Tender Touch

They weren’t, but he was. Heat scalded along his veins, quickening his pulse and shattering his composure.

He rested his hands on the edge of the worktop and dropped his head forward against the wall cupboard. Hell’s teeth, he thought raggedly. The way she’d looked at him with those bruised brown eyes, shot through with navy blue like dark pansies against her pale skin—

He dragged in a much-needed breath and lifted his head, tipping it back and staring up at the patchy ceiling.

His lips still tingled, his blood still raced, his heart was bounding against his ribs …

‘You’re in trouble, old son,’ he advised himself. ‘Deep trouble.’

He picked up his tea and went out into the dark garden. The scent of the lilac filled the air, reminding him of her. Need, sharp and savage in its intensity, raked through him and he groaned softly.

Her light was on. He wondered what she was doing, and stamped on that train of thought instantly.

She had problems. He had to keep reminding himself of that. No matter how he felt, if he didn’t keep it under wraps he wouldn’t be able to help her, and that was why she was here.

Not, he told himself, to entertain him when the evenings grew lonely and boring, and passion stalked him through the long hours of the night.

He would have to tread carefully with her, look after her, nurture her. He mustn’t frighten her off, because he had a feeling it would be all too easy to do, and deep inside he knew that if he lost this wary and gentle woman he would lose something infinitely precious and absolutely irreplaceable…

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_dcec965b-f927-5d4b-8745-749f0ba1fd3c)

OVER the next few days Laura settled in both at work and at home.

She thought of it as home, at least, even though it was Gavin’s and not strictly speaking hers. Largely, she realised, it was down to him and the way he had welcomed her so unquestioningly into it, sharing it with her without rules or regulations, no requests that she do this or that, just an unwritten understanding that they would each respect each other’s privacy.

It was an extraordinary thing that, even though she was so aware of him, she never in any way felt threatened or compromised by his presence.

It might have been the separate staircases, or the fact that he never set foot over the threshold of her sitting-room, but, although she shared all the rest of his house with him and often sat with him in his kitchen after supper, her space was definitely her own.

And so she began to relax with him, and in doing so, for the first time in her life, she had a real friendship with a man.

They talked, argued, laughed together and generally hashed over the day’s events, but above all they talked.

One subject, though, was taboo, and that was her past. She never mentioned it, avoided all reference to it and diverted Gavin away from it whenever he came too close.

By the Monday of the bank-holiday weekend, they had established an easy, comfortable relationship, so when they each found the other was off duty it was an obvious step to spend the day together working on the house.

‘How about your inglenook?’ Laura suggested as they ate breakfast in the garden.

‘Inglenook? I haven’t got one.’

‘Yet.’

‘You reckon it’s there?’

‘There’s only one way to find out.’

‘It could make a hell of a mess,’ he warned.

Laura laughed. ‘I don’t doubt it. There’s always my sitting-room if we totally wreck it, and, anyway, you’ve still got the skip outside until tomorrow. It would be a shame to waste that last little space in it!’

So they put on scruffy clothes and heavy work gloves, smothered the room in dust sheets and laid about the wall with hammers.

‘I’ve found something,’ Laura said excitedly. ‘Look! It’s like the edge of a piece of boarding.’

Gavin poked it, worked a screwdriver under the edge and levered, and a huge crack appeared, running across the wall and then down. ‘It’s been covered over,’ he told her unnecessarily, and he shot her a cheeky grin, looking more than ever like a little boy in search of treasure.

‘It’s probably just a hole in the wall,’ Laura warned, but there was no holding him now and he seized a crowbar, worked it under the board and levered it away from the wall. With a splintering crack it broke free, and a huge cloud of soot and dust erupted into the room.

Gavin reeled away, coughing, and when the dust had settled they peered into the gaping hole.

‘I knew it,’ Laura announced with satisfaction.

‘Look at that—what a lovely bressummer!’ Gavin squinted at the beam. ‘I expect we’ll find a bread oven somewhere.’

Laura eyed the beam suspiciously. ‘You realise it’s probably full of dry rot or something.’

‘Rubbish. Look. Hard as a rock.’ He took the screwdriver from the floor and poked the wood. It was absolutely sound, and Gavin, wiping his face in the crook of his arm to get the dust and soot off it, shot her a victorious grin. ‘See? Perfect. Now all we need to do is find the bread oven.’

Six hours later the plaster was chipped away from the wall and the inglenook revealed, complete with bread oven as Gavin had suspected.

Laura looked around at the chaos. ‘Um, Gavin?’

He followed the direction of her eyes and shrugged. ‘We knew it would make a mess. It’ll vacuum up.’

‘It will?’ She was sceptical, but Gavin was riding on an adrenaline high and nothing could dent his good humour.

‘Of course. Here, take that end of the dust sheet,’ he instructed, and, opening the door, he seized his end and half dragged, half carried the mess of dust and plaster out into the front garden.

They manoeuvred the mess into the skip, shook off the dust sheet and repeated the process with the other sheets.

By the time they had finished, the carpet was covered in white footprints, but remarkably little of the dust had percolated under the sheeting, to Gavin’s relief.

‘I probably should have done this sort of thing before I put the carpets down,’ he said with a rueful smile, and Laura laughed.

‘Probably. Let’s see if we can suck this mess off the floor before it’s trodden in forever.’

She fetched the vacuum as Gavin cleared away the last of the tools, and as soon as the floor was restored and the beam and hearth vacuumed as well, using the tube, the cottage suddenly looked much more homely.

‘Wow,’ Gavin said with a satisfied groan as he dropped into his favourite chair. ‘How about that?’

Laura ran her hand through her hair, stiff and dry with plaster dust, and shook her head. ‘Amazing. You are clever.’

He shot her a look. ‘Are you being sarcastic?’

‘I thought it was my idea to look for it?’ she offered nonchalantly.

‘Damn women—they want all the credit,’ he grumbled, but he couldn’t keep the grin off his face. ‘I tell you what, why don’t you go and wash that dust out of your pores and put on something clean while I’ll finish off in here, then we’ll celebrate our good idea? OK?’