Art was busy looking at the bundle of onions and tomatoes neatly piled in front of him. He held the knife and began fumbling his way to something that only laughably resembled food preparation. He only realised that she had stopped what she had been doing and was staring at him when she said with amusement, ‘You haven’t got a clue, have you?’
‘These bloody things are making my eyes sting.’
‘They have a nasty habit of doing that,’ Rose agreed. ‘And you’re in for a rough ride if you intend to take a couple of hours dicing them. By the way, you need to dice them a whole lot smaller.’
‘You’re having fun, aren’t you?’
‘I’m thinking you look like a man who doesn’t know his way round a kitchen very well.’
‘Like I said, cooking has never appealed.’
‘Not even when you’re relaxing with someone and just having fun preparing a meal together?’
‘I don’t go there,’ Art said flatly. He gave the onion a jaundiced look and decided to attack the tomatoes, which seemed a safer bet. ‘I don’t do domestic.’
‘You don’t do domestic? What does that mean?’
‘It means that I don’t share those cosy moments you’ve just described.’
‘Why not?’ she asked lightly.
‘I don’t do personal questions either.’
Looking into the ancient mirrored tiles that lined the counter, Art noted her pink cheeks. He met her eyes to find her staring at him, her pink cheeks going even pinker. She looked away hurriedly to continue slicing and dicing. Strands of her wildly curly hair fell around her face and she blew some of them out of her eyes, blatantly making sure not to look in those mirrored squares in case she caught his eye again.
‘You don’t do cosy and domestic,’ Rose said slowly, swivelling to lean against the counter, arms folded, eyes narrowed, ‘and you don’t do personal questions. So, if I’m joining the dots correctly, you don’t invite women to ask you why you’re not prepared to play happy families with them.’
‘Something like that.’ Art shrugged. He was sharp enough to realise that there was no way he would ever get her onside if he came across as the sort of unliberated dinosaur she would clearly despise.
‘No cooking together...no watching telly entwined on a sofa...’
‘I definitely do the entwined bit,’ Art joked. Rose failed to return his smile.
‘You don’t want to encourage any woman to think you’re going to be in it for the long haul because you’re a commitment-phobe.’
‘I could lie and tell you that you’re way off target there,’ Art drawled, holding her stare, ‘but I won’t do you the disservice.’
‘I like that,’ Rose said slowly, not taking her eyes off him.
‘Which bit?’
‘The honesty bit. In my line of work, I see a lot of scumbags who are happy to lie through their teeth to get what they want. It’s laudable that you’re at least honest when it comes to saying what you think.’
‘You’re giving me more credit than I’m due.’ Art stopped what he was doing and let his eyes rove over her. Her skin was satiny smooth and make-up-free. ‘I like the way you look,’ he murmured. ‘I like the fact that you’re completely natural. No warpaint. No pressing need to clone yourself on the lines of a certain doll. Really works.’
* * *
Rose glanced at him and looked away hurriedly. Those dark eyes, she thought, could open a lot of boxes and kick-start a whole host of chain reactions and she might not know how to deal with them.
Rose wasn’t ready for a relationship with anyone and she certainly wasn’t up for grabs when it came to any man who was a commitment-phobe. Thanks, but no thanks. Enjoying this man’s company was a wonderful distraction but anything more than that was not going to be on the table.
She had to shake herself mentally and laugh inwardly at her fanciful thoughts; it wasn’t as though she was in danger of any advances from this passing stranger, who had been nothing but open and polite with her!
And even if he had made any suggestive remarks then she would, of course, knock him back regardless of whether he was a drop of excitement in her otherwise pleasantly predictable life.
She was careful. When it came to men, she didn’t dive head first into the water because you never knew what was lurking under the surface.
With the electrifying feel of those dark eyes broodingly watching her, Rose breathed in deep and remembered all the life lessons from her past. Remembered her mother, who had gone off the rails when Rose’s father had died. She’d lost her love and she had worked her way through her grief with catastrophic consequences, flinging herself headlong into a series of doomed relationships. Rose had been a child at the time but she could remember the carousel of inappropriate men and the apprehension she had felt every time that doorbell had sounded.
Then Alison Tremain had fallen in love—head over heels in love—with a rich, louche member of the landed gentry who had promised her everything she’d been desperate to hear. God only knew what she’d been thinking. She’d been hired to clean the exquisite Cotswold cottage owned by his parents, where he and twelve other fast-living friends had been staying for a long weekend. Had her mother really thought that it was love? But he’d swept her off her feet and maybe, Rose had later thought, when she had looked back at events through adult eyes, his heart had been in the right place.
The two had hurtled towards one another for all the wrong reasons. Rose’s mother because she’d wanted an anchor in her life. She’d been swimming against the tide and had been on the verge of drowning and he had given her something to hold onto and she hadn’t looked further than the wild promises he’d made.
And he...he’d wanted to rebel against restrictive parents and Alison Tremain had been his passport to asserting authority over a life that had been dictated from birth. Their disapproval would underline his independence, would prove that he could choose someone outside the box and damn the consequences. Brimming over with left-wing principles, he would be able to ditch the upper-crust background into which he had been born.
It had been a recipe for disaster from the word go and, for Rose, the personal disaster had started when her mother had dumped her with their neighbour: ‘Just for a bit...just until I’m sorted...and then I’ll come to fetch you, that’s a promise.’
Everyone had rallied around as she had found herself suddenly displaced—the benefit of a small community—but there had been many times when she had entered a room unexpectedly to be greeted by hushed whispers and covert, pitying looks.
Rose knew that things could have been a lot worse. She could have ended up in care. As it was, she spent nearly two years with the neighbours, whose daughter went to the same school as her.
Her mother had written and Rose had waited patiently but by the time a much-chastened Alison had returned to the village Rose had grown into a cautious young girl, conscious of the perils of letting her emotions rule her life.
She’d witnessed her mother going off the rails because of a broken heart and had lived through her disappearing and getting lost in a world, she later learned, of soft drugs and alcohol because Spencer Kurtis had been unable to cope with the daily demands of a life without money on tap. So much for his rebellion. He had eventually crawled back to the family pile and Alison Tremain had returned to village life, where it had taken her a further year to recover before she was properly back to the person she had once been.
Rose knew better than to ever allow her behaviour to be guided by emotion. Sensible choices resulted in a settled life. Her sensible choices when