her acidly, ‘Trixie isn’t my girlfriend. She’s my niece. This isn’t some idiotic lovers’ tryst gone wrong, if that’s what you’re thinking, but a piece of deliberate manipulation.’
His mouth twisted suddenly and the look in his eyes was one of disgust.
‘I realise that the circumstances here don’t exactly encourage you to believe that I’m a perfectly respectable member of our local community, but do I look like the sort of idiot who’d go swimming with his girlfriend on a freezing cold autumn evening, and then let her walk off with his clothes? That kind of thing’s for teenagers, not adults…’
To Harriet’s surprise, he seemed more infuriated by her surely perfectly natural mistake about the nature of his predicament than by her refusal to give him a lift. Now that she looked at him a little more closely she saw that his face was that of a man who was more than likely rather autocratic, and used to controlling situations rather than to being controlled by them. Unlike her…but this was one occasion on which she intended to stand firm.
No matter how plausible and respectable he might seem, she would be a fool to give him a lift…She gave a tiny shiver, contemplating the kind of fate that could be hers, if he were not everything that he seemed.
Luckily she had kept the car engine running and now, as she looked nervously over her shoulder, wishing another car would appear on the quiet road, he seemed to read her mind.
‘For God’s sake, woman,’ he said irately, ‘do I look like a rapist?’
The look he gave her seemed to imply that, even if he were, he would scarcely choose the likes of her for a victim. Always sensitive to what she considered to be her own lack of sex appeal, a lack which she had always felt was underlined by Louise’s casual ability to attract men to her side like so many flies to honey, she flushed brilliantly and snapped at him, ‘How do I know? I’ve never met one.’And then the acid look he gave her made her add uncomfortably, ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t give you a lift. You must see that. I could give someone a message, though…the local police?’
The look he gave her was as corrosive as acid.
A cool wind had sprung up, and even within the comfort of her small car she could feel its chill. No wonder that he, standing outside it, should suddenly shiver, his skin lifting in a rash of goose-bumps.
She almost weakened then, the caring, vulnerable nature which had been her undoing so often with Louise urging her to help him, but even as the words were forming on her tongue he was straightening up, his eyes brilliant with anger.
He said curtly, ‘No, that won’t be necessary,’ and then, sketching her a swift and insulting half-bow that oddly enough did not make him look in the least ridiculous, he said sarcastically, ‘That’s what I like so much about the female sex—its compassion and understanding…’
And then, as she reached for the car door to close it, he lifted his hand and stopped her, the unexpected contact of his cool, damp fingers touching hers, almost like an electrical impulse passing through her body, freezing her into immobility as she stared at him, her heart pounding like that of a terrified rabbit.
‘Do you really think that if I were intending you some harm I couldn’t quite easily have overpowered you already? You know damn well I don’t intend you any harm,’ he added with soft bitterness, ‘but, like the rest of your sex, you obviously enjoy torment for torment’s sake. A small act of human charity, that’s all I asked for.’
Her guilt increasing with every word he spoke, Harriet was just about to say she had changed her mind when, without warning, he removed his hand from hers and slammed the car door shut, leaving her feeling oddly bereft and hurt.
He had already turned his back on her and was disappearing in the direction from which he had come. Her car’s headlights briefly picked out the lithe, powerfully male body, and then he was gone!
A shudder wrenched through her, and she realised that she was sitting there like someone in a trance.
Jerkily she put the car in gear and drove away.
Half an hour later, when her heartbeat had still not returned entirely to normal, she drove through the village, and slowed down carefully, looking for the lane which led to her cottage.
In the village she hesitated, wondering if she ought perhaps to report the incident to the police, anyway. Then, recognising that to do so would probably cause the man more embarrassment than relief, she did not stop.
Embarrassment…she had been the one to feel that, not him, she admitted wryly, remembering the shock of her first realisation that he was virtually nude. Strange how one accepted the sight of men on the beach wearing the briefest of attire without giving it a second thought, and yet when one was confronted by the same image in totally different surroundings—
She swallowed nervously, remembering how difficult she had found it to keep her eyes focused on the man’s face without betraying her idiotic discomfort with his unclothed state. He should have been the one to feel discomposed, not her!
And as for telling her that it was his niece who was responsible for his plight…She frowned as she turned into the lane, forced to admit that both his anger and his words had held an undeniable ring of truth.
She had gained the impression that he was a man who did not have a particularly high opinion of the female sex. Why? she wondered. Given his looks, she would have thought that almost all his adult life he would have been surrounded by admiring women.
At last her car headlights picked out the shape of the cottage. It was properly dark now, and she wished yet again that she had not left it so late to leave London. There was something depressing about arriving alone and unwelcomed at her new home to find it all in darkness.
Apparently the cottage had originally been part of a large local estate, but had been sold off as being of no further use when the estate had been split up and sold several years ago, which accounted for the isolated position of the little house.
Previously it had been inhabited by the estate’s gamekeeper, the agent had told her, and then, after the gamekeeper’s death and until the estate had been broken up eighteen months earlier, the cottage had remained uninhabited.
Two local farmers had apparently bought most of the land, with the main house and its grounds being sold to a local businessman.
As Harriet unlocked the cottage door and switched on the lights, she felt a sense of relief. The light that flooded the small hall helped to banish the sense of apprehension and guilt that had filled her as she drove away from that uncomfortable interlude by the roadside.
Guilt… Why should she feel guilt? She had offered to report his plight…
She stood still, remembering the bitter look he had given her, his curt denunciation of her sex, and found herself hoping that, whoever he was, he lived far away enough to ensure that she didn’t run into him again.
It was still relatively early, barely ten o’clock, and despite her long drive she was filled with a restless urgency that drove her not only to unpack her personal possessions from her car, but also to set up her typewriter on the table in the cottage’s comfortably-sized kitchen-cum-living-room. There she started drafting out the beginnings of an idea which had occurred to her as she’d brought her things in.
Her furniture had arrived earlier in the week, and the
