Carmichael's Return

His own smile was faint. ‘Dictionaries and I are on very familiar terms.’

So what was he? A teacher needing accurate interpretations? A lawyer requiring precise definitions? She didn’t like to ask, and anyway it was no business of hers. Even if he stayed a while, he would leave some time in the near future. After all, he had to earn a living somehow.

Holding onto the chair, he rose carefully. ‘You could be right. Maybe I’m not in a fit condition to go anywhere.’ He had lost the hint of colour he’d seemed to gain from drinking the hot liquid.

‘Except—’ she pushed away her empty mug and stood too ‘—to bed.’

His lips quirked. ‘My hostess is ordering me to bed? In other circumstances that might have been a promising start.’

She could not help smiling into the silence that was left as he made his way upstairs, at the same time shaking her head.

Now that he had gone, Lauren went up to the room she now regarded as her studio and attempted to bring some order to the various pieces of artists’ equipment that she used m her work.

Pausing for a while, she leaned on the windowsill and gazed down into the gardens, admiring the colourful scene, her eyes drawn again to the terracotta heads that were placed at random across the wide-spreading grounds.

The ring of the telephone interrupted her reverie, and she hurned downstairs to answer it before it disturbed the sleeping stranger.

‘Hi,’ said Casey, ‘everything OK? I wanted to call earlier, but I was sent out on an assignment.’ He really loves that word, Lauren reflected with a smile. ‘Has the man from nowhere been behaving himself?’

‘He couldn’t do otherwise,’ Lauren pointed out. ‘He’s still weak from the illness he’s had. Anyway—’ she frowned as her conscience pricked her ‘—last night I locked him in his room.’

There was a burst of laughter from the other end. ‘Full marks to you, Lauren. What happened?’

‘You mean, when he discovered it?’ She could not tell him the whole truth. ‘He roared like a caged lion. Well, you know what I mean. Anyway, he’s in bed again.’

‘How long’s he staying?’

‘I—’ She hesitated, then decided to continue. ‘I more or less told him to stay for as long as it takes him to recover.’

‘You did?’ Casey seemed a little shocked. ‘How do you know you can trust him?’

I trust him, she thought, but did not know why. ‘I just know I can,’ was her deliberately evasive answer.

‘Mmm, don’t always trust your womanly intuition. What’s his job, by the way?’

‘I haven’t discovered that much about him.’

‘We—ell, I guess he could be unemployed. What’s his name? Surely you know that.’

‘It’s Brett—Brett Carmichael.’

There was a sharp intake of breath, then, ‘Hey, I’ve a hunch I’ve heard that name. Now…’ He seemed to be finger-drumming, and she guessed he was at his office desk. ‘This is going to be a tough one. First I’ll ask around, then I’ll look through back issues of newspapers—see if I can get a lead. Got to go, Lauren. I’ll call you if I get any info on that name. Right?’ He disconnected the call.

The sky was a clear blue, drawing Lauren into the garden with her sketchpad. She wandered round the flowerbeds, deciding which blooms to draw. A brilliantly red fuchsia caught her eye, and she squatted on her folding stool and assembled her crayons alongside the pad on the large drawing board she used for support.

Some time later a dragging sound caught her attention, and she turned to investigate. Brett was bumping a reclining garden chair and its extension across the lawn.

‘Please carry on,’ he said, unfolding it and arranging the sprung cushions, then attaching the footrest. ‘I helped myself—’ he indicated the chair ‘—hope you don’t mind. I didn’t want to disturb you.’

‘Feel free,’ Lauren commented airily. ‘Maybe the fresh air will help you throw off your trouble. Better than lying in a stuffy room.’

‘That’s what I figured.’

He draped his length over the chair, arms folded, his legs stretching over the footrest. Lauren returned to her work, but the presence of the man seemed to have taken away her ability to concentrate. Nevertheless, she returned to her sketching, but, to her annoyance, the picture started to go wrong.

Something in her subconscious mind was troubling her, and it had something to do with the man beside her.

‘That chair—where did you find it?’

‘In the shed.’

The shed? She hadn’t even noticed yet that there was a garden shed. And surely it was locked? Marie’s uncle Redmund seemed to have a fixation about locking everything that could be opened.

‘Where did you find the key?’ she queried.

A shoulder lifted. ‘In the kitchen, tucked away between the dresser and that ancient stove.’

‘Truly? You went searching?’ She smiled, but wondered if she should be worried instead. ‘You must be good at tracking things down. Maybe you’ve got a sort of magnet in your head, and the metal key gave out a magnetic field?’

He gave a brief laugh, which made Lauren surmise that he was on the way to recovery. A small, irritating voice whispered, You don’t want him to get better too soon, do you? She told it to be quiet.

‘Maybe you’re right,’ he answered. There was a pause, then he said, ‘Much of my life is spent in getting to the core of things.’

What do you do for a living? The thought formed in her mind but didn’t make it to her lips. He was plainly a ‘here today and gone tomorrow’ kind of man, a wanderer. He had as good as told her that last night, and as a result he picked up things like fevers. So what he did for a living was none of her business, was it?

Strange, she pondered, remembering her conversation with Uncle Redmund that morning—he had been the second person she’d heard describe himself as a wanderer. But thousands of people wandered the world these days—young women, unattached men, as this man seemed to be.

‘You make your living as an artist?’ he queried, watching the movements of her hand but, low down as he was, unable to see what they were reproducing.

She nodded. ‘Waiting for the next commission, wherever it might come from. Getting this job looking after Mr Gard’s house was a great help in plugging the hole I would have made otherwise in my bank balance.’ There was another pause, then, as her heartbeats revved to overdrive, she added as casually as she could, ‘Did I give you a definite answer to your question about whether you can stay here? Anyway, the answer’s yes.’

She glanced at him. Would he turn her down flat?

‘Indefinitely?’ An eyebrow lifted.

‘If you like.’

‘Thanks.’

It wasn’t until she heard his answer, delivered in an equally casual tone, that her heart returned to its normal beat. Then a small, annoyingly sane voice asked, Have you done the right thing? How long will he stay? Can you honestly trust him? For heaven’s sake, who is he?

For a while he seemed to be sleeping. As she worked Lauren tuned in to the sounds around her—the birdsong, a humming bee, a dog’s distant bark, leaves moving in the breeze.

He stirred and stretched his long body, and Lauren’s awareness of him immediately came to life. Why should her senses start reeling at the nearness of the man? OK, he was good-looking and clearly of high intelligence, with a magnetism about him that any woman would find difficult to resist.

So what? she tried telling herself. He was just another human being, wasn’t he? No, he wasn’t. She had to acknowledge that no other man had ever affected her in the way this stranger did.

She looked at him, and her pulses raced at the discovery that he had been watching her. He switched his attention to their surroundings.