Valentine's Night

He broke off as Sorrel gasped in indignation.

‘Something wrong,’ he asked her, lifting dark eyebrows.

‘When I want your opinion on my body, I’ll ask for it,’ Sorrel told him grimly.

‘No need to get so uptight. I was just curious to know why a woman like you hasn’t had a lover. When I was your age …’

He was somewhere in his mid-thirties, Sorrel guessed, although, with the deep tanning of his skin and the tiny lines that fanned out from his eyes, it was hard to be accurate. There was certainly no grey in his hair. No discernible excess of flesh on his hard-muscled frame.

‘I have no wish to know about your sexual experiences,’ Sorrel told him frigidly.

‘No man in your life, eh? Now …’

Sorrel had had enough. ‘As a matter of fact, there is a man in my life. I’m engaged to be married, and if Andrew has too much respect for me to … to rush me into bed, then …’

She broke off as she heard his laughter. Hot spots of colour burned in her face as she glared at him.

‘Too much respect? More like not enough guts,’ Val told her forthrightly. ‘What kind of man is he?’

‘A decent, respectable, hardworking kind,’ Sorrel told him grittily. ‘Not that it’s any business of yours.’

He was looking at her rather oddly, an almost devilish glint of amusement in his eyes.

‘I see. And I suppose the sober, respectable … worthy fiancé would not approve of you spending the next three days and nights alone here with me?’

Sorrel opened her mouth to protest that Andrew would understand, and then she remembered how very narrow-minded he could be on occasions, how much importance he placed on respectability, and she swallowed back the words. He would understand, of course he would. And no one outside the family need know. The kind of speculation and gossip that Andrew would abhor wasn’t going to arise because no one outside the family would ever know, would they?

She looked up and found that Val was watching her with cool amusement.

‘Of course Andrew would understand,’ she lied, tilting her chin and staring him down. ‘He trusts me implicitly, and besides, there’s no question of anything … well, illicit. It’s just that there’s been a mistake.’

‘He trusts you, but he doesn’t desire you. Sounds an odd basis for a lifetime commitment to me.’

‘Just because sex isn’t the most important part of our relationship, that’s no reason to sneer at it,’ Sorrel told him angrily.

‘As far as I understand it, sex doesn’t form any part of your relationship,’ Val threw back at her. ‘Lord, I thought your kind had gone out with the Victorians. What do the rest of the family think about this engagement?’

‘They … they like Andrew,’ Sorrel fibbed valiantly.

‘You don’t sound so certain. It seems to me that this engagement of yours has been a bad mistake.’

Sorrel couldn’t believe her ears. She knew that Australians believed in frank speaking, but this was sheer rudeness. Thoroughly affronted, she opened her mouth to tell him that her private life was no concern of his when he forestalled her by changing the subject and saying, ‘Any chance of anything to eat? We were late landing at Heathrow, and I never eat plane food.’

He made it sound as though he travelled a great deal, and Sorrel felt a faint unwanted stirring of curiosity about him.

His clothes, now that she looked at him properly, were expensive and well-tailored, despite their casual appearance. Looking at him, it would be impossible to judge just where he was from or what he did for a living.

‘I’ve got a home-made shepherd’s pie I could heat up. It will take about half an hour in the range.’ She went to put it in. ‘Your letter said that you had to come to England on business,’ she went on abruptly. ‘What kind of business?’

‘I have a boat-building business in Perth, and I’m over here to check out a new British technique for making super-lightweight craft.’

‘And you thought you’d look us up … just like that?’

Her aggression made him smile mockingly at her. Was there no way she could get under his skin the way he did hers? Sorrel thought crossly as she got the pie and put it in the oven, this time taking care to use protective oven gloves.

‘Ancestry’s very big back home at the moment. Something to do with the recent bicentennial fever, I guess. I knew that my family came originally from Wales, and I thought it might be interesting to have a go at seeing how far I could trace it back.’

‘Llewellyn’s a very common Welsh name,’ Sorrel pointed out.

‘I have a great-aunt who swears that she remembers hearing from her grandmother how her husband’s father came originally from this part of Wales. He was a Daniel, too, like your father. And the family diaries—’

‘Your family keep diaries, too?’ Sorrel’s face lit up, her animosity forgotten. ‘Oh, I’d love to see them. Ma asked Simon to bring ours down. She thought you might be interested in reading them. It’s a tradition that the women of the family always keep a diary.’ She stopped, annoyed with herself for forgetting how much she disliked him.

‘What’s this?’ he asked her suddenly, staring at her tapestry frame.

She told him reluctantly, but her love and enthusiasm for her craft refused to give way to her desire to be abrupt with him.

‘I’ve done the first three seasons,’ she heard herself telling him, in a voice that was suddenly, for no reason at all, slightly breathy. It couldn’t be because he had bent his head over her work, just in the direction she was pointing, so that his dark hair brushed against her wrist, causing tiny tingling sensations to race along her veins, heating her entire body, could it? No, of course not. It was unthinkable … ridiculous … impossible that she should react to this abrasive Australian in a way that she had never reacted to Andrew, the man she had agreed to marry.

Various alien and disturbing thoughts filled her mind, making the colour come up under her clear Celtic skin.

‘And the final season?’ Val prompted.

‘Winter,’ she told him curtly.

‘Yes … The last time I experienced snow like this was in the Canadian Rockies during my university days. I hadn’t realised you could have this kind of weather so late in the year.’

‘Half a dozen or more climbers who think the same thing lose their lives in these mountains almost every year,’ Sorrel told him. ‘You were lucky not to be trapped inside your car. Why did you go to university in Canada?’

He raised his eyebrows a little but, if he could ask her impertinent questions about her relationship with Andrew, then she was quite sure that she could reciprocate. It was odd how curious she was about him. Dangerous, too. She shivered a little, a tiny frisson of unfamiliar apprehension-laced excitement going through her.

‘I wanted to study geology, and I spent a postgraduate year in the Rockies doing fieldwork.’

‘Geology? I thought you said you built boats.’

‘I do—now. The pie smells as though it’s ready.’

In other words, no more questions. He was adroit at concealing more of himself than he revealed, and even more adroit at getting her to reveal far too much, she acknowledged as she went over to the oven.

The pie was almost ready. There were fresh vegetables to go with it, and rhubarb fool for pudding.

‘We ought to be toasting our new-found cousin-ship,’ Val remarked as he asked Sorrel where he could find the cutlery. ‘Is there anything to drink?’

Her mother had packed a couple of bottles of her home-made wine, and Sorrel produced one of them. She saw his eyebrows lift in a way that was becoming familiar as he studied the label, and she explained to him what elderberry wine was.

‘A resourceful woman, your mother.’

‘She’s a home-maker,’ Sorrel told him, ‘and she thrives on hard work. She’s spent her life doing all the things we’re told turn the female sex into drudges, and yet I’ve never met a more fulfilled woman than my mother. She’s interested in everything and everyone … and she knows so much about the history of the wife’s role in the running of a farm like ours. She sometimes gives talks on it to local WI meetings. She loves it … standing up on the stage, talking to them … and they love her. I asked her a few years ago if she had ever thought what she might have done if she’d had a career. She laughed at me. She said that being married to my father gave her the best of everything: a man whom she loved, his children, the pleasure of running her own home, and the business aspects of keeping the farm accounts, of being free to order her own day, to enjoy the countryside. I know what she means … I don’t think I could ever work for a large organisation with regimented rules and regulations after being my own boss.’