‘Abby!’
She heard him call her name, and although she would have preferred to ignore him until she had herself in control again, instinctively she slowed and glanced back. He was still standing near the rowing boat, his hands pushed into his pockets, the breeze from the loch stirring the silvery thickness of his hair. He looked so big and powerful somehow, so remote. She must have been out of her mind to imagine she might be able to influence a man like him, she thought bitterly. Her methods were so gauche, so unsophisticated, so amateurish! Ella would have known how to go about it. She had known. But Abby’s experience of men was limited to the boys from the village and Uncle Daniel.
‘Come back here!’ Luke called to her, but she could sense the irritation still in his voice and remained where she was.
‘What’s the point?’ she called in answer. ‘I’ll—see you later.’
‘Abby!’ Frustration hardening his tone, he strode up the shingle towards her where she stood, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, poised for flight. ‘Abby, you can’t expect to say something like that without arousing some reaction!’ He sighed, his anger controlled. ‘All right, so I do find your resemblance to your aunt—disturbing. But not for the reasons you think.’
‘I was rude,’ she said stiffly. After all, this man was a guest in her uncle’s house and old habits die hard. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Are you?’ Almost against his will it seemed, his hand came out and lifted her chin so that she was forced to look into his face. His fingers were cool against her heated skin, and his thumb probed her jawline involuntarily. ‘Don’t pay lip service to me. I get enough of that back home.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said again, shivering, and he let her go.
‘Come on,’ he said, as if coming to a decision. ‘We’ll take the boat out.’
Abby caught her breath. ‘But you said you didn’t want me to come with you.’
‘Perhaps I was being unselfish,’ he remarked enigmatically. Then, still unsmiling, he added: ‘If you’re prepared to waste your time with a middle-aged contemporary of your aunt’s, why should I object? Do you want to come or don’t you?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she nodded.
‘All right, let’s go.’
It was cooler on the loch, but she insisted on taking a turn at the oars and kept warm that way. He leaned back lazily as she rowed, his long legs stretched at either side of hers, and it was difficult for Abby to prevent herself from staring at his lean muscular body. It was true, she thought, she had never met anyone like him before, but she could quite see why her aunt—or any woman for that matter—would find him attractive. But she had to be objective about it …
Surprisingly, once the first few moments of awkwardness were over, they talked together easily. When he put aside the guard he had adopted, he became an amusing companion, telling her about his family—his brothers and sisters, and the struggle his mother had had to support the children after his father was killed.
‘It was one of those quirks of fate,’ he said with a shake of his head. ‘He was in the Merchant Navy and went right through the war without even an injury. He was killed in 1952 when the engine of his coaster exploded on a trip from Liverpool to Newcastle.’
‘How awful!’ Abby’s eyes were wide and sympathetic. ‘Your mother must have been frantic. With eight children to support.’ Eight children, she thought incredulously. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like to have seven brothers and sisters. Would Luke want a large family? she wondered, and trembled at the thought.
‘I was fourteen at the time,’ he recalled now. ‘I have two brothers older than me, but the rest of the family are younger.’
‘All the same, it must be nice for you belonging to a large family,’ she murmured, half enviously, and he smiled ruefully.
‘It’s expensive,’ he conceded with a dry inflection. ‘So many birthdays.’
‘And—and yet you’ve never had a family of your own?’ she probed, amazed at her own temerity.
Luke shrugged. ‘I was married once. But it didn’t work out. We were divorced twelve years ago.’
Abby hadn’t known that. It surprised her. Although as it was twelve years since his divorce, he must have been very young when he got married. Not so easy now to bring a man like him to the altar.
‘What about you?’ he asked, his eyes narrowed and questioning. ‘Do you want to get married?’
Abby bent over the oars to hide her flushed cheeks. ‘I—I suppose so. When—when the right man asks me.’
Luke drew out a case of cheroots and placed one between his teeth. ‘Ardnalui’s not a big place. If the right man hasn’t asked you yet, surely he can’t be here. Or are you waiting, as your mother did, for someone up from Glas—–”
‘No!’
Abby shipped the oars and let the small boat drift with the current, staring out blindly across the loch. She had no intention of marrying a man like her father—a charming man, but weak, drifting as this boat was doing with the current, only struggling for survival when it was too late …
‘So what will you do?’
Luke’s voice was soft as he applied the flame of his lighter to the cheroot, and she turned to look squarely at him. ‘I don’t know,’ she answered, pushing her hair back from her face with both hands, drawing his eyes to the pointed swell of her breasts surging against the thin nylon material of the windcheater. ‘You tell me.’
FOR several minutes Luke looked at her, and even in her innocence, she knew he was enjoying the experience. Her heart pounded heavily, the blood thundering in her head, and her palms moistened where they rested against the sides of her neck. Then her pulses steadied when he looked away, taking the cheroot out of his mouth and saying in a curiously flat voice: ‘What do you mean?’
She took a couple of quick breaths. ‘Perhaps—perhaps I should leave Ardnalui. Aunt Ella did, and look how successful she’s been. I could go to London. Maybe I could become an actress.’
Luke’s eyes turned back to her, cooler now and more penetrating. ‘I shouldn’t advise it,’ he told her harshly.
‘Why not?’
Luke shifted restlessly, putting the cheroot back between his teeth, reaching forward to take the oars. ‘It’s time we were getting back.’
Abby stared at him frustratedly. ‘Aren’t you going to answer me?’
Luke dipped the oars into the water. ‘What time is lunch?’
She clenched her fists. ‘I shall do it, you know. Whatever you say.’
Luke heaved a sigh, regarded her tense expression for a moment, and then shipped the oars again. ‘All right, all right. If you want it bluntly, I don’t think you stand a chance of doing what Ella has done.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’re not like her. You need to be a certain sort of person to become a successful actress. You have to be—hard, if you like. Dedicated, ambitious! I don’t think you have that kind of ambition. If you had, you’d have done something about it before now.’
‘What could I have done?’
‘Left Ardnalui, for a start. Pushed yourself into Ella’s life, whether she liked it or not.’
Abby