Turning the Tide (36 page)

Then the door nearly came off its hinges as Harry burst into the room.

‘So that’s why you changed tactics, was it?’

Matthew sat up, shaking his head in bewilderment.

‘It was risky when it was just me – but, once you knew that Jimi had a stake in the boat yard too, you weighed up the expense of a legal challenge and decided to take the other option. Being
nice
to me!’

She was hopping mad, all right. She was literally hopping – or was that because she was trying to pull her knickers on and rage made her clumsy?

‘Of course, you couldn’t imagine being
nice
to me before, when I was just a tomboy in a scruffy pair of dungarees, could you?’

Matthew winced as, with much wriggling and a nasty grating sound, the zip of her dress was wrenched up even faster than it had come down.

‘But last night you decided you could just about face it, so you asked me back here!’ This was a bit muffled because she was rummaging around under the bed. ‘Well’, she said, coming back up for air and brandishing a sandal at him, ‘I hope you enjoyed your cheap date. I hope I was worth it!’

‘Harry!’

Ignoring him, she clumped round to his side of the bed, retrieved the other sandal and plonked herself down to put it on.

‘Harry, please.’ He leaned forward and tried to put his arm round her, but she leaped up as if he was about to set fire to her.

‘Don’t even think about it!’ she yelled.

‘I like thinking about it,’ he said, giving her what he hoped was a placatory smile. ‘I was just thinking about it when you came in. Come on.’ He patted the space next to him. ‘Come here and let me explain.’

Harry went still, but she didn’t come any closer. ‘I’m all ears.’

Matthew exhaled and rubbed his head whilst he thought about where to begin. Really he should start at the beginning, when he’d found the charter granted to Sir Percival Campion amongst the old yacht club paperwork and it seemed like the fastest route to cutting loose from someone who was already beginning to disturb him.
He could tell her how bad he felt when he’d come upon her after the fire, worrying herself sick that George had done something stupid, and about how much he’d wanted to comfort her. It wasn’t as if he could have added to her pain then, could he? Perhaps he ought to tell her that he knew he’d decided to forget about the charter once and for all, when he’d seen the effect of concealing its existence from George?

He tried to remember what he’d said to her on
Calypso
.
Whatever it was it hadn’t been enough to reassure Harry, frantic about the prospect of losing everything that was dear to her. The more Matthew thought about where to start, the worse it was beginning to seem if he looked at it from Harry’s point of view. From that angle, his failure to tell her sooner that he wasn’t keeping the charter as some kind of insurance policy seemed to suggest that he was just waiting until her humiliation was complete – and she didn’t look in the mood to see reason at the moment.

‘Oh, Harry,’ he said sadly.

‘You don’t mind if I borrow this, do you?’ she said, picking up a jumper from the top of the chest of drawers and dragging it over her dress, where it hung fetchingly just above her knees. ‘Only I’d rather I was a bit better covered if the whole of Little Spitmarsh is going to see me do the walk of shame home.’

‘Harry! Wait!’ he cried, throwing back the covers and looking for his boxers. ‘I’ll take you home!’

‘You’ve already taken me to Hell,’ she told him as she walked out of the door. ‘That’s quite far enough.’

Fortunately, the inhabitants of Little Spitmarsh were still sleeping off the effects of the grand finale of the film festival as Harry stalked back to the boat yard. Small talk would have been beyond her and curiosity about why she happened to be pacing the streets at the crack of dawn in a state of déshabillé would have been deflected with comments bound to cause offence. By the time she reached the relative security of her house, most of the anger had died down to be replaced with utter misery.

‘Big mistake, Corrigan,’ Matthew told himself as the front door slammed. Somewhere in the night his life had taken a sharp turn for the worse. His only problem seemed to be identifying where he’d gone wrong. For a start he’d taken Harry Watling to bed. Now if anyone had predicted that one day he’d be lusting after a stroppy, tomboyish girl in scruffy dungarees, he would have told them she’d have to be the last girl on earth. Except it had never been that simple, had it?

