Penny Jordan (13 page)

She glanced at her watch.

'Look, I've got to go and see a patient. Can I leave you to sort through everything we've seen and work out the best place to start? You're going to need some money to buy supplies. We can talk about that this evening.'

'ANYWAY, HOW DO YOU KNOW
he loves you?'

'Because he said so,' Annalise told her tor-mentor quickly, flinching a little as the other girl tossed her newly styled, up-to-the-minute, oh-so-casually tousled mane of thick dark hair with its—

according to her—'naturally' sun-streaked strands of rich warm honey.

'Oh, but he would say that, wouldn't he?' Patti gave Annalise a sideways look as she added coolly, 'All boys say that when they're in bed with you.'

Annalise could feel her heart starting to ham-mer too fast. They were in the rumpus room above the garage block of Patti's parents' newly built neo-Georgian-style mansion on the outskirts of the town. Patti—who could twist her father around her little finger—had persuaded her parents to allow the band to sometimes practise in the large, centrally heated room above the detached garages. Her father had grumbled that allowing them to do so meant that he would have to put off having the space fitted out as a snooker room and bar for his own use, but he had nevertheless agreed.

The band, who had practised there for the first time the previous evening, had declared that their new venue was far cooler than Mike Salter's auntie's barn. Annalise was miserably aware that Patti's motives in arranging for them to be able to play at her parents' place were far from as altruistic as she liked to pretend.

As a newcomer to the area and to the school, by rights Patti ought to have kept a low profile, but Patti, it seemed, wrote her own rules for social behaviour.

Her father had owned a small chain of super-markets in the south of England, which he had recently sold for what Patti dismissively described as 'millions'. The reason he had moved his family up to Cheshire was because he was aware of the excellent business opportunities in the area. Like his daughter, Will Charles was a brash self-publicist with all the sensitivity of a rhinoceros hide.

Ever since her first weeks at school, Patti had made a beeline for, and been determined to become part of, the crowd around the band. Annalise had no doubts about the fact that Patti was secretly targeting Pete, her boyfriend. On the surface, Patti might claim that she wanted to be her friend; she might be besieging her with phone calls and invitations, but Annalise sensed that it wasn't
her
friendship she was after at all.

'Why do you have to do that?' Patti had demanded one evening when Annalise told her that she couldn't go out because she needed to help her father with the housework. 'Let your dad do it or find someone else. Has he got a girlfriend?'

she had asked with a gleam in her eye that Annalise hadn't liked.

'No,' she had told her shortly.

'How do you know?' Patti had countered. 'He might have and not have told you about it. Men don't always. He's a man after all and he must need sex. All men do. I bet Pete is good in bed,'

she had added coaxingly. 'You can tell me about it...I'm your best friend.'

'There isn't anything to tell,' Annalise had replied primly.

'Liar,' Patti had accused her promptly, rolling her eyes as she claimed, 'Pete is just so sexy. If he isn't getting it from you, then he's got to be getting it from someone else. And if he's going a bit short, / certainly wouldn't mind helping out!'

She had giggled, then added, 'Only joking. You know you're my best friend.'

Patti now gave Annalise a sharply assessing look, then frowned.

'I don't think that hairstyle suits you at all,'

Patti told Annalise. 'Really, I'm not being unkind.

I heard Pete saying the other day how much he liked girls with dark hair.' She tossed her own and shot Annalise a distinctly calculating glance. 'If he really loved you, he wouldn't say that, would he?' She stroked her hair. 'He told me that he really liked my new style.'

Annalise was beginning to feel sick. It was true what she had said to Patti about there being nothing to tell about her sex life with Pete. So far, all they had done was kiss. Pete had wanted to go further, to do more, but she had refused. She wanted to go to bed with him, to be completely and utterly a part of him, but her romantic soul yearned for something much, much more than the mundane, indeed almost casual, physical intimacy Pete was offering her. But it had been so hard to say no to him. She loved him so much.

