Mistaken Adversary

Didn’t want to be left alone like a child crying in the dark. She was being selfish, she told herself critically; she was thinking of her own emotions, her own needs, and not her aunt’s...

All through the visit she had talked with desperate cheerfulness of the cottage and the garden, telling her aunt that she would soon be coming home to see everything for herself, telling her—as though the words were some kind of special mantra—about the cat who had adopted the cottage as its home, about the special rose bushes they had planted together in the autumn, which were now producing the buds which would soon be a magnificent display of flowers. Her aunt was the one who was the keen gardener, who had always yearned to return to her roots, to the small-town atmosphere, in which she herself had grown up. That was why Georgia had bought the cottage in the first place—for her aunt...her aunt, who wasn’t living here any more, her aunt who...

Georgia could feel the ball of panic and dread snowballing up inside her and, as always, she was afraid of it, trying to push it down and out of the way, totally unable to allow it to gather momentum, to force herself to confront it. She was so desperately afraid of losing her aunt, so mortally afraid.

The cottage was only small: three bedrooms, one bathroom, and a tiny boxroom which she was using as her office, and then downstairs a comfortably sized living-kitchen area, a small cosy sitting-room and a dining-room which they never used, preferring the comfort of the kitchen. Its garden was large and overgrown: a gardener’s paradise, with its rows of fruit bushes, its well-stocked borders, its small fishpond and its vegetable beds. But it was Aunt May who was the gardener, not her, and Aunt May—

Georgia swallowed the angry tears gathering in her throat as she remembered the look on her aunt’s face when they had first come to look at the cottage. It had been that look of almost childlike wonder and pleasure which had pushed Georgia into taking the final step of committing herself to buy the cottage, even though she knew she could barely afford it. She had bought it for Aunt May. They had had nearly three months in it before Aunt May’s health had started to deteriorate, before the doctors had started talking about a further operation, before it had become necessary for Aunt May to have far more intense nursing than Georgia could provide.

Refusing to allow what she knew to be tears of self-pity to fall, Georgia headed for the stairs, carrying the work she had collected. She knew without looking at it that it would keep her busy for the rest of the afternoon and for long into the night, but she didn’t care. She needed the money if she was to keep on the cottage, and she had to keep on the cottage for somewhere for Aunt May to come home to when she was eventually able to leave the hospice. And she would leave it. She would come home. She had to.

Tiredly, Georgia went upstairs to the small boxroom which housed her computer. The cottage was old, and its loft space had been home to many hundreds of generations of house martins. The latest occupants scratched busily and noisily above her head while she worked. At first they had disturbed and alarmed her, but now she had grown used to the noise, and almost found it companionable. The cottage had originally been used to house agricultural workers, but had been sold off by its original owner, together with the land on which it stood. A prime site for development, the estate agents had told her. With so much land the cottage could be extended. Its privacy was virtually guaranteed, surrounded as it was by farmland, and at the bottom of a track which went virtually nowhere. But Georgia couldn’t have afforded to extend it even if she had wanted to. She could barely afford the mortgage repayments, and then there was the cost of the hospice and her own living expenses, plus running the small car which was an absolute necessity now with Aunt May in the hospice.

Her head was beginning to ache, the letters on the screen in front of her beginning to swim and blur. She rubbed her eyes tiredly and glanced at her watch, unable to believe how long she had been working. Her whole body ached, her bones feeling almost bruised as she moved uncomfortably in her chair.

She had lost weight in these last few months, weight some might say she could ill afford to lose. She wasn’t a tall woman, barely five feet five, with small delicate features that were now beginning to have the haunted, pinched look of someone under severe stress.

Her fair hair, which in London she had always kept perfectly groomed in a slick, neat hairstyle, had grown down on to her shoulders; she had neither the money nor the energy to do anything about getting it cut. The expensive London highlights had been replaced by the natural streaked effect of sunlight, just as her skin had gained a soft peachy warmth from that same exposure. She had never thought of herself as a particularly sensual or sexually attractive woman, but then she had never wanted to be, being quite content with the neatness of her oval-shaped face and the seriousness of her grey eyes.

She had her admirers: men who—like her—were too busy climbing the corporate ladder to want any kind of permanent commitment, men who, while admiring her and wanting her company, appreciated her single-minded determination to concentrate on her career. Men who respected her.

Yes, her career had been the sole focus of her life—until she had realised how ill Aunt May was. At first her aunt had protested that there was no need for her to go to such lengths—to give up her career, her well-structured life—but Georgia hadn’t listened to her. It wasn’t out of some grim sense of duty that she had made her decision, as one of her London friends had intimated. On the contrary, it had been out of love. Nothing more, nothing less—and there had not been one second of time since that decision had been made when she had regretted its making. All she did regret was that she had been so busy with her own life that she hadn’t realised earlier what was happening to her aunt. She would never be able to forgive herself that piece of selfishness, even though Aunt May had reassured her time and time again that she herself had known about and ignored certain warning signs, certain omens, which should have alerted her to seek medical help earlier than she had.

