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She didn’t know where to look and somewhere inside she knew that it didn’t matter because wherever she looked she would still end up seeing him. Tall, broad-shouldered, his body an amazing burnished bronze. She would still see the hardness of his six pack and the length of his muscular legs, the legs of an athlete.
Aside from a pair of low-slung boxers, he was completely naked.
Becky cleared her throat and opened her mouth and nothing emerged but an inarticulate noise.
‘I was just about to stick the clothes outside...’
Without the woollen hat pulled down over her head, her hair was long, tumbling down her back in a cascade of unruly, dark curls, and without the layers upon layers of shriekingly unfashionable arctic gear...
She wasn’t the round little beach ball he had imagined. Even with the loose-fitting striped rugby shirt, he could see that she had the perfect hourglass figure. News obviously hadn’t reached this part of the world that the fashionable trend these days leaned towards long, thin and toned to athletic perfection, even if the exercise involved to get there never saw the outside of an expensive gym.
He could feel his whole body reacting to the sight of her lush curves and he hurriedly turned away, because a pair of boxers was no protection against an erection.
He was staring. Becky stood stock-still, conscious of herself and her body in ways she had never been before. Why was he staring at her like that? Was he even aware that he was doing it?
She couldn’t believe that he was staring at her because she was the most glamorous woman he had ever set eyes on. She wasn’t born yesterday and she knew that when it came to looks, well, a career could not be made out of hers. Alice had got the looks and she, Becky, had got the brains and it had always seemed like a fair enough deal to her.
He’d turned away now, thankfully putting on some ancient track pants her father had left behind and an even more ancient jumper, and by the time he turned back around to face her she wondered whether she had imagined those cool, grey eyes on her, skirting over her body.
Yes, she thought a little shakily. Of course she had. She had stared at him because he looked like a Greek god. She on the other hand was as average as they came.
Should she feel threatened? She was alone in this house...
She didn’t feel threatened. She felt...excited. Something wicked and daring stirred inside her and she promptly knocked it back.
‘The clothes.’ She found her voice, one hand outstretched, watching as he gathered items of clothing and strolled towards her. ‘I’ll make sure they’re washed and ready for you tomorrow morning.’
‘First thing...before I’m sent on my way,’ Theo murmured, still startled at the fierce grip of his libido that had struck from nowhere.
She couldn’t wait to escape, he thought with a certain amount of disbelief.
Something had passed between them just then. Had she even been aware of it? A charge of electricity had shaken him and she hadn’t been unaffected. He’d seen the reaction in the widening of her eyes as she had looked at him, and the stillness of her body language, as though one false move might have led her to do something...rash.
Did rash happen out here? he wondered. Or was she out here because she was escaping from something rash? Was the awkward, blushing, argumentative vet plagued by guilt over a misspent past? Had she thrown herself into a one-way relationship to nowhere with a con man? A married man? A rampant womaniser who had used her and tossed her aside? The possibilities were endless.
She certainly wasn’t out here for the money. That bucket on the landing said it all. She might be living rent free at the place but she certainly wasn’t earning enough to keep it maintained. Old houses consumed money with the greed of a gold-digger on the make.
‘What if it’s still snowing in the morning?’
She was clutching the bundle of clothes like a talisman and staring up at him with those amazing bright blue eyes. Her lips were parted. When she circled a nervous tongue over them, Theo had to fight down an urge to reach out and pull her against him.
‘It won’t be.’
‘If you weren’t prepared to risk my life by sending me on my way, then will you be prepared to risk someone else’s life by asking them to come and collect me and take me away?’
‘I could drive you myself. I have a four-wheel drive. It’s okay in conditions like this.’
‘When I knocked on your door...’ Theo leant against the door frame ‘... I never expected someone like you to open it’
‘What do you mean someone like me?’ Becky stiffened, primed for some kind of thinly veiled insult.
Theo didn’t say anything for a couple of seconds. Instead, he watched her, head tilted to one side, until she looked away, blushing. Very gently, he tilted her face back to his.
‘You’re on the defensive. Why?’
‘Why do you think? I... I don’t know you.’ The feel of his cool finger resting lightly on her chin was as scorching-hot as the imprint from a branding iron.
‘What do you think I’m going to do? When I said someone like you, I meant someone young. I expected someone much older to be living this far out in the countryside.’
‘I told you, the house belongs to my parents. I’m just here... Look, I’m going to head downstairs, wash these things...’ Her feet and brain were not communicating because, instead of spinning around and backing out of the room, she remained where she was, glued to the spot.
She wanted him to remove his hand...she wanted him to do more with it, wanted him to curve it over her face and then slide it across her shoulders, wanted him to find the bare flesh of her stomach and then the swell of her breasts... She didn’t want to hear anything he had to say, yet he was making her think, and how could that be a bad thing?
