The City-Girl Bride

And this was an A road? Irritably Maggie started to drive through the water. That was the country for you, she fumed grittily.

She could hear above the noise of her car engine a loud rushing sound that for some reason made the hair at the back of her neck prickle, and then she saw why. Coming towards her at an unbelievable speed along the course of the river was a wall of water almost as high as the car itself.

For the first time in her life, Maggie panicked. The car’s wheels spun as she depressed the accelerator, but the car itself didn’t move, and the wall of water…

Finn was not in a good mood. His meeting had taken much longer than he had planned and now he was going to be late getting back. His mind was preoccupied with his own thoughts, so it gave him a shock to see the unfamiliar car motionless in the middle of the ford, but it gave him even more of a shock to see the swollen race of river threatening to overwhelm it.

He was in no mood to rescue unwanted and uninvited visitors with no more sense than to try to attempt to cross the river during what had to be the worst cloudburst the area had known in living memory, and in such an unsuitable vehicle. He frowned ominously as he dropped the Land Rover into its lowest gear.

He might have made the fortune which had enabled him to retire from the world of commerce by using what his mentor had once told him was the keenest and shrewdest financial brain he had ever come across, but that world and everything it encompassed was not one he ever wanted to return to. This was his métiere—what he wanted. But he wanted it permanently. And the lease on Ryle Farm could not be renewed when it ran out in three months’ time, which was why he had decided to bid for the Shopcutte estate. He knew that the house, the land and the other properties were being auctioned off in separate lots, but Finn wanted them all. He wanted and he intended to keep the estate intact, and with it his own privacy.

Protecting his privacy; guarding his solitude was vitally important to Finn, and fortunately, thanks to those hectic years he had spent working as one of the City’s most successful money market dealers, he had the financial means to buy that privacy and solitude—in the shape of the Shopcutte estate.

Those people who had known him in his early twenties wouldn’t be able to reconcile the man he had been then with the man he was now. He was a decade older now, of course, and in those days…In those days his high earning power had gained him an entrée into a fast-living world of trust fund socialites, models, money and drugs. But, as he had quickly come to discover, it was a world driven by greed and filled with insincerity. He had been too hardheaded to succumb to the easy availability of sex and drugs, but others he had known had not been so wise, or so lucky.

Already disenchanted with what had been going on around him, Finn had been filled with a sense of revulsion for the life he was living after the death of one of his colleagues from an accidental drug overdose. Finn had been openly and brazenly propositioned by girls crazed with need by their addiction, had attended parties thrown by clients where those same girls and the drugs that had ruined their lives had been handed round like sweets. It was a world that valued material wealth and held human beings cheap, and one day Finn had woken up and known that it could no longer be his world.

Perhaps unfairly, he had come to blame big city culture for sins that should have more appropriately been apportioned to his fellow human beings. But his own needs had forced him to question what he really wanted out of life, filling him with a craving for peace and a simpler, cleaner, more natural way of life, as well as a loathing for city life and, if he was honest, a wary hostility towards those who lauded it.

His mother had come from farming stock and he had obviously inherited those genes. He had made his plans, taken a calculated gamble on his own judgement which had netted him a profit that had run into millions. His employers had pleaded with him to stay, telling him he could name his own terms, but he had made his decision. Owning his own land would give him the opportunity to grow organic crops as well as breed cattle and increase his small herd of alpaca.

Unlike Maggie, the moment Finn heard the sound of the water thundering towards the ford he knew what it was, and immediately stopped his Land Rover, cursing under his breath as he realised that the huge flood of water filling the riverbed would mean that the ford would be impassable, even for his sturdy four-wheel drive, and that he would end up being marooned on the wrong side of the river. Angrily he looked at Maggie’s car. A trendy, top-of-the-range convertible that only a fool would possibly have attempted to take across a flooded ford.

The dangerously fast-flowing water was halfway up the side of the car—and rising. In another few minutes the car would be in danger of being swept completely away, and its blonde-haired driver with it.

Grimly Finn restarted his own vehicle and drove slowly and carefully through the swilling water towards Maggie, gritting his teeth as he felt the powerful surge of the water buffeting the side of the Land Rover and trying to force it downstream.

In her own car, Maggie could not believe what was happening to her. Things like this simply did not happen…especially not to her. How could she possibly be here, in the middle of a flooding river with water creeping higher and higher? She gave a shocked gasp as the car started to move, slewing sideways. She was going to be swept away completely. She might even drown. But she had seen the Land Rover coming up behind her and told herself that she was panicking unnecessarily. If its driver could cross the ford then so could she. Determinedly she tried to restart her car.

Finn simply could not believe his eyes. As he saw Maggie’s shiny blonde hair swing across her face when she leaned forward to restart her car he thought he must be hallucinating. What on earth was she doing? Surely she must realise that her car was not going to start? And even if by some remote chance it did…

Drawing alongside her, he carefully brought the Land Rover to a halt and wound down his window.

Maggie saw what he was doing and gave him a supercilious look, which Finn ignored. He could see now that she was a city woman, and his irritation and exasperation with her grew. Gesturing to her to wind down her own window, he returned her look with darkly bitter dislike.