The sound of a car coming down the bumpy track that led to the cottage alerted her to the arrival of her potential lodger. He was someone who apparently needed accommodation locally for a few months while he sorted out the financial affairs of a small local company his city-based group had recently taken over.

Georgia knew very little about the man himself, other than that the agency for whom she worked had been able to vouch for him as someone eminently respectable and trustworthy. When she had expressed doubts that someone as highly placed and wealthy as the chairman of a progressive and profitable group would want to lodge in someone else’s home rather than rent somewhere, Louise Mather, who ran the agency, had informed her that Mitch Fletcher did not fit into the normal stereotype of the successful entrepreneur-cum-businessman mould and that, when he had approached her for help with the additional staff he needed to recruit, he had told her that all he needed was somewhere to sleep at night and where he would remain relatively undisturbed by the comings and goings of the other members of the household. For that he was prepared to pay very well indeed and, as Louise herself had pointed out when she had urged Georgia to think seriously about taking him on as a lodger, he was the answer to all her financial problems.

Wearily Georgia stood up, clutching the back of her chair when she went slightly dizzy. She had not, she realised, eaten anything since suppertime last night, and even then she had pushed away the meal she had made barely touched.

Perhaps the discipline of having to provide meals for a lodger might force her to eat more sensibly. In these last few weeks since her aunt had gone into the hospice, she had found preparing and then eating her solitary meals more and more of a burden. Some evenings, once she returned from her final visit of the day to the hospice, she felt far too drained of energy and emotionally wrought-up to bear to eat, and yet logically and intelligently she knew that she needed the energy that came from a healthy well-balanced diet.

She glanced out of the window and saw the car stop outside the front gate. A steel-grey BMW saloon, it looked sleekly, almost arrogantly out of place outside her humble home.

As she went downstairs she reflected that this Mitch Fletcher was probably writing the cottage off as unsuitable even before she opened the door. She did not, she acknowledged as she went towards the front door, really want the hassle, the responsibility, of sharing her home with someone else. She was afraid that the inevitable inroads it would make into her life would somehow threaten the need she felt to devote every second of her spare time either to being with her aunt or willing her to get better, to recover and come home.

When she opened the door the cool words of greeting and introduction hovering on her lips fled in disordered confusion as she recognised the man standing there.

As he stepped forward, Georgia recognised that, infuriatingly, she had somehow or other by her silence lost control of the situation—because it was he who broke the silence, extending his hand towards her and saying, ‘Miss Barnes? Mitchell Fletcher. I understand from Louise Mather that you have a room you’d be prepared to let. I think she’s explained the position to you: I’m looking for somewhere temporary to stay while I’m working in the area.’

As he spoke, he came forward, and Georgia discovered that she was stepping back almost automatically, allowing him to walk into the hallway.

Until he suddenly stopped, she hadn’t realised that the shadows in her small hallway had cloaked her features from him, and that he had not, like her, had the benefit of that instant recognition.

Now, as he focused on her, she saw from his lightning change of expression that he had recognised her from their unfortunate encounter earlier in the day and, moreover, that he was not exactly pleased to be seeing her again.

His reaction to her brought all her earlier guilt and discomfort flooding back. Before, when she had so rudely ignored the brief moment of shared amusement he had offered her, she had comforted herself with the knowledge that they were not likely to meet again and that his awareness of her bad temper and unpleasantness was something that was unlikely to be reinforced by another encounter. But she had been wrong and, as she felt her skin flushing as the coolness in his eyes reminded her of just how unpleasant she had been, she had to subdue an extremely childish impulse to close the door between them and shut him out so that she wouldn’t have to face that extremely uncomfortable scrutiny.

It seemed that he was waiting for her to speak and, since he had now stepped into her hall, she had no option but to at least go through the motions of pretending that this morning simply had not happened, and that neither of them had already made up their minds that there was simply no way they could ever share a roof...

‘Yes, Louise has explained the situation to me,’ Georgia agreed. ‘If you’d like to come into the kitchen we can discuss everything.’

She had deliberately asked Louise not to mention her aunt or the latter’s illness to Mitch Fletcher, not wanting it to seem as though she was inviting his pity.

