Dangerous Interloper

She was a tall girl, but this man … was taller—six feet two at least. He had broad shoulders, very broad shoulders, she acknowledged weakly as she discovered she was still staring at him.

‘Oh, is that what it was?’ His voice was warm and deep, and laced with something that suggested that he had a good sense of humour. ‘I rather had the impression you were trying to escape from something or someone.’

She couldn’t help it; Miranda knew that her eyes were widening automatically in reaction to his perceptiveness. Instinctively she looked up into his eyes, and then immediately wished she hadn’t. They were warm and grey, and fringed with thick dark lashes. She couldn’t remember the last time a man, any man, had had such an intense physical impact on her. Come on, she warned herself, you’re twenty-eight, not eighteen. You do not walk into a stranger and then stand staring at him as dumbstruck as though you’ve fallen head over heels in love with him, even if he does come packaged six feet-odd, grey eyed, dark-haired and with the most devastating smile you’ve ever seen.

It’s the inner person who matters, not his outward physical appearance, she told herself severely as she tried to pull herself together, and realised that he was still smiling at her as though waiting for a response to his comment.

The very idea of explaining to him about Ralph Charlesworth was far too impossible even to be contemplated and so instead she launched into a breathless rush of semi-truths, explaining to him that it was the sight of the desecration of what had once been a wonderful example of small-town Georgian architecture that had sent her scurrying round the corner without paying attention to what she was doing.

‘Still, I suppose this computer genius who’s bought the place doesn’t know how important it is to preserve buildings like this one; nor if he did, would he care.’

As she came to a breathless full stop, his eyebrows arched. ‘That’s a rather biased criticism, isn’t it?’ he suggested mildly.

Miranda felt her face flush uncomfortably, aware that she had probably sounded more overheated than their very brief acquaintance warranted.

She also realised several other things as well: namely that she was deliberately if unconsciously delaying taking her leave of him; that she could have quite easily stood for hours here on the pavement looking at him; that she was going to be late arriving back at the office; that she was in fact behaving like a complete fool, and should have simply thanked him and apologised to him for bumping into him in a crisp businesslike manner and gone on her way.

‘I … I must go,’ she told him quickly. ‘I’m sorry I delayed you …’

She hesitated, half hoping he would make some kind of gallant comment about it being a pleasure to be delayed by her, and half relieved when he didn’t. If there was one thing that ordinarily she detested, it was heavy-handed compliments, and yet to know that this particular man had found her company pleasurable …

Angry with herself, she stepped hurriedly past him, walking quickly into the square and then across it.

Their office was on the other side of the square in a pretty Queen Anne town house, which her father had bought when he’d originally set up his practice in the town.

She didn’t allow herself to look back, but that didn’t stop her thoughts from wondering busily who he was. Ruefully she told herself that he was very probably married with a family, chiding herself for her interest in him. She hadn’t seen him around before, but that didn’t mean anything. The town was growing, mushrooming almost, and whereas when she’d first joined her father in his estate agency business as his junior partner she could hardly walk across the town square without stopping to acknowledge the greetings of almost everyone she passed, now the opposite was true.

Liz, their receptionist, gave her a sunny smile when she walked in.

‘Dad’s in his office, is he?’ she asked her.

‘Yes. He’s going out in half an hour, though, to show some clients round Frenshaw’s farm.’

Thanking her, Miranda walked through the pleasant, comfortable reception area and into the passage beyond it. Three doors led off the passage, one to her father’s office, one to her own, and one that they used as a general filing and storage space.

As she rapped briefly on her father’s office door before walking in, she found herself thinking about the man again, wondering who he was and where he had been going.

Stop it, she told herself severely. She was a woman of twenty-eight, who had firmly and deliberately avoided what she considered to be the pit-falls of falling in love and committing herself to the kind of marriage she had seen overwhelm so many of her friends.

Maybe in the large cities things were different, but here in this country town—and, she suspected, in others like it—a woman was still expected to be the mainstay of the family in the traditional way.

Oh, perhaps these days a woman had a job as well, but, from what Miranda could see of her friends’ lives, this made things harder for them and not easier. It might give them some financial independence, but in return for that they had to suffer losing the independence of having time to themselves, and to shoulder an extra burden of guilt, especially when they had children.

Most of her friends had married in their early twenties, when the last thing she had wanted had been the constraints of having to put another person’s desires and needs before her own. She liked being free to make her own decisions about how she should spend her life and her time. She knew that in the eyes of many of her friends she was well and truly established as a bachelor girl and a career woman, and originally this hadn’t bothered her, but lately she had begun to undergo some kind of sea change; a totally unexpected sea change, it had to be admitted.

