I know I won’t be able to live without.’
Helen laughed and teased him, ‘I do believe you’re a romantic!’
‘Aren’t most of us at heart?’
A computer expert who claimed to be romantic. Wasn’t that a complete contradiction?
‘Are you a romantic, Miranda?’
She stared at him, and felt her skin starting to flush. His question had caught her off guard. She had been listening to the conversation and yet had considered herself safely outside it. Now she wondered if he hadn’t thrown the question at her because he wanted to embarrass her, rather than through any desire to know what motivated her.
‘Miranda, romantic?’ her father snorted, answering the question for her. ‘Miranda is one of your modern breed of women who scorns such old-fashioned notions. She prides herself on being independent and self-sufficient.’
Miranda knew that her father was really only teasing her, but for some reason his words hurt her, drawing a picture of her which her emotions instantly rejected as she viewed the cold, emotionless creature his words had created. She wasn’t really like that, was she?
It was true that she was independent, but that was because … because … because what? Because she had wanted to give her father his freedom … his right to have a life of his own, the kind of life he might not have felt free to have with an adult daughter still living under his roof.
Well, maybe her motivation hadn’t been quite so altruistic, and certainly she enjoyed her work, but, if she was truly the woman her father seemed to think, wouldn’t she have long ago left this small market town behind her and headed out into a much wider and harsher world?
‘Jeffrey, honestly, that’s not true,’ Helen intervened. ‘Don’t listen to him, Ben,’ she exhorted. ‘Miranda might try to hide it, but in reality she’s one of the most tender-hearted people you could ever wish to meet, although I know she hates admitting it. I suspect she’s rather afraid of letting people see how tender-hearted she actually is in case it makes her too vulnerable.’
Miranda was horrified. Much as she had disliked her father’s jocular misrepresentation of her as a hard-headed determined woman with no room in her life for time-wasting emotions, it had been preferable to Helen’s far too accurate portrait of her.
She knew that Ben Frobisher was looking at her, but she could not bring herself to return his look with anything like the composure that doing so required.
‘No one likes to appear too vulnerable,’ she could hear him saying, but, although the words were addressed to Helen, she could sense that he was still watching her.
Her appetite had deserted her completely. She pushed the food around on her plate, longing for the evening to be over. She had been right; the only thing she had not guessed was the true intensity of the evening’s awfulness.
She was glad when her father started to ask Ben about his plans for relocating his business to the town, and was both surprised and rather chagrined to learn that, while he would be bringing some key people down with him from London, he was hoping to recruit the majority of his employees locally.
‘It’s the kind of business that requires young sharp minds,’ he told them all. ‘At a recent convention, the majority of those attending were under thirty, and a good percentage were under twenty. At the moment we hold a good place in the market because we’ve been able to specialise in a profitable area, but we can only hold on to that advantage if we remain in the forefront of new advances, and in order to do that we need keen, innovative minds.’
‘What will happen to your existing employees?’ Miranda asked him.
‘Most of them have already found new jobs. There’s no shortage of demand for trained people in and around London, and, of course, they’re all getting redundancy payments. In fact, none of them actually wanted to relocate with us. They’re all under thirty, with established lifestyles in London, most of them are unmarried, and the thought of moving out to a quiet market town didn’t have much appeal for them.’
‘But it did for you?’
Miranda had no idea why she was questioning him … talking to him. If she had any sense she would simply sit here in silence, having as little to do with him as possible.
‘I’m not under thirty. The pace of London life doesn’t have much appeal for me any more. I wanted a home … not a glossy London flat that’s antiseptic and arid. I’ve always liked this part of the world. My parents lived near Bath for a while when I was in my teens. They’ve moved north now. My father comes from the Borders and wanted to go back there when he retired.’
‘Which reminds me,’ her father interrupted. ‘I’ve got the details of some houses for you. You did say you’d prefer something outside the town?’
‘Yes, I do.’
While the two men discussed the various properties available, Helen commented to Miranda that she would be glad when all the fuss of the wedding was over.
Everyone had finished eating, coffee had been served, and the moment Miranda had been privately dreading had arrived.
The lights had been dimmed, the small band had started playing and couples were gradually filling the dance floor.
She prayed that Ben would not out of politeness ask her to dance. The very last thing she wanted was to be held in his arms. And yet, what had she to fear? She had already convinced herself that, no matter how physically attractive she had originally found him, that attraction had vanished once she knew who and what he was, and, that being the case, what had she to fear from dancing with him? Nothing; nothing at all, and anyway, why was she inviting problems that might not occur? In all probability he wasn’t even going to invite her to dance with him.
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