Valentine's Night

‘I know what you mean,’ Val told her, surprising her. ‘When I started off in mineral exploration, it was very much a free and easy life. You got a job working for a newly formed company. They bought the mineral right to a certain tract of land and sent you out to discover what, if any, value it might have. You lived in the outback … often for weeks at a time, turning in a report when you’d finished the job. But once the boom came, the pleasure went out of it.’

‘Was that why you build boats instead?’

‘Sort of. This wine smells good … Not quite up to our better Australian vineyards’ products, of course.’

‘It’s very potent,’ Sorrel warned him, dishing up their meal and putting a plateful of food in front of him.

It had surprised her a little that he had so readily and naturally helped her with the preparation of the meal, but perhaps if he had lived alone in the outback he was used to fending for himself. She had always thought that Australian men were very chauvinistic, and considered women to be little more than chattels.

Fair-mindedly, she acknowledged that she did not really know enough about the continent or its inhabitants to separate truth from myth, and it was probable that Australian men, like any men, were a mixed and varied bunch of human beings who should not be typecast.

‘This is good,’ Val told her appreciatively, tucking into his food. ‘Your mother’s an excellent cook.’

Sorrel bent her head over her own plate, not telling him that she had made the pie. She enjoyed cooking, and firmly believed that any form of creative achievement could be satisfying when one was well-taught. Although her mother was what was normally referred to as a plain cook, she took a pride in the meals she placed before her family, and she had passed on that pride to Sorrel.

Val had poured them both a glass of wine, and now he put down his knife and fork and picked up his glass, motioning to Sorrel to do the same.

‘To you, Sorrel Llewellyn,’ he toasted her softly. ‘I’m delighted to make your acquaintance … Drink it,’ he urged her when she barely touched her lips to the glass. ‘Otherwise I’m going to think it’s poisoned. You certainly looked at me as though you’d have loved to slip me a glass of hemlock when I first arrived.’

‘It was a shock to discover you were a man,’ Sorrel protested, letting the warming wine slide down her throat. It tasted delicious but, as she well remembered from past occasions, she really did not have a strong enough head to cope with her mother’s potent home-made brews.

Over their meal they talked, or rather Val talked and she listened, so that by the time they were ready for their pudding she was beginning to feel almost lazily content.

She started to get up to take their plates to the sink, but Val forestalled her, announcing that it was his turn to do some work.

As he walked past her chair he refilled her glass and she stared at it owlishly. Was that the third or fourth time he had filled it? She felt too pleasantly hazy to worry … too interested in the stories Val was telling her about his research into the family.

He had already explained to her that his name was Russian in origin, and that his mother had Russian blood. He had three sisters, he had informed her, all of them older than him and all of them married with families.

‘It’s a wonder I didn’t grow up in terror of the female sex,’ he told her with a grin as he handed her a generous helping of rhubarb fool. ‘You wouldn’t believe how much they bullied me.’

‘No, I wouldn’t,’ Sorrel agreed darkly. ‘They probably spoiled you to death.’

‘Not a bit of it,’ he assured her with a grin.

‘What did they think of you coming over here to meet your English relatives?’

‘Oh, they were all for it,’ he told her promptly. ‘In fact, they bet me that I’d probably go back with a …’

‘With a what?’ Sorrel asked him, curious not so much to know what he had been going to say, but the reason he had stopped so abruptly, giving her a look that was almost wary.

‘An English wife,’ he told her smoothly. So smoothly that she felt sure, for some reason, there was something he wasn’t telling her.

But the wine had made her feel so woozy and relaxed that it was too much of an effort to hold on to the thought, and so she let it slip away, asking instead, ‘Why should they think that?’

‘Because that’s what our original Llewellyn ancestor did. He was shipped over as a convict. He stole a loaf of bread. He was lucky it was only one loaf, otherwise he’d have been hanged and not transported, and that would have been the end. He was lucky in being chosen as an overseer by one of the colonists, mainly because he had some knowledge of farming methods—and after he’d served his seven years, he came back to England.’

‘To find a wife?’ Sorrel asked him, fascinated, but for some reason Val seemed reluctant to tell her any more.

