you’re sure you’re feeling all right?’ Helena checked as Annie dropped her and Bob off at the airport.
‘I’m fine. Stop fussing,’ Annie told her with a good-natured smile as she hugged them both and kissed them goodbye. ‘And to prove it I’m going to go home and make a start on that gardening I’ve been threatening to do for months.’
The garden of her small house was long and narrow, and enclosed at the back by a high brick wall which ensured her privacy but gave the garden a rather closed-in feel.
For Christmas, amongst the other gifts they had given her, Bob and Helena had given her a gardening book with some wonderful ideas plus a very generous gift voucher for a local garden centre, and Annie, who had been studying the book intently, had now come up with her own design for the garden based on the principles in the book.
The first thing she needed, she had decided, was some pretty coloured trellising to place against the walls, and so, after she had watched Bob and Helena’s plane take off, she headed back to her car and drove towards the garden centre.
Several happy and productive hours later Annie climbed back into her car again. She had chosen and ordered her trellising, and made arrangements for it to be delivered, as well as getting from the man in charge of the fencing department the telephone number of someone who would come out and fix it in place for her.
As she started her car engine Annie was humming happily to herself. It was a bright sunny day, a brisk breeze sending fluffy white clouds scudding across the sky, and on impulse, instead of taking the direct route back to her own home, Annie opted instead to head towards the river.
The prettily wooded countryside on the outskirts of the town was criss-crossed with narrow country lanes, confusingly so at times—especially when one descended down through the trees and lost sight of the river, as she had just done, Annie recognised as she came to an unmarked fork in the road and paused, not quite sure which road to take.
Instinctively she wanted to take the right-hand fork, even though logic told her the left must lead down towards the river. With a small mental shrug Annie gave in to instinct and then wondered just what she had done as the road she had chosen narrowed virtually to a single track, winding up a sharp steep hillside banked with hedges so thick and high it was impossible for her to gauge just where she was. And yet even though she knew she had never driven up it before Annie felt that the road was somehow familiar.
She gave a small gasp as she rounded a particularly sharp bend and saw in front of her the entrance to a large Victorian house. On the top of each brick gatepost was an odd metal sculpture. The sculptures were made from the harpoons used on the ships of the man who had built this house from the money he had made from his whaling fleet. And how had she known that? Annie wondered in bemusement as she stopped her car just inside the drive to the house and switched off the engine. She must have read it somewhere, she acknowledged. She had read avidly in the long months of her recovery, books on every subject under the sun, including some on the local history of the area.
And yet…Unsteadily she got out of her car, her heart starting to beat very fast as she walked towards the house. The rhododendrons flanking the drive obscured the sunlight, throwing out dark shadows so that when she actually stepped back into its full beam it dazzled and dizzied her, making her rock slightly on her feet and close her eyes, only to open them again as she felt something coming between her and the warmth of the sun.
‘You!’ she whispered, her whole body shivering in a mixture of shock and delight as she saw who was standing in front of her. ‘It’s you,’ she whispered a second time, her eyes glowing with bemusement and happiness as she stepped towards the man who had come out of the house to stand in front of her.
Close to and in the daylight he was so exactly the man from her dreams that the awesome nature of the impulse that had brought her here to him held Annie motionless in an invisible bubble of iridescent joy.
It was true. She had been right. There was something fateful, fated about him…about them…
Her eyes focused on him, eagerly absorbing every detail of him and mentally checking them off against her own private blueprint. His eyes were exactly the same dark dramatic blue she had dreamed of, his skin the same taut sheeny tan, his hair the same inky almost blue-black. Everything about him was just as she had dreamed—everything. Even his mouth. Especially his mouth!
His mouth. Annie shivered in sensual delight as she looked at the hard male curve of his upper lip, the sensual promise of his much fuller lower one. If she closed her eyes she would be able to recreate the sensation of it closing over her own, hungrily coaxing her lips to part whilst he caressed them, filling her with his life’s breath whilst she…
‘So you came.’
His voice reverberated through her, its tone unexpectedly harsh, even a little terse, but wholly recognisable and familiar.
The intensity of her emotions made her shudder as violent spasms of recognition racked her. She had travelled such a long way to reach this moment, this heartbeat out of infinity.
‘Yes,’ she whispered in response, her voice cracking against the dryness of her throat. ‘You…you knew that I would?’ she asked, her emotions so heightened that she felt as though she had suddenly entered an extra dimension of awareness.
Behind him she could see the open door to the house. Beyond it, she knew, lay a large hallway, with a table on which would be a bronze of the man who had originally commissioned the house, and into the stairway that curled upwards from it would be carved all manner of sea creatures, both real and mythical; leaping dolphins, graceful whales, octopuses, sea horses and mermaids.
‘I…’ His voice sounded terse and strained, as though he too was aware of the enormity of what was happening, and as she looked at him and saw the way his gaze suddenly shifted, as though he couldn’t quite meet her eyes, she was overwhelmed by a sudden flood of fiercely protective love.
Instinctively she moved towards him, her hand resting lightly on his arm as she whispered protectively, ‘It’s all right…everything’s all right. I’m here. We’re…’
Beneath her fingertips she could feel his muscles bunching, clenching, and as she looked up into his face she could see the tight white line of his mouth. Her own body registered the aftershock of what he was feeling in the rush of almost seismic shudders that jolted his body.
‘Can we…can we go inside?’ she asked him hesitantly.
The house drew her, compelling her to walk towards it. It was almost as though she knew it already, its shape, its rooms, its history, even its scent…Just as she knew him…
Now it was her turn to shudder and to tense, but she was already inside the hallway and he was right behind her, blocking out the light from the doorway.
‘I never thought this could happen,’ she told him simply as she let her dreamy-eyed gaze absorb the wonderful reality of him.
He was tall, much taller than her, but she had known that, and broad too. She already knew just how he would feel and look beneath that soft checked workshirt he was wearing, without those old faded jeans that hugged the taut strength of his thighs. There would be a small scar just inside the right thigh, a tiny indentation, the relic of a boyhood accident. She would place her lips to it and he…
She was trembling wildly now, unable to stop what she was feeling, what she was wanting. A shudder of almost orgasmic sensitivity ripped through her as she watched
