A Family of His Own
That, and wet footprints in the dust leaving a trail across the wide oak floorboards. Guilt more than any mission to do good drove her to follow them across the drawing room and into the hall to where they became dusty marks against the stair carpet.
From the floor above came the sound of running water as he took a shower. She found she’d been holding her breath, anticipating disaster, but that at least had the ring of normality about it. She found the kitchen, washed the green plant stains from her hands under the running tap, then filled the kettle and switched it on.
There was a small box of groceries standing on the table containing tea bags, a small loaf, from which a couple of slices had already been taken, and a carton of long-life milk. She put some bread into the toaster and then hunted through the cupboards until she found a plate and a mug.
Everything was covered in a film of dust and, while she ran hot water into the bowl, she looked for some washing-up liquid. There was a bottle, half empty, in a cupboard beneath the draining board. The manufacturer had changed the packaging several years ago and she had the unsettling feeling that Sara Ravenscar had been the last person to touch it.
Pushing aside the thought as ridiculously melodramatic, she swooshed some into the water and began to rinse the dishes.
What had he done? What on earth had he been thinking? Imagining that Sara was waiting for him in the garden. Talking to her. That woman must have thought he was mad when he’d kissed her.
Maybe he was.
Except it was clear that she’d known who he was, had known exactly what he’d been thinking. Was that why she’d let him embrace her? Hadn’t yelled blue murder when he’d kissed her?
Not only had she not struggled, screamed, slapped him, but she’d kissed him back, and for a moment, just a moment, he’d believed that he’d woken up from an endless nightmare. With the soft warmth of a woman’s mouth against his, hot life had raced through his veins and he’d felt like a man again.
‘Fool!’ He smashed his fist against the tiled wall. ‘Idiot!’ Would he never learn?
There was no hope, only despair that he’d mistaken a stranger for the woman he’d loved. Still loved. Beyond the superficial similarity of colouring, height, they were nothing alike. He’d allowed his mind to trick him. This woman, Kay Lovell,—‘Kay Lovell’—he said the name out loud to reinforce the message—was, if anything a little taller, nowhere near as thin. Her eyes were grey rather than blue. Her hair hadn’t had the heavy swing, the bright polish…
And she’d let him kiss her out of pity.
He grabbed for the soap, used it to wash his hair, rid himself of the fresh-air smell of her. Brushed his teeth to rid himself of the taste of her mouth on his.
There was no simple remedy for the pounding in his veins. The shocking response of his body to a total stranger.
That was a betrayal he was going to have to live with.
And he grabbed a towel, wrapped it about his waist. Then, since he’d only brought up his overnight bag, he went downstairs to fetch the rest of his luggage.
Kay made tea in the mug, then began buttering the toast. When she looked up, Dominic Ravenscar was standing in the doorway, watching her, his expression blank, unreadable. As if he’d had years of practising keeping his thoughts, his feelings, to himself.
He’d showered. His dark hair was damp and tousled where he hadn’t bothered to comb it—well, he hadn’t been expecting company—and he was naked but for a towel wrapped about his waist. There was little of him she couldn’t see and it was plain that this was a man who’d lost every bit of softness from his body as well as his heart.
‘You’re still here.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with your eyesight,’ she agreed. As the words left her lips she groaned inwardly. Even twenty-twenty vision could be fooled by the heart.
‘Did Greg send you?’ he demanded.
‘Greg?’ She sucked the butter from her thumb, a distraction from the spare, sinewy shoulders, ribs that she’d be able to count with her fingers if she walked them down his chest. There was not an ounce of spare flesh on him.
‘Did he ask you to keep an eye on me?’
‘No one sent me.’
‘You’re just an all-round busybody and do-gooder, is that it?’
What did she expect? Gratitude?
Had she been grateful when Amy had found her, taken her home, found ways to get her to eat—even if it was only chocolate; ways to get Polly into her arms and her to start living again?
No.
She’d just wanted to be left alone. She’d just wanted to die. She thought perhaps they had more in common than he’d ever know. He just wanted her to go, forget he’d ever set eyes on her, forget that he’d kissed her. No doubt he thought that being rude was not only the quickest way to get rid of her, but the most likely way to ensure that she’d stay out of his hair.
She’d tried that approach, too. In fact his response brought her own hateful ingratitude shamefully to mind. She’d been rude, too. Vilely rude. It hadn’t worked. Amy had seen through the anger to the pain and stuck with it.