‘This is delicious,’ he told her. ‘Is there any more?’

‘Yes. I’ll get you some.’ She stood up and then sat down again abruptly as her legs turned weak and wobbly and the room spun dizzyingly around her.

‘Something wrong?’

‘The wine. I’ve drunk too much of it … It’s so strong.’ And yet it didn’t seem to have affected him, Sorrel noticed.

What she needed now was a couple of cups of strong coffee to sober her up, but when she tried to say as much the words became hopelessly tangled.

‘I think you’d better just come and sit down by the fire,’ Val told her, grinning at her.

‘Not the fire,’ Sorrel mumbled, ‘fresh air.’

‘In this weather? You’re kidding!’

‘Fire needs stoking. Upstairs as well,’ Sorrel told him as she tried to stand up for a second time.

‘Leave everything to me. Hey, it has gone to your head, hasn’t it?’ she heard Val saying in a voice that seemed to hold more of a suspicion of laughter than concern, and then she was swept up into his arms and deposited in front of the range in one of the two easy chairs, her head spinning so badly that she closed her eyes and moaned faintly. It was the wine, of course, and nothing to do with the wholly unexpected sensation of being picked up and carried in Val’s arms, her head resting against his shoulder, her face turned into his skin so that her lips were almost touching the warm brown column of his throat. His skin fascinated her. She wondered woozily if he was tanned all over, and then blushed guiltily at the wantonness of her thoughts.

‘Fire too hot?’ she heard him asking her solicitously, and she opened her eyes reluctantly to find he was leaning over her, arms braced either side of her on the arms of the chair.

His shirt was open at the throat and she was sure she could see dark hair growing there. She had an odd squirmy feeling in her stomach—a sensation hitherto unknown to her. Andrew’s torso was almost hairless, his skin very pale. He hated sunbathing and she remembered had only reluctantly removed his shirt when they had spent a day in Pembrokeshire, walking along the cliffs with Simon and Fiona during the summer. Her brother had laughed at him, Sorrel remembered, and although she knew she hadn’t been meant to see it she had not missed the look of pity Fiona had given her.

Perhaps it was true that Andrew wasn’t a very male man, certainly nothing like as male as Val. She gave a tiny shiver and, to her consternation, felt the hard, calloused weight of Val’s palm against her forehead.

‘Just checking to see if you had a fever,’ he told her when her eyes opened wide.

‘If anyone should have a fever, it would be you,’ she told him crossly. ‘Walking through that snow …’

‘What would you have preferred me to do? Stayed in my car and frozen to death?’

The sensation of pain that struck her astounded her. She looked at him with confused, anguish-glazed eyes and suddenly his face came properly into focus and in his eyes she saw a predatory male look that made her body tense; then she blinked and it was gone, and she knew that she must have imagined it.

‘Bed for you, I think,’ she heard him saying wryly, ‘before you pass out on me down here.’

‘Won’t pass out,’ Sorrel told him indignantly. ‘Can’t—can’t go to bed … not with you …’

She thought she heard him chuckle as he bent to pick her up, but her head was whirling round so much that she had to concentrate all her attention on that.

‘If it bothers you that much, I can always doss down on the floor. It won’t be the first time. I slept rough often enough when I was prospecting.’

‘Prospecting?’ Sorrel questioned him drowsily as he headed for the stairs. She could get quite used to being held in his arms, she decided woozily. There was something very pleasant about the sensation of him all around her. She liked the scent of his body, the maleness of him. It made her want to nestle and cuddle up against him.

‘I’m a geologist, remember?’ he told her.

The stairs were steep, but he reached the top barely out of breath, Sorrel recognised admiringly. She tried to imagine Andrew picking her up and carrying her to bed once they were married, but the image refused to form, and the wine-induced elation spinning through her body suddenly turned to dejection.

She wanted to marry Andrew, she reminded herself. And there was more to marriage than having a husband strong enough to pick her up in his arms. Andrew had different strengths … far more important strengths. But, dredge her brain though she did, she couldn’t for some reason recall just what they were.