Committee for the Preservation of Local Buildings,’ Miranda heard her father saying while to her own fury she could feel her face flushing.
‘It isn’t quite as bad as you seem to think, you know,’ Ben Frobisher told her, still smiling at her, adding, ‘In fact, why don’t you give me an opportunity to prove it to you? Let me show you the plans I’ve had drawn up.’
‘By Ralph Charlesworth?’ Miranda demanded scornfully, letting her temper and her embarrassment get the better of her.
The whole evening was going to be a complete disaster. She could tell that already … Of all the humiliating things to have happened … had he known who she was when …? But no, he couldn’t have.
‘No, not by Charlesworth, as it happens.’
That made her focus on him and then immediately wish she had not done so, as she was subjected to the fully dizzying effect of meeting that level grey gaze head on.
It was like running full tilt into an immovable object, she reflected, the effect just as instant and even more of a shock to the system. Her heart was beating too fast; she was fighting not to breathe too quickly and shallowly. She felt slightly dizzy and thoroughly bemused. It was totally unfair that he should affect her like this.
‘I’m sure Miranda would be delighted to see them,’ she could hear her father saying heartily at her side. ‘Wouldn’t you, Mirry?’
Wouldn’t she what? she wondered muzzily, somehow or other managing to force herself to respond with a brief inclination of her head and a rather wobbly smile.
‘I’m delighted that you were able to join us tonight, Ben!’ Miranda heard her father exclaiming. ‘They’re a good crowd at the club.’
Behind her father’s back, Miranda grimaced slightly to herself and then flushed wildly as something made her look up and she saw that Ben Frobisher was watching her.
‘And you, Miranda,’ he enquired politely, ‘do you play golf?’
Her father answered for her, chuckling.
‘Not Mirry. She doesn’t have the patience. She plays tennis, though …’
‘Tennis. It’s becoming very fashionable at the moment.’
For some reason the musing comment delivered in Ben Frobisher’s very male voice made her stiffen and look defensively at him. She had the feeling that his comment had been slightly barbed … slightly derogatory.
‘I’ve been playing ever since I left school,’ she told him challengingly, adding pointedly just in case he hadn’t got the message, ‘long before it became fashionable.’
As they walked out to the car, Miranda tried to quell her mixed feelings of irritation and embarrassment and then reflected how very different reality was from her daydreams. In them she had perceived Ben Frobisher as a highly desirable stranger, who also desired her; in reality … In reality he quite plainly did nothing of the kind, and there was an abrasion between them, a covert hostility that was making her feel both uncomfortable and defensive.
It was all because she had made that stupid unguarded comment about the house, of course. And the only reason she had said that had been that she didn’t want to admit to him that he had been right and that she had been escaping from something and someone, namely Ralph Charlesworth and his pursuit of her. Well, it was too late now to wish she had not acted so impulsively. Much too late. But how could she have guessed who he was? She had imagined that the then unknown Ben Frobisher would be a much smaller man, hunch-shouldered and probably bespectacled, as befitted someone who spent long hours staring at a computer screen working out complex programs.
This man looked as though he had spent more time outdoors than in, although she ought to have been warned by the unmistakable intelligence and shrewdness in those grey eyes.
‘I thought we’d all travel together in my car,’ her father suggested, and before she could argue and insist on taking her own car Miranda discovered that Ben Frobisher was politely holding open one of the rear doors of her father’s BMW for her and that she had no option but to get in. When he went round the other side of the car and got in beside her, she could literally feel her muscles tensing.
Not against him, she recognised miserably, but against herself, against her own involuntary reaction to him.
Hell, she swore crossly to herself. This was the last thing she needed … an inconvenient and definitely unwanted sexual reaction to a man whom she had now made up her mind she did not like.
All right, so maybe it wasn’t his fault that she had made such a fool of herself, but somehow, illogically, her emotions refused to accept this. There had been no reason for him to mention what she had said about the house in front of her father and Helen, had there? It was bad enough that he knew how tactless she had been, and as for looking at his precious plans … She tensed again as she realised belatedly that she had already accepted his offer. That would teach her to let her mind wander and not to concentrate on what was going on around her! With good reason had her teachers rebuked her for daydreaming.
Teachers? She wasn’t a schoolgirl now, she was a woman … an independent career woman. An independent career woman who willfully daydreamed about unknown men? She chewed unhappily on her bottom lip, angry with herself as well as with the man sitting silently beside her.
The evening was going to be a total and utter disaster, she knew it.
As her father drove them towards the golf club, she told herself that it served her right and that this was what came of allowing herself to weave idiotic daydreams around a man she didn’t really know.
Had she known who he was when they met … She frowned to herself as she stared out into the darkness of the surrounding landscape.
Would his physical impact on her have been lessened if she had known who he was? She wasn’t a young girl any more, after all; a person’s personality, their beliefs, their sense of humour, their views of life and love—it was important that all these should mesh with and complement her own, and anyone who could employ someone like Ralph Charlesworth to undertake the renovation of a graceful old house like the one Ben Frobisher had bought could not possibly have the same outlook on life as herself. Which was probably just as well. After all, he had not shown any reciprocal awareness of her interest in her—quite the reverse—so the sensible, indeed, the essential thing for her to do was to forget the disruptive physical effect that the first unexpected meeting had had on her and to concentrate instead on the reality of the man he was actually proving to be.
A very sensible and mature decision to come to; so why, at the same time as she was congratulating herself on this sensible mature outlook, was she also angrily wishing that she had dressed with a little more élan, a little more sophistication; that she had perhaps made the effort to take herself off to Bath and buy herself a new dress?
A new dress for the golf club dance—and when she had promised herself that this year she intended to save up and treat herself to a holiday in Hong Kong and the Far East? What on earth was happening to her?
Nothing, she told herself firmly, answering her own question; nothing whatsoever was happening to her, and nothing was going to happen to her.
Even so, when the lights of the club-house came into view she found herself wishing that the evening was already over and that she was safely tucked
