A Family of His Own

Her body, starved of tenderness, starved of the touch of a man, responded like a primrose to the sun after a long, hard winter, and, overriding her brain, she returned the kiss with every scrap of longing, all the need engendered by years of emptiness.

The kiss deepened as his confidence grew that she would not vanish at his touch.

Her hat fell to the grass as his fingers slid through her hair and he cradled her head as it fell back beneath the sweet invasion of his mouth.

The stubble on his unshaven jaw rasped against her face. His hand curved about her waist, drawing her into a closer embrace, crushing her against him as if he would make them one. In the tree above them, the blackbird pinked an urgent warning. And she felt his hot tears against her cheek. Or maybe they were her own.

The kiss had a dream-like quality, the perfection of fantasy, and it seemed that a lifetime had passed before his hold on her eased and he straightened. While her breathing returned to something approaching normality.

An age while he looked down into her face, confronted reality, and his expression of perfect joy turned first to confusion, then to pain as he realised his mistake.

Forever, while the light died in his eyes and they became dark, bottomless, unreadable.

She felt an answering hollowness in her own breast. To have shared such perfect intimacy, to have been gazed at with such devotion and then to have it snatched away…

Oh, good grief. What was she thinking?

‘Mr Ravenscar?’ She heard the shake in her own voice, but what did her petty feelings matter compared to what he must be going through? ‘Dominic, are you all right?’ She was too concerned about him to worry about her own feelings and it really was far too late to bother about the formalities of introduction.

‘Who are you?’ The urgency of her query had apparently got through to him, and when she didn’t immediately answer, ‘Who the hell are you?’ he angrily repeated, rising to his feet, stepping back and putting a yard of distance between them. It felt like a mile. A cold, unbreachable distance. ‘What are you doing here?’

Well, what did she expect? “Thanks for the kiss, ma’am. It was a real pleasure…”

‘I’m Kay Lovell.’

She forced herself to her feet, forced herself to act normally, as if nothing awkward or embarrassing had happened. The kiss had been neither. It was the aftermath that was difficult. Reality, as she’d long ago discovered, was always a lot harder to deal with than fantasy.

She forced herself to brace her knees so that her shaking legs wouldn’t collapse beneath her. Maybe kissing was like drinking, she thought. If you didn’t do it for a while the effects were amplified…

On the point of offering her hand, she managed to stop herself. It was a little late to be shaking hands. Instead she tried to concentrate on an explanation of what she was doing in his garden. ‘I’m just…’ No. It was no good. Any attempt to explain what she was doing, explain anything, was, for the moment, totally beyond her. And he didn’t want to know what she was doing. He just wanted to know why she wasn’t his wife. There was no explanation that would satisfy him. No answer that would help. ‘I’m just a neighbour,’ she said.

He took another step back as if, with every moment that passed, the enormity of his mistake increased. Then he looked beyond her to the peach trees, the newly cut brambles.

‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ he said. ‘Yesterday?’

He’d been here then? He’d seen her? She saw all hope die in his eyes and knew he had. Knew what he’d thought. ‘Yes, I was here,’ she said, guilt washing over her at the damage she’d done. At the forlorn hopes she’d unwittingly raised and then dashed.

‘And the child? The little girl?’

She frowned. If he’d seen Polly then surely he must have realised that she couldn’t be Sara?

‘Who is she?’ he persisted.

‘My daughter. Polly. We were picking blackberries to make pies for the harvest supper. She’s gone out with friends today. To the sea. The Hallams? I think you know them. Their youngest boy is just a few months older and they’re best…’ She stopped. She was talking far too much. ‘I’m so sorry—’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he snapped, cutting off her apology.

‘If I’d known you were home I’d have—’

‘You’d have knocked and asked permission?’ he enquired, with cutting sarcasm. ‘Why did you come back? To make sure you hadn’t missed any? Or was there something else you’d taken a fancy to?’

He glanced at the shrub, then at her, raised one brow about half a millimetre—more than enough to imply everything that he was thinking—and she felt the blood rush to her face.

‘No! I was just…’ She let it go. If he really thought she’d come to steal a shrub that size armed with nothing more than a pocket knife and a screwdriver, there wasn’t a thing she could say that would convince him otherwise. ‘The lock on the gate was rusted through. I came back to fit a new one. It should hold now. And I—’

‘Will it keep you out?’ His voice was no longer soft, but hard and cold as ice, perfectly matching the chilling lack of emotion, lack of anything, in his eyes.

‘It will if you bolt it behind me,’ she managed, with measured politeness, despite the fact that her heart was still pounding like a jackhammer. ‘In fact you’d be doing me a favour. I thought I’d have to bolt it from the inside and then climb over and it’s rather a long drop.’ She made a stab at a smile. He didn’t respond. Well, fine. She was in the wrong here, she reminded herself. He had every right to be angry. She gestured vaguely towards the wheelbarrow filled with the thorny trimmings that were destined for her bonfire. ‘I’d better go. I’ve done everything I came for.’

He glanced across at her barrow as if to reassure himself that she wasn’t making off with a haul of valuable plants. Frowned when he saw the contents.

‘Why did you do that?’

‘Fix the gate?’

‘Cut back the brambles. Why did you do that?’

‘They were growing over the peach tree. It was suffering…’ Then, because he didn’t say anything, it occurred to her that she’d never have a better chance to put her case for some work. The very worst he could do was throw her out and he was pretty much doing that anyway. ‘I’m a gardener. I was going to contact the house agents tomorrow to see if they were interested in giving me some work. To tidy up in here. Now it’s on the market.’

‘Don’t bother,’ he said abruptly. ‘I like it just the way it is.’

Suffocating. Like him, from the heart outwards.

‘You’re probably right,’ she said, bending down to pick up her hat. ‘Better let the new owners clear it out. Start again.’

‘Maybe they’ll employ you.’

‘I doubt that. It’ll take months to put this straight. I expect they’ll get in a contractor. Someone who can provide instant results with an earthmover. They’ll just dump all this in a skip and bring in fully grown plants like they do in those television makeover programmes.’

If she’d hoped to drive the chill from his eyes with hot anger, wake him from the coma of grief, she realised immediately that she was reaching a long way beyond her grasp. He was far beyond such pathetic pseudo-psychological tricks.

All she got was a blank expression.

Of course, he’d been working abroad for a long time. He’d probably never seen one of those programmes where a garden was transformed from backyard tip to easy-care Mediterranean landscape—with water feature—in a weekend. For a man who’d been working on aid programmes, the very idea of such a frivolous waste of resources would probably be anathema.

‘Well, I’ll go, then. If you need anything, I live at Old Cottage,’ she said. ‘Just down the lane.’

‘What could I possibly need?’ Between them hung the unspoken corollary “…from you?”

Nothing was clearly the answer. He was wrong. She could offer human contact. Be there for him, as Amy had been there when she had been lost in depths of despair, guilt. Day after day. Week after week. Gently persistent. Unwavering in the face of rejection. Refusing to be pushed away.

‘One day someone will need you, Kay,’ she’d said when she’d bemoaned her inability to repay such patient, unasked-for, unrewarded care. ‘Just pass on the love and don’t count the cost. That’s all any of us can do.’

She had a sudden, terrible premonition that this was her moment. And she wasn’t ready. Hadn’t a clue what to do.

‘I could offer you a cup of tea,’ she prompted. Oh, good grief. How English. How predictable. ‘Breakfast?’ she persisted. ‘The eggs are organic. I keep a few hens…’

He didn’t reply. Not by one twitch of his facial muscles did he indicate that he’d heard.