A Little Corner Of Paradise

He smiled wanly. ‘Are all men cowards at the sight of blood, or is it just me?’

‘You’re braver than most. You dressed the injury yourself.’ She held the coffee-pot poised over his mug. ‘Cream and sugar?’

‘Just sugar. Three lumps.’ He laughed, a light, rusty snort of amusement. ‘I need a lot of sweetening.’

From what she’d witnessed he seemed plenty sweet enough, but she realized it was an opinion based on very meager evidence. For all she knew, he could possess a foul temper and a wicked tongue, and be a wife-beater to boot—a reflection which raised the rather interesting question of his marital status. Offering him first aid, however, scarcely entitled her to pry into his personal life.

He suffered from no such reticence concerning hers. ‘How was your date?’

‘Date?’ She paused in the act of slicing the strudel.

‘With the knight in navy.’ He grinned unashamedly. ‘I eavesdropped the other day. Are the two of you, as they say in trendy circles, an item?’

‘I…er, no.’

He didn’t miss her hesitation. ‘But he’d like you to be?’

‘When are you going to marry me, Madeleine?’ Andy had asked lightly just before he’d dropped her off after dinner the night before. It wasn’t the first time he’d proposed, nor the first time she’d turned him down with the joking suggestion that he was married already, to his work.

‘Andy’s a good friend,’ she told Nick. ‘We’ve know each other since we were children.’

‘I take it from that that you were born here? Have you always lived in this house?’

She looked around the big country kitchen, scene of so many happy times. In winter, when she’d come home from school, there’d always been a fire glowing in the tiled woodstove in the corner.

Among her earliest memories was one December when she’d come down with bronchitis. Her mother had wrapped her in a quilt in the big rocking-chair that still sat next to the hearth, and she’d fallen asleep to the smell of hot mincemeat, the sound of carols on the radio, and the sight of flames flickering through the heavy glass window on the stove door. The way she remembered it, it had been Christmas when she woke up, and she had been all better again.

‘Except for a few years, right after I graduated from university, I’ve never lived anywhere else.’

Nick frowned. ‘Don’t you find it a bit removed from neighbors? That place next door doesn’t look as if it’s been lived in in years.’

‘It hasn’t, but Edgewater is only five miles down the causeway. I can be in town in no time at all. I’m not really as isolated as you might think.’

‘As long as you’re mobile I don’t suppose you are, but what if you had an accident and couldn’t get to the phone?’

‘I’d be missed around town and someone would come looking for me.’

‘Like the knight in navy?’ he inquired irreverently.

She shot him a reproving glance. ‘Among others, yes. People here tend to look out for each other. It’s one of the more endearing qualities of small-town life.’

He smiled. ‘From the way you say that, I get the feeling that you’ve found it has its drawbacks, too, and I’d love to hear about them—but I’ve taken up enough of your morning.’

He pushed away from the table and stretched. Peg Leg immediately hopped out of her basket by the stove and bounced over to him, tail wagging furiously. Hunkering down before her, he pulled gently on her ears and stroked her muzzle.

‘She’s trying to persuade you that she needs a walk,’ Madeleine said.

‘I wouldn’t take much persuading.’ Eyes shaded by disgracefully long lashes, he leaned forward and practically rubbed noses with Peg. I’ve always liked dogs. What happened to her leg?’

‘She was shot, either by a farmer or a hunter, when she was a puppy, which probably accounts for her fear of loud noises. I found her at the side of the road about four years ago. Her leg was so badly damaged that it had to be amputated.’

‘Are you nuts, or what?’ Martin had scoffed when he’d heard what she’d done. ‘It’ll cost a fortune to get that mutt fixed up, and if you think I’m about to foot the bill—ha-ha, no pun intended!—you’re mistaken.’

But Nick looked up at Madeleine, his eyes quite breathtakingly beautiful in his face. ‘A charming, lovely woman with a heart,’ he murmured. ‘Talk about a dynamite combination!’

‘Thank you.’

‘And you’re certainly well-protected. A person would have to be a fool to mess with you with her around.’

