Brad was grimacing to himself as he took his seat on the plane, but the stewardess still cast a dazzling and very approving smile in his direction. Unusually for a first-class passenger, he was wearing a pair of soft, well-worn denims and an immaculate white T-shirt that revealed the firm, tanned muscles of his arms—and hid what she suspected would prove to be the equally tanned and certainly equally firm muscles of his torso.
Generally speaking, she didn’t care for such dark-haired and formidable-looking men; macho was all very well in its way, but she preferred something a little softer, a little more malle able. In this particular hunk’s case, however, she was willing to make an exception, she decided enthusiastically.
It was true that those grey eyes looked as though they could hold a certain stern frostiness if required to do so, but there was no denying the sexual appeal of those thickly curling dark eyelashes or the hawkish, downright sexiness of that male profile with its warmly curved bottom lip.
‘Miss, miss … we’re Row F; where is that, please …?’ Reluctantly she turned her attention to the middle-aged couple approaching her. Just her luck, she thought—it was a busy, fully booked flight and she doubted that she would get any spare time to flirt with their sexy solitary passenger.
Brad was aware of the stewardess’s interest but chose to ignore it. He was not in the market for a relationship right now—of any kind. What he wanted more than anything else was to get this business in Britain all cleared up and functioning profitably so that he could hightail it back to the States and tell his uncles politely but firmly that there was no point in them looking to him to step into their shoes.
He wanted out. What he had in mind for his future was not another twenty-odd years worrying over the fate of the family business and its employees, but the freedom to pursue his own life and his own dreams.
What he had in mind was to leave work altogether, to finish building that boat of his, and then, who knew what …? To sail it around the world, maybe …? To do, in short, all the things he had never had the opportunity to do when he was younger, when he had been busy and too preoccupied with raising his brothers and sisters. He deserved some time for himself, didn’t he?
He wondered briefly what the elderly widow would be like. Not too fussy and house-proud, he hoped. He was beginning to regret using that particular delaying tactic and he wondered how quickly he would be able to make his excuses to his landlady and explain that he had changed his mind and decided that it might be better if he rented himself an apartment. He had certainly never expected Tim Burbridge to come up so quickly with someone who so closely fitted all his criteria.
Worrying about hurting his prospective landlady’s feelings by telling her that he had changed his mind should have been the last thing on his mind, he told himself as the plane started to lift into the sky.
Somewhere over the Atlantic he fell asleep. The stewardess paused to watch him, wondering enviously if there was already a woman in his life and how it must feel to wake up beside him every morning. Sighing regretfully, she moved further down the aisle.
CHAPTER TWO
CLAIRE was having a bad day. In fact, it had been a bad day from the moment she had woken up and remembered that this evening she was due to meet her prospective lodger for the first time. Irene had rung to stress to her how important it was that Tim’s new boss was made to feel welcome and at home.
‘I’ll do my best,’ Claire had promised meekly, but she had felt that Irene was going a touch too far when she’d informed her that she had borrowed from a friend with American connections a recipe book containing favourite traditional American recipes.
‘There’s a recipe in it for pot-roast, which, apparently, they love, and one for pecan pie and—’
Hurriedly thanking her, Claire had quickly brought the telephone conversation to an end. In the brief time which had elapsed since Irene had used strong-arm tactics to make her agree to help she had already begun to regret her decision, but, as yet, she had been unable to find the courage or the excuse to rescind it.
She liked Tim, who was a gentle, amiable man, technically brilliant in his field but slow to express himself verbally, unaggressive in his approach to others. She liked Irene as well, of course, but …
The small hand tugging on her arm distracted her from her private thoughts. She smiled lovingly and patiently as she waited for Paul to say something to her. He was the oldest of the children who attended the school, and whilst mentally extremely clever and quick, suffered very badly from cerebral palsy.
All the children were special in their own way but she had a particularly soft spot for Paul.
It was a lovely, warm, sunny spring day and, knowing how much they enjoyed the treat, she had taken Paul and one other child for a walk in the local park.
Everything had been all right until Janey, a Down’s syndrome girl, had seen the ice-cream van parked by one of the exits from the park.
Both of them, of course, had wanted an ice cream, especially Janey, whose wide, loving smile touched Claire’s heart every time she saw her, as did her loving hugs and cuddles.
Several other children and adults had already clustered around the van, waiting to be served, and Claire had had no inkling of what was to come as she’d joined them, although, as she had told herself bitterly later, she should have done. She was not, after all, completely unfamiliar with the cruelty with which people could sometimes treat those whom they perceived as different from themselves.
It had been a young woman who’d started it, quickly pulling her own child out of the way when pretty, brown-eyed Janey had tried to reach out and touch the girl’s blonde ringlets.
‘Keep away; don’t you dare touch her,’ she had screamed, her daughter now frightened and screaming too. Janey had also started to cry, but it had been the look of resigned knowingness in Paul’s eyes that had hurt Claire most of all—that and the awareness that she could not protect him from that knowledge.
As the other woman had led her screaming child away she’d turned round and shouted to Claire.
‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Kids like that should be with their own sort, not allowed to mix with normal kids.’
It had been Paul—bright, clever and pitifully physically limited Paul—who had asked her on the way back, ‘What did she mean, Claire—our own sort …?’
She had wanted to cry then. But not in front of them. To have done so would have demeaned everything that they struggled so hard to achieve, everything that they were, but she would cry later in the privacy of the staff loo.
Now, as she walked Janey and Paul back through the park to their respective homes, Janey ‘helping’ to push Paul’s chair, she hesitated when Paul asked if they could stop for a while to watch several children playing football.
Janey was starting to get tired and they still had several minutes before Paul’s mother would be home from her part-time job, so they headed for a nearby bench.
A man was seated on it, watching the young footballers. A parent? Claire wondered. An odd feeling, unfamiliar and, because of that, all the more disconcerting, threw her very much off balance as she glanced at him. It wasn’t, surely, those warmly tanned, hard-muscled male forearms revealed by the immaculate white T-shirt that were having such an extraordinary effect on her, was it?
Hastily she assured herself that it couldn’t possibly be. Other women might be susceptible to that kind of arrant male sexuality, but she most certainly wasn’t. Quite the opposite. Open male sexuality was