‘Aw, come on … With a figure like yours, you can’t need to worry about calories,’ Ralph leered, openly letting his gaze slide lasciviously over her body.
To her humiliation, Miranda felt her face flushing as guiltily as though she had in some way invited the intrusiveness of his sexual appraisal of her.
Surely her neat pleated skirt, with its complementary tailored jacket over a crisp white blouse, could never be even remotely described as provocative, and as for her manner … she was sure that at no time had she ever given Ralph Charlesworth the slightest reason to believe that she even liked him, never mind …
All too conscious of the attention she was drawing from the watching men above her, Miranda decided there was no point in allowing herself to be drawn into any further change of conversation, so she turned on her heel and walked angrily away, her mind seething with anger and resentment as she turned the corner and headed for the town square.
As she rounded the corner the wind caught her hair, whipping it across her eyes, momentarily blinding her so that she didn’t see the man coming towards her until it was too late and she had walked right into him.
‘Hey, are you all right?’
‘All right …’ The words reverberated dizzily somewhere deep within her, causing the most odd sensations inside her. Or was it the firm pressure of those male arms, the proximity of that hard male chest which rose and fell so … so steadily and somehow comfortingly against her own that was causing her to experience this odd light-headedness?
Shakily she fought to control her peculiar responses, pushing herself away from the warmth of his body, and drawing herself up to her full height as she forced herself to at least try to look businesslike and cool.
‘Yes … yes … I’m fine … so silly of me … I wasn’t looking where I was going.’
She looked at him as she spoke and suffered such a shock of sensation through her entire body that it was as though she had suddenly become completely paralysed.
She was a tall girl, but this man … was taller—six feet two at least. He had broad shoulders, very broad shoulders, she acknowledged weakly as she discovered she was still staring at him.
‘Oh, is that what it was?’ His voice was warm and deep, and laced with something that suggested that he had a good sense of humour. ‘I rather had the impression you were trying to escape from something or someone.’
She couldn’t help it; Miranda knew that her eyes were widening automatically in reaction to his perceptiveness. Instinctively she looked up into his eyes, and then immediately wished she hadn’t. They were warm and grey, and fringed with thick dark lashes. She couldn’t remember the last time a man, any man, had had such an intense physical impact on her. Come on, she warned herself, you’re twenty-eight, not eighteen. You do not walk into a stranger and then stand staring at him as dumbstruck as though you’ve fallen head over heels in love with him, even if he does come packaged six feet-odd, grey eyed, dark-haired and with the most devastating smile you’ve ever seen.
It’s the inner person who matters, not his outward physical appearance, she told herself severely as she tried to pull herself together, and realised that he was still smiling at her as though waiting for a response to his comment.
The very idea of explaining to him about Ralph Charlesworth was far too impossible even to be contemplated and so instead she launched into a breathless rush of semi-truths, explaining to him that it was the sight of the desecration of what had once been a wonderful example of small-town Georgian architecture that had sent her scurrying round the corner without paying attention to what she was doing.
‘Still, I suppose this computer genius who’s bought the place doesn’t know how important it is to preserve buildings like this one; nor if he did, would he care.’
As she came to a breathless full stop, his eyebrows arched. ‘That’s a rather biased criticism, isn’t it?’ he suggested mildly.
Miranda felt her face flush uncomfortably, aware that she had probably sounded more overheated than their very brief acquaintance warranted.
She also realised several other things as well: namely that she was deliberately if unconsciously delaying taking her leave of him; that she could have quite easily stood for hours here on the pavement looking at him; that she was going to be late arriving back at the office; that she was in fact behaving like a complete fool, and should have simply thanked him and apologised to him for bumping into him in a crisp businesslike manner and gone on her way.
‘I … I must go,’ she told him quickly. ‘I’m sorry I delayed you …’
She hesitated, half hoping he would make some kind of gallant comment about it being a pleasure to be delayed by her, and half relieved when he didn’t. If there was one thing that ordinarily she detested, it was heavy-handed compliments, and yet to know that this particular man had found her company pleasurable …
Angry with herself, she stepped hurriedly past him, walking quickly into the square and then across it.
Their office was on the other side of the square in a pretty Queen Anne town house, which her father had bought when he’d originally set up his practice in the town.
She didn’t allow herself to look back, but that didn’t stop her thoughts from wondering busily who he was. Ruefully she told herself that he was very probably married with a family, chiding herself for her interest in him. She hadn’t seen him around before, but that didn’t mean anything. The town was growing, mushrooming almost, and whereas when she’d first joined her father in his estate agency business as his junior partner she could hardly walk across the town square without stopping to acknowledge the greetings of almost everyone she passed, now the opposite was true.
Liz, their receptionist, gave her a sunny smile when she walked in.
‘Dad’s in his office, is he?’ she asked her.
‘Yes. He’s going out in half an hour, though, to show some clients round Frenshaw’s farm.’
Thanking her, Miranda walked through the pleasant, comfortable reception area and into the passage beyond it. Three doors led off the passage, one to her father’s office, one to her own, and one that they used as a general filing and storage space.
As she rapped briefly on her father’s office door before walking in, she found herself thinking about the man again, wondering who he was and where he had been going.
Stop it, she told herself severely. She was a woman of twenty-eight, who had firmly and deliberately avoided what she considered to be the pit-falls of falling in love and committing herself to the kind of marriage she had seen overwhelm so many of her friends.
Maybe in the large cities things were different, but here in this country town—and, she suspected, in others like it—a woman was still expected to be the mainstay of the family in the traditional way.
Oh, perhaps these days a woman had a job as well, but, from what Miranda could see of her friends’ lives, this made things harder for them and not easier. It might give them some financial independence, but in return for that they had to suffer losing the independence of having time to themselves, and to shoulder an extra burden of guilt, especially when they had children.
Most of her friends had married in their early twenties, when the last thing she had wanted had been the constraints of having to put another person’s desires and needs before her own. She liked being free to make her own decisions about how she should spend her life and her time. She knew that in the eyes of many of her friends she was well and truly established as a bachelor girl and a career woman, and originally this hadn’t bothered her, but lately she had begun to undergo some kind of sea change; a totally unexpected sea change, it had to be admitted.
For