A Reluctant Wife

‘You were a million miles away just then.’

‘Here you are.’ She ignored his remark and handed him his membership card, which he took and tucked away in his wallet.

‘So, now we’ve established that you needn’t stay here for lunch, will you accept my invitation?’

She heard the magnetic, charming persuasiveness in his voice with a vague sensation of terror.

‘No.’

He shook his head and gave her an impatient, perplexed look.

‘When do I need to get this book back to you?’ he asked, straightening and standing back from the counter.

‘Within two weeks or else I’m afraid I’ll have to apply a fine.’

‘Which is?’

‘I can’t remember. Everyone returns their books long before they become overdue.’

‘How virtuous of them.’

‘It’s a virtuous community,’ Sophie said politely, and he raised his eyebrows expressively.

‘Really…’ he said softly. ‘Yourself included?’

She could feel the colour rush into her face and she fought back an instinctive urge to slap his face. He hadn’t said anything rude or insulting, but the mere fact that he had made her blush with embarrassment, which was something she hadn’t done for longer than she cared to remember, made her hackles rise.

‘Especially myself,’ she said, meeting his gaze without blinking. ‘You might want to remember that.’ After a few seconds of silence she turned away and began to return books to their respective shelves.

CHAPTER TWO

FOUR days later Sophie decided to see for herself what was happening at Ashdown House.

She told herself that his was because she seemed to hear nothing but second-hand reports of massive reconstruction, and curiosity had finally got the better of her. Besides, she reasoned, she had a free day, with Jade at school and no work at the library. Despite the fact that it was bitterly cold, it was also temptingly sunny—too sunny to stay indoors, doing housework.

More to the point, Gregory Wallace was safely ensconced in London, according to Kat who seemed to know details of the man’s movements with remarkable intimacy. That was nothing unusual in Ashdown. There was no such thing as a secret life in the village. The smallness of the place made any such thing a complete impossibility.

As soon as she had returned to her cottage, having dropped Jade off at school, she hopped onto her bicycle. She’d made sure that she was securely wrapped up in as many layers of clothing as was humanly possible, without restricting movement, and headed off in the direction of the house.

The place wasn’t far from the village, but set right back from the road and picturesquely positioned on the sloping crest of a hill so that it commanded views in all directions.

In its heyday, before Sophie’s time, it had been the focal point of the village. Angela Frank had lived there with her son and her husband, and had entertained in grand style. Beautiful young things had gathered on the rolling lawns in summer, lazily sipping champagne and dressed to the nines. There had been croquet parties, which had started at lunchtime and supposedly meandered with ever more raucousness well into the late hours of the night. They were all second-hand and third-hand stories, which Sophie swallowed with a hefty pinch of salt since memories were usually unreliable when it came to accuracy.

All she knew for certain was that on the day Angela Frank’s husband and son were killed in a car crash the glamorous life at Ashdown House had come to a grinding halt. That had been over three decades ago, and until the place had been sold old Mrs Franks had lived there, surrounded by memories, with the house pitifully neglected and falling into a gradual state of disrepair.

Until now, Sophie thought as she cycled towards the house. The breeze whipped her hair around her face and promised at least two hours of hard labour to get the tangles out, and her hands, in their black fingerless gloves, gripped the handlebars of the bike. Until Gregory Wallace, that knight in shining armour, had descended on their village, kick-started it into a hum of activity and now, presumably, saw himself poised to become the lord of the manor.

At that thought she instinctively gave a little frown of distaste, and was still frowning when she finally arrived at the house, cutting through the back way so that she emerged facing the rear of the house, with a forested patch behind her and the fields stretching down towards the road.

She could hear the sounds of work in progress, drifting on the air towards her from the front of the house, but rather than head in that direction she climbed off her bike and left it lying on the grass. She began to stroll along the rear façade, peering into windows. Things were definitely happening inside. The carpets had all been ripped up and through some of the open doors she could see more signs of things happening.

