Penny Jordan (11 page)

As he walked over to the range to open the door and added more logs to the glowing flames, her mischievous expression changed to one of amazement as she saw.

'Oh, good, you've managed to light the range.

It's been threatening to go out on me for the past week and I've only just managed to keep it going with a lot of elbow grease and prayer.'

'No spells? You disappoint me.' David shook his head.

'It's a dreadfully temperamental old thing,'

Honor continued, ignoring his teasing comment.

'I intend to replace it. Fortunately, I don't have to rely on it to cook with. I've got a small portable stove and a microwave.'

'You mean I've gone through all this for nothing?' David complained.

Honor laughed. 'Well, no, not for nothing. You see,' she told him, wide-eyed, 'the range is the only thing big enough to take my cauldron and I can carry on now that you've lit it!'

'OK, so you're a "Rent-a-Witch",' David said gravely, his eyes warm with laughter as he looked at her. She was wearing jeans and Wellington boots, and where the top of her boots met her jeans, the fabric was dark with the heavy dew from off the fields. The cream cotton sweater she was wearing looked as though it had originally belonged to someone else—a male someone else—her husband? A lover? He frowned as he felt the unmistakable sharpness of a very male and ludicrously inappropriate shaft of jealous possessiveness.

Oversize though her sweater was, it still didn't disguise the full, soft thrust of her breasts as they jiggled enticingly with her movements, hinting at a deliciously promising unfettered naturalness.

Tiggy, despite her periodic desperate craving for sex, had been almost aggressively uptight about her body. She claimed that the underwear she wore would have been considered irresistibly provocative and arousing by any other man, but to David it had given her body all the appeal of a plastic doll, stiff and unyielding, cold and san-itized.

Honor, he suspected, would not smell of expensive perfume or set out to be deliberately alluring by wearing bras designed to give her extra cleavage or stockings worn self-consciously and anxiously in a 'refuse to be turned on by me if you dare' kind of pose.

No, Honor would be lusciously and deliciously female rather than artificially feminine. She would be warm and womanly, abandoning herself to her sexuality with a natural hedonism that couldn't fail to arouse her mate.

Her mate! But he wasn't that...wasn't and never could be. He—

'I don't know about you, but I like to start my day with a proper breakfast,' Honor was saying to him warmly.

A proper breakfast. In Jamaica breakfast, like every other meal, had consisted of fresh fruit from the trees, some fish they had caught and whatever other food they had either bartered for or been given by their patients and their families.

'A proper breakfast,' David repeated her words back to her.

Where had he gone? Where had his thoughts been just then, Honor wondered, musing curiously over the inwardly concentrated look she had seen in his eyes.

'Well, you know what they say,' Honor told him cheerfully. 'One should eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a lord and dinner like a pauper.'

'You're the boss,' David reminded her with a brief shrug of his shoulders. Tiggy had never eaten breakfast—at least not in his presence—and he had hated the chaos of the family kitchen.

Early in the morning he had snatched a cup of coffee and waited until he reached the office to satisfy his hunger on the sandwiches and croissants his secretary would send out for.

He could remember how irritated he had felt when Olivia had looked accusingly at him as he gulped his coffee, shouting from the bottom of the stairs to Tiggy, still in bed, that he was leaving.

In the kitchen, Olivia, dressed in her school uniform and wearing the shirt she would have had to iron herself, would be carefully pouring a bowlful of cereal for Jack.

How those memories hurt him now, but at the time if he had felt any guilt, it had been well buried beneath his own self-centredness and his belief that as his father's favourite son he was greater than the sum of all the other members of his family.

Like Tiggy, although no doubt for different reasons, he had found as many excuses as he could to spend as little time as possible with his children, at best bored and at worst irritated by their claims on his attention.

How easy it had been to slip into the habit of arranging evening 'business meetings', to go straight from work to the country club, arriving home when Olivia and Jack were doing their homework or in bed.

'Come back.'

