‘So do you want my help, or not?’
Holly swallowed, wishing that everything he said didn’t sound like a loaded and very sexy question. And the decision was really very simple—if she wanted to be totally independent and self-sufficient then she should decline his offer and do it all herself.
But a sensible person wouldn’t do that, would they? After all, she knew no one here, not a soul. Was she, the great risk-taker, really tying herself up in knots over a simple offer of assistance just because it happened to come from a man she found overwhelmingly attractive? Wasn’t that a form of sexism in itself?
‘Thanks very much! You can start bringing the stuff in from the car, if you like,’ she told him, trying to sound brisk and workmanlike, ‘while I go and see how habitable it is upstairs. I just hope it’s more promising than down here.’ But her voice didn’t hold out much hope. ‘Unless you happen to have been up there lately?’
He shook his head. ‘I’ve never set foot inside the place before.’
Holly frowned. ‘But I thought you said you were the landlord?’
‘I did. And I am—but an extremely new landlord. It’s a long story.’ He shrugged, in answer to the questioning look in her eyes. In the dim winter light shining through the shop window he became acutely conscious of how pale her skin looked, how bright her green eyes. With the deep copper ringlets tumbling unfettered around her shoulders, she could have stepped straight out of a pre-Raphaelite painting, jeans or no jeans, and he suddenly felt icy with a foreboding of unknown source.
‘And you didn’t ask to see any credentials,’ he accused suddenly. ‘Basic rule of safety, number one.’ His eyes glittered. ‘And you broke it.’
‘Do you have any on you?’
‘Well, no,’ he admitted reluctantly. ‘But the lesson is surely that I could be absolutely anyone—’
‘The impostor landlord?’ She hammed it up. ‘About to hurl me to the floor and have your wicked way with me?’
The air crackled with tension. ‘That isn’t funny,’ he said heavily.
‘No,’ she agreed, and her throat seemed to constrict as their gazes clashed. ‘It isn’t.’
‘In fact, it’s a pretty dumb thing to do—to put yourself in such a vulnerable situation,’ he growled.
Independent and self-sufficient—huh! She had fallen headlong at the first hurdle. ‘Okay. Okay. Lesson received and understood.’
He was still frowning. ‘You’d better give me the keys,’ he instructed tersely. ‘And I’ll move your car when I’ve unloaded all the stuff.’
Holly hesitated. ‘Er—you might find she’s a little temperamental in cold weather—like all cars of that age.’
‘I should have guessed!’ His voice was tinged with both irritation and concern—though he didn’t stop to ask himself why. How was she hoping to get a business up and running if she was this disorganised? ‘Why the hell don’t you buy yourself a decent car?’ he drawled. ‘Didn’t it occur to you that you might need something more reliable?’
His sentiments were no different from her own, but it was one thing deciding that she needed a newer car for herself—quite another for a complete stranger to bossily interrogate her on why she hadn’t bought one!
‘Of course it occurred to me,’ she agreed. ‘But reliable usually means boring. And expensive. To get an interesting car that you can count on costs a lot more money than I’m prepared or able to spend at the moment.’ She gave him a reassuring smile. ‘But don’t worry if she won’t start first time. A little coaxing usually works wonders.’
That smile was so cute. He threw her a lazy look in response. ‘And I’m a dab hand at coaxing the temperamental.’
‘Just cars?’ she quizzed, before she could stop herself. ‘Or women?’
He held her gaze in mocking query. ‘Do you always make assumptions about people?’
‘Everyone does. You did about me. And was my assumption so wrong?’
‘In this case, it was. I was talking about coaxing horses, actually—not the opposite sex.’
He had hooked his fingers into the loops of his jeans as he spoke, and he suddenly looked all man—all cowboy. Holly nodded and bit back a smile. It all made sense now. He had looked completely wrong strolling down a sleepy English village street, with his jeans and battered sheepskin and tough good looks. But she could picture him on horseback—legs astride, the muscle and the strength of the man and the animal combining in perfect harmony. It was a powerful and earthy image and she found that persistent fingers of awareness were prickling down her back. ‘Really?’ She swallowed. ‘Round here?’
‘No. Not round here. I’ve only just got back from Africa.’ He read the question in her eyes. ‘It’s a long story.’
That might explain the tan. ‘Another one? So when did you get back?’
He glanced down at the watch on his wrist—a tough-looking timepiece which suited him well. ‘About twelve hours ago.’
‘Then you must be jet-lagged?’
‘Yeah, maybe I am.’ Could he blame this troublesome tension on jet-lag, he wondered, or would that be fooling himself? He took the keys from her unprotesting fingers. ‘You go on up and I’ll start moving the stuff.’
Masterful, thought Holly wistfully, then immediately felt guilty as she found the staircase at the back of the shop, which led directly to the flat upstairs. Masterful men were very passé these days, surely?
The stair carpet was worn, and upstairs the accommodation was basic—in a much worse state than the shop below. Holly sniffed. It had the sour, dark tang of a place unlived in.
She glanced around, trying to remember what had caught her enthusiasm in the first place There was an okay-sized sitting room, whose window overlooked the street, a small bedroom containing a narrow and unwelcoming-looking bed, a bathroom with the obligatory dripping tap, and a kitchen which would have looked better in a museum. So far, so bad.
But it was the main bedroom which had first attracted her, and Holly sighed now with contentment as she looked at it again. Dusty as the rest of the apartment, it nonetheless was square and spacious, with a correspondingly high ceiling, and would be absolutely perfect as a workroom.
She heard footsteps on the stairs and went out to the landing to see Luke, with a good deal of her belongings firmly clamped to his broad shoulders.
She rescued a tin-opener which was about to fall out of an overfull cardboard box. ‘You shouldn’t carry all that!’ she remonstrated. ‘You’ll do yourself damage.’
He barely looked up as he put down two big suitcases and brushed away a lock of the dark, gold-tipped hair which had fallen onto his forehead. ‘Nice of you to be so concerned,’ he said wryly. ‘But I’m not stupid. And I’m used to carrying heavy weights around the place.’
She watched unobserved while he took the stairs back down, three at a time. Yes, he was. A man didn’t get muscles like that from sitting behind a desk Holly had grown up in the city, and city men were what she knew best. And they tended to have the too-perfect symmetry gained from carefully programmed sessions in the gym. Whereas those muscles looked natural. She swallowed. Completely natural.
It wasn’t until he had done the fourth and final load, and dumped her few mismatched saucepans in the kitchen, that Luke stood back, took a good look around him and scowled.
‘The place is absolutely disgusting!