For the first time, she had recently picked up a friend’s new baby, expecting to experience her normal lack of interest but ready to make all the appropriate noises to satisfy the new mother’s pride, and had instead experienced the most peculiar sense of completeness, of wanting to go on holding the small warm body; so much so that when she had handed the baby back to its mother she had actually felt a tiny ache of loss.

She had quickly put the experience behind her, telling herself that it was simply a momentary aberration; something hormonal that was unlikely to happen again. Only she had been wrong.

She hoped she was far too sensible to mistake this unfamiliar yearning for a mate and his offspring for anything other than a probable reaction to too much not-so-subtle pressure from the media to conform to the image of the modern woman, who, according to them, in order to be fulfilled must ‘have it all’. Certainly she had already ruefully decided that the chances of her finding a man with whom she might want to actually spend the rest of her life locally were very small indeed.

She had a large circle of friends, enjoyed their company, both male and female, but none of the men she knew had ever aroused anything more than a mild degree of friendship within her. At least until today …

‘Ah, there you are,’ her father greeted her as she walked into his office. ‘You haven’t forgotten about tonight, have you?’

‘Tonight?’

‘Yes, the dinner dance at the golf club. I told you about it,’ he reminded her. ‘I’ve invited Ben Frobisher, the man who bought the house in the High Street.’

‘The computer man?’ Miranda asked grimly. ‘Oh, you know how I feel about what’s happening to the town … to its buildings. I walked past there this morning. Ralph Charlesworth’s got the contract for the work.’ Her face hardened a little. ‘That building ought to have been listed. We’ve been in touch with the Georgian Society and they confirmed—’

‘Look, Miranda, I know how you feel,’ her father interrupted her patiently, ‘but this man’s an important client. He’ll have employees who will be wanting to relocate in the area. He himself is looking for a house. He’s renting the Elshaw place at the moment.’

‘If he’s as high-profile as you say, I can’t understand why he should want to attend the annual golf club hop,’ Miranda told her father drily.

‘I expect he wants to get to know people. After all, he is going to be a part of the community.’

‘Is he? From what I’ve seen, most of the people who’ve moved down here seem to prefer to form their own small smart cliques rather than try to integrate with the locals. Look at what’s happened at the tennis club.

‘This time last year we had four tatty courts that were only used in the summer and a club-house that was falling down; now, thanks to a small high-pressure group of London wives, we’ve got a building fund going and ambitious plans to build two indoor courts, plus all the facilities of an expensive London gym, complete with swimming pool, bar, and everything that goes with it.’

‘So? What’s wrong with that?’

‘Dad, don’t you see? It’s spoiling the character of the place. Another few years and we’ll just be another dormitory town. The locals won’t be able to afford to live here any more, and during the week it will be a town of too rich, too bored women vying with one another.

‘There won’t be any real life to the town; it will be completely sanitised. There’ll be no children—they’ll all be away at boarding school. There won’t be any old people—they’ll all be packed off to exclusive residential homes.’

‘If that means that we’ll no longer have a dozen or more surly-looking youths hanging round the town square all night, then personally I think it would be a good thing.’

‘But, Dad, those kids belong here, and they’re not surly. They’re just … just young,’ Miranda told him helplessly. One of her extramural activities which gave her the most satisfaction was her work with a local youth club. ‘They need an outlet for their energy, that’s all,’ she told her father. ‘And they won’t find it in some expensive exclusive tennis club.’

He laughed, shook his head and smiled ruefully at her.

‘I think you’re over-reacting a little, Miranda. Don’t forget that people like Ben Frobisher are bringing new life to the area, new jobs … new opportunities.’

‘New architecture,’ Miranda murmured under her breath, unable to resist.

Her father looked at her. ‘You don’t know what he intends to do with that house. He struck me as an eminently sensible man. I’m sure that he—’

‘Sensible? And yet he still employed Ralph Charlesworth?’

Her father sighed. ‘All right. I know you don’t like Ralph Charlesworth; admittedly he isn’t the most prepossessing of men, but he does have a good reputation as a builder. He’s tough and he sticks to his contracts.’

Miranda shook her head, knowing that this was a subject on which she and her father would never agree That was what made her job so enjoyable, though: the fact that they were so different … had views which were sometimes so conflicting. Her father admitted that since she had joined the firm their business had improved dramatically, and equally she was the first to concede that without her father’s experience, his ‘know-how’, his tolerance, she would never have been able to branch out into testing ideas which were innovative and new.

They made a good team, she recognised as she smiled at him.

‘Don’t forget,’ he warned her, ‘about tonight; I’ve arranged for Frobisher to meet us at home, and we’ll all set off from there. It will make things easier.’