‘Oh, about six, once I’ve locked up.’
It was a Friday night. She was a young girl. Yes, the area might not be hopping with wild night excitement, but had she nowhere to go?
Curiosity, like some alien virus, entered his bloodstream and he stood up, waiting for her to leave before heading back to the cottage. Where he cleverly adjusted a couple of switches so that his ridiculous story could be corroborated.
For once, the panacea of work took a back seat. Gloria phoned, updating him on various deals he had on the go, filling him in on the snippets of gossip, in which he was not the slightest interested. As she spoke, Theo thought about Sophie, then slammed shut the door on the thoughts the second he became aware of them.
At six he heard the buzz of the doorbell and there she was when he pulled open the door. No longer in her jeans and rugby shirt, but combat trousers and a cream sweater over which she wore a longish olive-green jacket that engulfed her. The rumpled hair was now brushed and tied back into two little plaits that made her look about fifteen.
‘On time,’ he said, stepping aside and watching as she walked into the hall and deposited her coat on the banister with the familiarity of someone who had probably spent a lifetime doing it.
‘I live just above the office. It takes me all of ten minutes to get here.’ Sophie looked around, expecting and finding the house in impeccable condition. Annie and Catherine would have told her if he had been a slob. He might be arrogant, obnoxious and full of himself but at least he was relatively tidy. No sign of anything, not even the reams of paper she would have expected to be piling up somewhere. He probably just wrote directly on to his computer—no need to print anything.
Reluctantly she allowed her eyes to finally rest on him and again that little frisson of something. What was it about him that did that to her? Was it because there was a watchful stillness about him that made her painfully self-conscious? When he began walking towards her, her pulses leapt and she had to make an effort not to take a couple of steps backwards. Even with that slight limp, he moved with the grace of an athlete, every muscle in his body honed to fine perfection.
She felt her breasts ache in a sudden unwelcome response to his overpowering masculinity.
Dislikeable he might be, but he was, she conceded, drop dead gorgeous. The black hair swept away from his face threw into relentless emphasis the drama of his face. It would be enough to send any woman into a dither, she concluded uneasily, even one who disliked him and could smell him for the heartbreaker he probably was from a mile away.
‘I’ll have a look at that heating and then I’ll be off.’ She turned on her unsteady heel and headed for the boiler room where, for a few minutes and some elementary twiddling, she got the system going. When she turned round it was to find him right behind her, leaning against the doorframe with his arms folded.
‘You were right. Pretty easy.’
‘Very. Now, if you don’t mind…?’
‘Why don’t you stay for a drink?’
‘I can’t.’ At least she could breathe when he wasn’t looming over her like that.
He had followed her back out into the hall, where she was pulling on her jacket and seemed in a desperate rush to leave.
Theo was not accustomed to any woman being in a desperate rush to avoid his company. In fact, he had become adept at avoiding theirs. Before Elena, with variety spread before him like a moveable feast, he had sampled the wares and moved on. The physical pull towards a beautiful woman had always had temporary, limited appeal. It was the way he had liked it. Since Elena, the moveable feast had become a rude invasion of his privacy, but he had still been accustomed to having it there, to dealing with the necessity of avoiding it.
Something elemental kicked in now, in the face of a woman who was already making for the door as though he was a seriously infectious disease.
‘Where are you going tonight?’ he asked politely. The jacket was sizes too big for her and he wondered if it had belonged to her father. Or the blond man at the office with the over-developed protective streak.
‘Oh.’ Caught on the hop, Sophie looked at him for a few silent seconds, her face going redder by the minute as she tried to think of something fun she might be doing.
‘Exciting nightclub somewhere?’ Theo prompted silkily. He walked through to the kitchen and helped himself to a glass of wine. ‘Cinema? Theatre, if there’s one around here within striking distance? Maybe a restaurant?’ He paused and sipped some of the wine. ‘Or, of course, there’s always the pub. Although you were quick to dispel the myth that all the locals do is frequent a pub and down pints of ale.’
‘I suppose you think you’re so clever,’ Sophie told him in a shaking voice, to which he shrugged and walked towards the sitting room, leaving her with the option of either storming out in mid-tirade and looking like a coward, or else following him.
She followed to find him lounging on her sofa, thoroughly and infuriatingly calm.
‘You might be some kind of writer. Who knows? Maybe you’re even famous in that little circle you mix in, but that doesn’t cut it with me!’
‘What little circle?’ Theo asked, curious to discover what image she had of his mysterious and fictional life.
‘Oh, you know what I mean!’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘That little circle of academics! Everyone sitting around, drinking wine and congratulating themselves on being so much smarter than the rest of the human race!’
There was a lot of insight in what she had just said, Theo thought, and it applied to his own circle of financiers and businessmen, the richest of the rich who could afford to relax on the Olympian summits of their own self-worth.
He watched her fume over the rim of his glass and nodded thoughtfully. ‘You’re right.’
‘But don’t think that you can swan in here and throw your weight around!’ His words registered belatedly and she lapsed into silence. ‘What did you just say?’
‘I said you’re right. There’s a lot of self-righteous preening that takes place when wealthy, important people get together. It’s fairly nauseating.’
‘So you agree with me.’
‘I agree with the concept, but not,’ he said lazily, ‘in so far as it applies to me.’
‘Because…?’ Sophie felt giddy. She took a couple of tentative steps into the sitting room and swore that she would be out of the cottage just as soon as he backed up his statement. She couldn’t very well initiate this and then flounce off, could she? Not, she reminded herself piously, when he was her tenant, a small fact which, once again, she appeared to have forgotten.
‘Because I happen to be a very modest man.’ Quite a few, he admitted to himself, might disagree.
Something didn’t sit right with that statement, but she had to admit that he had not been stingy in conceding her point. When he reiterated his offer of a glass of wine, she found herself accepting. She justified that easily on the grounds that it was just so nice being back in this sitting room, even if she had to share the space with a man like Theo Andreou. And, besides, her bank manager would appreciate her good manners.
He had drawn the curtains and the room was just how she loved it, bathed in the mellow glow of the standing lamp, with lots of shadows in the corners and the wind rattling against the window panes. Her father’s books were ranged along one wall, housed in a bookcase that looked as old as the overhead beams.
‘You hate this, don’t you?’
Snapped back to the present, Sophie looked at him and frowned uncomfortably. ‘Hate what?’
‘Renting out this cottage to an arrogant bastard like me.’
Sophie