As they would be, she thought to herself, when the man in question was rich, powerful and involved in the construction business. He probably, she thought as she peered into a room but found it difficult to make out anything because timber boards were leaning against the windows, just had to snap his fingers and an entire design team would appear in front of him. Willing, able and, of course, committed to putting his little pet project ahead of whatever else they had on their calendar. Because, frankly, he owned them.

He might come across as Mr Charm personified, but she knew enough about his type to know that any such charm was just a façade for the single-minded ruthlessness of the born opportunist. He would laugh and be warmly humorous to the outside world, but when he closed his doors and the mask slipped he would simply be another man whose only goal in life was to trample over those closest to him in order to remain at the top of his personal pecking order.

She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling the breeze cut through her clothes to settle its teeth on her flesh, and peered into another room, where three men were working with impressive efficiency. Walls were being plastered and there were rolls of wallpaper in one corner of the room. She squinted and tried to decipher the pattern, but failed.

Katherine had not been lying when she’d said that the place was undergoing a major overhaul.

She stretched forward, avoiding the shrubbery underneath the window, and was leaning against the windowsill, with her body supported by her hands, when a voice said from behind her, ‘Enjoying yourself?’

The shock of being addressed when she’d believed herself to be unobserved almost made her fall forward into the shrubbery. Instead, she propelled herself backwards and spun around to be confronted by Gregory who was standing, looking at her, with his arms folded and an aggravating look of amusement on his face.

‘What are you doing here?’ Sophie said, highly flustered at being caught red-handed doing something she would not have dreamt of doing under normal circumstances. Namely, snooping.

‘What am I doing here?’ He appeared to give the question a great deal of thought, then his brow cleared and he said, as though bowled over by a sudden revelation. ‘Oh, yes, I remember. I live here!’

A sudden gust of wind blew Sophie’s hair across her face, and she pushed it aside, tucking it irritatedly behind her ear. ‘I was told that you were going to be in London.’

‘Aren’t gossips unreliable?’ He stared at her as her face became redder, then rescued her from complete humiliation by saying lazily, ‘Actually, I was supposed to be in London until tomorrow, but I rescheduled my meeting so that I could come up here and see what was happening to the work on the house.’ He was, she saw, still dressed in a suit of charcoal grey, visible beneath his coat, which seemed to add height and width to him so that he appeared even more daunting than she remembered.

‘I apologise if I was trespassing on your land,’ Sophie said stiffly, glancing around and making sure that her bike was where she had left it.

‘But you happened to be in the general vicinity…?’

‘No.’

‘Ah, in that case, you must mean that you made a special trip out here just to see what was going on.’

‘That’s right.’ Now that she wasn’t moving it was much colder than she had thought. Bitterly cold, in fact.

‘I didn’t see a car out front.’

‘I came on my bike.’ She nodded briefly in the direction of the abandoned bicycle and fought down the urge to sprint over to it, jump on and cycle away from the house as fast as she could pedal.

‘Cold out here.’ He looked around him, enjoying, she thought sourly, every moment of her discomfort. The breeze obligingly picked up, gusting through the empty branches of the trees and making the shrubbery rattle against the side of the house. ‘Why don’t you come inside? Then you can see exactly what I’m doing to the place and you can put your curiosity to rest.’

‘I’m not that curious, thank you.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake. What is your problem?’

‘I don’t have a problem, and it’s too cold to stand around here, arguing the point. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll just hop on—’

‘Don’t be so bloody ridiculous,’ he cut in impatiently. ‘Everyone’s curious about what I’m doing to the place. It’s only natural, and if you can’t admit that you are as well then you’re a damned hypocrite.’

Sophie’s mouth fell open. ‘Just who do you think you are?’ she finally demanded, in a high voice.

‘The owner of this property and someone who is fairly intolerant of stupidly stubborn women who are afraid of saying what they’re thinking.’