Strangely, it was because Harry’d always been seriously unimpressed by him that he’d started having those thoughts that he would never have admitted to anyone. He hadn’t built up a valuable property portfolio by taking refusals at face value. Matthew had learnt to use patience, skill and some old-fashioned cunning, but Harry had walked away from anything he’d offered her rather than compromise the boat yard she believed was worth fighting for.

Okay, taking Harry to bed had been a good idea. That wasn’t where he’d gone wrong. But making love with Harry certainly hadn’t been what he’d anticipated. It wasn’t exactly chivalrous, but he’d half hoped that it would be like going to bed with Gina, a bit like scratching an itch. Whereas he and Gina had both taken what they wanted and gone their separate ways, with Harry he had been amazed and moved by a shared experience, something emotional as well as physical, something that transcended the sum of its parts. In some respects he understood Harry better than he would have thought possible; in other ways she was completely out of his reach. He wanted to return to her over and over again. He took a deep breath; no mistakes there, then.

No, the problems had started when Harry had gone downstairs and read the letter. Matthew thought about her face, so pinched and white, and wished not only that he’d never left the letter out, but that he’d done something about it sooner. Business could have been the way he liked it: cold, clinical, no strings, in and away. And then he never would have known the beautiful, elusive and giving Harry hidden beneath that brittle shell.

Ducking as he went through the low doorway to the bathroom, Matthew grinned to himself in the mirror. ‘Fucking idiot,’ he told himself, delighted that he had worked out where he’d gone wrong. It was nothing to do with making love with Harry – the mistake was that he’d let her go.

Harry could see Matthew standing on the other side of the glass door, with a carrier bag from the General Store in one hand and one of Black Narcissus’s biggest bouquets in the other. Bloody great! If Frankie and Trevor had caught wind that something had happened between her and Matthew, it was highly likely that soon most of Little Spitmarsh would be gagging to know what exactly had gone on.

‘Go away!’ she yelled.

Matthew dangled a set of keys at her. Her keys. The ones George was supposed to hang on to in case of emergency. So George knew too.

‘Since we had such an early start,’ Matthew said, as she let him in before he used the keys, ‘I thought you’d like something to eat.’

‘Well, that’s nice of you, but I’m quite used to feeding myself.’

‘Not if that soup you had on the boat was anything to go by.’

He strode past her to the kitchen and unloaded his carrier bag. Harry regarded him reproachfully as he negotiated his way round, digging out pans and utensils. His back, she now knew, was every bit as smooth and muscular as she’d imagined. His legs were lovely – no nasty scary hairy surprises, but just enough to know you had a real man between the sheets – and he had a very nice firm bum. Not that she was ever likely to see it again. Nor did she want to, she told herself hurriedly.

‘I’m sorry this isn’t anything more elaborate,’ he said, after a little while, putting a plate in front of her. ‘But I didn’t exactly get the chance to shop around.’

Harry looked down at her faultlessly cooked breakfast. Matthew’s behaviour might leave a lot to be desired, but not his cooking. Wouldn’t it be lovely, she thought, as the mouth-watering aroma wafted up to her, to come home to a cooked meal after a long cold day?

She glowered at him. ‘Haven’t you had enough fun at my expense already? I mean, you’ve done what your solicitor wanted, so you don’t have to pretend to be nice to me any more. What a pain it must have been to find out that you couldn’t rely on the charter.’

Matthew pointed to her breakfast. ‘I didn’t cook that for you to ignore it. Now stop talking and start chewing. You’ll feel better when you’ve had something to eat.’ Then he smiled. ‘And if you don’t feel better, I will – because at least when you’ve got your mouth full you won’t be able to pick holes in me.’

Harry was surprised to find that it was a lot easier to concentrate on her food than she would have thought. ‘I have to hand it to you,’ she said grudgingly. ‘That was seriously good. But I was really hungry.’

‘Ah well, you’ve had quite a lot of exercise, haven’t you?’ said Matthew, making her face flame.

After the intimacy and tenderness they had shared, it was hard to think that it had all been another tactic to get his hands on her land. No wonder she was feeling so miserable.

