If he could do that with an almost smile, she wasn’t going to risk the full nine yards.
‘I’ll survive.’
She sketched what she hoped was a careless shrug. ‘Close enough.’
And this time the smile, no more than a dare-you straightening of the lips, reached his eyes, setting her heart off on a flashy drum solo.
‘Shall we risk it, then?’ he prompted when she didn’t move.
‘Sorry.’ She wasn’t an impressionable teenager, she reminded herself. She was a grown woman, a mother… ‘I’m still a bit dazed.’ That, at least, was true. Although whether the fall had anything to do with it was a moot point. Forget laughing about this. Hal North was a lot safer when he was being a grouch.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s try this. You roll to your right and I’ll do my best to untangle us both.’
She gingerly eased herself onto her shoulder, then gave a little gasp at the unexpected intimacy of his cold fingers against the sensitive, nylon-clad flesh as he hooked his hand beneath her knee. It was a lifetime since she was that timid girl who’d watched him from a safe distance, nearly died when he’d looked at her, but he was still attracting and scaring her in equal quantities. Okay, maybe not quite equal…
‘Does that hurt?’ he asked.
‘No!’ She was too fierce, too adamant and his eyes narrowed. ‘Your hand was cold,’ she said lamely as he lifted her leg free of the frame.
‘That’s what happens when you tickle trout,’ he said, confirming her impression that he’d just stepped up out of the stream when she ran into him. It would certainly explain why she hadn’t seen him. And why he hadn’t had time taking avoiding action.
‘Are you still selling your catch to the landlord of The Feathers?’ she asked, doing her best to control the conversation.
‘Is he still in the market for poached game?’ he asked, not denying that he’d once supplied him through the back door. ‘He’d have to pay rather more for a freshly caught river trout these days.’
‘That’s inflation for you. I hope your rod is still in one piece.’
His eyebrow twitched, proving that he did, after all, possess a sense of humour. ‘Couldn’t you tell?’
‘Your fishing rod…’ Claire stopped, but it was too late to wish she’d ignored the innuendo.
‘It’s not mine,’ he said, taking pity on her. ‘I confiscated it from a lad fishing without a licence.’
‘Confiscated it?’
As he sat up, she caught sight of the Cranbrook crest on the pocket of his coveralls. He was working on the estate? Poacher turned gamekeeper? Why did that feel so wrong? He would be a good choice if the liquidators wanted to protect what assets remained. He knew every inch of the estate, every trick in the book…
‘Aren’t they terribly expensive?’ she asked. ‘Fishing rods.’
‘He’ll get it back when he pays his fine.’
‘A fine? That’s a bit harsh,’ she said, rather afraid she knew who might have been trying his luck. ‘He’s only doing what you did when you were his age.’
‘The difference being that I was bright enough not to get caught.’
‘I’m not sure that’s something to be proud of.’
‘It beats the hell out of the alternative.’ She couldn’t argue with that. ‘I take it, from all this touching concern, that you know the boy?’
‘I imagine it was Gary Harker. His mother works in the estate office. She’s at her wit’s end. He left school last year and hasn’t had a sniff of a job. In the old days he’d have been taken on by the estate,’ she prompted. ‘Learned a skill.’
‘Working for the gentry for a pittance.’
‘Minimum wage these days. Not much, but a lot better than nothing. If the estate is hiring, maybe you could put a good word in for him?’
‘You don’t just want me to let him off, you want me to give him a job, too?’ he asked.
‘Maybe there’s some government-sponsored apprenticeship scheme?’ she suggested. ‘I could find out. Please, Hal, if I talk to him, will you give him a break?’
‘If I talk to him, will you give me one?’ he replied.
‘I’ll do better than that.’ She beamed, aches and pains momentarily forgotten. ‘I’ll bake you a cake. Lemon drizzle? Ginger? Farmhouse?’ she tempted and for a moment she seemed to hold his attention. For a moment she thought she had him.
‘Don’t bother,’ he said, breaking eye contact, turning back to her bike. ‘The front wheel’s bent out of shape.’
She swallowed down her disappointment. ‘Terrific. For want of an apple the bike was lost,’ she said, as he propped it against a tree. ‘Can it be straightened out?’
‘Is it worth it?’ he asked, reaching out a hand to help her up. ‘It must be fifty years old.’
‘Older,’ she replied, clasping his hand. ‘It belonged to Sir Robert’s nanny.’
His palm was cold, or maybe it was her own that was hot. Whatever it was, something happened to her breathing as their thumbs locked around each other and Hal braced himself to pull her up onto the path. A catch, a quickening, as if his power was flooding into her, his eyes heating her from the inside out.
Just how reliable was the finger test as a diagnosis of concussion, anyway?
‘I’ve got you,’ he said, apparently feeling nothing but impatience, but as he pulled, something caught at the soft wool of her jacket, holding her fast.
‘Wait!’ She’d already wrecked her bike and she wasn’t about to confound the situation by tearing lumps out of her one good suit. ‘I’m caught on something.’ She yelped as she reached back to free herself and her hand snagged on an old, dead bramble, thorns hard as nails. ‘Could my day get any worse?’ she asked, sucking at the line of tiny scarlet spots of blood oozing across the soft pad at the base of her thumb.
‘That depends on whether your tetanus shots are up to date.’
Was that, finally, a note of genuine concern? Or was it merely the hope she would need a jab—something to put the cherry on top of her day—that she heard in his voice?
‘That was a rhetorical question,’ she replied, tired of being on the defensive, ‘but thanks for your concern.’ And he could take that any way he chose.
Right now she’d gladly suffer a jab that would offer a vaccination against dangerous men. The kind that stood in your way on footpaths, made you say blush-making things when you hadn’t blushed in years. Made you feel thirteen again.
Made you feel…
‘Here.
