Which so exactly mirrored his own, original opinion of her that Geraint felt a stab of guilt. ‘There are plenty of other things you could do, I’m sure,’ he said gruffly.
‘Would that I had your confidence in me. Which sounds really rather pathetic. You are right, I am stuck in a rut and have no purpose whatsoever in my life save to look decorative while waiting for a suitable husband to appear,’ Flora replied brightly. ‘Thank you, as I said earlier, for pointing that out, but if you don’t mind, I have had quite enough picking over my empty life and my character flaws for one day.’ She picked up her notebook and pencil. ‘I think we should get back to work.’
Her smile was fixed, her cheeks flushed, though she countered his scrutiny with a determined tilt of her chin. Geraint was not fooled, but he was not such an idiot as to ignore the signs. No trespassing. He ought to be pleased with himself for making her face up to some unpalatable truths, but he wasn’t. She had taken his criticisms on the chin, too. She would have been within her rights to tell him to mind his own business, which was what he would have said had the roles been reversed. Flora Carmichael might look as if a puff of wind would blow her away, but she had backbone. He had to admire her for that. In fact, the more he got to know her, the more he liked her....
The realisation set him quite off-kilter. Geraint got to his feet and made a point of consulting his wristwatch. A gift from his parents on his twenty-first birthday, it was a plain, functional timepiece, but it was one of his most precious possessions. ‘You carry on without me. I need to check on the lads.’
* * *
The door closed behind him, but Flora remained where she was. Geraint did not, as Robbie would say, pull his punches. It was a dispiriting thought, but she suspected she had been merely marking time with her life without even realising it. Forcing herself to think about it now, the very idea of turning into her mother, which she would, if she continued to allow herself to drift with the tide, made her shudder. Her parents expected so little from her that it was ridiculously easy to please them. And it would, sadly, be ridiculously easy to disappoint them, were she to pursue some sort of independent course.
‘Whatever that may be,’ Flora muttered to herself. Pacing over to the window, she stared morosely out at the loch. The problem was that now Geraint had pointed it out, she could not deny the creeping dissatisfaction she had been feeling, and nor could she ignore it, though to do something about it would be to fly in the face of her parents’ expectations. ‘So I am damned if I do, and damned if I don’t,’ she said wryly. ‘Which brings me no nearer at all to knowing what it is I am going to do.’
You are bright, quick-witted, practical and articulate, Geraint had said. None of those epithets had ever been applied to her before, yet Geraint never said what he didn’t believe. He was blunt to a fault, but he also saw things in her that others did not, and expected much more of her than anyone else did, which both pleased and scared her a little. What if she failed?
Think positively, Flora castigated herself. She would not fail, because that would reflect badly on Geraint, and she wanted Geraint to succeed. Almost more than she wanted to succeed herself. Which was a novel, not to say startling, thought. ‘Sink or swim,’ Flora repeated, remembering the pact they had made.
An image of a naked Geraint swimming beside her in the loch, rivulets of water coursing down his muscled back and buttocks, sprang shockingly vivid into her mind’s eye. ‘Swim it shall most definitely be,’ Flora muttered, pressing the backs of her hands against her flaming cheeks.
A few days later, as October was coming to a close, Flora and Geraint were in the attics, a jumble of rooms at the top of a narrow staircase. Though the main part of the house had electricity, which ran from a generator, there was no light here, save for what crept in through the occasional dusty skylight and what was given off by the two oil lamps they had brought with them. It had been Flora’s idea, since the outhouses and the old stables were already full to overflowing with displaced furnishings, to put the smaller and more valuable artefacts here, but she was beginning to wonder if it had been a mistake. ‘I hadn’t realised there was so much up here already,’ she said, looking around her in dismay.
Geraint was standing just inside the doorway, clutching the low frame, staring past her into the cramped room, his eyes unfocused. ‘Geraint? Are you feeling unwell? You look quite pale.’
Flora set her lamp carefully down and put the back of her hand on his brow. It was clammy with sweat. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said brusquely, before pushing her hand away and ducking his head to enter the attic. ‘I see what you mean. I’ve never seen such a collection of junk.’
His voice sounded brittle to her, but his colour had returned. If he was feeling ill, he did not care to admit to it. Flora edged her way into the confined space, which was strewn with bric-a-brac. Old trunks, dusty boxes, broken furniture and huge empty picture frames comprised the majority of it, but there were also moth-eaten rugs, several stacks of account books, and an assortment of stuffed animals in various states of decline. ‘I doubt I’d recognise that thing if it were alive,’ she said, pointing to a decrepit mound that looked like a large shoe with fangs. ‘What on earth is it?’
Geraint picked it up gingerly. ‘It appears to be a baby crocodile or alligator. Did one of your ancestors have a penchant for taxidermy?’
‘I have absolutely no idea. Why do you ask?’
‘I’m just worried we might stumble across a stuffed laird or two.’
Flora burst into laughter. Geraint, now seemingly quite restored, was smiling at her in a way that made her heart beat erratically. It was an intimate smile, a complicit smile, and at the same time a very sensual smile. His eyes looked more black than brown in the dim light and there was a warmth in them that triggered a corresponding heat in her blood. Tearing her mind back to the job in hand, she looked around despairingly. ‘I shall have to clear some space, though how I am to decide what can be jettisoned...’ She took the crocodile from Geraint and eyed it distastefully. ‘You can go for a start, my lad.’
‘And what about this?’
She whirled around to find him draped in an ancient sheepskin cloak, clutching a dagger. The leather was worn, the fleece was moulting in places, the blade of the dirk was rusted through, and yet he managed to look both fierce and proud, not just a warrior, but a warrior king.
‘What do you think, wench?’ he growled.
She thought, rather fancifully, that she could understand why a woman would let herself be carried off by such a man to be—well, who knows what? ‘You look very—convincing.’ There was a smear of dust across his cheek. His hair was dishevelled. The cloak emphasised the breadth of his shoulders and his chest, just as the army puttees so tightly bound around his legs showed off the muscles of his calves. ‘They’d have worn that thing over a plaid originally,’ Flora said.
‘Shall I take off my tunic for the sake of authenticity?’
They both knew he meant it for a joke, but as she looked at him, the smile died on his face. She touched the fleece, which was hemmed with a complicated design of coloured wools. Her hand brushed against the rough khaki serge of his tunic. She snatched it away. ‘It must be like wearing a hair shirt,’ she mumbled.
His eyes were dark, dangerous. She stood rooted to the spot, unaccountably certain that he was going to kiss her. Then he took a deliberate step back and discarded the cloak. ‘No worse than a plaid would be, I imagine,’ he said.
Did she imagine it, that almost kiss? She did not think so, but she had so little experience, she could not be sure. She had wanted him to kiss her. Had been wanting him to kiss her since that first day when he had pressed his lips to her palm. Had it been her own latent desire that had made her mistake his intentions? Slanting a glance at him, she received an inscrutable look.
‘Is