Valentine's Night. PENNY JORDAN
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have a boat-building business in Perth, and I’m over here to check out a new British technique for making super-lightweight craft.’
‘And you thought you’d look us up … just like that?’
Her aggression made him smile mockingly at her. Was there no way she could get under his skin the way he did hers? Sorrel thought crossly as she got the pie and put it in the oven, this time taking care to use protective oven gloves.
‘Ancestry’s very big back home at the moment. Something to do with the recent bicentennial fever, I guess. I knew that my family came originally from Wales, and I thought it might be interesting to have a go at seeing how far I could trace it back.’
‘Llewellyn’s a very common Welsh name,’ Sorrel pointed out.
‘I have a great-aunt who swears that she remembers hearing from her grandmother how her husband’s father came originally from this part of Wales. He was a Daniel, too, like your father. And the family diaries—’
‘Your family keep diaries, too?’ Sorrel’s face lit up, her animosity forgotten. ‘Oh, I’d love to see them. Ma asked Simon to bring ours down. She thought you might be interested in reading them. It’s a tradition that the women of the family always keep a diary.’ She stopped, annoyed with herself for forgetting how much she disliked him.
‘What’s this?’ he asked her suddenly, staring at her tapestry frame.
She told him reluctantly, but her love and enthusiasm for her craft refused to give way to her desire to be abrupt with him.
‘I’ve done the first three seasons,’ she heard herself telling him, in a voice that was suddenly, for no reason at all, slightly breathy. It couldn’t be because he had bent his head over her work, just in the direction she was pointing, so that his dark hair brushed against her wrist, causing tiny tingling sensations to race along her veins, heating her entire body, could it? No, of course not. It was unthinkable … ridiculous … impossible that she should react to this abrasive Australian in a way that she had never reacted to Andrew, the man she had agreed to marry.
Various alien and disturbing thoughts filled her mind, making the colour come up under her clear Celtic skin.
‘And the final season?’ Val prompted.
‘Winter,’ she told him curtly.
‘Yes … The last time I experienced snow like this was in the Canadian Rockies during my university days. I hadn’t realised you could have this kind of weather so late in the year.’
‘Half a dozen or more climbers who think the same thing lose their lives in these mountains almost every year,’ Sorrel told him. ‘You were lucky not to be trapped inside your car. Why did you go to university in Canada?’
He raised his eyebrows a little but, if he could ask her impertinent questions about her relationship with Andrew, then she was quite sure that she could reciprocate. It was odd how curious she was about him. Dangerous, too. She shivered a little, a tiny frisson of unfamiliar apprehension-laced excitement going through her.
‘I wanted to study geology, and I spent a postgraduate year in the Rockies doing fieldwork.’
‘Geology? I thought you said you built boats.’
‘I do—now. The pie smells as though it’s ready.’
In other words, no more questions. He was adroit at concealing more of himself than he revealed, and even more adroit at getting her to reveal far too much, she acknowledged as she went over to the oven.
The pie was almost ready. There were fresh vegetables to go with it, and rhubarb fool for pudding.
‘We ought to be toasting our new-found cousin-ship,’ Val remarked as he asked Sorrel where he could find the cutlery. ‘Is there anything to drink?’
Her mother had packed a couple of bottles of her home-made wine, and Sorrel produced one of them. She saw his eyebrows lift in a way that was becoming familiar as he studied the label, and she explained to him what elderberry wine was.
‘A resourceful woman, your mother.’
‘She’s a home-maker,’ Sorrel told him, ‘and she thrives on hard work. She’s spent her life doing all the things we’re told turn the female sex into drudges, and yet I’ve never met a more fulfilled woman than my mother. She’s interested in everything and everyone … and she knows so much about the history of the wife’s role in the running of a farm like ours. She sometimes gives talks on it to local WI meetings. She loves it … standing up on the stage, talking to them … and they love her. I asked her a few years ago if she had ever thought what she might have done if she’d had a career. She laughed at me. She said that being married to my father gave her the best of everything: a man whom she loved, his children, the pleasure of running her own home, and the business aspects of keeping the farm accounts, of being free to order her own day, to enjoy the countryside. I know what she means … I don’t think I could ever work for a large organisation with regimented rules and regulations after being my own boss.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Val told her, surprising her. ‘When I started off in mineral exploration, it was very much a free and easy life. You got a job working for a newly formed company. They bought the mineral right to a certain tract of land and sent you out to discover what, if any, value it might have. You lived in the outback … often for weeks at a time, turning in a report when you’d finished the job. But once the boom came, the pleasure went out of it.’
‘Was that why you build boats instead?’
‘Sort of. This wine smells good … Not quite up to our better Australian vineyards’ products, of course.’
‘It’s very potent,’ Sorrel warned him, dishing up their meal and putting a plateful of food in front of him.
It had surprised her a little that he had so readily and naturally helped her with the preparation of the meal, but perhaps if he had lived alone in the outback he was used to fending for himself. She had always thought that Australian men were very chauvinistic, and considered women to be little more than chattels.
Fair-mindedly, she acknowledged that she did not really know enough about the continent or its inhabitants to separate truth from myth, and it was probable that Australian men, like any men, were a mixed and varied bunch of human beings who should not be typecast.
‘This is good,’ Val told her appreciatively, tucking into his food. ‘Your mother’s an excellent cook.’
Sorrel bent her head over her own plate, not telling him that she had made the pie. She enjoyed cooking, and firmly believed that any form of creative achievement could be satisfying when one was well-taught. Although her mother was what was normally referred to as a plain cook, she took a pride in the meals she placed before her family, and she had passed on that pride to Sorrel.
Val had poured them both a glass of wine, and now he put down his knife and fork and picked up his glass, motioning to Sorrel to do the same.
‘To you, Sorrel Llewellyn,’ he toasted her softly. ‘I’m delighted to make your acquaintance … Drink it,’ he urged her when she barely touched her lips to the glass. ‘Otherwise I’m going to think it’s poisoned. You certainly looked at me as though you’d have loved to slip me a glass of hemlock when I first arrived.’
‘It was a shock to discover you were a man,’ Sorrel protested, letting the warming wine slide down her throat. It tasted delicious but, as she well remembered from past occasions, she really did not have a strong enough head to cope with her mother’s potent home-made brews.
Over their meal they talked, or rather Val talked and she listened, so that by the time they were ready for their pudding she was beginning to feel almost lazily content.
She started to get up to take their plates to the sink, but Val forestalled her, announcing that it was his turn to do some work.
As he walked past her chair