Time For Trust. PENNY JORDAN

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СКАЧАТЬ The house is going to be my home, not a set piece that looks like a photograph out of a glossy magazine. Mind you, I’m a long way from the decorating and furnishing stage as yet. As I discovered this morning, there’s some pretty bad damp damage, and an awful lot of restoration work to be done, simply to bring the fabric of the building up to scratch. At the moment I’m virtually camped out in a couple of rooms.’ He grimaced wryly. ‘I was hoping to get the worst of the repairs over before Christmas, that’s why I’m so damned annoyed with this builder.’

      ‘Wouldn’t it have been more sensible to stay in London at least until the house is habitable?’ Jessica asked him, curiosity about him overcoming the dull ache in her arm.

      ‘Sensible, perhaps,’ he agreed. ‘But there comes a time when living and working at the hectic pace demanded by city life begins to pall. My business necessitates my working in the City, but I don’t have to live there. Once I’d made the choice to move out…’ He shrugged meaningfully, and Jessica guessed that he was a man who, once he had made a decision, seldom changed his mind.

      ‘Your business…?’ she asked and then hesitated, wondering if her questions were too intrusive. She had never felt anything to match the fierce need she was now experiencing to know everything there was to know about this man. He filled her senses, absorbing her attention to the exclusion of everything else, and these sensations were a phenomenon to her. She found it hard to understand how she, normally so cautious in her dealings with others, could feel so at ease with this stranger, and yet at the same time so keyed up, so buoyed up by his presence that everything in her life now seemed to be coloured by her reactions to him.

      She sensed his hesitation in answering her question and flushed uncomfortably. Was she being too pushy, too inquisitive? After all, she had no previous experience to go on—no past relationships in her life to show her how to deal with the sensations he was arousing inside her.

      But at last he answered her, his voice oddly sombre as he told her almost reluctantly, ‘I’m an economist. I work in the City.’

      An economist. She guessed vaguely that he was probably involved in some way with the stock market, and, knowing how secretive people involved in the sales of stocks and shares sometimes had to be, she felt she could understand his reticence and quickly changed the subject.

      ‘Quite a few City people have moved out this way recently, although we are a bit off the beaten track. It isn’t unknown for the village to be snowed in in a bad winter,’ she warned him, but he laughed and seemed unconcerned by the threat of not being able to reach the City.

      ‘What about you?’ he challenged her. ‘I’ve already heard all about your tapestries. In fact, I suspect that the marvellous creation I recently admired hanging on a friend’s wall was designed and made by you, but surely from a selling point of view you’d do better living somewhere, if not central to London, then, say, like Bath, where there’s a thriving interior decoration industry.’

      ‘I don’t like cities…or crowds,’ she told him shortly. The ache in her shoulder was nagging painfully. ‘I prefer to live somewhere quiet.’

      ‘And isolated?’ he probed skilfully, the golden eyes watching her as she looked at him in startled defensiveness. ‘It wasn’t so difficult to deduce,’ he told her gently, as though answering her unspoken question. ‘A very attractive and clever young woman living alone in a tiny rural village; a young woman whom it is obvious was not born and bred here, and whose skills have a much wider field of demand than her environs suggest. What happened?’ he asked gently.

      Tears clogged her throat. This was the first time anyone had asked her about the past; the first time anyone had seen past her defences and guessed that there was more to her desire to live so quietly than merely a love of the Avon countryside. She wanted to tell him, and yet conversely was afraid to do so. Why? In case he dismissed her fears as trivial and foolish as her parents had done? In case he was embarrassed by them as her London friends had been? Or just in case he simply did not understand the trauma of what she had endured and how it had affected her?

      Panic suddenly overwhelmed her, followed by the old dread of talking to anyone about what she had endured—a fear which her doctor told her probably sprang from an atavistic belief that, in somehow refusing to talk about her ordeal, she was succeeding in shutting herself off from it, and that her reluctance to talk about it sprang from a deep-rooted dread that, once she did, her old terror would mushroom and overwhelm her, growing beyond her control to the point where it dragged her down and consumed her.

      Her throat muscles locked, her body suddenly tense as she sat crouched on the sofa, defensive and inarticulate, the half of her brain that could still reason knowing that he must be wondering what on earth he had said to spark off such a reaction, and dreading him withdrawing from her.

      A sound beyond the room distracted him. He lifted his head, frowning, and then said quietly, ‘I think the doctor has probably arrived. I’ll go and let him in.’

      Tactfully he offered to leave her alone with the doctor, but she shook her head, wanting his presence, feeling protected and comforted by it, and yet at the same time feeling guilty, because she was imposing on him.

      When she tried to say as much he shook his head and then took hold of both her hands, saying quietly, ‘No, never…I want to stay.’

      And then he smiled at her, and in the warmth of his eyes she saw a promise that dazzled and awed her. He shared her awareness of that instant and shocking recognition, that sensation of feeling inexplicably attuned to one another. She had heard of people falling in love at first sight. Was this what had happened to them?

      But falling in love was an ephemeral, laughable thing that only happened to the reckless and impulsive, and she was neither of those. There was nothing shallow about the way she felt about him. No. This was more than a sense of recognition, of knowing that here was a man who seemed to understand, as though by instinct, everything there was to know about her—about her fears and apprehensions, about her weaknesses and strengths. Indeed, it was almost as though he possessed some deep inner knowledge of her that enabled him to recognise her every emotion and feeling.

      He deliberately busied himself clearing away their china mugs and emptying the teapot while the doctor asked her to remove her sweater and examined her injured shoulder and arm.

      Already both were painfully swollen, showing evidence of the bruising that was yet to come.

      ‘Mm…Nothing’s broken, but you’re going to find that arm painful and stiff for a few days, I’m afraid. I think it might be as well to rest it in a sling at least for the next forty-eight hours.’

      It would have to be her right arm, Jessica reflected wryly as the doctor rummaged in his bag for an antiseptic pack containing the requisite sling.

      ‘I can leave you some pain-killers,’ he suggested, eyeing her thoughtfully. ‘Generally speaking, when a patient suffers extreme shock as you have done I can prescribe a mild sleeping tablet…’

      Jessica shuddered and shook her head. She remembered the drugs she had been prescribed before, supposedly to help her sleep, but which in reality had doped and numbed her to such an extent that they had actually intensified her struggle to come to terms with her residual fear once she was without the crutch they offered.

      ‘Sensible girl,’ the doctor approved. ‘A mild sedative isn’t necessarily addictive, but I don’t like prescribing them unless it’s absolutely essential. If you want my advice, perhaps a good tot of brandy in your bedtime cocoa is just as effective.’

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