‘You’re on the defensive. Why?’
‘Why do you think? I... I don’t know you.’ The feel of his cool finger resting lightly on her chin was as scorching-hot as the imprint from a branding iron.
‘What do you think I’m going to do? When I said someone like you, I meant someone young. I expected someone much older to be living this far out in the countryside.’
‘I told you, the house belongs to my parents. I’m just here... Look, I’m going to head downstairs, wash these things...’ Her feet and brain were not communicating because, instead of spinning around and backing out of the room, she remained where she was, glued to the spot.
She wanted him to remove his hand...she wanted him to do more with it, wanted him to curve it over her face and then slide it across her shoulders, wanted him to find the bare flesh of her stomach and then the swell of her breasts... She didn’t want to hear anything he had to say, yet he was making her think, and how could that be a bad thing?
She barely recognised her voice and she certainly didn’t know what was going on with her body.
‘Okay.’ He stepped back, hand dropping to his side.
For a few seconds, Becky hovered, then she cleared her throat and stepped out of the room backwards.
By the time he joined her in the kitchen, the clothes were in the washing machine and she had regained her composure.
Theo looked at her for a few seconds from the doorway. She had her back to him and was busy chopping vegetables, while as background noise the television was giving an in-depth report of the various areas besieged by snow when spring should have sprung. He felt that her house would shortly be featured because there was no sign of the snow letting up.
Before he had come down, he had done his homework, nosed into a few of the rooms and seen for himself what he had suspected from the bucket on the landing catching water from the leaking roof.
The house was on its last legs. Did he think that he was doing anything underhand in checking out the property before he made an offer? No. He’d come here to conduct a business deal and, if things had been slightly thrown off course, nothing had fundamentally changed. The key thing remained the business deal.
And was the woman peeling the vegetables an unexpected part of acquiring what he wanted? Was she now part of the business deal that had to be secured?
In a way, yes.
And he was not in the slightest ashamed of taking this pragmatic view. Why should he be? This was the man he was and it was how he had succeeded beyond even his own wildest expectations.
If you allowed your emotions to guide you, you ended up a victim of whatever circumstances came along to blow you off course.
He had no intention of ever being one of life’s victims. His mother had so much to give, but she had allowed her damaged heart to take control of her entire future, so that, in the end, whatever she’d had to give to anyone else had dried up. Wasn’t that one reason why she was so consumed with the thought of having grandchildren? Of seeing him married off?
Because her ability to give had to go somewhere and he was the only recipient.
That was what emotions did to a person. They stripped you of your ability to think. That was why he had never done commitment and never would. Commitment led to relationships and relationships were almost always train wrecks waiting to happen. Lawyers were kept permanently busy sorting out those train wrecks and making lots of money in the process.
He had his life utterly in control and that was the way he liked it.
He had no doubt that whatever had brought Becky to this place was a story that might tug on someone else’s heartstrings. His heartstrings would be blessedly immune to any tugging. He would be able to find out about her and persuade her to accept that this was no place for her to be. When, inevitably, the house was sold from under her feet, she would not try and put up a fight, wouldn’t try and coax her parents into letting her stay on.
He would have long disappeared from her life. He would have been nothing more than a stranger who had landed for a night and then moved on. But she would remember what he had said and she would end up thanking him.
Because, frankly, this was no place for her to be. It wasn’t healthy. She was far too young.
He looked at the rounded swell of her derrière...
Far too young and far too sexy.
‘What are you cooking?’
Becky swung round to see him lounging against the door frame. Her father was a little shorter and reedier than Theo. Theo looked as though he had been squashed into clothes a couple of sizes too small. And he was barefoot. Her eyes shot back to his face to find that he was staring right back at her with a little smile.
‘Pasta. Nothing special. And you can help.’ She turned her back on him and felt him close the distance between them until he was standing next to her, at which point she pointed to some onions and slid a small, sharp knife towards him. ‘You’ve asked me a lot of questions,’ she said, eyes sliding across to his hands and then hurriedly sliding back to focus on what she was doing. ‘But I don’t know anything about you.’
‘Ask away.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘London.’ Theo couldn’t remember the last time he’d chopped an onion. Were they always this fiddly?
‘And what were you doing in this part of the world? Aside from getting lost?’
Theo felt a passing twinge of guilt. ‘Taking my car for some exercise,’ he said smoothly. ‘And visiting one or two...familiar spots en route.’
‘Seems an odd thing to do at this time of year,’ Becky mused. ‘On your own.’
‘Does it?’ Theo dumped the half-peeled onion. ‘Is there anything to drink in this house or do vets not indulge just in case they get a midnight call and need to be in their car within minutes, tackling the dangerous country lanes in search of a sick animal somewhere?’
Becky stopped what she was doing and looked at him, and at the poor job he had made of peeling an onion.
‘I’m not really into domestic chores.’ Theo shrugged.
‘There’s wine in the fridge. I’m not on call this evening and, as it happens, I don’t get hundreds of emergency calls at night. I’m not a doctor. Most of my patients can wait a few hours and, if they can’t, everyone around here knows where the nearest animal hospital is. And you haven’t answered my question. Isn’t it a bit strange for you to be here on your own...just driving around?’
Theo took his time pouring the wine, then he handed her a glass and settled into a chair at the kitchen table.
His own penthouse was vast and ultra-modern. He didn’t care for cosy, although he had to admit that there was something to be said for it in the middle of a blizzard with the snow turning everything white outside. This was a cosy kitchen. Big cream Aga...worn pine table with mismatched chairs...flagstone floor that had obviously had underfloor heating installed at some point, possibly before the house had begun buckling under the effect of old age, because it wasn’t bloody freezing underfoot...
‘Just driving around,’ he said slowly, truthfully, ‘is a luxury I can rarely afford.’ He thought about his life—high-voltage, adrenaline-charged, pressurised, the life of someone who made millions. There was no time for standing still. ‘I seldom stop, and even when I do, I am permanently on call.’ He smiled crookedly, at odds with himself for giving in to the unheard of temptation to confide.
‘What on earth do you do?’ Becky leant against the counter and stared at him with interest.
‘I...buy