The Trusting Game

Mentally, Christa contrasted what he was saying with the lives of some of the people in the villages she had visited in India and Pakistan. There they did not have the luxury of allowing their livestock to become tame pets.

As though he had read her mind, he said quietly, ‘Yes, I know what you’re thinking and you’re probably right, but would you have wanted to be the one to sign the death warrant?’

His perception was beginning to disconcert her.

‘It would depend whose name was on it,’ she told him pithily.

The sound of his laughter surprised and irked her. He was supposed to get offended, angry, to be betrayed by his pride and ego into revealing himself as he really was-not to be tolerantly amused.

Daniel Geshard was dangerous, Christa acknowledged uneasily. His claim that a month on one of his courses would change her entire outlook on life was one she still scathingly discounted. Her own claim to herself that, knowing who he was, or more importantly what he was, there was not the slightest risk of that initial tug of empathy and attraction she had felt towards him being rekindled—that claim was the truth, wasn’t it?

‘What’s wrong?’

Christa tensed against his choice of words—not the impersonal, ‘Is something wrong?’ but the much, much more personal, ‘What’s wrong?’ as though he already knew her so well that it was taken for granted that he knew that something was.

‘What’s wrong?’ She gave him a cold stare. ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ she told him bitingly, ‘apart from the fact that you’ve interrupted me in the middle of some important work, practically forced your way into my home, tried to take total control of my life…’

‘The decision to accept my offer was yours,’ he pointed out easily. ‘You could always have refused.’

Liar, Christa wanted to say. He knew damn well she could not have refused it without totally losing face. As she turned her back to walk away from him she heard him saying to her, ‘You’ll need to pack at least three changes of outdoor clothes, plus a warm weatherproof coat. When we get snow…’

‘Snow?’ Christa stopped and whirled round. ‘It’s October,’ she objected derisively. ‘We don’t get snow in this country in October…’

‘Maybe not, but Wales is a different country and we do get snow, and we’re up in the mountains, high enough to have bad snow as early as September in some years.

‘Did you manage to get walking boots, by the way?’ Daniel called after her.

‘Walking boots?’

‘It was on the list of required clothing,’ he told her.

And the list had no doubt been with the brochure which she had thrown away, Christa acknowledged hollowly. What else had she omitted to discover through that foolish piece of stiff-necked pride?

‘No, I did not manage to get walking boots,’ she enunciated grimly. ‘But then I shan’t need them as I shall not be doing any walking.’

If she had expected him to respond to her challenge by arguing with her she was disappointed…As though she simply hadn’t spoken, he continued easily, ‘Well, don’t worry about it too much. There’s an excellent sports and climbing equipment shop in our local market town. You’ll like visiting it—everyone does. It’s still very much a traditional market town, with a weekly cattle auction. You’ll enjoy it…’

Christa gave him a withering look.

‘I hardly think so,’ she told him dismissively. ‘I’m a city person, I’m afraid…’ It wasn’t really true, but she was beginning to feel not just resentful but, more worryingly, slightly afraid of the way he seemed to be continuously reading her mind, second-guessing her. ‘Watching some bucolic farmers haggling over the sale of a handful of ragged sheep is hardly my idea of pleasure…

‘No?’ The dark eyebrows rose. ‘That isn’t what I’ve heard. Apparently they’ve learned to be extremely wary of the English cloth-lady in the factories of India and Pakistan.’

Christa tensed warily. Where had he learned that?

‘Buying cloth is my job…watching other people buying sheep isn’t. Besides, I thought the ethos behind these courses was that one put aside all thoughts of work and learned, instead, to play,’ she commented mockingly.

‘Our ethos, as you call it, is to teach people, to help people to live well-balanced and fulfilling lives; to learn to acknowledge and accept that the human psyche has other needs besides the more material ones.’

‘Oh, the trauma of the poor stressed-out executive,’ Christa taunted disparagingly. ‘How great his need, how noble the role of the one who eases it for him. There’s a real world peopled by human beings who are starving…dying…’

‘Yes, I do know,’ he told her quietly.

