Penny Jordan (9 page)

'You sound disapproving.' Honor smiled.

'Well, the house is very isolated—'

'And very dilapidated. Yes, I know,' Honor agreed. 'I've been trying to find a builder to take on the work that needs doing, but I can't get anyone local because of its reputation.'

'Its reputation? Oh, you mean that old story about it being haunted,' David guessed.

Honor had insisted on pouring him a glass of her home-made wine. The effect of it combined with the warmth of her kitchen and a full stomach was making him relax his guard a little.

He knew about the house's reputation. That meant he must be local, Honor thought, but she didn't say anything, simply commenting instead,

'Not many walkers use this bridle-way. I think you're the first I've seen all week. I expect you were heading for Fitzburgh Place.'

'Yes. I'm looking for some casual labouring work—and somewhere to stay,' David admitted.

'I thought it might be worthwhile asking Lord As-degh's estate manager if he needs anyone.'

'Mmm... Well, you're in between seasons for casual work now,' Honor warned him. 'Most of the harvesting is done by machinery, and although they do take on beaters for the shooting season, I don't think they're looking for anyone right now.'

As she watched David's face, an idea was beginning to take shape in her mind.

'You did a very professional job on that sink.

I'm looking for someone who can take on the task of making this house weatherproof for the winter.

The pay wouldn't be very much, but I could certainly offer bed and board.'

David gave her an astonished look. 'You're offering
me
a job? Are you serious?'

'Are
you
serious about needing work?' Honor countered.

'But you don't know the first thing about me,'

David protested.

'I know you have clean nails and good manners,' Honor half joked. 'And I know that you can fix a leaking washer and you like my chilli.'

'I don't
believe
this,' David maintained, shaking his head. 'Have you any idea of—"

'If you're going to read me a lecture about the dangers I could be inviting, the risks I could be taking, then please don't,' Honor advised him firmly. 'I'm an adult woman and perfectly capable of making my own judgements and decisions. The offer stands. Whether or not you accept it is up to you. Apple pie?' she asked, standing up to collect their empty chilli bowls.

'Er...please...yes. Look, let me get those,' David insisted. He stood up quickly and reached out for the bowls at the same time as Honor did.

As they touched, Honor was conscious of the lean strength of his hands and their warmth. He had long fingers and his movements were economical and deft. When he touched a woman, his touch would be firm and carefully judged. But would it also be sensual? Would the cool hesitancy, the watchfulness she could sense in him, be burned away by the heat of passion? Or was he the kind of man who remained impervious to real desire and was perhaps even a little afraid of it? If so, then he was not a man who would hold her interest for very long.

But perhaps she would not
want
to hold him for very long...perhaps—

'What exactly would it involve, this work you're offering me?' David broke into her thoughts.

'Er...well, as I said, I'd like to get the house as weatherproof as possible before winter sets in.

You said yourself just now that those pipes need lagging. There's a leak in the roof and some of the windows are desperately in need of repainting—one or two of them have panes of glass missing. There's an awful lot of heavy work to be done in the garden and there's a greenhouse up at Fitzburgh Place that my cousin says I can have.

I just have to find someone to put it up for me.'

'Cousin?' he questioned sharply.

'Yes,' Honor responded openly. 'Lord Astlegh is my cousin. That's how I've come to be here.

He's letting me live here for a peppercorn rent.'

'You mean you're actually paying someone to live in this wreck?' David grimaced.

Honor gave him an arch look. 'Now you sound
exactly
like my daughters,' she told him drily.

David thought quickly. He needed somewhere to live and he had to eat. Honor wasn't local, so there was no danger of her recognising him. Nor from what she had told him did she socialise, apparently preferring her own company. He was surprised that she was allowed to keep so much to herself, given the extraordinary sensuality she possessed. Or perhaps that was why. Very few women, no matter how happily or securely married, would want to risk their husbands for too long in the company of a woman like Honor. David knew how dangerously aware of her, how dangerously aroused by her,
he
already was, which was a very good reason for turning down her suggestion.

