Time For Trust

She was desperately trying to distract herself, to bring herself back on an even keel, and so missed the sudden tension of his body, the brief hesitation as he replied, ‘Chance, really. I’d been looking for a house outside London for some time, and then someone mentioned this village.’

‘Someone mentioned it?’ Jessica looked at him, frowning, and then her frown cleared. ‘Oh, you mean your estate agents. Well, they must have been relieved to have sold the Court. It’s been empty for almost two years, and it’s been badly vandalised.’

‘You don’t have to tell me that,’ Daniel told her wryly. ‘When you feel up to it, I’d like to have your views on how best to redesign the kitchen. My existing builder is a bit short on imagination, and I want to avoid the stereotyped blandness so prevalent among kitchen designers. It will be a good-sized room: two rooms, really, since I’m having the wall between it and what was at one time the housekeeper’s room knocked down.’

Gradually the sexual tension was easing from her body, to be replaced by a genuine interest in his plans for the house. When he glanced at his watch and informed her that it was almost seven o’clock she could hardly believe it.

‘Will you be OK if I leave you for long enough to go and collect a few things?’ he asked her. ‘I could ask Mrs G to sit with you…’

Jessica shook her head. ‘I’ll be fine. Really, you don’t need to stay overnight. I—’

‘I’m staying,’ he told her gently. ‘And don’t you dare move from that sofa until I get back. Remember what the doctor said about not straining the muscles.’

It wasn’t very difficult to obey him; in fact, it wasn’t any hardship at all to simply sit there and give in to the luxury of day-dreaming about the promises that had been implicit in almost everything he had said to her.

She had never believed this would happen to her—that she would meet someone and fall in love so quickly and intensely that within a few short hours it would be impossible to imagine her life without him—but it had happened, and not just to her, but to him as well.

She closed her eyes and gave in to the temptation of imagining what it would feel like to have his mouth moving on hers, his hands touching her skin, exploring her body with all the delicate skill his touch had already promised.

A rash of goose-bumps broke out under her skin, a tense, coiling sensation invading her lower stomach.

Physical desire…Up until now she had been a stranger to such feelings, so what was it about this particular man encountered in such harrowing circumstances that had led to its birth now?

Were the feelings, both emotional and physical, which she was experiencing genuine, or were they some kind of by-product of her fear?

Deep within her a part of herself recognised that alongside her burgeoning happiness ran a fine thread of cautious reluctance, as though that part of her was unwilling to allow itself to be committed to what she was feeling for Daniel.

She was too exhausted to dwell on the matter. Upstairs in her workroom, the phone rang. That was her business line, and by rights she ought to go up there and answer it. She was doing quite well now, but not so well that she could afford to turn down business.

Daniel had been so kind to her. So caring. Surely far more so than she, as a stranger to him, merited, and it struck her that he himself must be a very well-adjusted human being to be able to reach out so readily and warmly to a stranger, disregarding the possibility of their rejection. She realised that in similar circumstances she would most probably not have offered the same Good-Samaritan-inspired kindness, not because she would not have wanted to, but because she would have been afraid, as she suspected many people were afraid, of having her offer misconstrued or, even worse, resented. If she had spurned Daniel’s kindness and retreated into the prickly sharp shell she normally used to conceal her true self from strangers, she suspected that he would have treated her reaction with equally considerate and thoughtful kindness.

He was plainly a man of intense generosity of spirit, and it humbled her that he should choose to treat her as his equal when she knew that inwardly she was nothing of the sort. She tended to hold even people who knew her at a distance, deliberately refusing to let them trespass too far.

Daniel was the first person in a long time whom she had actually wanted to draw into her life.