The City-Girl Bride. Penny Jordan
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looked at one another in mutual hostility.
CHAPTER TWO
MAGGIE finished the call she had just made to her assistant explaining to her what had happened and asking her to organise the cancellation and reissue of her credit cards.
‘Do you want them sent direct to you where you are?’ Gayle had asked her.
‘Er, no…Get them to send them to the hotel for me instead, please Gayle. Oh, and when you report what’s happened to my insurance company and the garage make sure they know I’m going to need a courtesy car, will you?’
She had kept the details of what had happened brief, cutting through Gayle’s shocked exclamations after she had retreated to the room Finn Gordon had shown her to, clutching the mobile telephone he had loaned her. It galled her to have to ask him for anything, and she frowned now as she quickly dialled her grandmother’s number. She hadn’t told her what she was planning to do, had simply fibbed instead that she was going away on business for a few days.
The fraility in Arabella Russell’s voice when she answered Maggie’s call choked Maggie’s own voice with emotion.
Standing outside the partially open door, with the cup of tea he had made for his unexpected and unwanted guest, Finn heard the soft liquid note of love in her voice as she asked, ‘Are you all right, darling?’
Stepping back sharply from the door, he wondered why the knowledge that there was a man, a lover in Maggie’s life should be so unwelcome.
They had exchanged names earlier, with a reluctance and formality which in other circumstances he would have found ruefully amusing. Despite her bedraggled state, Maggie still managed to look far too desirable for his comfort. He had tried to reassure himself that his preference was and always had been for brunettes, and that he preferred blue eyes to brown, but he had still found himself staring at her for just that little bit too long.
Her call to her grandmother over, Maggie examined her surroundings. The room Finn had shown her to was large, and mercifully possessed its own bathroom. Its dormer windows looked out onto fields, beyond which lay some awesomely steep hills clothed in trees. The autumn light was already fading. What on earth was she going to do, stuck here until the river subsided? Maggie wondered bitterly.
Her request to her ‘host’ for access to his computer so that she could e-mail Gayle had met with a grim and uncompromising, ‘I don’t have one. I prefer to choose whom I allow to intrude into my life.’
Which had been a dig at her as well as a reinforcement of his dislike of technology, Maggie suspected. The man was positively Neanderthal. Everyone had a computer. Everyone, that was, but this farmer she had managed to get herself trapped with. Crossly Maggie acknowledged that if fate had done it deliberately to annoy her it couldn’t have produced a man who would antagonise and irritate her more, or whose lifestyle was so much the opposite of hers. So far as she was concerned the river could not go down fast enough—and not just because of the impending auction.
In his kitchen, Finn was listening to the local weather forecast on the radio. As yet no one had been able to come up with any an explanation for the freak storm that had been so oddly localised and which, it seemed, had caused chaos which was only limited to within a few miles of the farm.
Finn hoped the river would be crossable in time for the auction. He preferred to bid in person rather than by phone; he liked to see the faces of his competitors so that he could gauge their strengths and weaknesses. Not that he was expecting to have much competition for the estate so far as the main house and the agricultural land went. However, when it came to the estate cottages it was a different matter. There was no way he wanted second home owners or holidaymakers living on his land. No, what he wanted was his privacy. What he wanted—
He turned round as the kitchen door opened and Maggie walked in. She had removed the jacket of her suit and the thin silk blouse she was wearing revealed the soft swell of her breasts, surprisingly well rounded in such an otherwise fragile fine-boned woman. The sight of her in silk shirt, plain gold earrings and straight tailored black skirt, but minus her shoes, caused Finn to smile slightly.
Immediately her chin came up, her eyes flashing warningly. ‘One word,’ she cautioned him. ‘Just one word and I’ll…’
Finn couldn’t resist. ‘You’ll what?’ he goaded her. ‘Throw something at me? A shoe, perhaps?’
‘I’m a mature woman,’ Maggie told him through gritted teeth. ‘I do not throw things…ever.’
‘What? Not even caution to the winds, in the arms of your lover?’ Finn derided her. ‘How very disappointing that must be for him.’
Maggie couldn’t believe her ears. How on earth had they managed to get on such personal ground?
‘I do not have a lover,’ she heard herself telling Finn sharply.
Finn digested her too-quick denial with silent cynicism. He already knew that she was lying. She embodied everything he most disliked about the life he had left behind him. So why did he feel this virtual compulsion just to stand and look at her? He had seen more beautiful women, and he had certainly known far more sexually encouraging women. She had an almost visible ten-foot-high fence around her, warning him to keep his distance—which was exactly what he wanted and intended to do. So why was a reckless part of him hungrily wondering what it would feel like to hold her, to kiss her, to…?
Compressing his mouth against the folly of such thoughts, he said curtly, “I’m going out to lock up the fowl for the night. If you want something to eat help yourself from the fridge.’
Help herself? Eat on her own? Well, he certainly believed in being hospitable, Maggie reflected waspishly as she watched him walk out into the yard. If she’d been in the City now she would still have been working. She rarely finished work before eight, often leaving her office even later, and most evenings she either had dinner with clients or friends; if with friends at one of the City’s high-profile restaurants, if with clients somewhere equally expensive but far more discreet.
Her apartment possessed a state-of-the-art stainless steel kitchen, but Maggie had never cooked in it. She could cook, of course. Well, sort of. Her grandmother was a wonderful cook and had always encouraged Maggie to concentrate on her studies whilst she was growing up, and somehow there had never been time for Maggie to learn domestic skills from her.
Well, at least if she had something to eat now she could retreat to her room and stay there. Who knew? By tomorrow the river might be fordable again. Certainly if it was possible for a person to will that to happen then that person would be Maggie.
Skirting the large table in the middle of the room, she looked disparagingly at the untidy mess of books and papers cluttering it. An old-fashioned chair complete with a snoozing cat was pulled up in front of the Aga, not a bright shiny new Aga, Maggie noticed, but an ancient chipped cream one. The whole house had a rundown air about it, a sad shabbiness that evoked feelings in her she didn’t want to examine.
Maggie had spent the early years of her childhood being dragged from one set of rented lodgings to another by her mother after the break-up of her parents’ marriage. Every time her mother had met a new man they had moved, and inevitably, when the romance ended, they had moved again. In some people such a life might have created a deep-seated need for stability and the comfort and reassurance of a close loving relationship with a partner, in Maggie it had created instead a ferocious determination to make herself completely and totally independent.
This house reminded her of those days and that life and she didn’t like it. Nothing in Maggie’s life now—the life she had created for herself—was shabby or needy, nothing was impermanent or entered into impulsively without cautious and careful thought. Everything she surrounded herself with was like her: shiny, clean, groomed, planned, ordered and controlled.
Or rather like she normally was, she corrected herself, as she looked down at her unshod feet in their expensive designer tights. Maggie never went barefoot—not even in the