She dunked the tea bag, added milk to the mug and offered it to him. ‘You haven’t got any sugar, so I assume you don’t take it. You haven’t got any marmalade for the toast, either.’
‘I haven’t got much of anything except you,’ he said, ignoring the mug. ‘You, I have altogether too much of.’
‘That’s how it is with us do-gooders,’ she said, putting the tea down on the table where he could reach it. ‘I’ll bring you a pot of mine. It’s very good. It won best-in-show at the summer fête.’
‘Congratulations, but don’t put yourself out. I don’t like marmalade.’
‘Strawberry jam?’ she offered. It was as if her mouth had a mind of its own. ‘I used organic, home-grown strawberries. It won best in its class.’ She snapped her mouth shut.
‘What do you want?’ he persisted.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Absolutely nothing.’
‘Good, because that’s what you’ve got.’ And he picked up the tea and tipped it down the sink.
She swallowed, stunned at how much that had hurt. But then it was meant to. She knew all the moves.
‘You prefer coffee?’ She didn’t make the mistake of offering to make him some, but said, ‘I’ll remember that for next time. In the meantime, if you need anything you know where to find me.’ And without waiting for him to respond, to tell her to get lost, stay away, she walked back out into the garden.
Back to the witch hazel she’d been rescuing when he’d kissed her.
Her head told her to keep going, but she refused to leave a job half done and she knelt down to finish her rescue mission. Only when she attempted to unravel the tightly coiled stem of the bindweed did she discover that her hands were shaking so much that she was forced to tuck them beneath her arms to hold them still.
Dom picked up the toast and, tight-lipped, he tossed it in the bin. Then he picked up his bags and carried them upstairs to the bedroom he’d shared for one sweet, perfect year with Sara.
Last night the only scent he’d been aware of was the lingering ghost of her perfume clinging to her clothes.
He dropped his suitcase and strained to find it again, to cling to that last lingering essence of the woman he loved.
But it evaded him. Today, the only smell was that of a house locked up and unlived-in for too long. And he opened a window.
CHAPTER THREE
“Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
Gerard Manley Hopkins
DOM LINGERED at the window to breathe in the fresh, green scent of the garden, of newly turned earth, and looked beyond the walls to where the picture-perfect village was laid out before him.
Nothing had changed.
Not the carefully mown section of the village green where cricket was played every weekend in the summer before the teams retired to the pub to continue their rivalries on the dart board. Not the rougher grassland of the common, where willows dipped over the stream-fed pond that teemed with tadpoles in the spring, moorhens nested and a donkey was, even now, cropping grass on the end of a long tether.
It could even be the same donkey.
It was exactly the right place to bring up a family, Sara had said, utterly charmed from the moment they’d set eyes on the place. It was so safe.
But nothing was that perfect and every Eden had its serpent. Hidden, insidious dangers. He looked down into the wreck of the garden. It had taken everything from him. To look at its beauty had been an agony and he’d run from it. But Sara had loved it and to see it like this, neglected, overgrown, was somehow worse.
A movement on the green caught his attention and he looked away, grateful for the distraction. At least he was until he realised that it was Kay Lovell heading for the village-shop-cum-post-office-cum-everything, to fetch a pint of milk, or the Sunday newspaper.
The warmth of her smile reached his window as she stopped to speak to someone, exchange the time of day. No prizes for guessing the subject of their conversation. The news that the house was on the market would be the hot subject of gossip this morning. By tomorrow, he had no doubt, everyone in the village would know that he was back, courtesy of his blackberry-raiding neighbour. Back home and losing his mind.
He watched her continue on her errand, long-limbed and lithe, striding across the green, and wondered again how he could ever have mistaken her for Sara. They were not in the least bit alike.
It had been just a trick of the imagination, tiredness perhaps, that had fooled him. Or maybe just that she was there, in Sara’s place, doing the things that she would have been doing…
He wrenched his gaze away from her and looked back at the garden. From above, he could clearly see the peach tree freed from its bramble prison, the fresh, clear patch of earth around the shrub where she’d been weeding, and, furious with himself—with her—he clattered down the stairs, raced down the garden, sliding the bolt into place on the gate before turning and leaning with his back to it, eyes closed, while he regained his breath. He didn’t want her, or any more sightseers, invading the privacy of the garden. It wasn’t fit to be seen. And with a roar of anguish he grabbed the agent’s For Sale sign and wrenched the post out of the ground.
