the rubber pull on the end of the cord. The loosened painter was gripped lightly in his other hand.
The boathouse was on two levels. The bottom storey, level with the jetty, had large arched, panelled doors and had been used for storing small boats. The upper level was a single room with a balcony that stretched the width of the building. He was waiting for her to walk out on to it, spread her hands wide on the railing and lean forward to inhale the glorious, salty, slightly seaweedy air. Her glossy dark hair would swing forward and the wind would muss it gently.
A minute passed and she didn’t appear. He began to feel twitchy.
With a sigh, he climbed out of the boat and planted his boots on the solid concrete of the jetty. ‘Are you okay back there?’
No response. Just as he was readying his lungs to call again, she appeared back on the jetty and shrugged. ‘No key,’ she yelled back, looking unduly crestfallen.
All his alarm bells rang, told him to get the hell back in the boat and keep his nose out of it. Whitehaven wasn’t his responsibility any more. Only the message obviously hadn’t travelled the length of his arm to his fingertips, because he suddenly found himself retying the boat and walking back up the jetty to the steep flight of steps that climbed up to the boathouse door.
As he reached the bottom step, she turned and looked down at him, one hand on the metal railing, one hand bracing herself against the wall. Her thick, dark hair fell forward as she leaned towards him.
‘Do you know where the key is?’
With his fingernails, already dark-rimmed from the rich compost of the glasshouse plants, he scraped at a slightly protruding brick in the wall near the base of the stairs. At first, he thought he’d remembered it wrong, but after a couple of seconds the block of stone moved and came away in his hand. In the recess left behind, he could see the dull black glint of polished metal. Laura had told him about the secret nook—just in case.
He supposed he could have just told the woman about it, yelled the vital information from the safety of the dinghy. He needn’t get involved. Even now his lips remained closed and his mouth silent as he climbed the mossy stairs and pressed the key into the soft flesh of her palm.
There. Job done.
For a couple of seconds, they stayed like that. He pulled his hand away and rubbed it on the back of his jeans.
CHAPTER TWO
‘THANK YOU,’ she said, then shook her long fringe so it covered her eyes a little more.
She slid the key into the lock and turned it. He’d half-expected the door to fall open, but it swung in a graceful arc, opening wide and welcoming them in. Well, welcoming her in. But his curiosity got the better of him and he couldn’t resist getting a glimpse.
‘Wow.’
He’d expected shelves and oars and tins of varnish. Decades-old grime clung to the windows, and the filmy grey light revealed a very different scene. A cane sofa and chairs huddled round a small Victorian fireplace, decorated with white and blue tiles. A small desk and chair occupied a corner in front of one of the arched windows.
She walked over to the desk and touched it reverently, leaving four little smudges in the thick dust, then pulled her fingers back and gently blew the dust off them with a sigh.
‘Did she come here often, do you know? Mrs Hastings?’ she said, still staring at the desk.
Why exactly he was still here, keeping guard like some sentry, he wasn’t sure. He should just go. He’d kept his promise to Laura. He wasn’t required. And yet…he couldn’t seem to make his feet move.
She turned to look at him and he shrugged. ‘Not when I knew her. She was too frail to manage the path down, but she talked of it fondly.’
She blinked and continued to stare at him, expressionless. He wasn’t normally the sort who had the urge to babble on, but most women didn’t leave huge gaping gaps in the conversation. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and kicked at the dust on the bare floorboards with the toe of his boot. Everything was too still.
‘Not really the sort of place to interest a woman like you, is it?’ he muttered, taking in the shabby furniture, the broken leg on the desk chair, held together with string. The place was nowhere near elegant enough to match her.
Her chin rose just a notch. ‘What makes you think you know anything about what sort of woman I am?’
Just like that, the sadness that seemed to cloak her hardened into a shell. Now the room wasn’t still any more. Every molecule in the air seemed to dance and shimmer and heat. She strode over to the large arched door in the centre of the opposite wall, unbolted it, threw the two door panels open and stepped out on to the wide balcony.
He was dismissed.
He took a step towards her and opened his mouth. Probably not a great idea, since during his last attempt at small talk he’d found a great muddy boot in it, but he couldn’t leave things like this—taut with tension, unresolved. Messy.
Her hands were spread wide as she rested them on the low wall and looked out over the river, just as he’d imagined. The hair hung halfway down her back, shining, untouchable. The wind didn’t dare tease even a strand out of place. He saw her back rise and fall as she let out a sigh.
‘I thought I’d asked you to get off my property.’ There was no anger in her tone now, just soul-deep weariness.
He turned and walked out of the boathouse and down the stairs to the jetty with even steps. She didn’t need him. She’d made that abundantly clear. But, as he climbed back into the dinghy, he couldn’t help feeling that part of his promise was still unfulfilled.
This time there were no interruptions as he untied the painter and started the motor. He turned the small boat round and set off in the direction of Lower Hadwell, afew minutes’ journey upstream and across the river.
When he passed the Anchor Stone that rose, proud and unmoving, out of the murky green waters, he risked a look back. She was still standing there on the balcony, her hands wide and her chin tilted up, refusing to acknowledge his existence.
* * *
Louise had been staring so long at the field of sheep on the other side of the river that the little white dots had blurred and melted together. She refused to unlock her gaze until the dark smudge in her peripheral vision motored out of sight.
Eventually, when it didn’t seem like defeat, she sighed and turned to rest her bottom on the railing of the balcony and stared back into the boathouse.
He couldn’t have known who he’d looked like standing there below her on the steps as he’d offered her the long black key. It had been one of her favourite scenes in A Summer Affair—when Jonathan came to see Charity in her boathouse sanctuary, the place where she hid from the horrors of her life. Not that anything really happened between them. It was the undercurrents, the unspoken passion, that made it one of the most romantic scenes in any film she’d ever seen.
He had looked at her with his warm brown eyes and, somehow, had offered her more than a key as he’d stood there. For the first time in years, she’d blushed, then hurried to hide the evidence with her hair.
And then
