Leigh stared at his dark, handsome face in silence. She wanted to fire back with a retort. In normal circumstances she could hold her own in any argument, was rarely at a loss for words, but somehow her mouth had managed to go dry and wouldn’t do what she wanted it to.
She had a swift feeling of giddiness, and then she blinked and reality returned.
‘Believe me, the last thing I’m interested in is the number of women in your life!’
Her heart was beating heavily, and she could feel her hands clammy and tightly clenched at her sides. She just wanted to get away from this man. He was overpowering her.
There was a knock on the door, and Freddie bounded in. Nicholas released her abruptly, and her moment of confusion and alarm was over.
She retreated to her suitcases, which she began dumping on the bed, and chatted to Freddie, her words spilling over each other as she tried to shove the effect that Nicholas had had on her to the back of her mind.
Freddie was in high spirits. He wanted to do everything, see everything, yesterday. He had already unpacked, which meant that he had thrown all his clothes into the nearest available drawers and cupboards, and was now raring to go. He somehow managed to persuade Nicholas to take him to Piccadilly Circus, which he had heard about, on the Underground of course, and Leigh couldn’t resist a grin as she tried to picture Nicholas squashed in the middle of a crowded train.
‘Nicholas probably has to return to work,’ she said, trying to wipe the smile off her face.
This thought had obviously not crossed Freddie’s mind. ‘Oh,’ he said, deflated, ‘can’t you take the day off?’
‘Freddie!’
‘It’s all right, Freddie. I already have, and it’s just as well that you become acquainted with London as soon as possible.’
Freddie bounded back out of the room, an excitable puppy whose energy left Leigh feeling exhausted, and Nicholas turned to her.
‘I don’t suppose you’ll share the joke with me?’
‘Joke? What joke?’
‘The one you were grinning at a few minutes ago.’
Leigh blew a strand of her hair from her face, and said obligingly, ‘I will, actually. I was trying to imagine you on the Underground, with elbows and newspapers sticking into you, like a sardine in a tin.’
‘I see,’ Nicholas said thoughtfully. ‘Well, I find it equally hilarious to picture you on the Underground, sticky and uncomfortable and moaning about how much you’d wished you’d stayed in Yorkshire.’
‘Just as well as I’m not coming with you, then, isn’t it,’ she replied tartly, ‘so you’ll have to forgo the opportunity to laugh at me?’
Once he was out of the room, she ran a hot bath and settled into the suds with delicious enjoyment.
Over the past fortnight, she had barely had time to think, and now, in the silence of the room, her mind played around all the quickfire sequence of events that had occurred recently. It was unbelievable. Plucked from her rural home town and catapulted into London, and not just London, but the London champagne set, because she knew without being told that that was where Nicholas belonged.
It was like Cinderella at the ball, she thought, but an unwilling Cinderella without the fancy dress. She was the plain-clothed, plain-speaking rustic in a world which no doubt operated on various levels of innuendo and subterfuge.
She had as yet met none of his friends, and it was an experience which she was not looking forward to.
She wondered whether they would all be like Nicholas. The men all tall, and debonair, and the women sophisticated and bursting with savoir faire.
It was hard to imagine anyone quite like him, but maybe that was simply because she had never moved in this sort of world.
A sudden thought struck her: had she brought the right sort of clothes? Flowered print dresses, sandals and jeans might be all right in her small home town, but would they look out of place here? She mentally shrugged and decided that people could take her as they found her; she certainly didn’t intend losing much sleep over it.
Later on, when she was dressing for dinner, she looked dubiously at her wardrobe once again, finding it slightly more difficult this time to dismiss the thought that the things she had brought with her really were a bit on the well-worn side.
She had somehow not managed to do any shopping for the past few months, none at all in fact since the death of her grandfather, and a lot of her stuff seemed that touch faded. Of course, it didn’t matter one jot, she told herself defiantly, choosing a green uncluttered dress to wear that evening. She was meeting Sir John and she wanted to look just right.
Nicholas was eating out, and wasn’t going to be in until later, probably when they were having coffee.
Just as well, she thought, staring at her face in the mirror, wondering whether to put on any make-up and deciding against it. She was too sensitive to his presence to really relax with him.
Sir John was waiting for her in the sitting-room when she went down a few minutes later. Leigh introduced Freddie, and as the old man chatted to him she took the opportunity to observe him.
She barely remembered him. He couldn’t have been much older than her grandfather, but he certainly looked it. There were lines of resignation and disappointment around his mouth and his eyes were faded and blue as though he had spent years looking at things that he found depressing.
He turned to her and began talking.
Even his voice, she thought ruefully, was thin and strained. He apologised for not meeting them sooner, ‘But my doctor doesn’t like me exerting myself. I tend to spend a lot of time reading, or resting.’
It didn’t sound like a very healthy lifestyle to her, but she nodded politely and moved the conversation on to other things. She chatted about her grandfather, with Freddie butting in every two minutes with anecdotes which were only just on the right side of risqué, and after a while the old man began to look slightly more animated.
‘He was a rogue in his youth, that old Jacob,’ Sir John said whimsically.
Leigh laughed, throwing her head back, ‘He was a rogue in his maturity as well, Sir John, believe me.’
‘He drove the women crazy,’ Freddie said with a grin.
‘He did?’
Leigh nodded. ‘There was always some lady or other being invited around for coffee. If he really liked her…’
‘He would present her with something he’d made,’ Freddie finished. Leigh looked at her brother, and they giggled.
‘There was this one lady,’ Freddie offered, laughing at the memory until tears came to his eyes, ‘Mrs Bolby, a widow.’
‘Freddie! Sir John won’t want to hear about Mrs Bolby!’
‘Pray continue, young man.’ He really was looking more animated.
‘Mrs Bolby,’ Leigh said primly, ‘was a very quiet lady…’
‘A prude!’ Freddie screeched.
‘And Grandad saw fit—I don’t know what got into him…’ She began to giggle uncontrollably.
‘To present her with this wooden carving of a bed…’ Freddie continued.
‘And a lute. He told her they could make sweet music under cover!’
Sir John laughed, wheezing at first, then louder.
Over the exquisite meal of salmon with prawns, Freddie and Leigh regaled him with humorous things their grandfather had done. The old man really seemed to enjoy it, and over coffee he shook his head and murmured how much he envied Jacob’s life.