Which means he should handle you with care …
She slapped the masochistic part of herself that had come up with that dumb thought. He wasn’t going to be handling her anywhere. At all. Ever. She needed to get that into her thick skull.
Which was easier said than done. Especially as the more he glowered at her the more her pulse skipped. What was wrong with her? Really? Why did something inside her whisper that she should stop running in the opposite direction and just give in?
And when she was aware of him watching her—which was always—her skin tingled and her concentration vanished. She did her best to ignore the prickling sensation up her spine when he was near, but it seemed to be getting stronger all the time.
There it went again—like a pair of fingers walking up her back.
She decided to search the other side of the room from him, just to see if a little extra distance would help.
It didn’t.
‘Do you think there’s any order to this stuff?’ she called out as she lifted the top ledger in a dusty pile and inspected the front page: Meat ordering: 1962-65. Fascinating for the right person, probably, but not what she was looking for. She put it down again and inspected the rest of the stack. They were various household accounts from the fifties and sixties—all decades too late to help her.
‘We could spend weeks searching this place,’ she said as she came across Marcus again behind a stack of crates. ‘Just rummaging could be pointless. What we really need to do is sort it all out, clean the room and put it in some order.’
He nodded. ‘But you’re supposed to be working on the window. You haven’t got time to clean my cellar for me.’
Ah, the ticking clock inside his head—counting down to the moment when she would leave. Even now it made itself apparent.
She nodded up to the snow packed against the windows. After a brief reprieve the snow had returned with a vengeance. ‘At the moment I can’t even get to the chapel, and I need to find some documentary back-up,’ she replied. ‘I’m stuck here twenty-four-seven and you haven’t got cable. What else am I going to do with my time?’
Marcus just shook his head and wandered off, muttering something about the sheer stupidity of trying to lay cable in a moat and how satellite dishes would spoil the roofline. Faith let her mouth twitch. This getting Marcus to lighten up thing was almost fun, and it had the added bonus that if she managed to keep him from glowering at her she might start acting sensibly for a change.
He was saved from answering her by a rap on the open cellar door. A man she didn’t recognise poked his head in, and he and Marcus talked in hushed voices. Faith decided not to eavesdrop and took herself to the far side of the cellar and leafed through a stack of old papers. He reappeared a couple of minutes later, looking frustrated.
‘Problems?’ Faith asked.
He huffed. ‘Nothing to do with the window. We host a Christmas Ball every year and ticket sales have ground to a halt. My events manager says the forecast for ongoing snow is to blame.’
‘When is it?’
‘A week on Saturday.’ A grimace of annoyance passed across his features. ‘I really don’t want to cancel it. We’ve already laid out a lot of money, and no ball means no revenue and plenty of lost deposits.’
‘But you can cover that, right? It’s not like you’ll be going without your Christmas lunch because of it.’
He gave her a look that told her she didn’t know much about anything. ‘A place like this eats money,’ he said carefully. ‘I know it might not look like it from the outside, but even Hadsborough feels the pinch of tough economic times.’ He shook his head. ‘People are worried about getting stuck on the motorway in the snow, or stranded at the station if trains get cancelled.’
She picked up a dusty newspaper and looked at it. ‘Can’t they just put on some snowboots and walk?’
‘Most of the guests aren’t local. The ball is a very exclusive event, and people come from all over the south of England.’
He mentioned a ticket price that made her eyes water.
‘No wonder people are wary about spending that much and then not even getting here.’ She replaced the newspaper on its pile. ‘You know what? You should drop the ticket price and get the locals to come—have a party for the villagers. I know it won’t raise as much money, but there’s a whole heap of other stuff you could do quite cheaply—’
Marcus stood up ramrod-straight. ‘Miss McKinnon, I’m very grateful for your…input…but my family has been running this estate for three hundred years. Maybe you should concentrate your opinions on your own area of expertise.’
She blinked. Well, that told her, didn’t it?
But she found she wasn’t going to sigh and ignore it, as she would have done if one of her sisters had delivered such a stinging put-down. She found she couldn’t just walk away from Marcus Huntington when he issued a challenge.
‘Actually, when it comes to Christmas I’m something of an expert.’
His face was deadpan. ‘You do surprise me. I hadn’t pegged you as the reindeer jumper and flashing Santa earrings type.’
‘Well, I didn’t reckon you’d be quite so up your own butt when I first met you, but it seems you’re not the only one who can be wrong.’
His expression was thunderous for a moment, but all of a sudden he threw back his head and laughed. It was a rich, earthy sound, most unlike his clipped speaking voice, and it made him seem like a completely different man. Faith wasn’t sure if she wanted to march over there and slap him, or if she should just let go of the tension in her jaw and join him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, when he’d finally regained his composure. ‘You’re right. I was being horrendously pompous.’ And then he spoilt his apology by bursting out laughing again. He dragged his hand over his eyes then looked at her. ‘You’re very direct, aren’t you?’
This time Faith joined him. Just a little chuckle. It was hard not to when she saw the warmth in those normally intense blue eyes.
‘So where does all this Christmas expertise come from?’ he asked.
‘I grew up in a small town that takes the holidays very seriously,’ she replied. ‘Anything that’s fixed down—and a few things that aren’t—are in danger of being draped with fairy lights and tinsel during the week-long festival each year, running up to Christmas Eve.’ She shook her head gently, smiling. ‘I pretended I hated it when I was a teenager.’ The smile faded away. ‘I suppose I kinda miss it.’
Wow. She hadn’t expected those words to come out of her mouth. She suddenly remembered those plane tickets burning a hole in her purse upstairs in the turret.
‘When were you last home for Christmas?’ he asked.
‘Five years ago.’
That was a long time, wasn’t it? Suddenly a pang of something hot speared her deep inside. She brushed it away. She didn’t do homesickness. It
