Snowbound With His Innocent Temptation

Only ever having watched her sister from the sidelines, laughing and amused at the way Alice fell in and out of love, she had lacked the confidence to make the first move.

And in the end, thank goodness, because, had she done so, then she would have been roundly rejected. The boy she had considered her soul mate, the boy she had fancied herself spending her life with, had not been interested in her as anything but a pal. She had thought him perfect for her. Steady, hard-working, considerate, feet planted firmly on the ground...

He, on the other hand, had not been looking for a woman who shared those qualities.

He had wanted frothy and vivacious. He had wanted someone who shoved his books aside and sat on his lap. He had wanted tall and blonde and beautiful, not small, dark-haired and plump. He hadn’t wanted earnest.

As the dark night began to shed its first flurries of snow, Becky wondered whether retreating to the Cotswolds had been a good idea. She could see herself in the same place, doing the same thing, in ten years’ time. Her kid sister felt sorry for her. Without even realising it, she was becoming a charity case, the sort of person the world pitied.

The house was falling down.

She was going to be jobless in a matter of months.

She would be forced to do something about her life, leave the security of the countryside, join the busy tide of bright young things in a city somewhere.

She would have to climb back on the horse and start dating again.

She felt giddy when she thought about it.

But think about it she did, and she only stopped when she heard the sharp buzz of the doorbell, and for once didn’t mind having her precious downtime invaded by someone needing her help with a sick animal. In fact, she would have welcomed just about anything that promised to divert her thoughts from the grim road they were hell-bent on travelling.

She headed for the door, grabbing her vet’s bag on the way, as well as her thick, warm, waterproof jacket, which was essential in this part of the world.

She pulled open the door with one foot in a boot, woolly hat yanked down over her ears and her car keys shoved in her coat pocket.

Eyes down as she reached for her bag, the first things she noticed were the shoes. They didn’t belong to a farmer. They were made of soft, tan leather, which was already beginning to show the discolouration from the snow collecting outside.

Then she took in the trousers.

Expensive. Pale grey, wool. Utterly impractical. She was barely aware of her eyes travelling upwards, doing an unconscious inventory of her unexpected caller, registering the expensive black cashmere coat, the way it fell open, unbuttoned, revealing a fine woollen jumper that encased a body that was...so unashamedly masculine that for a few seconds her breath hitched in her throat.

‘Plan on finishing the visual inspection any time soon? Because I’m getting soaked out here.’

Becky’s eyes flicked up and all at once she was gripped by the most unusual sensation, a mixture of dry-mouthed speechlessness and heated embarrassment.

For a few seconds, she literally couldn’t speak as she stared, wide-eyed, at the most staggeringly good-looking guy she had ever seen in her life.

Black hair, slightly long, had been blown back from a face that was pure, chiselled perfection. Silver-grey eyes, fringed with dramatically long, thick, dark lashes, were staring right back at her.

Mortified, Becky leapt into action. ‘Give me two seconds,’ she said breathlessly. She crammed her foot into wellie number two and wondered whether she would need her handbag. Probably not. She didn’t recognise the man and, from the way he was dressed, he wasn’t into livestock so there would be no sheep having trouble giving birth.

Which probably meant that he was one of those rich townies who had second homes somewhere in one of the picturesque villages. He’d probably descended for a weekend with a party of similarly poorly equipped friends, domestic pets in tow, and one of the pets had got itself into a spot of bother.

It happened. These people never seemed to realise that dogs and cats, accustomed to feather beds and grooming parlours, went crazy the second they were introduced to the big, bad world of the real countryside.

Then when their precious little pets returned to base camp, limping and bleeding, their owners didn’t have a clue what to do. Becky couldn’t count the number of times she had been called out to deal with weeping and wailing owners of some poor cat or dog that had suffered nothing more tragic than a cut on its paw.

In fairness, this man didn’t strike Becky as the sort to indulge in dramatics, not judging from the cool, impatient look in those silver-grey eyes that had swept dismissively over her, but who knew?

‘Right!’ She stepped back, putting some distance between herself and the disconcerting presence by the door. The flurries of snow were turning into a blizzard. ‘If we don’t leave in five seconds, then it’s going to be all hell getting back here! Where’s your car? I’ll follow you.’

‘Follow me? Why would you want to follow me?’

His voice, Becky thought distractedly, matched his face. Deep, seductive, disturbing and very, very bad for one’s peace of mind.