‘You don’t seem too intimidated by her,’ Madeleine said, then blushed at the implied insult in her words.

Nick grinned. ‘Well, of course not, because I don’t intend you any harm and she’s smart enough to know it.’

He was a nice man, an injured man. Furthermore he was right: Peg would tear him apart if he threatened her in any way. ‘Would you like to stay for lunch, Mr Hamilton?’

He stood up and brushed one palm against the other, taking care not to jar his thumb. ‘No, ma’am, thank you very much. I’ve already outstayed my welcome. But I would like to take a rain-check, and I’d very much like to hear more about this lovely old house of yours.’

‘I’d like to show it to you,’ she said, her last faint trace of reservation slipping into oblivion. ‘Come tomorrow instead, if you’re not busy. About one o’clock?’

‘I’m not busy,’ he said, and was almost through the door when he turned back.

Madeleine looked at him inquiringly. ‘Is there something else?’

‘Just one thing,’ he said, his eyes alight with amusement. ‘I don’t want to appear nosy or anything, but do you mind telling me your name?’

‘Madeleine,’ she said, laughing, and thought how silly she’d been ever to have felt that he might not be as trustworthy as he first appeared.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_e88513da-b567-58df-9ed9-fce31af01fcd)

HOUSED in a dignified turn-of-the-century stone building that was the twin of the Town Hall situated on the opposite side of the Market Square, the Edgewater Memorial Library had somehow managed to survive the passage of time unscathed. Its high-ceilinged rooms were cooled by old-fashioned fans in the summer and heated by a set of clanking old radiators in the winter.

Wire baskets, lined with moss and stuffed with seasonal flowers, hung at precise two-foot distances from each other along the eaves of the front portico. Dilys Steach, the head librarian, measured to make sure they didn’t deviate by so much as an inch either way. ‘I expect certain standards,’ she was fond of pronouncing.

‘Certain standards’ included discouraging gossip. Other people might relish passing along the latest dirt, but Dilys never did. It was the senior librarian’s unbending adherence to this principle that had saved Madeleine after Martin’s chicanery had been exposed before the whole town.

‘This is not a coffee-house, erected for your backbiting pleasure,’ she had declared sourly to those people who, in the aftermath of the scandal, had whispered together behind their hands and flung meaningful glances Madeleine’s way whenever she happened to come across them in the book aisles or the reading-room. As a result, the library had become her retreat, its quiet rooms, with that slightly musty odour of vellum and old leather peculiar to Victorian libraries, a sanctuary of peace and order.

Monday was her day off but on Tuesday following her lunch with Nick, Madeleine showed up for work with a smile on her face that refused to go away. It was still firmly in place when Sadie Brookes, her friend and secretary to the mayor, popped in for her daily visit during her morning coffee-break, even though doing so was guaranteed to elicit Dilys’s frosty disapproval.

‘Thought you’d want to hear the latest,’ Sadie whispered, leaning over Madeleine’s desk. ‘Council has been spared having to expropriate the Tyler Resort. The tax arrears were paid in full yesterday.’

‘How nice.’ Finding it difficult to bring her mind fully to bear on the information, Madeleine continued to smile dreamily. ‘We all know what an unpopular move land seizures are.’

Sadie groped for the glasses that spent most of their time perched on top of her head and propped them on her nose, so that she could take a closer look at Madeleine. ‘You’re not your usual alert self today, my dear. I’ve just told you that your precious lodge won’t be put on the auctioneer’s block and snapped up by some money-grubbing tycoon with no soul. I expected that, as president of our revered Heritage Society, you’d be jumping up and down with glee. What’s the matter? Have you fallen in love or something?’

The absurd question sent Madeleine’s thoughts winging back to Sunday and for one preposterous moment she almost answered ‘yes’.

Nick had shown up on her doorstep precisely on time, with a bottle of wine in his uninjured hand. Memory, she’d quickly discovered, had not played her false. Even allowing for the fact that this time she was half prepared for the impact of him, he still struck her as the most formidably attractive man she’d laid eyes on in all her thirty-two years.