The Perfect Match?. PENNY JORDAN
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her late uncle’s small house, a task she could only relate, in terms of stress levels, to the mythical job of cleansing the Augean stables.
Every racing paper that Charlie had bought during his tenure in the house—and there had been many of them—instead of being thrown away had simply been tossed in an untidy pile on the spare-bedroom floor. This was the very room that Chrissie had planned to occupy during her hopefully brief stay. And that was just for starters. Letters, bills, in the main unpaid, junk mail, you name it—Uncle Charles had kept it.
Chrissie suspected they must have grave doubts about her at the local supermarket when she had very nearly cleaned them out of their supply of rolls of black plastic refuse sacks.
Her initial idea had been to burn the waste paper on a bonfire in the terraced cottage’s small back garden, but she had soon recognised that there was far too much of it for such easy disposal and instead she had been forced to apply to the local authority for their advice and assistance on its disposal.
This morning, a couple of friendly workmen plus an open lorry had arrived in the street to remove the sacks of paper she had prepared for them.
The cottage was one of a terrace of similar properties built into what had originally been one of the town’s boundary walls using, Chrissie suspected, stone ‘reclaimed’ from the walls themselves and the castle, which had been virtually destroyed during the Civil War.
It could, she admitted judiciously, with a little imagination and an awful lot of determined hard work, be turned into a very attractive home for a single person or a young childless couple.
Several of the other cottages in the street had already undergone or were undergoing this process and the shiny brightness of their painted front doors highlighted the air of shabby neglect that hallmarked her uncle’s cottage.
Now that she had emptied the small second bedroom, she did at least have somewhere to sleep. Her mother would have been grimly approving, no doubt, had she seen the fervour with which she had scrubbed and sanitized both the bathroom and kitchen before allowing herself to use them. She still had her reservations, though, about the wisdom of using the ancient fridge, which had formerly been home to various, thankfully unidentifiable, mouldy pieces of food.
But the worst ordeal of her visit still lay ahead of her and that was her appointment tomorrow with her late uncle’s solicitors.
His clothes she had already consigned to another much smaller collection of plastic liners ready for collection by a representative of a local charity.
The house had, as she and her parents had already guessed, revealed no material assets likely to provide enough money to help to settle his debts, with the exception of a rather attractive small yew desk.
When Chrissie had mentioned this item to her mother, she had said instantly that the desk had originally belonged to her grandmother, Chrissie’s great grandmother.
‘Don’t arrange for it to be sold, Chrissie,’ she had begged her daughter. ‘We’ll have it valued instead and I’ll buy it from the estate. I asked Charles what had happened to it after Mother died and he said he didn’t know.’ She had given a small sigh. ‘I suppose I ought to have guessed that he’d keep it for himself. I’m just glad that he didn’t actually sell it. I suppose it’s too much to hope that he kept Nan’s Staffordshire figures, as well?’
‘I’m sorry, Mum, but they’re definitely not here,’ Chrissie had told her, promising that she would have the desk appraised independently as well as by the dealer she had arranged to come and value the small, and she suspected, mainly worthless bits and pieces she had found round the house.
The desk certainly was a very attractive piece, all the more so now that she had cleaned and polished it; sturdily made it was, at the same time, very prettily feminine.
Chrissie glanced at her watch. The dealer she had been recommended to contact by her late uncle’s solicitors would be here any minute. Once he had checked over and removed the bits and pieces she had placed on one side along with all the cottage’s furniture—apart from the desk that was in the front room—she could arrange for the estate agent to view the cottage and put it on the market.
Tiredly she stretched her body but at least she had the satisfaction of knowing that every single nook and cranny of the small house was now clean. She still had the remnants of some of the cobwebs on her person to prove it, she acknowledged ruefully as she caught sight of the small grubby mark on her once pristine white T-shirt.
CHAPTER THREE
GUY knocked briefly on the cottage door and then waited. Knowing the way Charlie Platt had lived, he had deliberately changed into a pair of faded, wellworn jeans and an equally faded and now rather closefitting T-shirt. The days when he had been considered an undersized weakling were now long past. It had caused him a certain amount of wry amusement when he attended antique fairs to be mistaken for one of the helpers brought in to carry the heavier pieces of furniture.
Chrissie heard the knock on the door and went to open it. Guy started to glance at her with brief disinterest, preparatory to introducing himself, and then looked at her again whilst Chrissie returned his look with the same shocked intensity.
She had heard, of course—who hadn’t?—of ‘love at first sight’ but had always wryly dismissed it as a fairy-tale fantasy.
Surely no one in these modern times could possibly be stricken so instantly, so totally, in the space of less than a minute, or know immediately that this was the one, the only person with whom they could spend the rest of their lives.
But none of these admirably logical and sensible thoughts came anywhere near entering her head now as she simply stood and returned the intensity of Guy’s silent visual contact with her.
Outside in the street, in the rest of the world, people went about their normal daily business, but the two of them were as far removed from that kind of mundanity as it was possible to be, transported to a world of their own where only the two of them existed.
Chrissie could feel her pulse jumping, her heart beating with frantic haste, her breathing growing far too fast and shallow, as she and Guy continued to search one another’s face, the recognition between them both instant and compelling.
That he was good-looking and very physically male she had noted automatically when she opened the door, but her reaction to him now went deeper than that, much, much deeper. It encompassed not just his outward appearance, his physical attributes, but his deeper inner self, as well.
It was almost as though there was some psychic, soul-deep bond between them that both of them had instantly recognised and responded to. There could surely be no other reason for the sheer intensity of their shared sense of recognition and awareness, Chrissie reasoned as she mechanically stepped back into the cottage knowing that Guy would follow her in.
Guy couldn’t believe what was happening to him. He knew there was a story within the family that along with the physical genes inherited from their wild Gypsy ancestor, there were those Cookes who also inherited some of his more spiritual and psychic gifts, but he had never had any occasion in the past to consider himself one of those so gifted, nor indeed to put very much credence in their existence.
He was far too much a modern twenty-first-century man for that, and yet he was intensely aware of that startling moment of unexpected insight he had experienced when the cottage door opened and he had seen her standing there, had known the moment he looked at her that he was confronting his own fate. Somehow he already knew just how that wonderful waterfall of dark red hair would feel slipping through his hands, against his body...how she would feel, how she would taste, how she would smell and even how she would look...cry out in the moment of their shared physical coming together. He knew...he knew...
He could hear the blood pulsing in his ears and feel the rapid-fire volley of his heartbeat that sounded like a warning drum roll. He knew as he looked at her that she was the woman, the one woman, who would make his life—him—complete. He knew, too, that if he were to stretch out his hand to her now, she would put her own into it and silently follow him; allow him