But if he wanted to stay in the area, could he afford to turn it down?
If
he wanted to... He had a momentary mental image of Olivia as she had looked earlier. Bowed down...unhappy...in need...

'I'll take the job,' he told Honor quickly.

'Good,' she responded and then asked him wryly, 'Aren't you going to ask me how much I intend to pay you?'

'Bed and board, I thought you said,' David reminded her.

Bed and board! He was prepared to work for
that.
Why? Honor wondered curiously. But she sensed that any attempt on her part to question him would only result in his withdrawal from her and even perhaps his rejection of the offer she had made.

'I thought to begin with, for a trial period of, say, a month, I would pay you fifty pounds a week,' Honor suggested, naming a sum that she knew to be risible, but she was interested to find out what David's response would be.

When he accepted calmly and without question, Honor knew then that she had every reason to feel curious about him, curious and suspicious, perhaps? Her daughters most certainly would have been. But she was not her daughters, Honor reminded herself firmly. She preferred to trust her own inner judgement rather than to doubt it.

Fifty pounds a week. Riches indeed when compared with the tiny income he and Father Ignatius had eked out in Jamaica. But this was not Jamaica, David warned himself.

What was he hoping to achieve? Why had he really come back? To ease his own conscience?

To see his family? His unanticipated witnessing of Olivia's unhappiness earlier in the day had given him far more to think about than his own feelings. Why did he sense so strongly that Olivia needed him? She had Jon to turn to after all. Jon, whose company she had always preferred to his, just as Max, Jon's son, had turned more to his uncle. But Max and Jon were now very obviously close.

Honor was refilling their glasses with her home-made wine. Lifting hers towards him in a toast, she proclaimed, 'To a very successful and enjoyable relationship between us.'

The slow smile she gave him, even more than the ambiguous way she had phrased her words, made David look sharply at her. Honor was a stunningly attractive woman but not, he guessed, a sexually predatory one. She wouldn't need to be. In Jamaica he had met women who had spoken quite openly of their desire to have him satisfy their sexual hunger and their willingness to pay him for doing so.

There was a glint of curiosity in Honor's eyes when she looked at him, but David knew instinctively that it was a curiosity she would curtail and control unless he made a move—and even then...

There was something about her that fascinated him. She was so open, so seemingly careless of her physical and emotional safety and yet at the same time he had the distinct impression that she was very well protected, that she had a wisdom and a strength that came from experiencing life's pains as well as its joys.

As he drank his wine, David wondered what Father Ignatius would make of his present situation. Would he approve of what he was doing?

David smiled inwardly to himself, imagining the older man's response to such a question.

'Do
you
approve?' was what he would be more than likely to say. 'Your own approval of your actions and your thoughts should be more important to you than mine. It is far harder to deceive ourselves than it is to deceive others and thus we are our own sternest critics.'

'Yes, o master,' David would sometimes tease him at the end of one of his homilies.

'There is no master here,' the priest would correct him gendy. 'Only two pupils.'

David had no qualms about his ability to do the work Honor wanted doing. After he left England, he had spent some time in Spain, and whilst he was there had earned his living working illegally building villas for foreign buyers.

'Tell me a bit about yourself,' Honor invited.

It was potent wine, especially for a man who had virtually not touched a drink since the night Father Ignatius had picked him up out of one of Kingston's gutters. His drinking binges had been a pathetic and solitary attempt to destroy what was left of his life. It hadn't worked—thankfully—but his own disgust at his behaviour, coupled with the abstemious way the priest lived, had meant that alcohol was something David's system was no longer used to. Careful, he warned himself as he felt it warming his blood and loosening his tongue.

'There isn't very much to tell,' David responded cautiously.

Honor's eyebrows lifted, but she didn't argue with him, commenting instead, 'You mentioned that you had children.'