Honor's soft command brought him out of his introspection. Smiling ruefully at her, he admitted,

'I was just remembering family breakfasts when the children were young.'

'Unhappy memories?' Honor guessed accurately.

'Yes,' David admitted.

Her directness, so very different from his own habit of caution and secrecy, could have been deemed offensive in someone else. In her, it seemed so natural and easy that he found it equally natural to reply openly.

'It isn't always easy being a parent,' Honor offered,

'It isn't easy being a child when you have a father as neglectful and selfish as I was,' David countered quietly. 'My children have little to thank me for and much to blame me for.'

'And do they? Blame you, I mean,' Honor asked him.

David shook his head. 'I don't know, but in their shoes...' He stopped and looked at her. 'This is getting maudlin and can't be of any interest to you. What exactly
does
this proper breakfast of yours consist of, apart from dubiously safe mushrooms?'

Honor laughed. She could recognise a closed door when she saw one, especially when it had been closed in her face with such determined, if gentle, politeness.

'There is nothing dubious about my mushrooms. Just wait until you taste them.'

'Mmm... What I'm worried about is whether I'll remember tasting them or if I'm going to wake up with a bad headache and then discover—'

'That I've used your body for my wicked female satisfaction,' Honor suggested with a grin that made her look like a girl.

A very sexy girl, David acknowledged as he leaned towards her and told her huskily, 'Now that I would resent.' As her smile faded, he added softly, 'Were you to take me to bed, I promise you that I would want to savour and remember every single second. I certainly would not need the encouragement of any aphrodisiac or magic spell to do so.'

Now what the hell had made him say something like that? Some kind of braggartly machismo, some kind of misguided desire to prove to her that he was a man...? What kind of
idiot
was he? With one sentence, virtually between one breath and another, he had completely changed the nature of their relationship, and in
her
shoes...

He held his breath, waiting for her to make a crushingly dismissive retort, or worse still, to tell him coldly that she had changed her mind about having him working and living at her house. Instead, she simply turned away from him, then walked over to the fridge and opened the door.

'The estate keeps me supplied with all my meat,' she told him calmly. 'The bacon's home-grown and home-cured. My cousin Freddy says I'm ruining the flavour of it by putting it in the fridge, but I'm not too happy about the efficiency of the drains here. I feel that I'd rather exchange a small loss of flavour for the advantage of knowing it isn't going to be contaminated by anything.

In the summer, after a few days of hot weather, we seem to get an alarming number of flies.'

'The drains probably need rodding out,' David recited mechanically, hardly daring to believe that she had actually been gracious enough to over-look his indecorous comment.
Gracious.
It was an odd word to apply to such a thoroughly modern woman, implying some dowager-like Edward-ian female of rank and fearsome hauteur. Honor's graciousness was much, much more than that—a subtle blending of gentleness, compassion, wisdom and strength, its strands as difficult to define and isolate as the notes of a beautifully blended perfume.

'Oh, and whilst we're on such unappealing subject matter, I feel I ought to warn you that I have my suspicions that the house might have mice.'

'Mice! I should imagine it does, out here in the middle of the countryside. A cat would soon get rid of those.'

'Mmm...that's what I thought, but so far, Jasper has proved to be either exceedingly inept or too well-fed to bother with them.'

'Jasper?'

'The cat...not mine...well, not exactly. He just sort of arrived. Since no one knows whom he belongs to, he and I have adopted one another. He'll be coming in soon for his breakfast. He always arrives about eight o'clock.'

'A cat that can tell the time. Well, plainly, he's far too intelligent to waste precious minutes catching mere mice,' David joked. As Honor walked past him and opened a cupboard to remove a heavy-duty grilling pan, he offered, 'If that's for the bacon, I'll cook that.'

'Thanks. I like mine crisp,' Honor informed him, handing over the pan without any protest or insistence that she should be the one to do the cooking.

She really was the most extraordinary woman, he acknowledged half an hour later as, the breakfast cooked, she disappeared into the hallway. She reappeared several seconds later with a copy of the
Telegraph,
which, she informed him, she always read whilst she ate her breakfast.

