you were.’
The proper response to this was, You don’t have to tell me. I didn’t mean to pry.
But she couldn’t say it. She wanted him to go on. If this lonely, isolated man was about to invite her into his secret world then, with all her heart, she wanted to follow him inside. If he would stretch out his hand and trust her with his privacy it would be like a light dawning in her life.
‘Well, I’ve been wrong in the past,’ she mused, going carefully, not to alarm him. ‘If you knew the things I was thinking about you that first day, and even worse on the second day.’
‘But I do know,’ he said, and even from over her head she could hear the grin in his voice. ‘You didn’t bother to hide your terrible opinion of me—grim, gruff, objectionable. And that was when you were thanking me for helping you over those lost papers. When I landed you the job from hell with Charlie your face had to be seen to be believed.’
‘But I soon realised that you were right,’ she said. ‘I’m the ideal person to do it because I can enjoy the game. A woman with a heart would be in danger.’
‘And you don’t have a heart?’
‘I told you, my fiancé finished all that.’
‘I’ve begun to understand you,’ Roscoe said slowly. ‘You come on like a seductive siren but it’s all a mask. Behind it—’
‘Behind it there’s nothing,’ she said lightly. ‘No feeling, no hopes, no regrets. Nothing. Just a heartless piece, me.’
‘No!’ he said fiercely. ‘Don’t say that about yourself. It’s not true. Once I thought it was but now I know you better.’
‘You don’t know me at all,’ she said, fighting the alarm caused by his insight. ‘You know nothing about me.’
‘You’re wrong; I do know. I know you’re kind and sweet, gentle and generous, loving and vulnerable—all the things you’ve tried to prevent me discovering, prevent any man discovering.’
‘Nonsense!’ she said desperately. ‘You’re creating a sentimental fantasy but the truth is what’s on the surface. I have no heart because I’ve no use for one. Who needs it?’
‘That’s your defence, is it? ‘ he asked slowly. ‘Who needs a heart? I think you do, Pippa.’
‘Mr Havering, I am a lawyer; you are my client. My private life does not concern you.’
Her voice was soft but he heard something in it that was almost a threat, and he backed off, worried more for her than for himself. There seemed no end to the things he was discovering about her, but he feared to put a foot wrong, lest he harm her.
‘All right, I’m sorry,’ he said in a soothing voice. ‘It’s none of my business, after all. Don’t cry.’ He could feel her shaking against him.
‘I’m not crying,’ she said. ‘I’m laughing. Me, saying I’m a lawyer and you’re a client, when we’re lying here—’
‘Yes, we’ve got a bit beyond that point, haven’t we?’ he said. ‘We’ve both experienced things to make us bitter. Like the way when someone has promised to marry you, they become the person above all others you have to beware of.’
‘That’s true,’ she said in a voice of discovery. ‘Once you start twining your life with theirs, they have a whole sheaf of weapons in their hands—the house you chose together, the secrets you tell each other—all the things they know about you that you desperately wish they didn’t. Ouch!’
She gasped for Roscoe’s hands had suddenly tightened.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘Did that last one—? ‘
‘Struck right home,’ he agreed, drawing her head down against his chest once more. ‘You brood about it, which is nonsense because she and her new love have other things to talk about apart from you. But you picture them laughing, and wonder how you could ever have trusted her so much.’
‘And then you don’t want to trust anyone again,’ she whispered. ‘So you promise yourself that you won’t.’
‘But it isn’t so easy. If you go through life drawing away from people, at last you turn into a monster. I don’t want to turn into a monster, although several people would probably tell you that’s what I am.’
‘Sometimes it feels safer,’ she agreed.
‘I won’t believe anyone’s ever said it of you.’
‘Why? Because I’ve got a pretty face? Haven’t you ever heard of a pretty monster? It’s all part of the performance, you see. The lad who was here the first night, the one I half crippled, don’t you think he sees me as a monster?’
‘That doesn’t mean you are one,’ he said with a touch of anger in his voice. ‘Stop this.’
‘I led him on, didn’t I? You’d think I’d know better by now, but a girl must have some fun in her life. You knew that, even then. That’s why you hired me.’
He groaned and raised his hands to cover his eyes. ‘And this is what he did to you? Your fiancé?’
‘Or maybe I was always like that. It’s hard-wired into me and it took him to bring it out.’
‘You don’t really believe any of that stuff.’
‘Don’t tell me what I believe.’
‘I will because someone’s got to show you how to see yourself straight. You’re as beautiful inside as you are out.’
She pulled herself up on the bed so that she could see him better in the dim light and pull his hands down.
‘We’ve known each other only a few days,’ she reminded him.
‘I’ve known you a lot longer than that. I knew it when I saw you in the graveyard, swapping jokes with a headstone. It was the kind of mad, daft—’
‘Mutton-headed,’ she supplied.
‘Glorious, wonderful—I knew then that you had some secret that was hidden from me, that you could teach it to me and then I’d know something that would make life possible.’
He lay looking up at her, defenceless, all armour gone, nothing left but the painful honesty with which he reached out to her.
Pippa felt dizzy, knowing that she’d come to one of those moments when everything in her life might depend on what she did now. Roscoe’s eyes told her that this was her decision, and she was stunned by how quickly it had come to pass. Just a few days.
He was reasonably attractive without being handsome. Yet the experience he’d given her tonight—of peace, joy and safety—had astounded her by outshining all other experiences in her life, and now the desire to kiss him was the strongest she had ever known. The tantalising half kiss he’d once given her had lived with her ever since, taunting and teasing her onwards to discover everything about him.