'A son and a daughter,' David agreed heavily.

'But I'm not in contact with them any more.'

Cursing himself under his breath, David wondered what on earth had made him tell her that, but to his relief, instead of pouncing on his admission, Honor merely remarked calmly, 'It does happen. People divorce, and despite everyone's good intentions, sometimes it just isn't possible to maintain contact. My husband had very little to do with our daughters. He was a photographer.

My family never really approved of him and I've always suspected that at least a part of the reason he walked out on us was for the perverse pleasure it gave him to prove them right. He was like that.'

'It must have been hard for you, bringing up your daughters on your own,' David told her politely.

Honor gave him a wry look. 'Not really. What was hard was trying to bring them up to live with him We were young,' she added by way of explanation. 'He took to the excesses of the time like a duck to water. Drink, drugs, sex, money—

he wanted them all and had them all, as well. He's dead now.' She saw David's look of surprise.

'And by one of those quirks of fate, I inherited his estate. I can't pretend that the money hasn't been very welcome. My family washed their hands of me when I married, and even though I later left him, so far as they were concerned I had made my bed and I should, therefore, continue to lie in it with or without my husband.

'Are you divorced?' Honor asked him in her straightforward way.

'Yes. At least I understand a divorce went through,' David answered tersely. 'I haven't had any contact with my wife or my family for some time, but the marriage was effectively over before... before I left. What made you become interested in herbalism?' he asked, to change the subject.

'What makes anyone become interested in anything?' Honor countered. 'I liked the idea of using nature's own healing powers. Perhaps I'm more a child of my time than I like to admit.' She gave a small shrug.

'If you ever manage to find a plant-based method for weight loss, you'll become a million-airess overnight,' David told her drily.

'Nature
has
already provided one,' Honor re-joindered tartly, and then explained as he looked queryingly at her, 'It's called famine.'

David had the grace to look a little shamefaced.

'I'm sorry. I didn't mean to belittle your work.'

'Or me?' Honor asked him with a direct look.

There was a brief pause before David responded. 'I have no right to belittle anyone or to sit in judgement on them. By rights I should be...'

He stopped.

'You should be where?' Honor encouraged him.

'Somewhere else,' David told her abruptly.

What would she have said if he had finished his original sentence and told her that by rights he should be in prison, serving a fully deserved sentence for the crime he had committed.

'Somewhere else. You mean with your fam-.

ily?' Honor guessed, sensing that something was disturbing him and that the potency of her home-made wine had pushed down barriers he would much rather have kept erected against her questions.

'No, I do
not
mean with my family,' David told her angrily. 'My family...my family would probably turn away if they saw me in the street, and who could blame them? No doubt they'd like to pretend that I no longer existed...that I never existed—and with good reason. They have every right to feel shame at being related to me. Me—

their father...brother...son...uncle—a thief and a coward.'

'A thief?'

Honor breathed a small, inward sigh of relief.

Thank goodness for
that.
Just for a moment she had wondered what on earth it was he might have done. Theft, whilst a deplorable crime to any right-thinking, conventional, law-abiding person, hardly merited too much concern to someone whose ancestors had for many generations indulged in that same crime on a grand scale.

'Really, Honor, you do yourself no favours with such radical thinking,' her aunt once chided her icily when Honor had questioned this relative's sanitised, not to say sanctified, version of their family history. 'Your great-grandfather was one of the most respected men of his generation and your great-uncle was Lord Lieutenant of the county.'

'Yes, I'm sure that they were as upright and honest as anyone could possibly be, but what about our real ancestors, the ones who raped and murdered and stole?'

'That was centuries ago when everyone did that kind of thing,' her aunt had insisted, adding critically, 'You really are the oddest girl. I don't know why you must bring up such things. It really isn't done.'

Done or not, there was no escaping the facts and she doubted that whatever crime David might have committed came anywhere near equalling the atrocities of her ancestors.