Her throat stung with weak, silly tears. It was almost too much for her to take in that this man, who had every reason in the world for standing aside and letting disaster strike her, was actually reaching out a hand to help her. It confused her, threw her off guard, made an almost painful happiness flower deep inside her.
‘It’s time we got started,’ Neil warned her.
The sun was already up, the air still with the threat of thunder. Trying to gather her scattered wits, Rue told him which rows of flowers needed to be picked; how to pick them and how to put them in the wide trugs she had brought down with her. Trembling a little, she directed him to one row of flowers as she started working on another.
Her awareness of his presence made her tense and clumsy, so that for the first half-hour he was almost outpacing her as they worked, but then gradually her tension slipped away as the need to work as fast as they possibly could overwhelmed everything else. At eleven o’clock, despite the fact that they had been working without a rest from five, they had cleared barely a third of the rows.
‘Time for a break, I think,’ Neil announced, straightening up and stretching.
Her own back felt as though it was on fire, but Rue stubbornly refused to move.
‘There isn’t time,’ she told him grittily, ‘but if you want a rest, go ahead.’
He came over and took the secateurs and the basket away from her.
‘A rest now will give you more energy for later,’ he told her firmly. ‘We’ll go back to the cottage and have something to eat and drink.’ And somehow or other, before she could raise any further objection, Rue found that she was firmly but gently being guided away from the field.
They spent barely half an hour in the kitchen drinking the coffee Rue had made and eating the sandwiches Neil had insisted they both needed. Her back had ceased to feel as though it was on fire and about to break in two, and the tension which had made her deny that she needed a rest had eased as well, and with it the headache that had been threatening.
Unwilling to acknowledge that Neil had been right to insist that they had a rest, Rue walked silently at his side as they headed back to the fields.
‘There’s no need for you to do any more,’ she told him abruptly.
‘That bad, am I?’ he queried ruefully, smiling at her in a way that made her heart suddenly somersault.
Rue shook her head, unwilling to speak in case her voice betrayed her. In point of fact, he had worked so swiftly and efficiently that she herself had been hard put to it to keep pace with him.
Now, despite the fact that there were no clouds in sight, the sky had a brassy cast to it and there was not a breath of air.
‘Phew, you can almost feel the thunder in the air, can’t you?’ Neil commented, tugging off his T-shirt in a movement that made Rue fascinatedly aware of the smooth movement of his muscles. His skin was lightly tanned, the fine, dark hairs covering his chest narrowing down over his stomach.
Rue watched him out of the corner of her eye, wanting to look away and yet somehow unable to do so.
‘Come on, back to work,’ he told her cheerfully, reaching out and placing a firm hard hand on the nape of her neck.
The effect of his touch was electrifying. She could feel a fine tremor start in the pit of her stomach and spread out to every part of her body. His touch scorched her, branded her, and yet she was unable to pull herself away from it, and in some unspoken way he knew what was happening to her. His hand tensed against the back of her neck and then relaxed, his fingers gently caressing her nape.
Rue felt stifled, threatened, and as much terrified by her own reactions to his touch as she was by the fact that he was touching her. She drew a deep breath and pulled away from him, saying shakily, ‘Don’t touch me.’
The brooding look he gave her made her stomach melt, and she had to fight to stop herself being drawn towards him. It was the thunder in the air that was having such an odd effect on her, she told herself shakily, as she turned her back on him and walked away from him. Yes, that must be what it was. It was the threat of thunder and the anxiety that were making her behave so oddly.
They worked until one, and this time it was Rue who called a halt. She must have felt like this before, she acknowledged as she straightened her aching back, but if so she couldn’t remember it. She felt as though she would never be able to walk upright again.
‘Lunch,’ she told Neil briefly, barely able to find the energy to speak.
To her anger, he shook his head, and then motioned towards the clouds gathering on the horizon.
‘If we stop now, we’ll lose half an hour,’ he told her grimly, ‘and by the way that cloud’s moving, we’ve got three hours at the most before the storm hits us.’
As she looked towards the horizon, Rue realised that what he said was true. A sick feeling of despair twisted her stomach and she looked from the sky to the field in front of them. They had worked hard and cleared well over half of the plants that needed cutting, but as she looked at the work which was still to be done, the lines of colour wavered in front of her eyes. She wasn’t going to cry. She couldn’t cry, not now, not in front of him.
Gritting her teeth, she bent back over the seemingly never-ending rows of flowers. Alongside her she could hear Neil working. Horatio growled and whined, moving uneasily.
‘He doesn’t like thunder,’ she told Neil as he straightened his back and looked at the dog. ‘I found him in a thunderstorm. He’d been abandoned,’ she added tersely.
‘Mmm. I bet you didn’t know what sex he was when you took him home,’ Neil responded in a grunt.
Rue felt irrationally hurt, although she knew the jibe was well-deserved. She worked as she had never worked in her life before, and Neil kept pace with her. No, Neil set the pace, she acknowledged tiredly as she saw him move slightly ahead of her and instantly redoubled her own efforts to catch up with him.