Most other women he knew of her generation would have insisted on cooking the breakfast
and
handing the paper over to him to read first But instead of being chagrined by her behaviour, David actually found it refreshing and invigorating.

It was as though she was subtly and indirectly informing him with her casual indifference to his traditional male role that only a very special sort of man, only a very special sort of
maleness
would impress and excite her.

A very special sort of man. Well, he most certainly wasn't
that.
He doubted that many women would find him attractive or desirable once they knew the truth about him and what he had done, and he couldn't blame them—

'Whatever happened in the past is past. We are living in the present. In the here and now. And live in it we must.'

David jumped a little as he realised that Honor had put down her paper and was watching him.

How had she known he was thinking about his past?

'Are you sure you aren't a witch or at least a mind-reader?' he asked a little defensively before adding more openly, 'We may live in the present, but our pasts are a part of us. The things we've done make us the people we are.'

'Yes. But to dwell on past mistakes is to refuse to allow ourselves to learn from them, to grow and to move on,' Honor told him firmly.

'What about when our mistakes haven't just affected our own lives but also those of people close to us?' David pressed.

Honor looked thoughtfully at him. He was a man with a troubled conscience, no doubt about that.

'What about when we can't ask those people to forgive us because we know that what we've done can't be forgiven?' he asked her slowly.

'I don't know,' Honor admitted, shaking her head. 'I don't know, but if you—'

She stopped abruptly as the back door suddenly rattled loudly, making them both, but especially David, jump.

'It's just Jasper,' she reassured him, getting up to let the cat in.

'He needs a proper cat flap,' David said as the black cat stalked across the kitchen floor, then sat in front of the range and studied David assessingly before commencing to wash his paws. 'I'll make him one. You said you'd go through the work you wanted me to do,' David reminded Honor.

'Yes, of course,' Honor agreed, recognising that he wanted to change the subject and was probably regretting having said as much to her as he had.

She was surprised at the extent of her own curiosity about him. He was a lean, attractive man, yes, a very attractive and very virile man. His body brought her own out in a rash of goose bumps of sensual female appreciation, but...

But she was not in the market for a fling and she certainly had no intention of being a confi-dante or providing a comforting shoulder for him to lean on. Why should she? Other people's troubles and complicated lives were their own concern. She could only work best as a healer by distancing herself from her patients and remaining calm and unemotional.

'I'll take you on a tour of the house after breakfast,' Honor promised, wrinkling her nose as she added, 'You're going to need an extremely large note pad to list everything that needs doing.'

'I
CALLED IN
at the travel agency yesterday.

They've got quite a good deal going at the moment on flights to New York. I estimate it will be cheaper for all of us to fly there first and then take a domestic flight to Philadelphia rather than attempt to fly direct. It'll take longer, of course, but as a treat I thought we'd stay somewhere like the Pierre overnight and after the wedding I thought we'd really go mad and spend a few days touring New England—'

'Caspar, there's no way I can go to America,'

Olivia exploded, pushing away untouched the cup of coffee she had just poured herself. Upstairs, she could hear the regular household sounds of the girls getting ready for school. She had already been up for two hours. She had had some reading she needed to catch up on.

Caspar hated her working at home, but as she told him when they argued about it, her current workload meant that she had no option. It was all very well for him to say that when she worked at home it meant she had less time for him and the girls, but if she didn't, she would never get through everything.

She hated it when he pressured her and made her feel guilty. Sometimes it seemed as though she could never measure up to the standards imposed on her by the men in her life. Besides, increasingly lately, she felt that she desperately needed that extra hour to herself in the morning when the day belonged to her alone and the only needs she had to consider were her own.

Once, her only reason for waking up early in the morning had been so that she and Caspar could make love, but that seemed like a lifetime ago now. She couldn't remember the last time she had actually wanted to make love—wanted Caspar—and when Caspar did try to initiate lovemaking, it was resentment and anger she felt and not desire.