‘You should’ve sent Hero off to the knackers when I told you to!’ Brian Whitaker bit out in disgust. ‘Instead you’ve kept him eating his head off in that stable. How can we afford that with the cost of feed what it is?’
‘Chrissie’s very fond of Hero. She’s coming home from uni next week and I wanted her to have the chance to say goodbye.’ Lizzie kept her voice low rather than risk stoking her father’s already irascible temper. The older man was standing by the kitchen table, his trembling hands—the most visible symptom of the Parkinson’s disease that had ravaged his once strong body—braced on the chair back as he glowered at his daughter, his gaunt, weathered face grim with censure.
‘And if you do that, she’ll weep and she’ll wail and she’ll try to talk you out of it again. What’s the point of that? You tried to sell him and there were no takers,’ he reminded her with biting impatience. ‘You’re a bloody useless farmer, Lizzie!’
‘That horse charity across the valley may have a space coming up this week,’ Lizzie told him, barely even flinching from her father’s scorn because his dissatisfaction was so familiar to her. ‘I was hoping for the best.’
‘Since when has hoping for the best paid the bills?’ Brian demanded with withering contempt. ‘Chrissie should be home here helping you, not wasting her time studying!’
Lizzie compressed her lips, wincing at the idea that her kid sister should also sacrifice her education to their daily struggle for survival against an ever-increasing tide of debt. The farm was failing but it had been failing for a long time. Unfortunately her father had never approved of Chrissie’s desire to go to university. His world stopped at the borders of the farm and he had very little interest in anything beyond it. Lizzie understood his reasoning because her world had shrunk to the same boundaries once she had left school at sixteen.
At the same time, though, she adored the kid sister she had struggled to protect throughout their dysfunctional childhood and was willing to take a lot of grief from her father if it meant that the younger woman could enjoy the youthful freedom and opportunities that she herself had been denied. In fact Lizzie had been as proud as any mother when Chrissie had won a place to study Literature at Oxford. Although she missed Chrissie, she would not have wished her own life of back-breaking toil and isolation on anyone she loved.
As Lizzie dug her feet back into her muddy boots a small low-slung shaggy dog, whose oddly proportioned body reflected his very mixed ancestry, greeted her at the back door with his feeding bowl in his mouth.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Archie...I forgot about you,’ Lizzie groaned, climbing out of the boots again to trudge back across the kitchen floor and fill the dog bowl. While she mentally listed all the many, many tasks she had yet to accomplish she heard the reassuring roar of a football game playing on the television in the room next door and some of the tension eased from her slight shoulders. Watching some sport and forgetting his aches and pains for a little while would put her father in a better mood.
Her father was a difficult man, but then his life had always been challenging. In his case hard work and commitment to the farm had failed to pay off. He had taken on the farm tenancy at a young age and had always had to work alone. Her late mother, Francesca, had only lasted a few years as a farmer’s wife before running off with a man she deemed to have more favourable prospects. Soured by the divorce that followed, Brian Whitaker had not remarried. When Lizzie was twelve, Francesca had died suddenly and her father had been landed with the responsibility of two daughters who were practically strangers to him. The older man had done his best even though he could never resist an opportunity to remind Lizzie that she would never be the strong capable son he had wanted and needed to help him on the farm. He had barely passed fifty when ill health had handicapped him and prevented him from doing physical work.
Lizzie knew she was a disappointment to the older man but then she was used to falling short of other people’s expectations. Her mother had longed for a more outgoing, fun-loving child than shy, socially awkward Lizzie had proved to be. Her father had wanted a son, not a daughter. Even her fiancé had left her for a woman who seemed to be a far more successful farmer’s wife than Lizzie could ever have hoped to be. Sadly, Lizzie had become accustomed to not measuring up and had learned to simply get on with the job at hand rather than dwell on her own deficiencies.
She started her day off with the easy task of feeding the hens and gathering the eggs. Then she fed Hero, whose feed she was buying solely from her earnings from working Saturday nights behind the bar of the village pub. She didn’t earn a wage at home for her labour. How could she take a wage out of the kitty every week when the rising overdraft at the bank was a constant worry? Household bills, feed and fuel costs were necessities that had to come out of that overdraft and she was dreading the arrival of yet another warning letter from the bank.
She loaded the slurry tank to spray the meadow field before her father could complain about how far behind she was with the spring schedule. Archie leapt into the tractor cab with her and sat panting by her side. He still wore the old leather collar punched with his name that he had arrived with. When she had found him wandering the fields, hungry and bedraggled, Lizzie had reckoned he had been dumped at the side of the road and, sadly, nobody had ever come looking for him. She suspected that his formerly expensive collar revealed that he had once been a much-loved pet, possibly abandoned because his elderly owner had passed away.
