She stopped in the village at the local garage, which she knew would still be open, and which thankfully still had some milk for sale.
Despite all his efforts, Peter had still not managed to persuade her to drink her coffee black, and since her mother was still valiantly attempting to convince herself that both she and her father actually preferred the milk produced by their goats, if she, Elspeth, wanted anything like a decent cup of coffee, she would have to provide her own milk.
Her stop at the garage delayed her longer than she had intended. The proprietor was a friend of her parents and wanted to chat, so that it was fifteen minutes before she could get away, by which time dusk had started to fall properly.
Never mind, she only had a very few miles to go, and there was virtually no traffic.
Secretly, if she was honest with herself, she still enjoyed coming home. There was something about Cheshire with its pretty countryside, so neat and clean, its fields speckled with black and white cows, its crops growing on land which had yielded harvests since before the Romans had landed and built Chester.
As she turned off the main road and into the narrow lane leading to her parents’home, security lights suddenly sprang into life at her approach.
Automatically slowing down, Elspeth stared at them in a mixture of surprise and approval. Ever since her parents had moved here she had been advising them to have these lights installed, reminding them severely of their potential vulnerability to thieves, but her father, while listening to her, had never seemed to take her advice to heart, and she had despaired of ever making her parents see the wisdom of her suggestion.
Now it seemed that she had been wrong. A further and equally pleasant surprise was the discovery that her mother’s goats, which normally roamed the lane and the yard, providing a hazard for the unwary, were safely penned up in the paddock.
She could hear the dogs barking as she approached the yard, and the familiar feeling of anticipation mingled with anxiety gripped her stomach.
Anticipation because, no matter how much she might dislike it, there was still a part of her that missed this country environment in which she had grown up, and which reacted to her return to it with an almost heady sense of release; and anxiety because invariably she arrived home to discover that her parents had got themselves involved in one or other of the potentially dangerous situations they seemed to be irresistibly attracted to. Like children to water, she reflected in affectionate exasperation as she turned into the yard and neatly parked her car next to the mud-spattered red car, which must be the new one her mother had told her she was buying.
The mud-spattered red car!
Elspeth froze in her seat and stared at it in a mixture of dismay and disbelief. It couldn’t be the same car—of course it couldn’t. It was just a coincidence…and besides, this one had its hood up—and besides, how on earth could he have possibly known her destination?
Shakily she opened her door, reassuring herself that it was just coincidence, but as she did so a man rounded the corner of the house; a tall, broad-shouldered, dark-haired man who paused when he saw her and then looked at her.
It was the look that did it. She found she was literally grinding her teeth as she stood up, and she wished passionately that she was taller so that she could look directly at him instead of having to look up at him.
At close quarters the tanned face was not quite as suavely handsome as it had seemed. For a start the strong, high-bridged nose had been broken at some stage and was now slightly crooked, but in some odd way that imperfection seemed to add something elusively attractive to the man rather than detract from his appeal, lending his face a strength and character that a more perfect profile would have lacked.
As she stared at him, Elspeth even caught herself wishing almost wistfully that it weren’t quite so dark so that she could see what colour his eyes were. What did it matter what colour they were? she chastised herself furiously. What did matter was that he had no right to be here—none at all—and if he thought for one moment she was going to be flattered by his presence…
Quickly, before she could weaken completely and give in to the totally unfamiliar foolishness that seemed to have caught hold of her, she told him as much, delivering the words in the sharp, crisp tones of the modern woman she considered herself to be; a woman who knew exactly how to deal with his sort of man and who lost no time in doing so, making it abundantly clear to him exactly what she thought of his behaviour.
It was only when she stopped to draw breath that she realised indignantly that neither of her parents had appeared to rescue her from him and that, instead of looking thoroughly chastised by her justifiable denunciation, he was instead watching her with a mixture of mockery and disdain.
‘I hate to stop you in mid-flood,’ he told her while she gulped in air. ‘I applaud your performance, by the way. Your parents never said you were into amateur dramatics. A bit over the top, perhaps.’
Elspeth was still staring at him. ‘My parents?’ she demanded, confused. ‘You know them?’
‘Yes. In fact…Look, why don’t we go inside so that we can talk properly?’
Go inside? Talk properly? Elspeth looked wildly at him…Where were her parents? Why didn’t they come and rescue her from this madman?
‘Go inside…’ she stuttered, stupefied that he should actually think she was willing to go anywhere with him.
‘Mm. I’ve just about finished out here. I was going to wash down your mother’s car, but I suppose that can wait.’
Her mother’s car. She looked from him to the mud-spattered vehicle. ‘That…that belongs to my mother?’
‘Mm. She was going to buy a small hatchback, but she saw this in the showroom and fell in love with it. She said you’d be horrified and probably give her a long lecture.’
Suddenly another emotion was added to her confusion. This one was sharp and painful—desolation mingling with a sense of betrayal that her mother should discuss her with this…this stranger.
Immediately another and potentially scorchingly humiliating thought struck her, and she asked huskily, ‘When you followed—er—saw me on the road, did you know who I was?’
She was praying that he wouldn’t answer in the affirmative, and when she saw him nod his head she felt quite sick.
‘Oh, yes. I recognised you immediately. You haven’t really changed. Of course I was expecting you. Stupid of me, I suppose, but I’d expected you to recognise me too and when you didn’t…’
He rubbed his hand along his jawline, and suddenly, and far too late, she did.
‘You’re Carter!’
Impossible not to keep either the shock or the chagrin out of her voice, and she realised as he looked down at her that the smile had gone out of his eyes.
‘Yes,’ he agreed curtly, ‘and now that we’ve established that fact, perhaps we can go inside. I’ve had a long and tiring day, not made any better by a half-hysterical woman accusing me virtually of attempting to abduct her, not to mention my crimes against the wife and family I do not happen to have.’
As Elspeth stared towards the house, its silence suddenly made her suspicious. ‘Where are my parents?’ she demanded, frowning at him.
‘That’s what I wanted to tell you. They decided to leave a few days earlier and spend some time with some old friends en route for Southampton. They left this morning—said to give you their love and to tell you you aren’t to worry about a thing. I promised them I’d be on hand when you arrived to explain everything. That’s why I was hoping to stop you earlier—I was on my way to drive over to Knutsford with some provisions for a restaurant we supply there, but in the circumstances…’
Several things struck Elspeth at once. The first and most immediate was that she had made an utter and complete fool