Reece didn’t think he’d miss the large, slobbering dog.
‘Sorry I was so long.’ Darcy’s smile faded as her eyes collided with the large stranger’s green eyes and their gazes meshed. His stare had a heady, narcotic quality, and for a moment Darcy was physically incapable of looking away.
A breathless, confusing moment later she was free of that mesmeric gaze, and other than a heart that was still thudding too fast and loud and a dryness in her throat there were no lasting side-effects. It all happened so fast she wasn’t really sure in retrospect if anything unusual had happened—he certainly wasn’t acting as if it had.
Naturally she was relieved to see that the clouded vagueness had gone from his eyes, but she didn’t consider the cool, analytical detachment that had replaced it to be an unqualified improvement!
‘I’m not in any position to complain…?’ The fleeting smile might have softened his hard eyes but Darcy was making a point of not looking—she didn’t want a repeat performance of that silliness! The little shudder that chased its chilly pathway up her slender spine had nothing to do with the weather.
‘Darcy.’ For a fleeting, selfish moment she almost regretted not letting Nick, even in his exhausted condition, drive him.
‘Of course…Darcy. I’m in your debt, Darcy.’
Darcy could almost hear him thinking, Outlandish name…outlandish family. She had a strong suspicion that had this man not considered himself in her debt he would have had no qualms about complaining; he didn’t give her the impression of someone who had a particularly high patience quotient. She just couldn’t see him suffering in silence.
‘I’m not keeping score.’ She decided to make allowances for his attitude. I probably wouldn’t want to smile either if I’d just bashed my head and bust my arm, she reasoned.
‘You’re just being neighbourly, I suppose?’
This time it was impossible to misinterpret the acerbic scepticism in his voice. She twisted the excess moisture from the ends of her wet hair as she slid in beside him. With a wet splat the hair was casually flicked over her shoulder. There was a faint puzzled line between her feathery eyebrows as she turned in her seat and levelled her thoughtful gaze at him.
‘Is that so unusual?’ she asked, unable to keep the edge from her voice.
‘Only slightly less so than an honest politician.’
Reece had noticed straight off that at some point during the last few minutes she’d paused to anoint those wide lips with a covering of glossy lipstick, and the soft colour clung stubbornly to the damp outline. This evidence of female vanity amused Reece; it also drew his attention to the soft lushness of her mouth.
Through the miasma of dull pain he felt his libido drowsily stir. It was the sort of mouth it was a crime not to kiss. Reece shifted uncomfortably as she gazed trustingly over at him. That was definitely one for the modern-man-is-a-myth school.
‘Well, it looks like your cynicism has survived the crack on the skull intact—congratulations.’
‘You sound disapproving…?’
Darcy shrugged; she didn’t fight with people who were in urgent need of medical attention—even if they were misguided.
‘In my experience people rarely do anything for nothing,’ he announced, authoritatively doling out some more of his homespun cynicism.
This was a man who had very definite opinions, she decided, and a strong belief in his own infallibility. Darcy was beginning to suspect it might be mixed blessings that Reece Erskine had recovered his wits—he was one seriously joyless individual. In a different situation she might have been tempted to put up a strong argument against this jaundiced slant on life, but under the circumstances she contented herself with a gentle, ‘I promise you, I have no hidden motives.’
Despite her assurance, his silent response—this man could do things with an eyebrow that defied belief!—made it abundantly clear that he wouldn’t have taken her words at face value if she’d had her hand on a stack of Bibles.
She found it increasingly hard to hide her growing antipathy as she carefully scraped a clear area in the condensation on the windscreen in a businesslike manner.
Reece couldn’t decide if he was being reprimanded or not. However, there was nothing ambiguous about her disapproval—the stuff was emanating from her in waves! He caught the full force of it almost as clearly as the light perfume that pervaded her smallish person—his nostrils twitched; it was light, flowery and vaguely distracting, but it made a pleasant change from the wet-dog smell that wafted every so often from the direction of the old blanket flung over the back seat.
He watched as she wiped the excess moisture from her face with the back of her hand; her skin was remarkably clear, creamy pale and very lightly freckled.
‘She doesn’t like wet weather,’ Darcy explained defensively as the engine spluttered and fizzled on the first three attempts.
‘Who doesn’t…?’
‘Bingo!’ Darcy gave a gentle sigh of relief when the engine eventually came to life. ‘She’s temperamental sometimes,’ she explained, banging the dashboard affectionately.
Reece wasn’t really surprised that she endowed the rusty pile of metal with human characteristics—it was entirely in keeping with the sentimental, mawkish traits this girl had displayed so far.
‘The heater will warm up in a minute,’ she promised with another trusting beam in his direction—she wasn’t the type to hold a grudge, it seemed. ‘I’ll take the back road and we’ll be there in no time at all.’
‘Good,’ he said, turning his face deliberately to the dismal view through the window. He hoped she’d take the hint and leave him in peace, since there wasn’t any place he could escape if she didn’t.
The snub was deliberate enough to bring a flush of annoyance to her cheeks. There was nothing Darcy would have liked more than to let her moody passenger brood in peace; he wasn’t her idea of the ideal travelling companion—not by a long chalk!
The problem was he’d had a bump on the head; for all she knew, he might have a fractured skull! If he dozed off, how was she to know if he’d just fallen asleep or lapsed into a coma? This alarming possibility made her search his face surreptitiously for signs of imminent collapse—she found none.
But she did discover that in the subdued light her passenger’s to-die-for bone-structure had an almost menacing quality. Nick’s outlandish hypotheses were still fresh in her mind, and Darcy reasoned that this explained the small bubble of anxiety which she sensibly pushed aside—at least she thought it was anxiety that was responsible for the adrenalin surge that had her body on red alert.
The idea of being stuck miles away from medical assistance with an unconscious man had limited appeal for Darcy. No, the fastidious and reserved Mr Erskine was going to stay awake whether he liked it or not!
Trying to keep her growing uneasiness from her voice, she asked, ‘What brings you to this part of the world?’ Only a comment on the weather, she decided, could be less innocuous—not that you’d think so by his tight-lipped, rude response.
‘Solitude.’ Surely she’d take the hint now.
With anyone else Darcy would have felt inclined to put down this display of boorish bad manners to pain and discomfort—with anyone else…!
He considered himself a tolerant, patient sort of bloke, but ten minutes and what felt like several hundred questions later Reece was having trouble controlling his temper.
‘You can’t possibly be spending Christmas at the Hall!’
He hadn’t come right out and said so—actually the gorgeous but tight-lipped Mr Erskine hadn’t come right out and said anything without prompting, and then it had been as vague and uninformative as he could