to Audrey in a flurry of mud and gravel.
I pressed my lips together in disapproval. George Challoner was allegedly the estate manager, although as far as I could see this involved little more than turning up at inconvenient moments and distracting everyone else who was actually trying to do some work.
He was also my neighbour. I’d been delighted at first to be given my own cottage on the estate. I was only working on the project until Hugh Morrison, my old mentor, had recovered from his heart attack, and I didn’t want to get involved with expensive long-term lets so a tied cottage for no rent made perfect sense.
I was less delighted to discover that George Challoner lived on the other side of the wall, his cottage a mirror image of mine under a single slate roof. It wasn’t that he was a noisy neighbour, but I was always so aware of him, and it wasn’t because he was attractive, if that’s what you’re thinking.
I was prepared to admit that he was extremely easy on the eye. My own preference was for dark-haired men, while George was lean and rangy with hair the colour of old gold and ridiculously blue eyes, but, still, I could see that he was good-looking.
OK, he was very good-looking. Too good-looking.
I didn’t trust good-looking men. I’d fallen for a dazzling veneer once before, and it wasn’t a mistake I intended to make again.
I watched balefully as George waved and strode across to join me at the foundations. The men had all brightened at his approach and were shouting boisterous abuse at him. Even Frank grinned, the traitor.
I sighed. What was it with men? The ruder they were, the more they seemed to like each other.
‘Hey, Frank, don’t look now but your foundations are full of holes,’ said George, peering down at the steel cages.
‘They’re supposed to be that way,’ I said, even though I knew he was joking. I hated the way George always made me feel buttoned-up. ‘The steel takes the tensile stress.’
‘I wish I had something to take my stress,’ said George. He had an irritating ability to give the impression that he was laughing while keeping a perfectly straight face. Something to do with the glinting blue eyes, I thought, or perhaps the almost imperceptible deepening of the creases around his eyes. Or the smile that seemed to be permanently tugging at the corner of his mouth.
Whatever it was, I wished he wouldn’t do it. It made me feel...ruffled.
Besides, I had never met anybody less stressed. George Challoner was one of those charmed individuals for whom life was a breezy business. He never seemed to take anything seriously. God only knew why Lord Whellerby had made him estate manager. I was sure George was just playing at it, amusing himself between sunning himself on the deck of a yacht or playing roulette in some swish casino.
I knew his type.
‘What can we do for you, George?’ I said briskly. ‘As you can see, we’re rather busy here today.’
‘The guys are busy,’ said George, nodding at the foundations where the men had gone back to pouring the concrete. ‘You’re just watching.’
‘I’m supervising,’ I said with emphasis. ‘That’s my job.’
‘Good job, just watching everyone else do the work.’
I knew quite well that he was just trying to wind me up, but I ground my teeth anyway. ‘I’m the site engineer,’ I said. ‘That means I have to make sure everything is done properly.’
‘A bit like being an estate manager, you mean?’ said George. ‘Except you get to wear a hard hat.’
‘I don’t see that my job has anything in common with yours,’ I said coldly. ‘And talking of hard hats, if you must come onto the site, you should be wearing one. I’ve reminded you about that before.’
George cast a look around the site. Beyond the foundations where the concrete mixer churned, it was a sea of mud. It had been cleared the previous autumn and was now littered with machinery and piles of reinforcing wires. ‘I’m taller than everything here,’ he objected. ‘I can’t see a single thing that could fall on my head.’
‘You could trip over and knock your head on a rock,’ I said, adding under my breath, ‘with any luck.’
‘I heard that!’ George grinned, and I clutched my clipboard tighter to my chest and put up my chin. ‘I never had to wear a hard hat when Hugh Morrison was overseeing,’ he said provocatively.
‘That was before we’d started construction, and, in any case, that was up to Hugh. This is my site now, and I like to follow correct procedures.’
I promise you, I wasn’t always unbearably pompous, but there was just something about George that rubbed me up the wrong way.
‘Now, that’s a useful thing to know,’ he exclaimed. ‘Maybe that’s where I’ve been going wrong!’
His gaze rested on my face. Nobody had the right to have eyes that blue, I thought crossly as I fought the colour that was stealing along my cheekbones. My fine, fair skin was the bane of my life. The slightest thing and I’d end up blushing like a schoolgirl.
‘So what’s the correct procedure for asking you out?’ he asked, leaning forward confidentially as if he really expected me to tell him.
I kept my composure. Making a big play of looking over at the foundations and then checking something off my list, I said coolly: ‘You ask me out, and I say no.’
‘I’ve tried that,’ he objected.
He had. The first night I arrived, he had popped round to suggest a drink at the pub in the village. He asked me every time he saw me. I was sure it was just to annoy me now. Any normal man would have got the point by then.
‘Then I’m not sure what I can suggest.’
‘Come on, we’re neighbours,’ said George. ‘We should be friendly.’
‘It’s precisely because we’re neighbours that I don’t think it’s a good idea,’ I said, making another mark on my clipboard. George wasn’t to know it was meaningless. ‘You live right next door to me. If we went for a drink and you turned out to be some kind of weirdo, I’d never be able to get away from you.’
‘Weirdo?’
He was doing his best to sound outraged, but he didn’t fool me. I could tell he was trying not to laugh.
Pushing my hair behind my ears, I glared at him.
‘Maybe weirdo isn’t quite the right word,’ I allowed, ‘but you know what I mean.’
‘I see.’ George pretended to ponder. ‘So you think that after one date, I might never leave you alone? I might pester you to go out again or fall madly in love with you?’
My beastly cheeks were turning pink again, I could feel it. ‘I don’t think that’s very likely.’
‘Why not?’
I looked down at my clipboard, wishing that he would stop asking awkward questions
