through her grief with catastrophic consequences, flinging herself headlong into a series of doomed relationships. Rose had been a child at the time but she could remember the carousel of inappropriate men and the apprehension she had felt every time that doorbell had sounded.
Then Alison Tremain had fallen in love—head over heels in love—with a rich, louche member of the landed gentry who had promised her everything she’d been desperate to hear. God only knew what she’d been thinking. She’d been hired to clean the exquisite Cotswold cottage owned by his parents, where he and twelve other fast-living friends had been staying for a long weekend. Had her mother really thought that it was love? But he’d swept her off her feet and maybe, Rose had later thought, when she had looked back at events through adult eyes, his heart had been in the right place.
The two had hurtled towards one another for all the wrong reasons. Rose’s mother because she’d wanted an anchor in her life. She’d been swimming against the tide and had been on the verge of drowning and he had given her something to hold onto and she hadn’t looked further than the wild promises he’d made.
And he...he’d wanted to rebel against restrictive parents and Alison Tremain had been his passport to asserting authority over a life that had been dictated from birth. Their disapproval would underline his independence, would prove that he could choose someone outside the box and damn the consequences. Brimming over with left-wing principles, he would be able to ditch the upper-crust background into which he had been born.
It had been a recipe for disaster from the word go and, for Rose, the personal disaster had started when her mother had dumped her with their neighbour: ‘Just for a bit...just until I’m sorted...and then I’ll come to fetch you, that’s a promise.’
Everyone had rallied around as she had found herself suddenly displaced—the benefit of a small community—but there had been many times when she had entered a room unexpectedly to be greeted by hushed whispers and covert, pitying looks.
Rose knew that things could have been a lot worse. She could have ended up in care. As it was, she spent nearly two years with the neighbours, whose daughter went to the same school as her.
Her mother had written and Rose had waited patiently but by the time a much-chastened Alison had returned to the village Rose had grown into a cautious young girl, conscious of the perils of letting her emotions rule her life.
She’d witnessed her mother going off the rails because of a broken heart and had lived through her disappearing and getting lost in a world, she later learned, of soft drugs and alcohol because Spencer Kurtis had been unable to cope with the daily demands of a life without money on tap. So much for his rebellion. He had eventually crawled back to the family pile and Alison Tremain had returned to village life, where it had taken her a further year to recover before she was properly back to the person she had once been.
Rose knew better than to ever allow her behaviour to be guided by emotion. Sensible choices resulted in a settled life. Her sensible choices when it came to men, all two of them, might not have worked out but that didn’t mean that she was going to rethink her ground plan.
She also knew better than to trust any man with money and time had only served to consolidate that opinion.
Her mother had been strung along by a rich man and in the end he hadn’t been able to tear himself away from his wealthy background. But, beyond the story of one insignificant person, Rose had seen how, time and again, the wealthy took what they wanted without any thought at all for the people they trampled over.
The community that had rallied around her was, over the years, being invaded because developers couldn’t keep their hands away from the temptation to take what was there and turn it into money-making projects. Their little oasis in the Cotswolds was achingly pretty and was also close enough to Oxford to save it from being too unremittingly rural.
In a very real sense, Rose felt that she owed a duty to the small community that had embraced her when her mother had started acting erratically and that included saving it from the whims of rich developers.
She was, for the first time in her life, sorely tempted to explain all of this to the ridiculously good-looking guy who, she noted wryly, had completely abandoned all attempts at vegetable preparation and was now pushing himself away from the counter to hunt down whatever wine was in the fridge.
‘I never know what’s there,’ Rose said, half turning. ‘The fridge has ended up being fairly communal property. Once a week someone has a go at tossing out whatever has gone past its sell-by date and everyone more or less tries to replace what’s been taken so that we never find ourselves short of essentials like milk.’
‘Doesn’t that bug you?’
‘No. Why should it?’
‘Maybe because this is your house and a man’s house should be his castle? What’s the point of a castle if you let down the ramparts every two seconds to welcome in invaders? Who go through your belongings like gannets? Is this wine common property? Who does it belong to?’ He held up a cheap bottle of plonk, which was better than nothing.
‘That’s mine and on the subject of one’s house being one’s castle, I can’t afford that luxury.’ Rose wasn’t looking at him as she delivered this observation. In the companionable peace of the kitchen it felt comfortable to chat and she realised that, yes, quite often she longed for the pleasure of having the house to herself. ‘I’m just lucky that I have this place. It was given to my mum by...er...by a friend and when she died it was passed onto me...’
Arturo looked at her carefully, but his voice was casual enough when he next spoke.
‘Generous gift,’ he murmured. ‘Boyfriend? Lover? That kind of friend?’
‘Something like that.’ Rose swivelled, took the wine from him and, having bunged all the vegetables and seasoning into a pan with some sauce, she edged towards the kitchen table, absently sweeping some of the papers away and stacking half-finished cardboard placards into a pile on the ground. ‘You’re doing it again.’
‘Doing what?’ Arturo sipped some wine and looked at her over the rim of the glass.
‘Prying,’ she said drily. ‘Is that a habit of yours? No, don’t answer that.’ She raised her eyebrows and shot him a shrewd assessing look. ‘You pry. I gathered that the second you started opening doors to rooms when you first arrived, wanting to find out what was going on where. Must be your nature.’
‘Expertly summed up... I like to find things out. How else can anyone have an informed opinion unless they’re in possession of all the facts?’
‘You’re very arrogant, aren’t you?’ But she laughed, seeing that as commendable in someone who felt passionate about what was happening in the world around him. Too many people were content to sit on the fence rather than take a stand. Digging deep and arriving at an informed opinion was what separated the doer from the thinker. ‘I mean that if you don’t encourage domesticity and you don’t do much talking to women then it’s unlikely you ask them many questions about what they think. So why,’ she added, ‘are you being so inquisitive with me?’
‘Maybe because I’ve never met anyone like you before.’
‘Is that a good thing?’ Rose detected the breathless note in her voice with a shiver of alarm. She was mesmerised by the lazy smile that lightened the harsh beauty of his face.
‘For me, it’s...strangely exciting.’