Kay dropped her newspaper on the dresser. With a rare morning to herself, she’d planned a lazy hour with her feet up with the colour supplement and the gardening pages, but now she was home she was all of a twitch and there was no way she could sit still.
Never mind. She’d work off her nervous energy doing something practical. She had pastry to make, harvest pies to fill and freeze, and there was no time like the present.
Forget Dominic Ravenscar, she told herself as she washed her hands and got out the scales. Forget the way he’d kissed her. It wasn’t her he’d been kissing, she reminded herself as she shovelled flour from the bin onto the scales with hands that weren’t altogether steady.
He’d thought she was his wife. A ghost, for pity’s sake.
And she’d been tempted to play amateur psychologist? She should be grateful that he’d made it absolutely clear that he never wanted to set eyes on her again.
She took a deep, steadying breath, then dumped another scoop into the scales.
What the devil did she think she could do in ten minutes with a cup of tea and a slice of toast, anyway? She wasn’t Amy Hallam with her gift for seeing through to the heart of the matter. For making you see it too.
She stared blankly at the pile of flour and tried to recall what she was doing.
Pastry.
She was making pastry.
Right.
‘He couldn’t have made it plainer that he didn’t want me anywhere near him or his garden,’ she said. Asleep on top of the boiler, Mog wasn’t taking any notice, but talking to the cat had to be better than talking to herself. Marginally.
‘He didn’t actually tell me what I could do with my “tea and sympathy”,’ she continued, despite the lack of feline encouragement. ‘Not in so many words. But then why would he bother, when his actions spoke for him? Loud and clear.’
The cat opened one eye, sighed and closed it again.
‘OK, so you had to be there.’
And what exactly was she complaining about, anyway? So he’d poured away the tea she’d made him. That was rude by anyone’s standards, but, to be fair, he hadn’t asked her to make it. Hadn’t asked for her concern, either. She’d foisted herself on him and he’d made no bones about unfoisting her in double-quick time.
She should be relieved. She’d got momentarily carried away with noble aspirations that were not in the least bit appreciated. She was the one who was out of line. Luckily, he had made it easy to walk away with a clear conscience.
‘I should be relieved,’ she said. She was relieved.
‘It isn’t as if I don’t have anything better to do.’ She fetched the butter and lard from the fridge and began to chop it up into small pieces with rather more vigour than was actually called for. ‘I’m a single mother with a child to raise. A cat to support. I don’t need any more complications in my life.’
Chop, chop, chop.
Not that Polly was anything other than a joy. But still. Parenthood, even with a complete set of parents, required absolute concentration. Alone it was…
Chop, chop. The snap of the heavy blade against the board happily cut short this train of thought.
One kiss and suddenly she felt lonely? When did she have time to get lonely?
‘I’m a single mother with a child to raise and a business that’s going nowhere,’ she informed the cat briskly.
Chop.
The cat yawned.
‘And let’s not forget the part-time job in the village shop. That’s more than enough work for one woman. I don’t need Dominic Ravenscar and his problems complicating my life any further.’
Chop, chop, chop, chop.
‘As for his garden—’
But Mog, realising that she wasn’t going to get any more peace, stood up, stretched, then jumped down and walked out of the kitchen, her tail aquiver with disgust.
‘Oh, great. The least you could do is lend a sympathetic ear in return for all the meaty chunks you stuff down. No more top-of-the-milk treats for you, you ungrateful creature.’
All she got in reply was a disdainful flick of the tail as Mog headed towards a patch of catnip growing near the path.
‘And I’ll dig that up, too,’ she warned.
The cat, recognising an empty threat when she heard it, nuzzled the plant, a blissful expression on her face.
‘I’ll dig it up and plant something useful. Onions. Garlic, even,’ she threatened. ‘Then you’ll be sorry.’
Which was another thing. Any time and energy she had to spare were needed for her own garden. You couldn’t make prize-winning strawberry jam unless you put in the time at the strawberry beds.
And even if she wanted the chance to clear up the Linden Lodge garden—OK, she did want it, rather desperately—she didn’t have time to take on the role of Dominic Ravenscar’s personal agony aunt. Always supposing he wanted her to. Which he plainly didn’t.
That was time-consuming. Amy had spent hours just being there for her. Days. Weeks. Even now all she had to do was pick up the telephone…
Not that she had to. Polly’s godmother usually found an excuse to drop in most days. Sometimes, it felt as if she was being checked up on… She backed away from that ungrateful thought even as it surfaced, dealing with the remainder of the shortening in double-quick time.
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