‘Who are you?’ She looked at him narrowly and her heart picked up pace. He absolutely towered over her.

‘Ah. Introductions. Now we’re getting somewhere. You only have to invite me in and normality can be resumed without further delay.’

Because this sure as hell wasn’t normal.

Theo Rushing had just spent the past four-and-a-half hours in second gear, manoeuvring ridiculously narrow streets in increasingly inhospitable weather conditions, and cursing himself for actually thinking that it would be a good idea to get in his car and deal with this mission himself, instead of doing the sensible thing and handing it over to one of his employees to sort out.

But this trip had been a personal matter and he hadn’t wanted to delegate.

In fact, what he wanted was very simple. The cottage into which he had yet to be invited.

He anticipated getting it without too much effort. After all, he had money and, from what his sources had told him, the cottage—deep in the heart of the Cotswolds and far from anything anyone could loosely describe as civilisation—was still owned by the couple who had originally bought it, which, as far as Theo was concerned, was a miracle in itself. How long could one family live somewhere where the only view was of uninterrupted countryside and the only possible downtime activity would be tramping over open fields? It worked for him, though, because said couple would surely be contemplating retirement to somewhere less remote...

The only matter for debate would be the price.

But he wanted the cottage, and he was going to get it, because it was the only thing he could think of that would put some of the vitality back into his mother’s life.

Of course, on the list of priorities, the cottage was way down below her overriding ambition to see him married off, an ambition that had reached an all-time high ever since her stroke several months ago.

But that was never going to happen. He had seen first-hand the way love could destroy. He had watched his mother retreat from life when her husband, his father, had been killed suddenly and without warning when they should have been enjoying the bliss of looking towards their future, the young, energetic couple with their only child. Theo had only been seven at the time but he’d been sharp enough to work out that, had his mother not invested her entire life, the whole essence of her being, in that fragile thing called love, then she wouldn’t have spent the following decades living half a life.

So the magic and power of love was something he could quite happily do without, thanks very much. It was a slice of realism his mother stoutly refused to contemplate and Theo had given up trying to persuade her into seeing his point of view. If she wanted to cling to unrealistic fantasies about him bumping into the perfect woman, then so be it. His only concession was that he would no longer introduce her to any of his imperfect women who, he knew from experience, never managed to pull away from the starting block as far as his mother was concerned.

Which just left the cottage.

Lavender Cottage...his parents’ first home...the place where he had been conceived...and the house his mother had fled when his father had had his fatal accident. Fog...a lorry going over the speed limit... His father on his bicycle hadn’t stood a chance...

Marita Rushing had been turned into a youthful widow and she had never recovered. No one had ever stood a chance against the perfect ghost of his father. She was still a beautiful woman but when you looked at her you didn’t see the huge dark eyes or the dramatic black hair... When you looked at her all you saw was the sadness of a life dedicated to memories.

And recently she had wanted to return to the place where those memories resided.

Nostalgia, in the wake of her premature stroke, had become her faithful companion and she wanted finally to come to terms with the past and embrace it. Returning to the cottage, he had gathered, was an essential part of that therapy.

Right now, she was in Italy, and had been for the past six weeks, visiting her sister. Reminiscing about the cottage, about her desire to return there to live out her final days, had been replaced by disturbing insinuations that she might just return to Italy and call it quits with England.

‘You’re barely ever in the country,’ she had grumbled a couple of weeks earlier, which was something Theo had not been able to refute. ‘And when you are, well, what am I but the ageing mother you are duty-bound to visit? It’s not as though there will ever be a daughter-in-law for me, or grandchildren, or any of those things a woman of my age should be looking forward to. What is the point of my being in London, Theo? I would see the same amount of you if I lived in Timbuktu.’

Theo loved his mother, but he could not promise a wife he had no intention of acquiring or grandchildren that didn’t feature in his future.

If he honestly thought that she would be happy in Italy, then he would have encouraged her to stay on at the villa he had bought for her six years previously, but she had lived far too long away from the small village in which she had grown up and where her sister now lived. After two weeks, she would always return to London, relieved to be back and full of tales of Flora’s exasperating bossiness.

Right now, she was recuperating, so Flora was full of tender, loving care. However, should his mother decide to turn her stay there into a permanent situation, then Flora would soon become the chivvying older sister who drove his mother crazy.