknowledgement of what he’d done—not that he expected it. Instead, closing the gate smartly behind him with a satisfying click, he strode back down the path to his own house and headed straight for the television remote in the living-room. He’d drown out the painful self-recrimination tumbling around in his head with the athletics meet that the BBC were broadcasting and hopefully forget about everything else but the pursuit of athletic excellence and competing with the best.
Her fingers embedded in dough, Rowan paused in her energetic kneading to stare out the window at her poor, bedraggled garden. The grass was almost bald in places and in others it grew wild and free, vying with the weeds for precedence. She’d have to lay some new turf if she wanted a lawn, but first she needed to tackle those weeds and cut the wild grass down to a more manageable length. On a positive note, there was plenty to delight the eye as well. Little clumps of sunny primula and bunches of bright yellow daffodils swayed in the breeze, and there were even a few dainty bluebells stating their presence amongst the green.
What had possessed Evan Cameron to fix her creaking gate after everything she’d said? For the umpteenth time that afternoon, Rowan’s thoughts gravitated back to him. Had he felt guilty when she’d told him that her husband was dead? No. The man simply didn’t seem capable of such a human emotion. Clearly he just hadn’t been able to endure another night’s broken sleep, that was all. He’d simply been looking after his own interests when he’d decided to assume the role of odd-job man. Well, OK…as long as he didn’t expect her to be grateful. From now on she really would give him a wide berth and she certainly wouldn’t waste another one of her ‘annoyingly sunny’ smiles on him again, even if he begged her. Which, of course, he wouldn’t. A man who looked like Evan Cameron would never have to beg a woman for anything—that was if they were prepared to overlook the unrelenting chill in those fascinating green eyes of his. What was his story, she wondered. What had put the strain around that austere mouth? The tiny grooves in that otherwise smooth, almost olive skin of his? And why would a man like him want to bury himself in the depths of the countryside like some kind of hermit?
‘Think about something else, why don’t you?’ Incensed with herself for spending too much time dwelling on the man, Rowan pounded the innocent dough with more force than was strictly necessary. But there was great satisfaction in having an unexpected outlet for the rage that had been boiling inside her since Evan Cameron’s offensive remarks that morning. If the man were hanging off the edge of a cliff she wouldn’t raise one finger to help him. No. She’d just smile sweetly and wave goodbye. As far as Rowan was concerned, he could plummet into oblivion and good riddance!
Half an hour later, a steak and kidney pie simmering in the oven and the washing-up done and put away, Rowan returned to her living-room to sort through some old photographs. She’d been putting off the task since she moved into the cottage a month ago, but now there was no reason—except maybe fear—for her not doing it. She’d already decided there were too many pictures for her to keep, and anyway, why did she want reminders of what Greg had looked like? His beloved features were imprinted on her heart for always. Looking at photographs of happier times would only bring her pain, and it wasn’t as if she had children to keep them for. A pulse throbbed in her temple at the thought.
Settling the two old-fashioned biscuit tins side by side on the dark wood table, Rowan carefully prised off the lid of one of them, then, taking a deep, shuddering breath to steel herself, picked up a handful of photographs and studied them. Now, there was a man who had known how to smile. First picture she’d handled and there was Greg, grinning cheerfully into her camera, for once happy to be in front of the lens instead of behind it. It had been taken on a stolen day out at the seaside, and the pair of them had behaved like a couple of carefree children. Eating huge ice creams as they strolled along the promenade, having fun at the small fairground, then eating fish and chips for their tea as they sat on the sand and watched the tide come in, they’d honestly believed they had a wonderful future in prospect.
Her throat tightening with a now familiar ache, Rowan stroked the glossy picture, her heart swelling with love and pride at the man she had loved and lost. Greg had had a nice face. Not handsome or good-looking, but a good face that people had been instantly drawn to. His sunny, benevolent nature hadn’t disappointed either. At his funeral there had been friends and colleagues in plenty along with family to mourn his untimely passing.
Rowan’s mind drifted along on a sea of remembrance. She could hardly believe that almost seven months had gone by since the accident. After spending the first three months after Greg’s death in a kind of numbed existence, where she’d got up, washed, dressed, ate breakfast and gone to work, it had slowly dawned on her that she should sell the house in Battersea. Instead, she would take up residence in their ‘nest egg’—the dream cottage that they had bought in wild and beautiful Pembrokeshire. All of a sudden she had known a desperate desire to escape the noisy, gridlocked city and take refuge in some peace and quiet.
Now that she was here, she couldn’t help wondering if she had bitten off more than she could chew. So much needed to be done, and Rowan was a city girl who had lived in London all her life. Working as a production assistant for a busy, up-and-coming television company, she hadn’t had time to develop an interest in ‘do it yourself’ and neither, bless him, had Greg. He had either been away for long periods on assignments all over the world or at the studio doing important research for his next job. Sighing as she glanced around at the dilapidated shelves that needed painting and repositioning, the wooden floor that needed sanding down and varnishing before she could adorn it with the beautiful rugs Greg had brought back from his travels, Rowan knew she would seriously have to get down to learning how to do some of these jobs herself. If she was going to take a whole year out of work as she’d planned, then she couldn’t afford to pay workmen to do all the jobs that needed doing round the house to make it habitable.
Already she felt t
hat she’d failed in some way because Evan Cameron had had to come to her rescue and fix her damn creaky gate. Well, she’d show him! That was the last time he was going to treat her like some dull-witted, pathetic female who didn’t have a clue how to do anything more complicated than paint her toenails! Suddenly realising that sorting through her photographs wasn’t the task that most needed doing after all, Rowan dropped the pictures back into their tin and jammed the lid down hard. As the delicious aroma of cooking meat pie started to pervade the house, she jumped up and disappeared into her bedroom to rummage through her bookshelves for the two second-hand books she had purchased a week ago on home decorating and ‘Do It Yourself for the Enthusiastic Beginner’.
His black hair sleek from his shower and a striped bath towel secured around his toned-hard middle, Evan took his time crossing the room to get to the ringing telephone. Only two people—as far as he was aware—knew his whereabouts. Right now, the mood he was in, he didn’t relish speaking to either of them.
‘Yes?’ He deliberately didn’t announce his name or number, and he most definitely didn’t put out a vibe that came anywhere close to friendly.
‘Evan, is that you?’ rejoined a familiar female voice.
‘Beth,’ he sighed, and wondered how soon he could bring the call to an end without being rude. Five years younger than her big brother, his sister still acted like a mother hen around him. ‘How are the kids?’
‘Luke and Alex are fine. It’s not them I’m concerned about, as well you know.’
‘And from that do I deduce that I’m the focus of all your loving concern?’
‘It’s not a joke, Evan. A couple of months ago you nearly died of the flu! It’s only natural that I want to keep in touch to make sure everything’s all right. Are you eating OK? I know you’re big on all that nutritional stuff for fitness, but are you getting enough fresh fruit and veg? You know there’s that handy little greengrocers in the village, don’t you? Their stuff is pretty good, and they even stock things like nuts and seeds.’