He was chopping logs when she came back downstairs, having already cleared the path at the back of the house leading from the kitchen to the log store.
He was wearing black rubber boots now, pulled high and tightly over his jeans. His black hair was falling forward as he worked. Wielding the axe against the backdrop of the snow-swept valley and the awesome vastness of the sparkling mountains, he looked like the wild man of the moor, Taylor fancied, feeling the tug of something reckless inside of her as she stepped out into the biting air.
Throwing down the axe, he glanced up and saw her.
‘That’s much more practical,’ he commented laconically with a swift appraisal of her thick dark sweater, warm trousers and sensible shoes before bending again to his task.
He was using a large steel wedge to split the logs he had already chopped, driving it into the wood with a mallet, the strike of metal on metal ringing out across the frozen hillside.
He was working hard—looked hot, Taylor thought, volunteering, ‘Do you want any help?’
He paused from his work, one booted foot resting on the cut ring of a tree trunk he was using as a platform to split the logs, a hand resting on a denim-clad knee.
‘Are you any good with an axe?’
She looked at him uncertainly, then at the implement lying beside him.
Well, she had never done it before, but there was always a first time, she thought, moving to pick it up.
‘Don’t be silly,’ he said, so that she realised then that he was joking. ‘Go and see if you can rustle up something appetising for breakfast. Bacon, scrambled eggs and blueberry pancakes will do to start.’
‘Ha!’ Her laugh rose on a cloud of warm vapour before she glanced back at him over her shoulder. ‘You wish,’ she told him with a grimace, going back along the cleared path and wondering how she was even going to heat any water let alone anything else.
As it turned out, she found the answer almost immediately in the large black kettle, only kept now for ornamental purposes on the hearth. She supposed it had been used domestically in Jared’s grandmother’s day, in the larger fireplace in the kitchen that now housed the modern equivalent of the old range. Even that needed electricity to operate it, she thought rather despairingly, pulling a face as she picked up the ancient kettle.
Gratefully, however, she took it out into the kitchen, half filled it, then struggled with it into the sitting room, first adding more logs to the fire to make a flat surface for the kettle to stand on, before placing it carefully on top. Only then did she decide it was safe to leave, before grabbing the pale fleece she had unpacked and hung in the hall the previous night and venturing back outside.
‘What will we do if the pipes freeze?’ she called out worriedly to Jared, coming down the path to where he was filling the wicker basket with logs. ‘If we can’t get any water?’ While filling the kettle it had suddenly struck her how much worse things could get.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, seeing her concern. ‘There’s next to no chance of that happening. With these Lakeland winters no one risks being without the necessary insulation. They’re far more diligent about such things up here than we are in the south. The place was already well protected when my grandmother was alive but then just before she died I persuaded her to let me get a major reinsulating job done. Grandmother was stubborn—fiercely independent and quite unmovable in most things—but I was determined she’d let me do that much, though I must admit, she did put up quite a fight.’
Taylor smiled, catching the fond note in his voice, regretting that she had never met the kind-looking grey-haired woman who had died the year before she had met Jared and whose photograph stood in a little silver frame on the tall oak chest in the room she was occupying. It was taken with Jared’s grandfather, almost on the spot where Taylor was standing. She had a feeling that it was Jared who had taken it.
‘You loved her a lot, didn’t you?’ she remarked, slipping her hands into the pockets of her fleece to keep them warm. His grandfather too, she thought, remembering how he had said that when his own father had died just before his second birthday, his grandparents had opted to look after him when their daughter-in-law had insisted on pursuing her acting career.
For an answer he simply went on tossing logs into the basket.
‘Were you close to your mother?’ It surprised her to realise that, despite having lived with him for more than eighteen months, there was still a lot about him she had failed to discover.
‘Not as close as I would have liked.’
‘Did she visit very often?’
‘No.’ The log he threw made a dull ‘chick’ as it landed on top of the others, alarming a little brown dunnock that had been foraging around with scant hope of finding a staple meal of insects, worms or seeds beneath the heavy covering of snow. Watching it hop unobtrusively beneath a winter jasmine which was bravely sporting its bright yellow flowers against the boundary wall, Taylor made a mental note to put down some scraps. ‘She didn’t like Cumbria,’ Jared was enlarging then. ‘She liked bright lights and city life.’
‘Does she still live in New York?’
He stopped what he was doing, and stood, stern-mouthed, looking out across the snow-laden hedge to the silent valley.
‘No,’ he said at length. ‘She died. A couple of months ago.’
‘She…’ Taylor stared at his dark, tousled hair as he stooped to finish loading the last few logs into the basket. ‘How?’ she whispered, shocked.
‘She had a crippling illness that came on gradually over the past fifteen months or so,’ he surprised her by saying. ‘I spent a lot of time going backwards and forwards to the States. If I hadn’t, I would have come looking for you a long time ago,’ he interjected grimly, without looking at her, which explained why she hadn’t seen or heard from him for so long, Taylor realised, her heart going out to him over what must have been an extremely difficult time. ‘I tried to spend as much time with her as I could during her last months and I suppose we became closer than we had ever been throughout our lives. After all, she did her best for me—gave me everything,’ he said, with something of the strain he must have suffered showing briefly in that hard, handsome face. ‘But I would have traded it all for some of her time.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Taylor whispered, catching that note of deep regret—the loss—for what might have been—in that last, softly uttered statement.
She had only met the woman once. It was shortly after their wedding when they had come back from Hawaii. A fading actress who had never really achieved star status, Calista Steele had been in London with an equally fading male counterpart and had called to see them at Jared’s penthouse flat.
Tall and elegant, with a swathe of grey streaking her thick black hair, the woman had nevertheless possessed the same awesome detachment as her son. And while there had seemed to be a deep respect for each other, between mother and son, Taylor had noticed no real display of obvious affection in their relationship.
‘Why didn’t you let me know?’ she repeated emphatically.
‘When?’ His voice, as he swung the basket up into his arms, was harshly cynical. ‘Yesterday? Last week? Or at the time?’
‘Well…’ Taylor gave a quick bewildered shake of her head. She couldn’t believe something like that could have happened to him and she hadn’t even known about it. ‘At the time of course.’
‘I didn’t feel I needed to involve you when you’d made it quite plain you no longer wanted any part in my life— even if I had known where you were.’ He was all muscle and fitness striding ahead of her down the path, those brawny shoulders effectively blocking her out.
‘You thought I wouldn’t