‘There is no one else,’ he said, cutting her off.
The unspoken, And you owe me… lay unsaid between them. But she knew that, like her, he was remembering the hideous scene when he’d come to the back door, white-faced, clutching his roses. It had remained closed to his knock but he hadn’t gone away. He’d stayed there, mulishly stubborn, for so long that her grandfather had chased him away with the hose.
It had been the week before Christmas and the water was freezing but, while he’d been driven from the doorstep, he’d stayed in the garden defiantly, silently staring up at her room, visibly shivering, until it was quite dark.
She’d stood in this window and watched him, unable to do or say anything without making it much, much worse. Torn between her grandfather and the boy she loved. She would have defied her grandpa, just as her mother had defied him, but there had been Saffy. And Adam. And she’d kept the promise that had been wrung from her even though her heart was breaking.
She didn’t owe him a thing. She’d paid and paid and paid…
‘I can’t,’ she said, getting up, putting distance between them. ‘I told you, I know no more than you do about looking after a baby.’
‘I think we both know that your experience as a rescuer of lame ducks puts you streets ahead of me.’
‘Nancie is not a duck,’ she said a touch desperately. Why wouldn’t he just take no for an answer? There must a dozen women who’d fall over themselves to help him out. Why pick on her? ‘And, even if she were,’ she added, ‘I still couldn’t help.’
She couldn’t help anyone. That was another problem she was going to have to face. Finding homes for her family of strays.
There wasn’t much call for a three-legged cat or a blind duck. And then there were the chickens, Jack and Dolly, the bees. She very much doubted if the Crown would consider a donkey and a superannuated nanny goat an asset to the nation’s coffers.
‘Why not, May?’ he insisted. He got to his feet too, but he’d kept his distance. She didn’t have to turn to know that his brows would be drawn down in that slightly perplexed look that was so familiar. ‘Tell me. Maybe I can help.’
‘Trust me,’ she said. Nancie had caught hold of her finger and she lifted the little hand to her lips, kissed it. ‘You can’t help me. No one can.’
Then, since it was obvious that, unless she explained the situation, Adam wasn’t going to give up, she told him why.
Why she couldn’t help him or Saffy.
Why he couldn’t help her.
For a moment he didn’t say anything and she knew he would be repeating her words over in his head, exactly as she had done this morning when Freddie had apologetically explained the situation in words of one syllable.
Adam had assumed financial worries to be the problem. Inheritance tax. Despite the downturn in the market, the house was worth a great deal of money and it was going to take a lot of cash to keep the Inland Revenue happy.
‘You have to be married by the end of the month or you’ll lose the house?’ he repeated, just to be certain that he’d understood.
She swallowed, nodded.
She would never have told him if he hadn’t been so persistent, he realised. She’d told him that she couldn’t help but, instead of asking her why, something he would have done if it had been a work-related problem, he’d been so tied up with his immediate problem that he hadn’t been listening.
He was listening now. And there was only one thought in his head. That fate had dropped her into his lap. That the boy who hadn’t been good enough to touch Coleridge flesh, who’d shivered as he’d waited for her to defy her grandfather, prove that her hot kisses had been true, now held her future in the palm of his hand.
That he would crack the ice in May Coleridge’s body between the fine linen sheets of her grandfather’s four-poster bed and listen to the old man spin in his grave as did it.
‘What’s so important about the end of the month?’ he asked. Quietly, calmly. He’d learned not to show his thoughts, or his feelings.
‘My birthday. It’s on the second of December.’
She’d kept her back to him while she’d told him her problems, but now she turned and looked up at him. She’d looked up at him before, her huge amber eyes making him burn, her soft lips quivering with uncertainty. The taste of them still haunted him.
He’d liked her. Really liked her. She had guts, grit and, despite the wide gulf in their lives, they had a lot in common. And he’d loved being in the quiet, ordered peace of the lovely gardens of Coleridge House, the stables where she’d kept her animals. Everything so clean and well organised.
He’d loved the fact that she had her own kettle to make coffee. That there was always homemade cake in a tin. The shared secrecy. That no one but she knew he was there. Not her grandfather, not his family. It had all been so different from the nightmare of his home life.
But taking her injured animals, helping her look after them was one thing. She wasn’t the kind of girl any guy—even one with no pretensions to street cred—wanted to be seen with at the school disco.
But their meetings weren’t as secret as he’d thought. His sister had got curious, followed him and blackmailed him into asking May to go as his date to the school disco.
It had been as bad as he could have imagined. While all the other girls had been wearing boob tubes and skirts that barely covered their backsides, she’d been wearing something embarrassingly sedate, scarcely any make-up. He was embarrassed to be seen with her and, ashamed of his embarrassment, had asked her to dance.
That was bad, too. She didn’t have a clue and he’d caught hold of her and held her and that had been better. Up close, her hair had smelled like flowers after rain. She felt wonderful, her softness against his thin, hard body had roused him, brought to the surface all those feelings that he’d kept battened down. This was why he’d gone back time after time to the stables. Risked being caught by the gardener. Or, worse, the housekeeper.
Her skin was so beautiful that he’d wanted to touch it, touch her, kiss her. And her eyes, liquid black in the dim lights of the school gym, had told him that she wanted it too. But not there. Not where anyone could see them, hoot with derision…
They had run home through the park. She’d unlocked the gate, they’d scrambled up to the stables loft and it was hard to say which of them had been trembling the most when he’d kissed her, neither of them doubting what they wanted.
That it was her first kiss was without doubt. It was very nearly his, too. His first real kiss. The taste of her lips, the sweetness, her uncertainty as she’d opened up to him had made him feel like a giant. All powerful. Invincible. And the memory of her melting softness in the darkness jolted through him like an electric charge…
‘You need a husband by the end of the month?’ he said, dragging himself back from the hot, dark thoughts that were raging through him.
‘There’s an entailment on Coleridge House,’ she said. ‘The legatee has to be married by the time he or she is thirty or the house goes to the Crown.’
‘He’s controlling you, even from the grave,’ he said.
She flushed angrily. ‘No one knew,’ she said.
‘No one?’
‘My grandfather lost great chunks of his memory when he had the stroke. And papers were lost when Jennings’ offices were flooded a few years ago…’
‘You’re saying you had no warning?’
She shook her head. ‘My mother was dead long before she was thirty, but she thought marriage was an outdated patriarchal institution…’