For a brief second Ellie actually had to close her eyes against the appeal of his voice that curled around her senses like a plume of warm smoke, soft as a caress. She had never been able to resist him when he’d switched on the charm like this, and to her horror she found that she still couldn’t.
‘Very well, then…’
Reaching back into her past, she dragged out from some hidden corner the image of the woman she had once been. The Eleanor Thornton who had been second in command of a large, profitable secretarial agency. The Eleanor Thornton that Morgan had first met.
Adopting a tone of voice that was all control, all businesslike and nothing more, she even managed to flash a swift and obviously insincere smile into his watchful face.
‘If you’ll just come this way, I’ll show you where everything is. And perhaps you’d like to know a little bit about the area too.’
This was better; she was in the swing of things now. After all, she had done this many times before. Meadow Cottage had been occupied almost every week since Easter, and Ellie had usually been the one to greet the new tenants.
‘Watch the floor here,’ she said when, after unlocking the door, she made her way into the narrow hall. ‘It’s a little uneven. As you will have seen in the brochure, Meadow Cottage was formerly one of the farm’s cowsheds, and these stone flags formed part of the original flooring.’
Her voice was perfectly steady as she went into the well-worn patter she had used so often before, but her control over the rest of her body wasn’t quite so complete. When a struggle with the slightly stiff door brought him to her side to help her, the brush of his tall, strong body against her own in the constricted, confined space sent her senses into overdrive.
He still wore the same aftershave that had been a favourite when they had been together; one that she had bought for him for the only Christmas and birthday they had shared. Just the scent of it was like an instant shot of memory, jolting her back in time to those gentler, happier days.
But underneath the evocative cologne was the subtler, more intensely personal scent of his body that stabbed straight to her heart as it stirred up the waters of the past, bringing to the surface the bitter-sweet recollection of how it had felt to lie in bed with him, her head pillowed on the strength of his shoulder, breathing in the clean, musky scent of his skin.
At once all her familiar spiel deserted her. Her head was buzzing, her senses stirring in a disturbingly primitive way. For a moment the memories that gripped her were so powerful, so real that her eyes burned with bitter tears and she had to blink furiously to drive them back.
‘The kitchen…’ was all she could manage, gritting her teeth against the sting of irony in his murmured, ‘Obviously.’
From then onwards all she wanted to do was to get the job done as quickly as possible. Not giving him time to look around, she marched him to the next door, opening it briefly.
‘The sitting room… The second bedroom is up there…’
A wave of her hand indicated the small gallery above the sitting room where a neat bedroom nestled under the eaves.
‘The bathroom is down here… And the main bedroom directly opposite. You can get milk and eggs from the farm—everything else from the store in the village, and they’ll cash a cheque for you in an emergency. I’m afraid there isn’t a bank anywhere nearer than St Austell. We provide fresh linen and towels on Mondays.’
There, she was done! Surely now he had to let her go.
‘Is there anything else?’
‘Just a couple of things. But why don’t we discuss them over coffee?’
‘No, thanks,’ Ellie managed through teeth gritted against the urge to scream in frustration. ‘I have other things to do.’
‘And I have things I want to discuss.’
Blatantly ignoring her protest, he turned and headed back down the white-walled corridor to the kitchen, leaving her with no option but to follow him.
‘Morgan, I don’t have time for coffee. I have to work…’
The need for her daughter was like an ache in her heart, a hunger that no food could possibly assuage.
‘Work?’
The look he directed at her burned with frank scepticism.
‘You working on a farm—that’s not at all what I’d have expected from the elegant Ms Thornton.’
‘I told you, I’m not the same person any more. I’ve changed a lot in the past eighteen months.’
‘So I see.’
His tone was a slow drawl and those brilliant eyes swept over her in a deliberately insolent assessment. She couldn’t miss the way that sapphire gaze lingered around the fullness of her breasts, the curves of her hips in the close-fitting skirt.
As a result of her pregnancy she had filled out noticeably, so that her shape was definitely more womanly when contrasted with her slenderness when they had been together. And Morgan, who had known her body with the intimacy of a lover, couldn’t be unaware of those changes either.
‘So I see,’ he repeated, and there was no mistaking the disturbingly sensual note on the words.
She knew that purring tone of voice. Knew only too well what it implied. She had heard it often enough when they had lived together. Then it had made her heart leap in anticipation, had set her body tingling in uncontrolled response. Just to hear her name spoken in that huskily appreciative way had been like a subtle form of foreplay, telling her instantly what was in his mind, and triggering off the same heated longings in her own.
But hearing it now shocked her rigid. Foolishly, naively perhaps, she had expected that the feelings Morgan had once had for her, every type of feeling, would have died, starved into non-existence by eighteen months of lack of nourishment. But there was no mistaking the heated desire that now flared in the brilliance of his eyes, the instant response that made his pupils so huge and dark.
‘Country life obviously suits you. You’re looking really well.’
‘I’m happy here.’
She had learned how to be happy but it hadn’t come easily to her. At first she had felt as if half of her soul had been cut away and it had only been the need to care for the baby growing in her womb that had kept her going.
‘So why don’t you make that coffee while I unload the car and then you can tell me all about it?’
Ellie’s breath hissed in through her teeth in a sound of exasperation.
‘Morgan, what part of what I said did you not understand? I don’t have time for this…’
But she was speaking to empty air. Morgan had already opened the door and gone out to the car. When she hurried after him it was to find that he’d opened the boot and was pulling a case from it.
‘Why won’t you listen to me? I can’t stay! Nan’s expecting me—she’ll be wondering where I am.’
‘I never thought of Marion as a slave-driver.’
He was coming back to the door again now, a suitcase in either hand so that Ellie had to flatten herself against the wall to let him past.
‘And I’m sure she’ll understand that you and I will need to spend a little time getting reacquainted.’
‘We’re not going to get reacquainted or re anything.’
Her words would have more emphasis if she didn’t have to keep trotting after him, forcing her shorter legs to keep up with the long, swift strides that took him through the cottage and into the ground-floor bedroom in the space of a few seconds.
‘I told you—the only reason I’m here