She wound down her window a couple of inches. The air was so cold it almost hurt to breathe, but it also didn’t smell like him.
No contest, really.
‘There are two cottages side by side. Josh, who looks after the cellar door, lives in the other one. He usually heads into town to eat so you’ll be able to catch a ride with him if you want.’ Be damned if she was going to be expected to play chauffeur.
‘If there’s a bed, I might just settle for that.’
She glanced across at him, seeing lit up in the headlights of a passing car the weariness that hovered around his eyes and weighed down on his eyelids. ‘Worn out after a long day travelling in first class? You have my sympathy. It must be hell.’
‘I’m surprised you’d give me the time of day, let alone your sympathy.’
She snorted and manoeuvred the car around a bend. ‘Yeah, you’re right. You don’t have my sympathy.’
Beside her she sensed the shift in his body as he angled himself on the seat. She sensed his eyes on her, and could almost feel the curve of his lips in a smile. She didn’t dare look, keeping her eyes on the road ahead instead, but she could feel him watching her and she waited, her heart thumping. She didn’t know much about this man, but she’d figured enough to know he wouldn’t let her have the last word. ‘You don’t like me,’ he said.
She shifted the gears down before turning into the cottage car park and pulling up in the space outside, ratcheting up the stiff hand brake, thinking about his words and their delivery. He’d made it sound like a challenge, like he was calling her on it, daring her to agree or to back down making excuses.
She wasn’t about to back down.
‘Don’t take it personally.’
‘No? How am I supposed to take it?’
She shrugged. ‘As a fact of life,’ she said, swinging open her door. She found a smile then and turned. ‘Like breathing. It just happens.’ And then she jumped out.
She didn’t wait for him. She grabbed the basket from the back seat and marched up the pathway, searching in her pocket for the key. If she had a choice, she’d hand over the key and leave him to it, but there was a crotchety water heater to turn on that had a degree of difficulty of three-point-five. There was no point even trying to explain it. He’d never fit under the bed anyway, where the damn thing was located.
So she let herself in and snapped on lights and then a gas heater as she went. It was cold inside the small cottage, although the vibe was cosy and embracing. It was decorated for the period, with overstuffed chairs and ruffled curtains and character in every nook and cranny, and Holly loved it. When she’d been a kid, before they’d done it up, she’d used it as her cubby house and her bolt hole. Strange to remember that now, she thought as she shivered. ‘It’ll soon warm up,’ she flung over her shoulder as she bustled through the kitchen, dropping the basket on the small table. ‘Have a look around, I just have to turn on the hot water and then it’s all yours.’
She looked over her shoulder, satisfied when she saw him prowling around the sitting room, picking up a magazine from the table. Excellent. If she was really quick, she’d be out of there before he realised what she was doing. And the sooner she got the hot water service turned on, the sooner she’d be back in the car and on her way home and maybe then she might be able to relax for ten minutes.
Just as soon as she got this hot water system switched on …
She dropped down on all fours beside the bed and then even lower before shimmying beneath. The switch had been set right in the middle at the back of the bed, just above the skirting. ‘Just for laughs,’ the electrician had joked when they’d finally found out where he’d put it and called him on it.
Yeah, it was funny all right.
She squirmed closer to the wall, found the switch, flicked it on and, mission accomplished, started backing out.
The cottage was tiny. Done out in girlie fabrics and filled with sofas loaded with cushions that looked like flowers. So not his thing. He dropped the magazine he’d picked up, a tourist guide that was not his thing either, and headed into the kitchen. He saw the basket where she’d dropped it, and hung his coat on a chair nearby, but Holly was nowhere to be seen. Until he went through another doorway and found her.
Or at least found her bottom half poking out from under the bed, a bottom half that was suddenly wriggling backwards, a bottom lifting once clear of the bed.
An unexpectedly shapely bottom.
And if he’d thought her shapeless polo top had been hiding secrets beneath, her khaki work pants had clearly been hiding a hell of a lot more.