Absorbed in what she was doing, she missed the warning signs of the birds’ flight as an intruder disturbed them, so that her first intimation of his arrival was when the protective fronds of the willow were swept aside, and she looked up to see a very tall and very angry man standing glaring furiously at her.
‘Robert.’
The curt demand for the child’s attention gave away their relationship even before Robert started trembling against her, clinging on to her.
‘It’s all right, Robbie,’ she whispered, soothing him, anger darkening her own eyes at Robert’s father’s lack of sensitivity.
‘If you would kindly let go of my son…’
The words were a demand rather than a request, and immediately Sarah felt herself reacting against them, her already low opinion of him dropping several more notches as she reflected on his poor handling of the situation, and his apparent inability to see that his attitude was simply terrifying and upsetting his son.
‘You must be Robert’s father,’ she commented, forcing back her anger and trying to stand up. Not an easy feat with Robert still clinging to her, but somehow or other she managed it, automatically assuming her classroom manner, forgetting how inappropriately it went with her casual clothes and almost childish pony-tail and makeup-less face, until she saw how at first angrily and even contemptuously she was being observed.
‘Yes, I am,’ he agreed flatly. ‘But I’ve no idea who you are, or what you’re doing with my son. However, I’ll have you know that the police take a pretty dim view of child abduction.’
Abduction… Sarah sucked in a mouthful of air, too stunned by what he was implying to be able to respond verbally.
Robert was clinging even harder to her now, and she wasn’t sure which of them was shaking the most, Robert from fear or she from anger.
As she swallowed the air she had gulped she retaliated with some heat.
‘Yes, and they take an equally dim view of…of parental cruelty.’
‘Parental cruelty?’
He had started to walk towards them, and now he came to an abrupt halt. His skin was tanned but suddenly his face had lost all its colour. Not from shame or guilt, but from rage. She could see it glittering in his eyes. He had very, very pale blue eyes, like shards of ice, she had thought at first, but now suddenly they were burning so hot that she could almost feel the searing lick of that heat against her skin.
Unlike Robert, he wasn’t fair-haired but much darker, although she noticed that his thick dark hair was touched faintly with gold at the ends as though he had at some time or other spent a long, long time in a very hot climate.
Surprisingly, though, facially he was very like his son, or, rather, Robert was a miniature version of him. They had the same bone-structure, the same nose, the same mouth, but whereas in Robert that full bottom lip trembled with baby emotion and vulnerability, in his father it betokened a sensuality and sexuality which made Sarah itch to distance herself physically from him, her body alive to a sense of danger that went far deeper than any immediate and conscious awareness of his anger and irritation. She didn’t allow herself to ponder on this, though; she was far too concerned about Robert and his panic-stricken reaction to his father’s arrival on the scene to have the time to concentrate on her own atavistic awareness of his father as a man…no, not as a man…as a male…a hunting, arrogant, sexual male being to whom she was a natural form of prey.
‘Parental cruelty,’ he repeated grimly now, jerking her attention back in focus. ‘What the hell are you trying to say? What has Robert been telling you?’ he demanded.
Without making any move towards her, without either raising his voice or using any kind of aggressive force, he was nevertheless attempting to intimidate her, and she responded immediately to that attempted intimidation, raising herself to her full height, her chin firming, her eyes steely and cool as they held his gaze.
‘Robert hasn’t said anything,’ she told him not quite truthfully. ‘He was in far too distressed a state. He’s a very unhappy little boy,’ she added pointedly, adding, to reinforce the point, ‘He was on his way to Ludlow…to London.’
She saw the way the blood surged up under the other’s skin, and knew how much he hated being confronted with the truth. In other circumstances she might have felt sorry for him. He was wearing an expensive business suit, and she noticed that his hands were badly scratched, and his shoes covered in dust, as though he had pushed his way relentlessly down the narrow stream-side path, desperately seeking his missing son. But motivated by what? Anger? She could certainly see that in his face, along with impatience and irritation, but what she could not see there was any love, any remorse, any guilt.
‘Come here, Robert,’he was demanding tersely now, frowning when his son refused to obey him. He was plainly unused to dealing with children, Sarah suspected, and, thinking of the child clinging piteously to her side, she said quietly,
‘Perhaps if I came back with you…?’
Immediately the tanned male face tightened in rejection, the blue eyes cold and biting as they studied her. She could see the refusal forming on his lips, but before he could speak Robert burst out frantically, ‘I won’t go back. I won’t go with you…I hate you…I hate you…and Mummy hated you too.’
He was crying again, tearing, racking sobs that, if they weren’t checked, could easily carry him into hysteria. Instinctively Sarah bent down and picked him up, lifting him in her arms, so that his face was buried in the hollow of her throat, his small arms wrapping fiercely round her as she rocked and soothed him.
As she talked quietly to him she heard his father cursing under his breath.
He shot back a cuff and glanced at his watch, and the sympathy she had started to feel for him fled as Sarah heard him say edgily, ‘That’s enough, Robert. Look, I’ve got a meeting in half an hour…’
He must have seen the contempt, the dislike that flashed through her eyes, Sarah recognised, because he stopped speaking, his mouth firming into a hard angry line before he told her acidly, ‘I’m a businessman as well as a father. I have a responsibility to my workforce as well as to my son. The outcome of an important new contract is in the balance here, and this meeting is a crucial one. Without it…well, let’s just say that without it I could have to let some of the workforce go. Why on earth he had to choose today of all days to play up like this… You do realise that Mrs Jacobs is out of her mind with worry, don’t you?’ he demanded of his son. ‘She had to ring me at work to tell me you’d gone missing, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that Ben saw you heading for the stream path…And as for you…’ he gave Sarah an angry, bitter look ‘…surely you realise that a child of his age, on his own, has to have left home without those responsible for him knowing where he is, and instead of encouraging him you could at least have attempted to take him home.’
His accusation took Sarah’s breath away, but before she could deny his statement he was speaking to his son again, reiterating curtly, ‘We’re going home, Robert.’
But, as Sarah had known would happen, Robert refused to let go of her, clinging desperately to her when his father tried to take hold of him.
It was, she knew, out of necessity and nothing else that the man was obliged to stand so close to her, close enough to put his arms around her as he tried to unwind Robert’s hands from behind her neck. She could smell the hot man scent of his skin, see the tiny pores of his face, dark where his beard would grow, his lashes a thick and enviably long fan against his skin as he frowned over his impossible task.
Uncomfortably aware of just how she was reacting to him, of the tiny female ripple of unexpected and unwanted response that jarred through her body, Sarah tried to step back from him, driven, as much by her need to put some distance between