An Unsuitable Wife. Lindsay Armstrong
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bit of cookery, seeing as you seem to be so very good at it.’
He eyed her over the rim of his cup. ‘How come no one else has been able to teach you?’
‘No one’s ever tried. Dad and I always lived on campus, you see. Oh, we had a self-contained flatlet but it was much easier to eat in the canteen.’
Mike Brennan put down his cup and stared into it silently but when she thought he wasn’t going to say anything and had begun to wish she’d never mentioned the subject he looked up at last with something wry and quizzical in his eyes. ‘I suppose one could only try,’ he said gravely. ‘If nothing else it might render you more marriageable.’
The glow that had started to light Sidonie’s face up faltered and he grimaced, stood up and patted her on the head. ‘Don’t look like that, kid. I’m still recovering from the shock of your little débâcle—yes, I’ll teach you how to cook, if it’s possible.’
With that she had to be content, and discovered, curiously, that she was. And even more so when, after he’d dealt with the dishes, he put some music on the CD, a lovely Enya album, and brought out the manual for the instrument known colloquially as a GPS, short for Global Positioning System. In fact it would have been true to say she was entranced as he explained the finer points of satellite navigation and how the instrument locked into several satellites and was thereby able to record the boat’s position so that they could plot it on a chart and know exactly where they were as well as being able to put in a destination point and have it tell them the course to steer to get to it, the range in nautical miles and the time it would take to get there.
And within a very short time she had a complete grasp of the instrument, causing him to say with a lifted eyebrow, ‘You may not be able to cook, friend Sid, but you’ve picked all this up in record time.’
Nothing diminished her glow of pleasure this time and she went to bed not long afterwards in a more contented frame of mind than one would have thought possible considering she’d nearly burnt the boat down. And as she listened to the gentle slap of the bow wave against the hull and snuggled beneath the covers her thoughts once again turned to Mike Brennan, a man she knew so little about yet was coming to like a lot.
It was at this point that it occurred to her again that while he might look like a rough diamond he didn’t sound like one nor behave like one and was even looking less and less like one on closer inspection. In fact, although she wouldn’t call him handsome, she decided, those aquiline features appealed to her, at least his brown hair was shiny and clean, and he did things on the boat with an economy and precision of movement, a fine-tuning of his superb physique, those broad shoulders, lean torso and long legs that was a pleasure to watch and even made her heart beat a little oddly sometimes. Then there was the way he cooked and the things he cooked and the music he liked and the books he read—you could almost be forgiven for thinking he was educated and cultured, she mused. And there was now the conundrum to add to all this that, despite her early doubts and despite incurring his dire wrath, she felt strangely safe with Mike Brennan...
* * *
The weather turned against them over the next few days. It was windy and wet, and they had a few exhilarating sails both clad in yellow rain-jackets, but when the wind rose to above twenty-five knots they sought protection in a secluded anchorage and spent two nights there until the weather eased. They were to turn into two of the happiest days Sidonie had known for a while, for several reasons. For one thing he cut down an ancient set of overalls for her and together they clambered down beneath the floorboards and inspected every part of the boat’s machinery minutely and she was able to exhibit her knowledge of diesel engines and run her hands lovingly over the Gardiner as well as attend to it where required. She was also able to squeeze into impossibly small spaces, spaces he couldn’t get into, and it was she who discovered the bilge pump that was not operating properly and was able to take it apart and fix it.
And although he didn’t say a lot she could see from the wry look he occasionally directed her way that she sometimes amazed him, sometimes amused him.
Then there were the evenings when the wind was howling through the halyards but they were snuggly battened down and he commenced his cooking lessons. They seemed to get into a routine. They showered and changed then she perched on a stool on the other side of the island bench from him and under his direction chopped, peeled and prepared. That was all she did the first night but she listened minutely as he explained what he was doing—pot roasting a piece of blade beef, sealing in the juices by searing it first then laying it on a bed of the vegetables she’d done with a little bit of liquid, seasoning and some red wine and setting it to simmer covered until done.
‘Very healthy and economical,’ he commented, pouring her a glass of wine.
‘Why?’
‘Well, you’re cooking everything in one pot on one burner and none of the goodness of the vegetables is lost because you use the liquid it’s cooking in as a thin gravy.’
‘I would never have thought of that. How do you know so much about it? Are you self-taught?’
‘More or less.’
‘That’s what I thought I could be,’ she said with a grimace. ‘It obviously didn’t work in my case.’
He smiled faintly. ‘Once some of the basics become clear to you, you could surprise yourself.’
But it was the next night that he surprised her. This time they were cooking the sweetlip he’d caught earlier; he’d shown her how to fillet it, how to make a light batter and they were intending to pan fry the fillets in olive oil. The wind had dropped but it was raining heavily, the lamps were on, and for the first time she’d left her hair loose to dry after getting caught in a shower while she’d checked that the anchor was holding; it was simply parted on the side and hanging to her shoulders. It was almost dry as she concentrated carefully on the potatoes she was slicing for chips. And when she looked up once it was to find him staring at her with a faint frown.
Her eyes widened. ‘Something wrong?’
‘No. Why on earth do you always scrape your hair back in a pigtail or a bun?’
She put a hand to her hair self-consciously. Its colour was fine, the palest gold in fact, its texture strong and vibrant, but left to itself the ends curled riotously. ‘Isn’t it a terrible mess?’
‘The kind of mess women pay fortunes to induce in their hair,’ he said ironically.
Sidonie stared at him, her lips parted. ‘Are you sure?’ she said after a moment.
His blue eyes roamed her face and she could see a kind of wry exasperation in them as he said, ‘Don’t you ever look at other women?’
‘Of course. Well, I must, mustn’t I?’
‘Then how come you’ve failed to realise that you have an almost perfectly oval face, beautiful eyes, skin like pale velvet, an amazingly stern little mouth when you want it to be but pink and inviting at other times—and that heavy mass of lovely hair just as it is sets it all off to perfection while the way you had it scraped back didn’t do much for you at all?’
Sidonie’s eyes almost fell out. ‘You’re joking!’
He grimaced. ‘I’m not. It may not be what you see on the pages of Vogue, although if you didn’t bite your nails that could help, but it’s a big improvement on Sidonie Hill as you normally present her to the world.’
‘But...but there’s the rest of me.’
His lips twisted. ‘I can’t see a great deal wrong with the rest of you either,’ he replied prosaically.
‘Well, I’m not terribly well-endowed if you must know.’
‘That could be a matter of opinion,’ he commented. ‘You actually have a rather coltish grace.’
‘I...I don’t know whether I should believe you,’ Sidonie said, her brow furrowed in a mighty frown.
He