When he’d first arrived, he had hung out with their aging sheepdog, Shep, and had demonstrated a surprising talent for picking up Shep’s skills so that when Shep had died even Brian Whitaker had acknowledged that Archie could make himself useful round the farm. Lizzie, on the other hand, utterly adored Archie. He curled up at her feet in bed at night and allowed himself to be cuddled whenever she was low.
She was driving back to the yard to refill the slurry tank when she saw a long, sleek, glossy black car filtering off the main road into the farm lane. Her brow furrowed at the sight. She couldn’t picture anyone coming in a car that big and expensive to buy the free-range eggs she sold. Parking the tractor by the fence, she climbed out with Archie below one arm, stooping to let her pet down.
That was Cesare’s first glimpse of Lizzie. She glanced up as she unbent and the limo slowed to ease past the tractor. He saw that though she might dress like a bag lady she had skin as translucent as the finest porcelain and eyes the colour of prized jade. He breathed in deep and slow.
His driver got out of the car only to come under immediate attack by what was clearly a vicious dog but which more closely resembled a scruffy fur muff on short legs. As the woman captured the dog to restrain it and before his driver could open the door for him Cesare sprang out and instantly the offensive stench of the farm yard assaulted his fastidious nostrils. His intense concentration trained on his quarry, he simply held his breath while lazily wondering if she smelt as well. When his father had said the Whitaker family was dirt-poor he had clearly not been joking. The farmhouse bore no resemblance to a picturesque country cottage with roses round the door. The rain guttering sagged, the windows needed replacing and the paint was peeling off the front door.
‘Are you looking for directions?’ Lizzie asked as the tall black-haired male emerged in a fluid shift of long limbs from the rear seat.
Cesare straightened and straight away focused on her pouty pink mouth. That was three unexpected pluses in a row, he acknowledged in surprise. Lizzie Whitaker had great skin, beautiful eyes and a mouth that made a man think of sinning, and Cesare had few inhibitions when it came to the sins of sexual pleasure. Indeed, his hot-blooded nature and need for regular sex were the two traits he deemed potential weaknesses, he acknowledged wryly.
‘Directions?’ he queried, disconcerted by the disruptive drift of his own thoughts, anathema to his self-discipline. In spite of his exasperation, his mind conti
nued to pick up on the fact that Lizzie Whitaker was small, possibly only a few inches over five feet tall, and seemingly slender below the wholly dreadful worn and stained green jacket and baggy workman’s overalls she wore beneath. The woolly hat pulled low on her brow made her eyes look enormous as she stared up at him much as if he’d stepped out of a spaceship in front of her.
One glance at the stranger had reduced Lizzie to gaping in an almost spellbound moment out of time. He was simply...stunning from his luxuriant black hair to his dark-as-bitter-chocolate deep-set eyes and strong, uncompromisingly masculine jawline. In truth she had never ever seen a more dazzling man and that disconcertingly intimate thought froze her in place like a tongue-tied schoolgirl.
‘I assumed you were lost,’ Lizzie explained weakly, finding it a challenge to fill her lungs with oxygen while he looked directly at her with eyes that, even lit by the weak spring sunshine, shifted to a glorious shade of bronzed gold. For a split second, she felt as if she were drowning and she shook her head slightly, struggling to think straight and act normally, her colour rising steadily as she fought the unfamiliar lassitude engulfing her.
‘No, I’m not lost... This is the Whitaker farm?’
‘Yes, I’m Lizzie Whitaker...’
Only the British could take a pretty name like Elisabetta and shorten it to something so commonplace, Cesare decided irritably. ‘I’m Cesare Sabatino.’
Her jade eyes widened. His foreign-sounding name was meaningless to her ears because she barely recognised a syllable of it. ‘Sorry, I didn’t catch that...’
His beautifully sensual mouth quirked. ‘You don’t speak Italian?’
‘The odd word, not much. Are you Italian?’ Lizzie asked, feeling awkward as soon as she realised that he somehow knew that her mother had been of Italian extraction. Francesca had actually planned to raise her daughters to be bilingual but Brian Whitaker had objected vehemently to the practice as soon as his children began using words he couldn’t understand and from that point on English had become the only language in their home.
‘Sì, I’m Italian,’ Cesare confirmed, sliding a lean brown hand into his jacket to withdraw a business card and present it to her. The extraordinary grace of his every physical gesture also ensnared her attention and she had to force her gaze down to the card.