She barely recognised her voice and she certainly didn’t know what was going on with her body.
‘Okay.’ He stepped back, hand dropping to his side.
For a few seconds, Becky hovered, then she cleared her throat and stepped out of the room backwards.
By the time he joined her in the kitchen, the clothes were in the washing machine and she had regained her composure.
Theo looked at her for a few seconds from the doorway. She had her back to him and was busy chopping vegetables, while as background noise the television was giving an in-depth report of the various areas besieged by snow when spring should have sprung. He felt that her house would shortly be featured because there was no sign of the snow letting up.
Before he had come down, he had done his homework, nosed into a few of the rooms and seen for himself what he had suspected from the bucket on the landing catching water from the leaking roof.
The house was on its last legs. Did he think that he was doing anything underhand in checking out the property before he made an offer? No. He’d come here to conduct a business deal and, if things had been slightly thrown off course, nothing had fundamentally changed. The key thing remained the business deal.
And was the woman peeling the vegetables an unexpected part of acquiring what he wanted? Was she now part of the business deal that had to be secured?
In a way, yes.
And he was not in the slightest ashamed of taking this pragmatic view. Why should he be? This was the man he was and it was how he had succeeded beyond even his own wildest expectations.
If you allowed your emotions to guide you, you ended up a victim of whatever circumstances came along to blow you off course.
He had no intention of ever being one of life’s victims. His mother had so much to give, but she had allowed her damaged heart to take control of her entire future, so that, in the end, whatever she’d had to give to anyone else had dried up. Wasn’t that one reason why she was so consumed with the thought of having grandchildren? Of seeing him married off?
Because her ability to give had to go somewhere and he was the only recipient.
That was what emotions did to a person. They stripped you of your ability to think. That was why he had never done commitment and never would. Commitment led to relationships and relationships were almost always train wrecks waiting to happen. Lawyers were kept permanently busy sorting out those train wrecks and making lots of money in the process.
He had his life utterly in control and that was the way he liked it.
He had no doubt that whatever had brought Becky to this place was a story that might tug on someone else’s heartstrings. His heartstrings would be blessedly immune to any tugging. He would be able to find out about her and persuade her to accept that this was no place for her to be. When, inevitably, the house was sold from under her feet, she would not try and put up a fight, wouldn’t try and coax her parents into letting her stay on.
He would have long disappeared from her life. He would have been nothing more than a stranger who had landed for a night and then moved on. But she would remember what he had said and she would end up thanking him.
Because, frankly, this was no place for her to be. It wasn’t healthy. She was far too young.
He looked at the rounded swell of her derrière...
Far too young and far too sexy.
‘What are you cooking?’
Becky swung round to see him lounging against the door frame. Her father was a little shorter and reedier than Theo. Theo looked as though he had been squashed into clothes a couple of sizes too small. And he was barefoot. Her eyes shot back to his face to find that he was staring right back at her with a little smile.
‘Pasta. Nothing special. And you can help.’ She turned her back on him and felt him close the distance between them until he was standing next to her, at which point she pointed to some onions and slid a small, sharp knife towards him. ‘You’ve asked me a lot of questions,’ she said, eyes sliding across to his hands and then hurriedly sliding back to focus on what she was doing. ‘But I don’t know anything about you.’
‘Ask away.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘London.’ Theo couldn’t remember the last time he’d chopped an onion. Were they always this fiddly?
‘And what were you doing in this part of the world? Aside from getting lost?’
Theo felt a passing twinge of guilt. ‘Taking my car for some exercise,’ he said smoothly. ‘And visiting one or two...familiar spots en route.’
‘Seems an odd thing to do at this time of year,’ Becky mused. ‘On your own.’
‘Does it?’ Theo dumped the half-peeled onion. ‘Is there anything to drink in this house or do vets not indulge just in case they get a midnight call and need to be in their car within minutes, tackling the dangerous country lanes in search of a sick animal somewhere?’
Becky stopped what she was doing and looked at him, and at the poor job he had made of peeling an onion.
‘I’m not really into domestic chores.’ Theo shrugged.
‘There’s wine in the fridge. I’m not on call this evening and, as it happens, I don’t get hundreds of emergency calls at night. I’m not a doctor. Most of my patients can wait a few hours and, if they can’t, everyone around here knows where the nearest animal hospital is. And you haven’t answered my question. Isn’t it a bit strange for you to be here on your own...just driving around?’
Theo took his time pouring the wine, then he handed her a glass and settled into a chair at the kitchen table.
His own penthouse was vast and ultra-modern. He didn’t care for cosy, although he had to admit that there was something to be said for it in the middle of a blizzard with the snow turning everything white outside. This was a cosy kitchen. Big cream Aga...worn pine table with mismatched chairs...flagstone floor that had obviously had underfloor heating installed at some point, possibly before the house had begun buckling under the effect of old age, because it wasn’t bloody freezing underfoot...