‘It’s all right, Matthew. You don’t have to try to make it easy for me. I was silly to go to bed with you, I know I’m not the kind of girl you’d normally get involved with, so I was just asking to get hurt, but …’ she dropped her voice. ‘Oh God, Matthew. I just wanted you so badly.’

‘So you used me?’ he said, very gently.

‘No!’ Harry shook her head. ‘No, I do have feelings for you, you know.’

‘Oh. Feelings. I see. What kind of feelings would those be?’

‘Please, Matthew, don’t embarrass me. Let’s just leave it at breakfast and then we’ll go back to how we were before. We’ll pretend it never happened.’

Matthew’s smiled disappeared. ‘Let me tell you once and for all – I didn’t make love to you for any reason other than the fact I couldn’t stay away from you any longer. Using the charter felt like a bad idea from the very beginning; I was reluctant to take advantage of it then and I’m certainly not going to now. And not because of what my solicitor told me. Come to bed and let me prove it to you.’

Harry lifted her head up and looked into his sleepily sexy
 
eyes. She only had to reach over, then she could trace the outline of his jaw beneath that hint of stubble. She watched his eyes darken, his lips part as he moved his head towards her. God, he was gorgeous! What on earth did he see in someone who was cross and rude and didn’t have legs up to her chest? He’d seen her scowl and cry, covered in engine oil, wielding a sander and on almost every occasion she’d been wearing dirty dungarees. No, Harry pulled her hands away and folded them in her lap. This was too good to be true.

Certain that everything had finally worked out over at the boathouse, George shut his shed door and decided to head for home. When Matthew had turned up at the caravan first thing, desperate for help, George had barely believed it. The Watlings were a perverse bunch and no mistake, forever snatching sorrow from the jaws of happiness. But not this time. The look on Matthew’s face proved that he wasn’t going to give up on Miss Harriet. Ever.

Dammit! Damn grit in his eyes or some sand blown in from the banks, he thought, ferreting around in his pocket for a handkerchief. Life would be very different in the future. All the years of worrying about Harry Watling and Harry senior before that – it had been like living on the edge of a storm, always wondering when it was going to blow up. He’d done his share of looking after folks called Harry. From now on George was going to have a quiet life, sitting by the caravan, watching the world go by … And then a really disturbing thought occurred to him. Taking another look over his shoulder at the boathouse, George started to pray that, please God, if Matthew and Miss Harriet ’ad a baby, let it be called Jade or Chelsea or Romeo – anything but Harry!

Just as he was beginning to relax again and think about sitting outside with a nice cup of tea and maybe a Bourbon or two, he heard a door slam and footsteps stomp across the yard.

‘Matthew?’ he said, rubbing his eyes. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be tucked up with Miss Harriet?’

‘Yeah, well,’ said Matthew, pushing his hands through his hair, ‘Harry didn’t read the same script, apparently.’

George fished in his pocket for his tobacco tin. Something was telling him that a biscuit wasn’t going to hit the spot.

‘She says too much has happened too soon and she needs time to think it over.’

George winced at the pain etched on Matthew’s face.

‘The trouble is, George, she’s been fighting to keep the business afloat for so long that she doesn’t know when to stop. It’s not about the land any more; it’s Harry I want. What if she refuses to believe me?’

‘You’re not going to give up now, are you, Matthew?’

As the younger man laid a firm hand on his shoulder, George felt weak with relief. ‘Have I
ever
struck you as the sort to give up, George?’

Chapter Thirty-One

On a fresh October morning, Matthew waited in a secluded coil in the creek, slowly going out of his mind. It was still early, yet there was some strength in the sun as it climbed in the sky, promising a golden autumn day. Matthew sat with his back to the world, staring at the fletch marks of gulls’ feet in the grey sands and the silver waves edging closer to the soft shore. Just when he was starting to worry that maybe he’d missed something – like a fire in the Chunnel, or a pile-up on the motorway, or the letter, maybe, telling him that she’d met a sexy Frenchman and was never coming back – he heard the whisper of the tall grass as she approached. And then it went quiet and he resisted the urge to turn round.