Nash emerged from the greenhouse and looked around. Nothing. No one. Then at the far side of the garden he saw someone peering over. It was a child. A little girl. Then she disappeared and his anger evaporated with her.
She meant no harm. It was an accident. The place was a wreck and she could hardly make it worse. He began to pick his way around the raised beds, the thicket of waist-high weeds, planning on tossing the ball back over the wall.
He was about halfway there when another, much older girl appeared, her baggy shorts giving him ample opportunity to admire her long legs as she flung them over the wall. Not a little girl, this one, not if the skimpy top she was filling out so nicely was anything to go by. And he found himself grinning as she jumped down to wade through the knee-high flowers, the sun backlighting the strands of chestnut hair that had escaped the little bobble thing she’d used to hold it back from her face.
She was too busy checking the ground to notice him and he remained quite still, watching her as she waded through the long grass looking about her for the ball. Every now and then she would stop to look at a flower. Not picking it, but just looking, gently touching the petals of the big daisies, the vivid poppies as if saying hello.
Definitely not a vandal.
Then, as she stopped by one of the peonies, the sun lit up her face and he saw a look of genuine pleasure lift the corner of her mouth, before her smile faded to sadness. She wasn’t a girl at all, he realised, but a full-grown woman.
He took half a step, opened his mouth to call out to her, but she turned suddenly. And he knew she’d spotted the strawberries.
It would be a criminal waste to leave them to the slugs, Stacey thought. The wretched creatures already feasted like kings in her garden, despite all her environmentally friendly attempts at controlling them. It was only fair to share, she reasoned, as she got down on her hands and knees and picked half a dozen of the biggest strawberries she could find as a treat for Clover and Rosie.
Then she picked one for herself and ate it warm from the sun, the way strawberries should be eaten. The juice dribbled down her chin and she wiped it off with her fingers and then licked them. Heaven. She couldn’t think how the slugs, or the birds, had missed them, but she was glad they had and took one more.
In fact, if the garden was going to be bulldozed for housing, she might as well come back when Clover and Rosie were at school and get some runners; then they could have their own strawberries next year. She checked to see how soon the little plantlets would be ready. Then she stopped.
What was the point? They wouldn’t be there next year.
Okay, so she’d been saying that for the last two years, but time was running out. She might not be saddled with a mortgage, but there was no chance that she could sell enough wild plants to keep up with the outgoings. And if she was reduced to producing boxes of petunias and bizzie lizzies, she might as well get a job in an office. And with that miserable thought, she began to back out of the strawberry bed.
Her feet encountered an obstruction and she stopped, frowning. She hadn’t noticed anything on the path as she’d crawled in amongst the strawberries and, puzzled, she turned to look behind her.
The obstruction was wearing a pair of well-worn boots with thick socks rolled down over them. Above the boots were two long, well-muscled legs with scarred brown knees, hairy thighs and a pair of denim cut-offs, worn duster-soft with use, clinging to the kind of hips that should be carrying a health warning.
‘Can I help?’ The voice that went with the legs was duster-soft, too.
Stacey felt her face turn the colour of the poppies. To be caught trespassing was bad enough. To have a handful of filched strawberries as evidence of her fall from grace rang a loud nine on the Richter scale of embarrassment; yet to abandon them would only compound her crime. She was still trying to think of something to say when Clover rescued her.
‘Mummee! Have you found it yet?’ Her oldest daughter, paying technical lip-service to her promise not to climb the old wall, was instead perched on a branch of an equally ancient apple tree and peering anxiously over the wall.
‘Get down!’ She should have been angry, but her daughter’s appearance at least lent her the cloak of respectability. She was a mother. A widowed mother, moreover. What could be more respectable than that?
She scrambled to her feet and, turning to face her embarrassment head on, found herself looking up at the kind of man who should not only have a health warning tattooed to his backside, but to his chest, his arms and his thoroughly workmanlike shoulders. To say nothing of a lean, tanned face, periwinkle-blue eyes and the kind of floppy sun-bleached hair that had always gone straight to her knees. Which was why she’d been married on her eighteenth birthday and a mother by her nineteenth, sieving vegetables for baby Clover instead of learning the business aspects of growing them at the local agricultural college.
That this delectable hunk of manhood didn’t have a health warning tattooed to his limbs or any other part of him, she could see for herself since, except for a suntan, the cut-offs were all that he was wearing. Apart from the boots and socks. And she had no doubt that his feet and ankles matched the rest of him and were of the killer variety. Like his smile.
‘Is this what you were looking for?’
‘Looking for? Oh, looking for…’ Stacey made a determined effort to drag her chin out of the strawberry bed and get her knees under control. ‘Er, yes.’
‘I was in one of the greenhouses over there when it came through the roof.’ He tossed the football, spun it on one finger, then caught it, balancing it on the palm of his hand. ‘That’s quite a kick.’ His glance measured the distance from the broken panes of the greenhouse roof to the top of the wall. ‘For a girl.’ And he grinned up at Clover, who was still clinging to her tree top perch. ‘Is your dad a professional coach?’
‘No, my daddy’s in heaven.’
Well, as conversation-stoppers went, that took some beating. ‘Clover, if you don’t get down right now,’ Stacey warned, turning away from the disturbing sight of the man’s muscle-packed shoulders, ‘I’ll leave your ball over here.’ Mike had had shoulders like that. All brawn and no brain, her sister had said. Dee had always been the smart one.
While she never learned.
Clover disappeared.
‘I bet she’s a handful.’
‘Oh, no, not really. Just football-mad.’ Other women had dainty little girls who yearned for satin pointe shoes and a starring role at the Royal Ballet. She was usually torn between pride and mortification that her first-born had ball skills that put the boys at her primary school to shame and whose most ardent yearning concerned a pair of football boots way beyond the means of the widow’s mite. His teasing ‘For a girl…’ brought her firmly down on the pride side, for once. ‘She’s captain of the school team.’ Then, ‘Was there much damage?’
‘Damage?’ He needed prompting, too, it seemed.
‘To the greenhouse.’
‘I don’t think one pane more or less will be noticed, do you?’ The grin softened into a smile.
‘N-no, I suppose not…’ she stuttered. A smile like that should be licenced. Then, ‘Oh, Lord, you weren’t…I mean…’ No, of course he wasn’t hurt. She could see for herself that his golden skin was unblemished. Well, apart from the faint white line of an old scar across his collarbone.
Then she saw the sun glint off a shard of glass clinging to his hair and without thinking she reached up and picked it off.
CHAPTER TWO
STACEY stared at the sharp sliver of glass she was holding between her fingers and felt herself go hot all over.