‘Just driving around,’ he said slowly, truthfully, ‘is a luxury I can rarely afford.’ He thought about his life—high-voltage, adrenaline-charged, pressurised, the life of someone who made millions. There was no time for standing still. ‘I seldom stop, and even when I do, I am permanently on call.’ He smiled crookedly, at odds with himself for giving in to the unheard of temptation to confide.
‘What on earth do you do?’ Becky leant against the counter and stared at him with interest.
‘I...buy things, do them up and sell them on. Some of them I keep for myself because I’m greedy.’
‘What sorts of things?’
‘Companies.’
Becky stared at him thoughtfully. The sauce was simmering nicely on the Aga. She went to sit opposite him, nursing her glass of wine.
Looking at her, Theo wondered if she had any idea of just how wealthy he was. She would now be getting the picture that he wasn’t your average two-up, two-down, one holiday a year, nine-to-five kind of guy and he wondered whether, like every other single woman he had ever met, she was doing the maths and working out how profitable it might be to get to know him better.
‘Poor you,’ Becky said at last and he frowned.
‘Come again?’
‘It must be awful never having time to yourself. I don’t have much but what I do have I really appreciate. I’d hate it if I had to get in my car and drive out into the middle of nowhere just to have some uninterrupted peace.’
She laughed, relaxed for the first time since he had landed on her doorstep. ‘Our parents always made a big thing about money not being the most important thing in life.’ Her bright turquoise eyes glinted with sudden humour. ‘Alice and I used to roll our eyes but they were right. That’s why...’ she looked around her at the kitchen, where, as a family, they had spent countless hours together ‘... I can appreciate all this quiet, which I know you don’t understand.’
The prospect of saying goodbye to the family house made her eyes mist over. ‘There’s something wonderfully peaceful about being here. I don’t need the crowds of a city. I never have or I never would have returned here after... Well, this is where I belong.’ And the thought of finding somewhere else to call home felt like such a huge mountain to climb that she blinked back a bout of severe self-pity. Her parents had moved on as had Alice. So could she.
Theo, watching her, felt a stab of alarm. A pep talk wasn’t going to get her packing her belongings and moving on and a wad of cash, by all accounts, wasn’t going to cut it with her parents.
When was the last time he had met someone who wasn’t impressed by money and what it could buy?
His mother, of course, who had never subscribed to his single-minded approach to making money, even though, as he had explained on countless occasions, making money per se was a technicality. The only point to having money was the security it afforded and that was worth its weight in gold. Surely, he had argued, she could see that—especially considering her life had been one of making ends meet whilst trying to bring up a child on her own?
He moved in circles where money talked, where people were impressed by it. The women he met enjoyed what he could give them. His was the sort of vast, bottomless wealth that opened doors, that conferred absolute freedom.
And what, he wondered, was wrong with that?
‘Touching,’ he said coolly. ‘Clearly none of your family members are in agreement, considering they’re nowhere to be seen. The opposite, in fact. They’ve done a runner and cleared off to a different country.’
‘Do you know what?’ Becky said with heartfelt sincerity. ‘You may think you’re qualified to look down your nose at other people who don’t share your...your...materialism, but I feel sorry for anyone who thinks it’s worth spending every minute of every day working! I feel sorry for someone who never has time off to just do nothing. Do you ever relax? Put your feet up? Listen to music? Or just watch television?’ Becky’s voice rang with self-righteous sincerity but she was guiltily aware that she was far from being the perfectly content person she was making herself out to be.
She hadn’t rushed back to the cottage because she couldn’t be without the vast, open peaceful spaces a second longer. She’d rushed back because her heart had been broken. And she hadn’t stayed here because she’d been seduced by all the wonderful, tranquil downtime during which she listened to music or watched television with her feet up. She’d stayed because she’d fallen into a job and had then been too apathetic to do anything else about moving on with her life in a more dynamic way.
And it wasn’t fun listening out for leaks. It wasn’t fun waiting for the heating to pack up. And it certainly wasn’t fun to know that, in another country, the rest of her family was busy feeling sorry for her and waiting for her to up sticks so that the house could be sold and valuable capital released.
‘I relax,’ Theo said softly.
‘Huh?’ She focused on a sharply indrawn breath, blinking like a rabbit caught in the headlights at the lazy, sexy smile curving his mouth.
‘In between the work, I actually do manage to take time off to relax. It’s just that my form of relaxation doesn’t happen to include watching television or listening to music... But I can assure you that it’s every bit as satisfying, if somewhat more energetic...’
CHAPTER THREE
‘WHAT DO YOU do here?’
