of knots in her stomach tightening with every uneven heartbeat.
‘The keys…’ she repeated with as much emphasis as she dared. ‘I have to be going.’
‘No.’
It came so softly, almost thrown away, that for a moment or two she wasn’t at all sure she had heard him right and frowned her confusion.
‘What…?’ Bewildered she looked up at him, golden eyes wide in shock and confusion. ‘Mr Stafford—I…’
Did she know what it did to him when she looked at him like that? Morgan wondered. Did she know how it twisted deep inside him to see those amazing eyes burn with rejection where once he had seen them burn with love for him—or with what he had believed was love? Did she know how it felt to see her so anxious to leave when in the past it had seemed that she couldn’t have enough of him? Couldn’t protest her love for him often enough.
Or had all that been a pretence too?
‘The name is Morgan,’ he declared with cold precision. ‘And you go when I say you can—not before.’
That brought a flare of defiance into her flashing gaze.
‘But I have to go!’
‘No.’
Dammit, it had taken months to get to his moment. Had he spent so long looking for her only to have her turn and run at the very first meeting? She was as edgy as a cat on hot bricks, and it wasn’t just as a result of seeing him again. She was hiding something and he was determined to find out what.
‘I only want what I’m entitled to.’
‘Entitled?’
The need to see Rosie was uppermost in her mind, making it impossible to think straight. She knew that her daughter was safe and well cared for with Marion who doted on her first great-grandchild, but it wasn’t for Rosie’s sake that she wanted to be with her. It was for her own.
One look at her baby daughter would remind her why she was in the hateful position of lying to the man she had loved.
Morgan’s slow smile mocked her tense question, the spark of uncertainty in her eyes.
‘The contract said that I would be met, given the keys—and shown round the property.’
‘Shown round! Oh, come on! I mean, look at it…’
The gesture of her hand to indicate the cottage beside them was wilder than she would have liked, betraying too much of how easily he had rattled her. Get a grip! she warned herself inwardly. Morgan in this mood was like some watchful predator. Show a moment of weakness and he would pounce.
‘You don’t need to be shown anything—you could walk round the entire place in two minutes flat.’
‘Nevertheless I expect you to fulfil the agreement. Come on, Ellie,’ he cajoled, his voice deepening, softening, his smile an enticement in itself. ‘Indulge me in this.’
For a brief second Ellie actually had to close her eyes against the appeal of his voice that curled around her senses like a plume of warm smoke, soft as a caress. She had never been able to resist him when he’d switched on the charm like this, and to her horror she found that she still couldn’t.
‘Very well, then…’
Reaching back into her past, she dragged out from some hidden corner the image of the woman she had once been. The Eleanor Thornton who had been second in command of a large, profitable secretarial agency. The Eleanor Thornton that Morgan had first met.
Adopting a tone of voice that was all control, all businesslike and nothing more, she even managed to flash a swift and obviously insincere smile into his watchful face.
‘If you’ll just come this way, I’ll show you where everything is. And perhaps you’d like to know a little bit about the area too.’
This was better; she was in the swing of things now. After all, she had done this many times before. Meadow Cottage had been occupied almost every week since Easter, and Ellie had usually been the one to greet the new tenants.
‘Watch the floor here,’ she said when, after unlocking the door, she made her way into the narrow hall. ‘It’s a little uneven. As you will have seen in the brochure, Meadow Cottage was formerly one of the farm’s cowsheds, and these stone flags formed part of the original flooring.’
Her voice was perfectly steady as she went into the well-worn patter she had used so often before, but her control over the rest of her body wasn’t quite so complete. When a struggle with the slightly stiff door brought him to her side to help her, the brush of his tall, strong body against her own in the constricted, confined space sent her senses into overdrive.
He still wore the same aftershave that had been a favourite when they had been together; one that she had bought for him for the only Christmas and birthday they had shared. Just the scent of it was like an instant shot of memory, jolting her back in time to those gentler, happier days.
But underneath the evocative cologne was the subtler, more intensely personal scent of his body that stabbed straight to her heart as it stirred up the waters of the past, bringing to the surface the bitter-sweet recollection of how it had felt to lie in bed with him, her head pillowed on the strength of his shoulder, breathing in the clean, musky scent of his skin.
At once all her familiar spiel deserted her. Her head was buzzing, her senses stirring in a disturbingly primitive way. For a moment the memories that gripped her were so powerful, so real that her eyes burned with bitter tears and she had to blink furiously to drive them back.
‘The kitchen…’ was all she could manage, gritting her teeth against the sting of irony in his murmured, ‘Obviously.’
From then onwards all she wanted to do was to get the job done as quickly as possible. Not giving him time to look around, she marched him to the next door, opening it briefly.
‘The sitting room… The second bedroom is up there…’
A wave of her hand indicated the small gallery above the sitting room where a neat bedroom nestled under the eaves.
‘The bathroom is down here… And the main bedroom directly opposite. You can get milk and eggs from the farm—everything else from the store in the village, and they’ll cash a cheque for you in an emergency. I’m afraid there isn’t a bank anywhere nearer than St Austell. We provide fresh linen and towels on Mondays.’
There, she was done! Surely now he had to let her go.
‘Is there anything else?’
‘Just a couple of things. But why don’t we discuss them over coffee?’
‘No, thanks,’ Ellie managed through teeth gritted against the urge to scream in frustration. ‘I have other things to do.’
‘And I have things I want to discuss.’
Blatantly ignoring her protest, he turned and headed back down the white-walled corridor to the kitchen, leaving her with no option but to follow him.
‘Morgan,