In her imagination, loving him and being loved by him were so different from the anxious reality of being his 'girl'.

In her day-dreams they were two parts of a per-feet whole and he loved her above and beyond everything and everyone else in his life. In her day-dreams he was just waiting for the day of her eighteenth birthday to marry her and make her his, and once they were married they would be so happy together. Everything would be perfect; she would feel so wanted, so loved, so safe.

She would never leave her children the way her mother had done. No, she would never do that.

She longed for Pete to say the words she needed to feel secure, but she had seen the way his glance roved to other girls. She had seen, too, the way they looked back at him, and her tender, vulnerable heart was already aching with the foreknowl-edge of what it sensed was to come.

'I know a way to make anybody I want love me,' Patti boasted, giving Annalise a crocodile smile of competitive self-assurance.

Gravely, Annalise watched her. She shouldn't really be here now. She ought to be at home, but the band was coming round later, and if she wasn't here, Patti, her 'best friend', would be making up to Pete, coming on to him.

'I wonder what time Pete will get here?' Patti was saying impatiently. 'He looked really fed up last night and he wasn't talking to you much, was he?'

Annalise said nothing, looking away from the other girl. Sometimes Pete could be cruelly indifferent to her. She tried not to mind, but when he wasn't nice to her it hurt so much.

'My parents will be away at the weekend and I'm going to have a party,' Patti informed her.

'I have to go,' Annalise said, getting up and heading for the door as she realised how late it was getting.

'But Pete will be here soon,' Patti told her, adding with a gleam in her eye, 'Still, if you must...

I'll look after him for you, shall I?'

Giving Patti a wan smile, Annalise opened the door.

'ANNALISE, IS THAT YOU
?' her father called out as she let herself into the house.

'Yes,' she called in reply, her heart sinking a little. She was later than she should have been, she knew. She had hoped to get back before her father came home from work. He didn't like Patti any more than he liked Pete, and if he knew that she had been with her instead of coming straight home to do her homework, he would be annoyed.

To her relief, as she pushed open the kitchen door, she saw that one of her father's friends, Hal, was sitting at the kitchen table with him.

Hal had his own business building extensions and doing general property repairs. He had always had a bit of a soft spot for Annalise, and with a twinkle in his eye, he told her, 'My, but you're turning into a lovely-looking lass.'

Whilst Annalise blushed, her father frowned.

'Don't you go filling her head with that kind of nonsense. She needs to spend more time at her books than at her mirror.'

Hal laughed, winking at Annalise as he teased her. 'What's this I hear about you and Pete Hunter courting?'

'Courting!' Annalise winced as her father exclaimed, 'She's doing no such thing!'

Giving Annalise a sympathetic look, Hal told her father pacifyingly, 'I was just teasing the lass a little bit, that's all.'

DAVID GRIMACED
as he looked at the list he had made of the materials and equipment he would need for the work Honor wanted him to do. It was going to be expensive, very expensive, and perhaps when Honor saw it...

Honor...

He wondered how much longer she was likely to be gone. The house felt empty without her. He had been thinking about her all day...imagining...

It was just because she was the first woman he had been in anything like close contact with for such a long time that he was reacting to her like this, he tried to reassure himself. She
was
very attractive after all and he was only human, only a man. Just how much of a man he was turning out to be around her was part of the reason he was feeling so bemused and on edge.

The afternoon had brought rain and dark, heavy clouds along with the threat of thunder.

He heard the sound of a car driving up to the house and his body tensed.

Outside, a car door slammed and then Honor was in the kitchen shaking raindrops off her hair and laughing up at him as she exclaimed breathlessly, 'It's pouring down out there. I got soaked just coming from the car.'

As he listened to her and watched her, a feeling of the most extraordinary tenderness swept over him. Very gently, he reached out his hand and brushed the raindrops from her face.

'You're wet. You should have worn a coat,' he told her absently, but it wasn't the dampness of her clothes that he was really thinking about, and the message in his eyes told her so. 'I've made a list of the materials and equipment you'll need.