Late afternoon sunshine flooded the comfortable kitchen. It was her aunt’s favourite room, reminiscent, so she had told Georgia the first time they viewed the cottage, of the home she had known as a girl. On hearing that, Georgia had ruthlessly changed her mind about replacing the kitchen’s ancient Aga with something more modern and getting rid of its heavy free-standing kitchen cupboards and dresser. Instead, she had done everything she could to reinforce Aunt May’s pleasure in the room’s homeliness—even if she did sometimes find that scouring the porous stone sink had a disastrous effect on her nails, and that the Aga, while giving off a delicious warmth, was not always as efficient as the modern electric oven she had had in her London flat. Maybe it was just that she was not accustomed to using it... Whatever, there had been several expensive mistakes before she had begun to appreciate its charms.

Once inside the kitchen, she waited, expecting to see distaste and scorn darkening Mitchell Fletcher’s astonishingly masculine golden eyes as he compared the kitchen to the marvels of modern technology to which he was no doubt accustomed. To her surprise he seemed to approve of the room, stroking the surface of the dresser and commenting, ‘Mid-nineteenth century, isn’t it? A very nice piece too... Solid and well made. A good, plain, unpretentious piece of furniture without any unnecessary frills and fuss about it. Good design is one of my hobby horses,’ he enlightened her. ‘That’s why—’ He broke off. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sure you don’t want to hear my views on modern furniture,’ he told her drily, adding in a more ironic tone, ‘And I know you won’t want me to waste too much of your time.’

She thought he was referring to her behaviour earlier in the day and could feel her face growing warm until he added, ‘Louise did warn me that you would want to keep this interview short. In fact she stressed that you were looking for a lodger who made as few demands on your time as possible.’ He was eyeing her in an odd way, with a mingling of cynicism and curiosity, as he asked her, ‘If it isn’t too personal a question, why exactly do you want a lodger?’

Georgia was too tired to lie and, besides, what did it matter what he thought? They both knew that he was not going to want to stay here. ‘I need the money,’ she told him shortly.

There was a brief pause and then he said wryly, ‘Well, that’s honest at least. You need the money, but I suspect that you most certainly do not want the company...’

For some reason his perception made her shift uncomfortably, almost as though a burr had physically attached itself to her skin and was irritating her, making her want to shrug off his allegation. ‘As Louise told you, I don’t have time to waste, Mr Fletcher. I’m sorry you’ve had an unnecessary journey out here, but in the circumstances I don’t think—’

‘Hang on a minute!’ he interrupted her. ‘Are you trying to tell me that you’ve changed your mind, that you don’t now want a lodger?’

Georgia stared at him. ‘Well, you can hardly want to lodge here...’

‘Why not?’ he demanded, watching her piercingly.

Georgia didn’t know what to say. She could feel the heat scorching her skin, turning her face poppy-red. ‘Well, the cottage is out of the way...and very small, and I expect...at least I assume—’

‘It never does to make assumptions,’ he interrupted her smoothly. Too smoothly, Georgia recognised uncomfortably. ‘And if you think that I’m the kind of man to be deterred by what happened this morning... You don’t have to like me, Miss Barnes—in fact to be honest with you the one thing that did tend to put me off was the fact that you are a young, single woman.’ He ignored her outraged gasp, continuing silkily, ‘I don’t mean to condemn your whole sex for the silliness of a very small minority, but I’m sure you’ll appreciate that, until meeting you, I was concerned that you might well be a member of that small minority—’

Georgia couldn’t listen to any more. ‘If you think that I’m looking for a lodger for any reason other than the fact that I need the money—’ she began.

Without seeming to raise his voice, he cut through her angry demand to say coolly, ‘Certainly not—now that I’ve met you. I’d like to see the room if I may, please...’

He wanted to see the room! Georgia stared at him. She had been so sure that he would not want to stay. She was still so sure that he wouldn’t want to stay!

Angrily she led the way upstairs, opening the door into the spare bedroom. ‘The cottage only has one bathroom,’ she warned him curtly.

He had been looking out of the window at the garden. Now he turned round, looking very tall against the low slope of the dormer windows. He had been looking out at the garden and now, as he studied her, Georgia felt an uncomfortable frisson of sensation prickle warningly over her skin. This man would, she recognised with a small shock of unease, make a very formidable adversary.

An adversary? Why should she think of him in those terms? All she had to say was that she had changed her mind and that the room was no longer available, and he would be gone—safely out of her life.

‘That’s all right. I’m an early riser and likely to be gone by seven-thirty most mornings. Louise tells me you work from home?’

The question, so neatly slipped in under her guard, had her focusing on his face in surprised bewilderment, as though she were not quite sure where it had come from or why.

‘Rather unusual in this day and age, to find a woman of your age and skills, living in such a remote spot and working from home...’

Something about the cynical way his mouth twisted while he spoke made her reply defensively, almost aggressively, ‘I have my reasons.’

‘Yes, I’m sure you do,’ he agreed suavely.

Another shock skittered down her spine. He knew about her aunt, but how? Why? Surely—