Initially Maggie had intended to ignore his arrogant command—in the City a woman never responded to overtures from unknown men—but then she felt her car move again.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Finn demanded irascibly once Maggie had lowered her window. ‘You’re driving a car, not a submarine.’

His obvious irritation and contempt infuriated Maggie, who was not used to being verbally mauled by the male sex. Normally her looks alone were enough to guarantee that they treated her gently.

‘What I am doing,’ she responded acidly, ‘is trying to ford the river.’

‘In this—a flood?’ Finn couldn’t keep the ire out of his voice.

‘There was no flood when I started to cross,’ Maggie retaliated hotly, and then gasped as her car started to move again.

‘You’re going to have to get out of the car,’ Finn told her. Any moment now, he suspected, the car would be completely swept away with her in it, if she didn’t move quickly, but he was worried that she would start to panic and make the situation even worse than it already was.

‘And how do you suggest I do that?’ Maggie asked him with a sharp frostiness icing her voice and her eyes. ‘Open the door and swim for it?’

‘Too dangerous—the current’s too strong,’ Finn informed her brusquely, ignoring her attempt at sarcasm. Giving her slender body a brisk inspection, he told her crisply, ‘You’ll have to climb out through the window; there should be enough room. I’m parked close enough for you to be able to crawl into the back of the Land Rover through the rear passenger window.’

‘What? You expect me—?’ Maggie was almost lost for words. ‘I am wearing a designer suit and a pair of very expensive shoes, and there is no way I am going to ruin them by crawling anywhere—least of all into an extremely muddy Land Rover.’

Finn could feel his blood pressure rising, and along with it his temper. He had never met anyone who had irritated him as much as this impossible woman was doing. ‘Well, if you stay where you are it won’t just be your shoes you’ll be in danger of losing. It could be your life as well—and not just your own. Have you any idea of the—?’ Finn broke off as her car rocked with the force of the water buffeting it. He had had enough.

‘Move. Now,’ he ordered her, and to her own shock Maggie found that even before he had finished speaking she was scrambling through her car window.

The feel of two strong male hands supporting her, almost heaving her towards the Land Rover’s open window as though she were a…a sack of potatoes, only increased her sense of outrage. As she wriggled and slipped head-first into the rear of the Land Rover the breath whooshed out of her lungs at precisely the same time as her shoes slid off her feet.

Without even having the courtesy to check that she was all right her rescuer was continuing to cross the river, his vehicle somehow pushing its way through the flood which had threatened her own car. As she struggled to sit up Maggie saw her car start to move downstream as the flooding river finally overwhelmed it. She was shivering with shock and reaction, but the driver of the Land Rover seemed totally unconcerned about her as they finally emerged onto dry land and he started to drive up the hill.

Another few seconds and that idiotic woman would have been swept away with her car, Finn fumed once he had safely negotiated their passage back onto dry land. Now, until the river went down, the farm was effectively marooned. There was no other road off the property, which was enclosed on both sides by steep hills.

‘You can drop me in the centre of the town,’ Maggie informed him in a dismissive clipped voice. ‘Preferably opposite a shoe shop, since I now have no shoes.’ And not anything else, she recognised. No luggage, no handbag, no credit cards…

‘The centre of what?’ Finn demanded incredulously. ‘Where the hell do you think you are?’

‘On the A road, five or so miles from Lampton,’ Maggie told him promptly.

‘On an A road…Does this look like an A road?’ Finn’s voice was loaded with male disbelief.

Now that she looked at it—properly—Maggie could see that it didn’t. For one thing it was barely more than single track, which meant…which meant that somehow or other she must have taken a wrong turning. But she never took wrong turnings—in any area of her life.

‘Things are different in the country,’ she informed Finn contentiously. ‘Any old road can be an A road.’

Her arrogance infuriated him.

‘For your information this is a private road, leading only to a farm…my farm.’

Maggie’s soft brown eyes widened. She studied the back of Finn’s head whilst she tried to assimilate what he had told her. He had a strong bone structure, and thick, very dark brown hair. His hair needed cutting. It covered the collar of his shirt. She wrinkled her nose fastidiously as she took in the shabbiness of his worn coat. She could almost see the forcefield of male anger and hostility that surrounded him, and she felt equally antagonistic towards him.

‘So I must have made a wrong turning somewhere.’ She gave a small shrug. Only she knew just how much it cost her to admit that she might have got something wrong.

‘If you hadn’t virtually hijacked me I would have been able to turn round and—’

‘Turn round?’ Finn interrupted her with a derisive snort. ‘If I hadn’t turned up you’d have been damned lucky to be alive right now.’

The brutality of his harsh words sent a shiver running through her, but Maggie refused to let him see it. Instead she did what she had trained herself to do, which was to focus on her ultimate goal and ignore everything else.

‘How long will it be before the river goes down?’ she asked him. ‘If we wait here?’

‘Wait…?’ Finn couldn’t keep the disbelief out of his voice. ‘Lady, a river like this could take days to subside,’ he told her, impatient of her naivety. People like her shouldn’t be let loose in the country. They had as much idea of how dangerous nature could be as a child had of crossing a motorway.

‘Days…?’

In his driving mirror Finn saw the panic flaring briefly in Maggie’s eyes, and against his will he wondered what had caused it. What the hell was he doing, getting curious about her?