It's going to be expensive,' he warned her a little huskily.

'Yes, I know,' Honor replied equally unsteadily. He really did have the most amazingly mes-merising dark blue eyes and she knew perfectly well that beneath the mundanity of their conversation something much more meaningful, powerful and potentially dangerous was taking place. A connection was being made between them at one of the deepest and most intense of human levels.

Men had flirted with her before, hinted and sometimes much more than hinted, with innuendo and
double entendre,
that they desired her, but none of them had ever had such a profound effect on her as David was now having. But she gave no hint of what she was thinking or feeling as she smiled calmly and moved away from him over to the table to pick up the list he had made and scru-tinise it.

'I think we had better organise some form of transport for you,' she told him when she finished reading it. 'Presumably you can drive?'

He could drive, yes, and even possessed a current driving licence, but of course it wasn't in the name he had given her and neither did he have any insurance.

'I—'

'My car is insured for any driver,' Honor informed him. 'It's a hatchback and large enough for most of the smaller things you'll require. You can use it when you need to.'

Had she guessed that he was lying to her about his identity? But no, she couldn't possibly have done. It was just his guilty conscience making him think that she was deliberately avoiding looking at him.

'I...' he began, then stopped as thunder crashed in the distance.

'I'm getting hungry,' Honor told him when the noise had died away, 'and I've got some notes to write up after we've eaten. Oh, and I called to see Freddy on the way back and he seems to think the estate manager will be able to supply us with any bricks or wood we might need. He introduced me to him. He's a nice guy, an Australian, and new to the job.'

David hadn't realised that he had been holding his breath with anxiety. But if the estate manager was an Australian and new, he was hardly likely to recognise David.

As she spoke, she accidentally dislodged a herbal book she had been reading from the table.

As David bent to pick it up, he read the Latin description of the plant on the page where it had fallen open, automatically translating it.

'You know Latin?' Honor asked him in surprise.

'A little. We...I...it was part of our school curriculum,' David stammered uncomfortably.

Honor frowned. She wasn't an intellectual snob, but an itinerant manual labourer who knew Latin was hardly the norm. To have attended a school where Latin was part of the curriculum also suggested that David must have attended a public school rather than a state comprehensive.

'Most people think of it as a very dry, dull language and associate it mainly with the law, but—'

'What makes you say that?' David interrupted sharply, so sharply that for a moment Honor frowned a little. He realised then that he was over-reacting and offered gruffly, 'I've always thought of it more as the language of the church. It's lin-gua franca, so to speak.'

'Yes, I suppose you're right,' Honor agreed easily.

Why had her innocent mention of the law provoked such a strong reaction in him? He had described himself to her as a thief. If that was the case, he would no doubt have good reason to fear the law.

'IT'S
GONE ELEVEN O'CLOCK.
I'm going up to bed now. Can I leave you to clear up?' Honor asked David as she came into the kitchen.

He had spent the evening drawing up some detailed worksheets of all the jobs that needed to be done so that Honor could prioritise them.

'Yes, of course. I'll start making some phone calls in the morning to find out where we can hire the stuff I'm going to need to fix the roof at the best rates. The sooner I can get that hole sealed and the slates replaced, the better.'

Smiling, Honor walked past him and opened the kitchen door. He had paused several times in his work during the evening to watch her whilst she concentrated on her notes. She was so totally engrossed in what she was doing that she was oblivious to his perusal.

Even in the harsh light of the kitchen, her skin was as fresh and unlined as a girl's, but her expression had a maturity, a warmth, that a girl's could never have. She was one of the most natural and relaxed people he had ever met. There was nothing either contrived or artificial about her and, in some odd way, she reminded him very much of the priest. Was it because he could sense that, like the priest, she possessed the ability, the honesty and the compassion to see right through a person's outer shell to the inner soul? To see through that shell and not to judge what lay behind it? Not to judge him?