‘Bye bye, Mr Dale,’ the girls chirped, waving scarlet-tipped fingers at him, and he had grinned back at them appreciatively.
‘Nice to meet you, girls.’ Then he shook Laura’s hand in his bone-scrunching way, nodding at her. ‘I’ll hope to hear from you soon, then, Miss Grainger, and don’t you fret about Josh Kern. His bark is worse than his bite.’
She hoped so. His bark was quite bad enough. A thought occurred to her and she asked, ‘By the way, did he say he had offered to buy the cottage?’
‘No, he made an offer, and she refused it.’
‘Why? Was it too low?’
‘No, he offered a good enough price.’ Mr Dale paused, frowning. ‘I forgot to tell you, with all the harassment we got from Josh...there is a covenant on the cottage, to the effect that whoever buys it must not resell to Josh Kern while Mrs Forest is alive.’
Startled, Laura stared. ‘That can’t be legally binding, surely?’
‘If you don’t sign the covenant, she won’t sell, and if you do sign the covenant it’s legally binding,’ said Mr Dale with one of his shrewd grimaces.
Laura had forgotten to tell Patrick about that. She must remember to tell him tomorrow when she rang. It might make a difference to his decision; such a binding agreement might be a problem later if they wanted to sell and couldn’t find a buyer.
They might then wish they could sell to Josh Kern, although Laura was already feeling very sympathetic towards Mrs Forest’s desire to keep him out of the property. It would give her a lot of pleasure to do anything that annoyed Josh Kern.
She only hoped she wouldn’t see much of him, if she and Patrick did decide to buy Fern Cottage. She bit her lower lip. Why pretend she wasn’t sure? She wanted the place. She had loved it on sight, and when she’d seen the beautifully restored interior she had wanted it badly. If someone else bought it before Patrick could see it she was going to be very disappointed.
In fact, it was exactly a week before she and Patrick drove out along the Castle Howard road again, and Mr Dale had been too busy, he said, to come with them, so he had given them the key to the cottage and left them to view the place alone.
‘Lucky he was busy. I much prefer to view a house without having an agent hovering about trying to push us into a quick decision,’ Patrick said cheerfully as they turned on to the rough track which led to the cottage.
Laura was driving, but her concentration wasn’t quite as fixed as usual. She kept looking across the fields on either side, her body tense, half expecting Josh Kern to appear at any moment. She had a shrewd idea why Mr Dale had been too busy to come out here again. She felt the same: she would rather not face Josh Kern again, even with Patrick there. In fact, having Patrick there somehow made it more nerve-racking, because Josh Kern didn’t look as if he would use violence against a woman. His face had been contemptuous and hostile, but she hadn’t actually been afraid of him. But Patrick was a man, and she sensed that Josh Kern’s rules would be very different with another man.
He might well push Patrick into a fight, and, much as she loved him, Laura knew Patrick was no fighter and never had been; he wasn’t a coward, he just lacked aggression. He believed in negotiation, not confrontation, discussion, not argument. Patrick was a reconstructed man, wanting to live peacefully in the world, in harmony with his friends and his woman.
Laura’s mouth curled in a little smile as she looked sideways at him, and Patrick caught that glance and asked, ‘What? What are you smiling at? Tell me the joke.’
‘I was just thinking how much I love you,’ she said, leaning over to kiss him.
Just as their mouths touched, a horse leapt over a hedge right next to the car.
Laura gave a sharp cry, instinctively ducking her head. Patrick went white. Out of the corner of her eye, Laura saw the big black animal leap over the bonnet, tucking its hooves neatly under it as it sailed across in front of the windscreen. She had to admire the precision of the jump and the way the horse swung round on landing and galloped on down the lane before slowing, turning, and coming back towards the car at a slow trot.
‘Is that...?’ Patrick whispered in a dazed voice.
‘Yes,’ Laura grimly said. ‘That’s him. Josh Kern.’
‘He must be out of his mind!’ Patrick’s hands were not quite steady and he still looked pale.
‘Way out,’ she agreed, scrambling out of the car as the black horse came to a halt next to it. Laura stared angrily up at the rider, her green eyes glittering with the resentment of someone who had just had a physical shock.
‘You madman!’ she yelled at him. ‘What a crazy, dangerous thing to do!’
‘How was I to know your car was parked there?’ Josh Kern drawled, smiling with mockery in a way that told her he had known very well that their car was there before he jumped, and that, what was more, he’d recognised it from her last visit. ‘When I’m riding over my own land I don’t expect to find trespassers hiding behind every hedge,’ he added smoothly.
Very flushed, Laura snapped, ‘I’d have thought that, even if you didn’t care whether or not you killed us, you’d have minded killing your horse. Or don’t you think animals matter?’
His smile went. ‘If I’d thought for an instant that my horse might get hurt I wouldn’t have taken that jump!’ he bit out, and she believed him.
The black horse tossed its head as if in agreement with its master, shifting its feet, the hooves scraping on flint in the track, and Laura was glad there was a car between them. The horse, like the man, was a big brute.
Laura looked from the horse to its master, whose beige-jodhpur-clad thighs effortlessly controlled the animal without needing to use the reins which lay loosely in his tanned hands. Open-necked shirt, dark tweed hacking jacket, a black riding hat on his black hair, polished black leather boots knee-high, Josh Kern belonged against this background—the rolling fields, the stone walls, and elms just coming into leaf. Laura had a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, and couldn’t account for it. Or was it just that he looked so much at home here, and she and Patrick didn’t?
Aware of her scrutiny, Josh Kern’s sardonic grey eyes wandered over her coolly, from her blonde head to her small, delicately shod feet.
She and Patrick were going to a wedding after lunch, that afternoon, and Laura was elegantly dressed in a cream silk suit with gold buttons—an outfit from a young British designer, in classical style, the skirt straight-fitting, with a little pleat at the back, the jacket tight-waisted, with long sleeves. In honour of the occasion, she had tied her blonde hair on top of her head in a gold bow, letting it fall in a shower of ringlets around her face.
From Josh Kern’s expression he wasn’t impressed. No doubt he, too, was thinking that she was from the city, she didn’t belong around here. She saw his mouth twist, then he lifted his stare to meet her eyes.
‘You’re the model who came last week,’ he said, pretending surprise, although she was certain he had recognised her car and that was why he had jumped his black horse right over the bonnet.
‘I’m not a model! I don’t know where you got that idea,’ she told him sharply.
He