‘What do you mean?’ Becky asked in sudden confusion.
‘To relax.’ Theo sprawled back, angling the chair so that he could loosely cross his legs, ankle resting on thigh, one arm slung over the back of the chair, the other toying with the wine glass, twirling it slowly between his long fingers as he continued to look at her.
‘I mean,’ he continued pensively, ‘it’s all well and good killing time in front of the television with your feet up, while you congratulate yourself on how peaceful it is, but what else do you get up to when you’ve had your fill of the great open spaces and the lack of noise?’
‘I grew up here’ was all Becky could find to say.
‘University must have been a very different change of scenery for you,’ Theo mused. ‘Which university did you go to?’
He could see her reluctance to divulge any personal details. It made him want to pry harder, to extract as much information as he could from her. Her dewy skin was pink and flushed. In a minute, she would briskly stand up and dodge his personal attack on her by busying herself in front of the Aga.
‘Cambridge.’
‘Impressive. And then you decided, after going to one of the top universities on the planet, that you would return here so that you could get a job at a small practice in the middle of nowhere?’
‘Like I said, you wouldn’t understand.’
‘You’re right. I don’t. And you still haven’t told me what you do for relaxation around here.’
‘I barely have time to relax.’ Becky stood up abruptly, uncomfortable with his questioning. She rarely found her motives questioned.
‘But I thought you said...’ A smile quirked at the corner of Theo’s mouth.
‘Yes, well,’ snapped Becky, turning her back to him, more than a little flustered.
‘But when you do...?’ Theo followed her to where she was standing, clearing an already tidy counter.
He gently relieved her of the cloth and looked down at her.
Becky had no idea what was happening. Was this flirting? She had successfully convinced herself that there was no way the man could have any interest in her, aside from polite interest towards someone who had agreed to let him stay for the night because of the poor weather conditions. But when he looked at her the way he was looking at her now...
Her mind broke its leash and raced off in all sorts of crazy directions.
He was obnoxious. Of course he was, with his generalisations, his patronising assertions and that typical rich man’s belief that money was the only thing that mattered.
He was just the sort of guy she had no time for.
But he was so outrageously beautiful and that was what gripped her imagination and held it. That was what was making her body react with such treacherous heat to his smoky grey eyes.
He’d painted a picture for her when he’d told her how he relaxed. He hadn’t had to go into details because in a few sentences she had pictured him naked...aroused...focusing all that glorious, masculine attention on one woman...
‘You surely must get a little lonely out here?’ Theo murmured softly. ‘However much you love the peace and isolation.’
‘I...’
Her eyelids fluttered and her lips parted on an automatic denial of any such thing.
Theo drew in a sharp breath, riveted by the sight of those full, plump lips. She had no idea how alluring that mixture of apprehension and innocence was. It made him want to touch, even though he knew that it would be a mistake. This wasn’t one of those women who’d stopped being green round the ears when they were sixteen. Whatever experiences this woman had had, whatever had driven her back to this house—and he was certain that something had—she was innocent.
He stepped back and raked his fingers through his hair, breaking the electric connection between them.
Becky was trembling. She could feel the tremor running through her body, as though she had had a shock and was still feeling the aftermath of it, even though he had returned to the table to sit back down. She couldn’t look at him as he picked up the conversation, making sure to steer clear of anything personal.
He asked her about the sort of situations she had to deal with out in the country... How many were in the practice? Had she always wanted to be a vet? Why had she chosen that over a conventional medicine course?
He didn’t ask her again whether she was lonely.
He didn’t ask her why she had chosen to retreat to the country to live when she could have had a job anywhere in the country.
When he looked at her, it was without that lazy, assessing speculation that made her blood thicken and made her break out in a cold sweat.
He complimented her on the meal and asked her about her diet, about how she managed to fit in her meals with the hours she worked.
He could not have been more meticulously polite if he had been obeying orders with a gun held to his head and she hated it.
His arrival at the house was the most exciting thing that had happened to her in a long time and it had occurred just when she had been questioning her whole life, putting it into perspective, trying to figure out a way forward. It had occurred hard on the heels of her sister’s phone call, which had stirred up a grey, sludgy mix of emotion in her, some of which she didn’t like.
It also felt as though fate had sent him along to challenge her.
And how was she going to respond to that challenge? By running away? By retreating? She was going to be challenged a lot more when her job came to an end and the roof over her head was sold, and what was she going to do then? Dive for cover, close her eyes and hope for the best?
Where was the harm in getting into some practice now when it came to dealing with the unexpected? It wasn’t as though there would be any repercussions, was it? You could bare your soul to a stranger on a plane and then walk away when the plane landed, safe in the knowledge that you wouldn’t clap eyes on that person again, so if they happened to be a receptacle for all your secrets, what difference would that make?
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