There was a certain note in the quiet male voice which for some reason made Christa flush slightly and look away from him, as though she was the one in error…at fault.

‘I cannot alleviate the ills of the starving—would that I could—but I can help people to come to terms with themselves, to learn to live in harmony with others. If all the world lived in such harmony,’ he told her gently, ‘there would be no wars, or famine.

‘I’ll wait down here for you, shall I?’ he continued.

Christa looked at him blankly. His words had caused her to feel such emotion…He baffled and bewildered her, catching her so repeatedly off guard that she felt like a wooden doll on a string which he manipulated.

Careful, she warned herself as she hurried upstairs, you’re letting him get to you and you mustn’t. Remember what he is, not what he seems to be. He’s a psychologist; he knows how people behave, how they react, and he knows how to project a specific image, how to gain someone’s sympathy and admiration.

But he would soon learn that she wasn’t so easy to deceive, and before her month in Wales was over he would be bitterly regretting his foolish public claim to be able to change her whole outlook on life. God might have wrought such a transformation in St Paul on the road to Damascus, but Daniel Geshard was a mere human being.

A mere human being…She paused, just with one foot on the second flight of stairs, her heart suddenly missing a small beat. There was nothing ‘mere’ about the man, and she would do well to hang on grimly to that fact.

CHAPTER THREE

‘IS THIS it?’ Christa asked in dismay at the ramshackle collection of stone-built, low-roofed buildings beyond the closed farm gate.

‘This’ looked more like a small farmhouse surrounded by farm buildings than a study centre. For starters, from the size of the main building she doubted that it could house more than four or five people.

‘Not exactly,’ he returned calmly, bringing the Land Rover to a halt in front of the gate.

Christa had been startled at first when she had seen the Land Rover. Somehow she had expected him to drive something more…more expensive…more imagereinforcing…A four-wheel-drive vehicle, certainly, but a top-of-the-range model, not this battered vehicle which looked as though it was held together with bits of string.

As he had watched her studying it, Daniel had told her with visible pride that he had rescued and rebuilt the vehicle himself.

‘Yes, it looks like it,’ Christa had agreed grimly, and then had felt oddly mean as she saw the pleasure fade from his eyes. Men did have, somewhere within their make-up, that little-boy eagerness and enthusiasm for certain cherished things.

‘What do you mean, not exactly?’ she asked him suspiciously as he opened the Land Rover door

‘This isn’t the centre,’ he admitted. ‘This is my home…The centre closed down at the end of last month…to give the staff a chance to have a break and to enable the builders to finish work on a new extension.’

‘What…you mean you’ve brought me here under totally false pretences?’ Christa flashed. ‘Well, in that case you can just turn this…this collection of rusty metal and string around and take me back again.’

‘Impossible, I’m afraid,’ Daniel told her calmly. ‘For one thing, I’m almost out of petrol, and Dai won’t be here with a fresh supply for me until some time tomorrow, and for another…it’s too late, Christa,’ he told her quietly, looking at her, watching her. She recognised a small heart-stopping surge of confused emotion—anger because he had deceived her and relief because he was refusing to let her go?

‘You agreed to come here,’ he reminded her, repeating his earlier words to her.

‘I agreed to attend a course held at your centre, not to…what do you mean, all the staff are having a break?’ she questioned him uncertainly.

‘Just that,’ he told her. ‘But you needn’t be concerned; I’m quite happy to conduct your course personally,’ he assured her. ‘In fact,’ he told her, his voice taking on a disturbing husky timbre, ‘I’m positively looking forward to it…’

‘Well, I’m not,’ Christa snapped. ‘And in fact-What’s that?’ she demanded, her eyes rounding with shock as the Land Rover suddenly rocked startlingly from side to side. In her efforts to counteract the rocking effect she reached out instinctively to brace herself against it, one hand pressed against the doorframe, the other…

The other, she recognised, was pressed flat against something much more solid and warm than a doorframe. And that something was Daniel’s chest, his heartbeat a steady regular rhythm beneath her hand.